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Abstract
Individual and collective efforts to mitigate climate change in the form of carbon offsetting and emissions trading schemes have recently become the focus of much media attention. In this paper we explore a subset of the UK national press coverage centered on such schemes. The articles, selected from general as well as specialized business and finance newspapers, make use of gold rush, Wild West, and cowboy imagery which is rooted in deeply entrenched myths and metaphors and allows readers to make sense of very complex environmental, political, ethical, and financial issues associated with carbon mitigation. They make what appears complicated and unfamiliar, namely carbon trading and offsetting, seem less complex and more familiar. A critical discussion of this type of imagery is necessary in order to uncover and question tacit assumptions and connotations which are built into it and which might otherwise go unnoticed and unchallenged in environmental communication.
Highlights
The issues of global warming and climate change have recently attracted immense media coverage
Building on work done on discourses around foot and mouth disease and avian influenza (Nerlich & Halliday, 2007; Koteyko et al, in press2008), this paper examines the use of two metaphor scenarios in discourses around carbon offsetting, namely the scenarios associated with “gold rush” and “cowboy” during a period of increased media attention to climate change
We found that many articles in the UK national newspapers made reference to other articles published in the Financial Times (FT) which is not covered by the Lexis Nexis database
Summary
The issues of global warming and climate change have recently attracted immense media coverage. As the UK government points out on its website: “Carbon offsetting involves calculating your emissions and purchasing “credits” from emission reduction projects that have prevented or removed the emission of an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide elsewhere” (DEFRA, 2005). This links up carbon offsetting with another tradition, more akin to green consumerism than green activism. The ambivalent framing of carbon offsetting schemes as good or bad (and this in different financial or moral senses) demonstrates how “commodification of carbon spawned a new industry around offsetting and CDMs [clean development mechanisms] without fully interrogating the bases and values implicated in this commodification in the first place.” As we argue further in this article, metaphor analysis can provide a tool for such an interrogation
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