Cashing-in on Risk Claims: On the For-profit Inversion of Signifiers for “Global Warming”1

Abstract

International environmental groups and a few Western governments have invested considerable resources in the social marketing of risk claims about global warming and climate change. These claims appear in novel forms of public service adverts that combine images and text in dramatic narratives of warning, natural disaster and moral responsibility. Although a few narratives mention government's regulatory role in mitigation, most speak to individuals’ personal culpability and assign responsibility for remedial actions (such as energy conservation) to them, rather than to industrial sources. These campaigns appear to be working. Opinion polls show public awareness increasing and some willingness to adopt recommended measures. The more compelling consequence, however, has been the commercial appropriation of this discourse, and its ironic reprise to promote greater consumption, the opposite of its sponsors’ original intent. The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, to analyze selected exemplars of the social marketing campaigns that have given global warming and climate change their cultural content, reframing them as public problems; second, to investigate how this content, once formed, is appropriated by private advertising for commercial ends; and third, to examine how the deployment of parody then inverts the original message to reinforce the values that the message had challenged. A sample of both visual and print media will be analyzed for evidence of these effects and to suggest a syntagmatic pattern that tracks the conversion of scientific messages of public concern into for-profit parody. Implications for the fate of risk messages in advanced commercial cultures will be considered.