Movement-Countermovement Dynamics in the Global Warming Policy Conflict

In a provocative paper, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus (2005) shook the environmental establishment by declaring that environmentalism had died, claiming that the movement pushing for global warming policies had failed because of their framing strategy. A content analysis of pro-global warming policy movement frames deployed in the New York Times from 1981 through 2003 shows support for their claim that the frames were largely technocratic and lacked linkages to larger American values. However, their claim that the movement has framed global warming as solely an environmental problem is not supported by the data. The pro-global warming policy movement first focused their frames on prognostics, or in other words the causes and consequences of the social problem, but after the issue arrived on the international governmental agenda in 1988 the movement's frames shifted focus to diagnostic frames, or solutions to global warming. Examination of countermovement frames shows that frame debunking fell into two categories: prognostic attacks and diagnostic attacks. The countermovement responded with diagnostic attacks when it mobilized in 1989 and in the 1990s gradually deployed prognostic attacks in equal numbers. Zero-inflated poisson regressions were used to test the sociopolitical factors accounting for frame deployment for both the movement and countermovement. Pro-global warming policy frames were found to increase in response to political threat, elite cues, and weather shocks. In contrast, anti-global warming policy counterframes decreased in response to political allies, election years, weather shocks, and elite cues. The agendas literature describes social problems progressing from the governmental policy agenda then to the media agenda; however I find that global warming media agenda access preceded Congressional agenda access.