Abstract
Lexical combinations of at least two roots around “carbon” as the hub, such as “carbon finance” or “carbon footprint,” have recently become ubiquitous in English-speaking science, politics, and mass media. They are part of a new language evolving around the issue of climate change that can reveal how it is framed by various stakeholders. In this article, the authors study the role of these “carbon compounds” as tools of communication in different online discourses on climate change mitigation. By combining a quantitative analysis of their occurrences with a qualitative analysis of the contexts in which the compounds were used, the authors identify three clusters of compounds focused on finance, lifestyle, and attitudes and elucidate the communicative purposes to which they were put between the 1990s and the early 21st century. This approach may open up new ways of analyzing the framings of climate change mitigation initiatives in the public sphere.
Highlights
The issues of global warming and climate change have been in and out of the news for many years (McComas & Shanahan, 1995)
They are part of a whole new language that is evolving around the issue of climate change which needs to be monitored and investigated in order to discover how climate change is framed as a public issue by various stakeholders (Alexander, 2008), how public attitudes and perceptions are shaped and which solutions to climate change and global warming are being proposed, contested and debated
As media frames tend to vary over time in the coverage of public policy issues (Downs, 1998; Trumbo, 1996), here we focus on providing a chronological overview of the use of carbon compounds and on examining their functions in the online discourses on climate change mitigation
Summary
The issues of global warming and climate change have been in and out of the news for many years (McComas & Shanahan, 1995). In line with previous research, focusing on the role of communicative devices for making sense of issues, this article studies frames used in web-based discourses on the management of climate change and global warming, which we believe can be ‘indexed’ by carbon compounds. The economic management of climate change does, have a second stage characterised by personal initiatives (such as carbon offsetting and calculating the size of individual carbon footprint) rather than national and corporate financial initiatives These person-centred activities may have contributed to the emergence of another, frequently occurring cluster of compounds centred on lifestyle, which, as we can see from Table 2, started to proliferate on the web around the same time. The UK newspaper websites display a wide range of both attitudinal and lifestyle compound types and are listed in both columns
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