Elites, Democracy, and Climate Justice

In her new book Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power, University of Toronto media scholar Hanna E. Morris argues that whether they realize it or not, some climate journalists, obsessed with preserving a self-determined “moderate center,” are deploying some of the same tropes and reinforcing some of the same narratives as the extreme right. Even as they see themselves defending democracy and confronting the climate crisis, these media elites might be contributing to a prize sought by both the MAGA right and the fossil fuel industry: Preventing the emergence of a hopeful, democratic, and class-defying movement against climate change.

Earlier this month, Morris spoke with Drilled about the who gets to choose which climate solutions are “right” and which ones are “wrong,” what the media’s divergent treatment of the Green New Deal and the Inflation Reduction Act reveals about its entrenched biases, and why a sense of fatalism and inevitability seems to pervade so much mainstream climate coverage.

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