Not ‘getting on the bandwagon’: When climate change is a matter of unconcern

Abstract

Extensive research into public attitudes about climate change commonly portrays those who do not express concern about this issue as unwitting victims of their own or others’ biases. Characterised as apathy, ignorance, scepticism or denial, absence of concern about climate change has been presented as being rooted in an individual’s lack of considered engagement with scientific reasons for concern. This ‘concern deficit’ is framed as a problem to be addressed through policy, education and communication that seeks to maximise concern about climate change. In contrast, we conceptualise unconcern about climate change as an expression of focal life concerns that are incommensurable with dominant narratives of climate change. Originating in active cognitive, social and experiential processes, we regard unconcern about climate change as inseparable from the lived contexts in which it is expressed and irreducible to the attitudes or attributes of individuals. Using narrative analysis of repeat in-depth interviews with Australians who express unconcern about climate change, we find that this unconcern has multiple sources, takes diverse forms and is entangled in epistemological and normative engagements with other issues. It is constituted through social relationships, discursive processes, moral values and embodied experiences that are overlooked in much existing research. We argue that respectful attention to the experiential conditions in which concern about climate change is resisted can enable constructive re-negotiation of narratives of climate change. Such agonistic processes could lead to more reflexive, pluralist and dialogical forms of discourse that better articulate climate science and policy with a wider diversity of lived concerns.

Keywords

Climate change concern public attitudes qualitative communication deficit model narrative

Introduction

Climate change communication is widely acknowledged to be in a state of deadlock (Corner and Groves, 2014). Calls for urgent action on climate change are met by increasingly entrenched forms of public and political opposition, deflection or dismissal. The approximate proportion of the global population who do not consider climate change a very serious problem was estimated to be 46% in 2015 (Stokes et al., 2015). While there is evidence that concern is rising in the United States (US) (Saad, 2017), publics in nations with some of the highest per capita emissions of carbon dioxide – Australia and the US – are among the least concerned and have the highest levels of political polarisation about climate change (Stokes et al., 2015). Research on public attitudes to climate change has typically focussed on ways to increase public concern, which is seen as a precondition to political action (Drews and van den Bergh, 2016; Tjernström and Tietenberg, 2008).

While a sizeable body of research has investigated concern about climate change, unconcern is commonly represented as a lack of concern rather than as a substantive phenomenon in its own right. Much of the research in this area has used public surveys to investigate climate change attitudes, with some studies using psychological experiments. In these primarily quantitative analyses, unconcern has been explicitly or implicitly characterised either as passive disengagement and reactive apathy or as motivated forms of climate scepticism and denial. There is little in-depth qualitative research on the lived contexts of climate change unconcern, although Norgaard’s (2011) study of the social organisation of climate silence in a Norwegian town and Callison’s (2014) analysis of the translation of climate science into moral concerns and ethical narratives by different social groups are exceptions. Such qualitative inquiry offers insight into the ways in which ‘[c]limate science cuts against the grain of ordinary human experience, the basis for our social arrangements and ethical instincts’ (Jasanoff, 2010: 237).

In this paper, we first characterise the concern deficit model that shapes much social research and communication about climate change. We argue that framing unconcern as a deficit to be overcome, rather than as a substantive expression of ‘lived lives and the specificities of human experience’ (Jasanoff, 2010: 238), has limited the depth and scope of much public discourse about climate change. Secondly, we analyse existing explanations, implicit and explicit, for lack of concern about climate change in the multidisciplinary literature on public attitudes to climate change. We describe five sources of individuals’ lack of concern emerging from this diverse literature. Finally, we investigate the lived experience of unconcern about climate change, reconsidering existing explanations through a qualitative lens, with attention to the ways in which the dominant normative imperative of climate change concern is actively marginalised by focal life experiences and concerns. We present narrative analysis of in-depth interviews with people from Tasmania, Australia, who express unconcern about climate change. Through a sequence of six to eight interviews with each participant conducted over several months, we explore attitudes to climate change in their lived context, situating individual particularity within the discursive relations through which it is shaped and expressed. Through this storied approach, we focus on the interplay of the matters of fact and matters of concern (Goeminne, 2012; Jasanoff, 2010; Latour, 2004) that are integral to the social production of unconcern about climate change. In this way, we pursue fuller understanding of social resistance to dominant narratives that produce concern about climate change (Fløttum and Gjerstad, 2017; Hulme, 2009).

A concern deficit model?

The assumption that a lack of concern about climate change reflects ignorance, and that public attitudes to climate change could be changed through the provision of scientific information, has long been discredited in social studies of science (e.g. Evans and Durant, 1995; Wynne, 2006). Nevertheless, knowledge deficit models of public understanding remain influential, implicitly or explicitly, in much science communication (Raps, 2016). They persist because of institutional and educational frameworks that privilege scientific knowledge, seeing science as having a universal validity that trumps other forms of knowledge (Simis et al., 2016). Science communication about climate change has focussed in particular on publicising the existence of a scientific consensus (e.g. Cook et al., 2016). A number of social and experimental psychologists have argued that belief in scientific consensus is a ‘gateway’ to increased public concern and support for action to mitigate climate change (van der Linden et al., 2015). Critics have labelled the construction of a narrative of scientific consensus as a process of ‘truth creation’ (Hulme and Mahony, 2010: 711) in which competing interpretations are marginalized, and science and policy conflated. In response, a growing range of political, social and context-sensitive approaches have been advocated (Carvalho et al., 2017). While the knowledge deficit model is losing ground, a ‘concern deficit model’ threatens to arise in its place, replacing a perceived epistemological deficit with a normative one. A growing literature proposes strategies to maximise public concern by solving the problem of the passively or wilfully unconcerned (e.g. Cook et al., 2017; Hine et al., 2016; Moser, 2009). Audience segmentation studies describe unconcerned publics using normative terms such as ‘indifferent’, ‘disengaged’, ‘doubtful’ and ‘dismissive’ and suggest communication tools to shift people out of these undesirable mindsets (e.g. Leiserowitz et al., 2012; Metag et al., 2017). In much the same way that the knowledge deficit model assumes that greater scientific understanding about climate change is unequivocally desirable, it is becoming normative in climate change communication to take the position that high levels of public concern about climate change are unequivocally positive.

In questioning this concern deficit model, we are not seeking to invert the bias against unconcern about climate change to argue that it is a social good and that it should be cultivated. In democratic societies, public concern can be a powerful impetus for the political action and social change required to deal with the predicament of climate change (Tjernström and Tietenberg, 2008). However, by framing unconcern negatively and passively, as an absence of care or interest, this model may contribute to the production of polarizing discourses and policies around climate change. It has the potential to inhibit reflection on discursive processes, including the social production of scientific knowledge (Jasanoff, 2010), within which climate change communication occurs. Concern deficit approaches may thus fail to recognise as legitimate the focal life concerns of those who express unconcern about climate change. A subsequent pathologisation of unconcern can thus lead to instrumental forms of public engagement that support only concerned publics whose interests match policies favoured by those in power (Höppner, 2009). Assuming that unconcern has unambiguously negative consequences for climate change action also closes down opportunities for agonistic questions about existing assumptions and arrangements that encourage reflexivity and inclusivity in climate knowledge production, policy and communication (Pepermans and Maeseele, 2016). In this paper, we argue that climate change communicators may be better placed to facilitate more constructive forms of disagreement, re-evaluation and coalition-building by conceptualising unconcern as originating in active social, discursive and experiential processes.

Matters of (un)concern

The interpretive social sciences have long argued that the omniscient gaze assumed by scientific epistemologies should be replaced by forms of objectivity that recognise and validate multiple, contested and partial forms of situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1986; Jasanoff, 2010; Latour, 1993, 2004, 2008). This literature resists dualistic epistemologies that cede physical matter to objective description and rational reorganisation and relegate human values to an intangible and disorderly realm of subjective preference. In response, the field of science and technology studies, amongst others, has pioneered a variety of strategies for recognising the many ways in which facts and values, objects and subjects, are tangled together in lived experience (Collins and Evans, 2002; Demeritt, 2001; Latour, 1993, 2004). While scientists, economists and policy-makers work hard to make the facts of the complex problem of climate change appear separate from their political, cultural and ethical meanings (Demeritt, 2001; Goeminne, 2012), social understandings of, and responses to, these problems resist any such work of separation. Scientifically assembled facts of climate change are not disconnected from the experiential concerns of social life in which human values are inextricably embedded. Bruno Latour’s concept of ‘matters of concern’, for example, draws attention to facts as claims made within experiential social systems that give them power and meaning. As he describes it:

A matter of concern is what happens to a matter of fact when you add to it its whole scenography, much like you would do by shifting your attention from the stage to the whole machinery of a theatre. (Latour, 2008: 39)

Much of the literature examining the ‘matter of fact’ of unconcern about climate change represents it as a problem with specific causes to be targeted with discrete forms of corrective action. Within the social production of concern, the unconcerned are often portrayed as unwitting victims; for instance, of denialist marketing or of their own unconscious bias. In response, we aim in this paper to sketch some of the lived scenography of the ‘matter of unconcern’. Drawing upon narrative analysis of interviews, we ask: how is unconcern about climate change entangled with concern for other issues? How is unconcern animated by values, attitudes, practices and experiences? How is it enmeshed in social relationships and embodied in the materiality of everyday life? Through this analysis, we pursue a more complete account of, and a more empathetic engagement with, people who express unconcern about climate change.

Existing explanations of a lack of concern

Research on public attitudes to climate change draws on a range of social science disciplines, including psychology, geography, sociology, political sciences, media and communication studies. A large proportion of this literature is based on quantitative analysis of social surveys or psychological experiments, focussing on knowledge about, belief in, or concern about climate change. Explanations of a lack of concern are in many cases implicit in findings that focus on concern. A small number of studies have examined public attitudes to climate change in the context of lived experience (Callison, 2014; Hochschild, 2016; Norgaard, 2011). In a variety of methodologically distinct ways, this diverse literature implicates a variety of interacting cognitive, cultural, social and political processes underlying a lack of public concern about climate change. The following analytical review is not comprehensive, but provides a novel characterisation of five key explanations for individuals’ lack of concern proposed in the literature: ideological, group-based, religious, self-enhancing and self-protective. These explanations are not mutually exclusive; an individual may manifest a complex mixture of all or several of them. Each source should also be interpreted in light of a spectrum of engagement. High levels of disengagement lead to expressions of an uncommitted response – described, for instance, as very low levels of concern or as changeability or uncertainty of opinion – while high levels of engagement can lead to strongly motivated forms of rejection of concern, such as impassioned climate change scepticism or denial.

Ideological sources of a lack of concern

Surveys of public attitudes to climate change in the US from the 1980s show that it was originally a bipartisan issue, with concern spread evenly between Democrats and Republicans (Carmichael et al., 2017). However, since the mid-2000s, political affiliation has become an increasingly consistent predictor of concern and lack of concern about climate change in the US. People who support right-wing parties are less likely to see climate change as a concerning issue, less supportive of climate policy and more sceptical of climate science than those on the Left (Dunlap and McCright, 2008; McCright and Dunlap, 2011). This pattern has also been found in the UK (Poortinga et al., 2011), Canada (Rabe et al., 2011), the European Union (McCright et al., 2016a) and Australia (McCrea et al., 2015; Tranter, 2011). Polarisation about climate change appears to largely be a product of English-speaking western democracies (Capstick et al., 2015; McCright et al., 2016a).

Research into political polarisation about climate change has directed attention to ideological sources of disengagement from or resistance to concern (e.g. Häkkinen and Akrami, 2014; McCright and Dunlap, 2011; McCright et al., 2016b). A political ideology is ‘a set of beliefs about the proper order of society and how it can be achieved’ (Erikson and Tedin in Jost et al., 2009: 309). Ideology is typically classified on a left–right continuum, where values of ‘conservatism’, ‘order’, ‘individualism’, ‘capitalism’ and ‘fascism’ are associated with the Right, and values of ‘equality’, ‘progressive’, ‘radical’, ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ are associated with the Left (Fuchs and Klingemann, 1990). In surveys of public attitudes to climate change, people who place themselves on the right side of this continuum are more likely to express a lack of concern (Häkkinen and Akrami, 2014).

Both psychological and socio-cultural studies suggest that reliance on existing social systems for security, reassurance and stability is particularly important for people who identify as being ideologically on the Right. Psychological studies find that this reliance generates system-justifying tendencies that are associated with a lack of concern about or denial of climate change (Feygina et al., 2010). Studies based on human values theory (Schwartz, 1992) and cultural theory (Douglas and Wildavsky, 1982) similarly find that the ‘conservative’ values of tradition, conformity and security are associated with having low or no concern about climate change (Aasen, 2015; Lucas, 2018 and Lakoff, 2002), climate denial (Kahan et al., 2011; Poortinga et al., 2011) and a lack of support for climate policy (Dietz et al., 2007; Drews and van den Bergh, 2016). These values involve opposition to changes to the social status quo and endorse the need for hierarchical systems that enforce rules, social order and obedience.

Conservative values are central to the lives of participants in Hochschild’s (2016) sociological study of the working-class Right in the US. These participants express a desire for small government, low taxation, no regulation and no welfare, even if this is seemingly at their own expense. Hochschild describes the ‘great paradox’ of this worldview: people suffering from industrial pollution of their environment desire deregulation of industry and weakening of environmental protection. They also do not express concern about climate change, despite personal experience of increasingly severe hurricanes and sea level rise. Hochschild’s interviewees described the power, dignity and honour of paid work available through polluting industries. This is also noted by Lamont (2009), whose ethnographic research in the US finds that working-class people increasingly define themselves according to moral, rather than economic or educational standards, prioritising hard work and the traditional values of security and conformity. According to George Lakoff (2002), family values have become central to how people think about political values. For people on the Right, self-discipline and the freedom to make your own way are seen as morally preferable to being cared for and protected. State-sponsored social welfare is looked upon as weakening society and corrupting individuals (Lakoff, 2002).

Group-based sources of a lack of concern

Another explanation of the partisan divide on climate change is that people who are not concerned are responding to accepted views of the social groups to which they belong or with which they identify. This may take the form of relaying opinions expressed by right-wing political leaders and influencers (Carmichael and Brulle, 2016; Guber, 2012). Partisan media coverage is implicated in increasing polarisation of social groups who identify with political parties (Farstad, 2016; Hmielowski et al., 2013), as are the narratives of a ‘counter-movement’ of right-wing think tanks funded by carbon-intensive industry to challenge representations of consensus and to elevate perceptions of scientific uncertainty about climate change (Jacques et al., 2008; Oreskes and Conway, 2010).

Group-based disinterest or apathy towards narratives of climate change may also result from conscious or subconscious efforts to retain the benefits of belonging to a social group and avoiding the risks that may come with being excluded (Kunda, 1990). For example, people who wish to be with and participate in Republican groups in the US have strong incentive to avoid concern about climate change, as this issue has become an increasingly non-negotiable element of Republican identity and affiliation (Hart and Nisbet, 2011). While ideology may play a role here, analyses of group-based disengagement from or resistance to concern draw attention to the role of particular opinions as markers of belonging to or exclusion from a particular group (Guber, 2012; Hoffarth and Hodson, 2016; Iyengar et al., 2012). Thus, to belong to the right-wing Tea Party movement in the US, one might be expected to oppose such diverse policies as abortion, gun laws and action on climate change. People who feel strongly about only one of these issues may voice the group-majority opinion on others in order to maintain their acceptance by the group (Nelson and Kinder, 1996). It is likely that the effects of values, elite cues and group identity work together to buttress a lack of concern about climate change (Bliuc et al., 2015). Equally, it can be assumed that group-based processes within the political Left may mask or dampen expressions of a lack of concern about climate change, as concern about this issue is now a keystone of left-wing identity (van Prooijen et al., 2015).

Religious sources of a lack of concern

Religions have both individual and collective influence on normative responses to climate change. However, even within denominations, the influence of doctrine and religious institutions is multiple and complex (Ivakhiv, 2006). While there are strong movements for environmental stewardship within each of the world’s major religious groups, there are also reactionary responses to climate science, in which the existence of anthropogenic climate change is seen to threaten understandings of divine power (Haluza-DeLay, 2014). The majority of research into religious attitudes to climate change focuses on Christianity, particularly in the US (Haluza-DeLay, 2014). Conservative Christian faiths, particularly those that interpret the Bible as literal truth, have been associated with lack of concern about climate change (Morrison et al., 2015; Truelove and Joireman, 2009), although other researchers suggest that religion is secondary to ideology in mediating unconcern (Smith and Leiserowitz, 2013). Theologies describing climate as created and controlled by a higher power can lead holders of these beliefs to feel that humans have limited influence on the climate or that any influence they do have is bestowed upon them (Wolf and Moser, 2011). A Christian doctrine of human dominion over nature has been implicated in unconcern about climate change (Hand and van Liere, 1984; Morrison et al., 2015; Pepper and Leonard, 2016). Theology describing end-times has also been identified as a source of a lack of concern about climate change, because environmental destruction is seen as an inevitable sign of a pending day of judgement that an eternal afterlife for the righteous (Barker and Bearce, 2012). All these beliefs are interpreted and enacted in a variety of ways, at all scales from individual responses to those of international religious organisations (Danielsen, 2013; Haluza-DeLay, 2014). While non-Christian religions may also affect attitudes to climate change, little research has addressed this to date.

Self-enhancing sources of a lack of concern

Another set of explanations for a lack of concern about climate change involve the prioritisation of individual aspirations and goals over collective concerns. This can reflect a ‘finite pool of worry’ (Pidgeon, 2010; Weber, 2006), in which day-to-day concerns crowd out what appear to be more generalised and distant worries such as climate change, leading to disengagement. However, this can also reflect self-enhancing traditions such as liberal individualism that motivate engaged forms of resistance to climate concern. Individualism prioritises personal autonomy and personal responsibility (Realo et al., 2002). Many people with strong individualist views support the free market as an arbiter of societal decisions and oppose government intervention in individual lives. Individualism has been associated with lack of concern about climate change (Aasen, 2015), lack of support for climate policy (Drews and van den Bergh, 2016), climate scepticism and denial (Kahan et al., 2011). This may also be related to ‘solution aversion’, as many of the most often discussed actions to mitigate climate change, such as international regulation and taxation of carbon emissions, are counter to liberal individualist perspectives (Campbell and Kay, 2014; Prins et al., 2010). In human values theory (Schwartz, 1992), values relating to self-enhancement are opposed to those relating to self-transcendence. Several studies have found that self-transcendent values including care for others and for nature are associated with support for climate policy (e.g. Howell and Allen, 2017; Nordlund and Garvill, 2002). Most of these studies find a negative effect of self-enhancement values on support for climate policy.

Self-protective sources of a lack of concern

Other studies of climate change attitudes have examined the way people may actively close their minds to concern about climate change as a defence against the perceived enormity of the threat and/or the response required. Randall (2009) points out that there is an asymmetry between catastrophic warnings of imminent climate change impacts and the small positive steps for individuals suggested by the climate change communication literature. This dissonance can lead to overwhelming feelings of helplessness, loss and apathy. Facts about climate change can become what Rayner (2012) calls ‘uncomfortable knowledge’ causing individuals (and groups) to try to protect themselves through contradicting these facts, refusing responsibility, asserting the insignificance of their personal or national contribution, pointing to the inaction of others, claiming ignorance, believing that it is inevitable or hoping that technology will fix it (Norgaard, 2011; Stoknes, 2014; Stoll-Kleemann et al., 2001). Responses to uncomfortable knowledge extend to diversion, in which attention is drawn away from the contentious issue, and displacement, in which an alternative but related issue is substituted for the object of discomfort (Rayner, 2012). Resistance to concern about climate change is also connected with political disengagement and loss of trust in government (Pidgeon, 2010; Whitmarsh et al., 2011). Feelings of distrust in social institutions, lack of self-efficacy and fear can lead to fatalism (O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole, 2009). Fatalist worldviews deny responsibility for the environment by framing it as unpredictable, uncontrollable and resilient to human activity (Corry and Jorgensen, 2015). People may also defend themselves against concern about climate change by interpreting the issue as remote, being distant in time and space, separate from their social reality and varying in certainty (Devine-Wright, 2013; Spence et al., 2012).

Norgaard (2011) describes disengagement as a collective process rather than an individual response. Within socially organised spheres of denial, information about climate change is disregarded because of collectively defined limits to perception, attention, memory and concern. The systemic links between climate change and every aspect of modern lives gives rise to dynamics of social resistance that seek to reassert ‘a sense of security and order… through cultural practices’ (Norgaard, 2011: 221). One such cultural practice, as Hochschild (2016) notes, is a cultural silence on climate change that shuts it out from conversation or debate or relegates it as one amongst many peripheral issues that clutter news bulletins.

Method

As Capstick et al. (2015) point out, changes to social understandings of climate change do not occur in isolation, but as part of larger patterns and processes of social transformation and environmental change. Quantitative studies have been invaluable in providing snap-shots of social attitudes. However, in-depth qualitative research is required to shed light on the broader dynamics in which these attitudes are situated, by exploring the lived contexts in which they are expressed and the discursive processes through which they are entangled in epistemological and normative engagements with other issues.

The participants for the study we report here were initially engaged through participation in a public survey called the ‘Hobart Values Survey’ (HVS) we conducted in April–May 2015. The non-probability sample of the HVS comprised 522 adults from Hobart, the capital city of the state of Tasmania, Australia. The survey was presented as a questionnaire on values, priorities and views on social issues. Questions about climate change were presented amongst a wide range of other issues. In a Likert scale (1–6) question asking: ‘How concerned (if at all) are you about climate change (also known as global warming)?’, the large majority (84%) of survey participants responded that they were 4 (somewhat), 5 (very) or 6 (extremely) concerned about climate change. For the qualitative part of this study, we were interested in those who had responded that they were 1 (not at all concerned), 2 (not particularly concerned) or 3 (a little concerned). By recruiting nine people ranging from the completely unconcerned to those who expressed ‘a little’ concern, we sought to include participants expressing both motivated and disengaged forms of unconcern. A strength of this method is that it captured people not easily or commonly engaged in public attitude research. Seven participants were interviewed by the first author eight times each, at approximately fortnightly intervals, over the space of six months; one participant was interviewed six times and one seven times. The method of inquiry was intended to develop trusting, empathetic relationships with participants in which they were comfortable sharing not just information about their concerns and attitudes, but in reflecting over an extended period about their focal life concerns and contexts. Interviews first centred around focal life concerns and values, before broadening out to global issues. The interview series enabled a process of sequential disclosure of the aims of the study to participants. Climate change was first introduced as a subject of discussion in the fifth interview and was explained as the focus of the research in the sixth.

Our method draws on narrative inquiry, seeing people’s representation of their experience and identity as ‘storied’. Clandinin and Rosiek (2006: 42) describe narrative inquiry as:

An exploration of the social, cultural and institutional narratives within which individuals’ experiences are constituted, shaped, expressed and enacted – but in a way that begins and ends that inquiry in the storied lives of the people involved.

Within each person’s story, personal values, cultural norms and social practices interact. Metaphors, symbols and stories that have cultural currency are re-told and re-contextualised from within the perspective of individual lives. Through the ways people narrate their lives, perceptions of the past and future, private and public, immediate and distant are brought into relation, shaped and re-shaped and given ‘meaning, value and autobiographical justification’ (McAdams et al., 2008: 979). By moving over an extended time from personal, to local, to global concerns, and from personally held values and commitments to publically controversial issues, we were able to explore the underlying context and reasons for responses to dominant narratives of climate change.

What matters to the unconcerned

Our group of nine unconcerned participants – five men and four women – ranged widely in age (21 to 70 years), education (incomplete secondary education to postgraduate university education) and employment (student, public servant, childcare worker, Christian minister, retired school administrator, small business owner, retired librarian, incapacitated taxi driver and political advisor). Each participant had a different story and expressed different reasons for their unconcern about climate change. We have chosen to represent three lived stories in detail, to enable depth of discussion and to better explore how these textured accounts of lived experience illuminate the incommensurability of participants’ focal life concerns with dominant narratives of climate change.

Paddling against the current

Rachel is a smartly dressed retiree of age 60. She lives with her husband of many years, with whom she has three children, in the well-to-do neighbourhood where she has lived all her life. Although not particularly interested in electoral politics, Rachel’s values are conservative, voting all her life (like her parents) for the (centre-right) Liberal Party: ‘I probably have never been a changer, people who swap from one to the other [of the main political parties]’. Rachel is anxious to maintain social stability, predictability and certainty: ‘I’ve always been a very safe, secure person. I’ve always known where I’m putting my foot down. You know, if I lift one up, I know exactly where I’m putting it down’. This has led to a life lived within narrow geographical and social boundaries.

Although a consummate risk-avoider, Rachel is unconcerned by claims that climate change is the greatest threat currently facing humanity. To make sense of this apparent paradox, we need to understand the focal concerns of Rachel’s life. Rachel sees herself as a moral person. She has good reason to do so: she looks after her family and friends and volunteers her time to help in the community. She describes herself as ‘the peacekeeper in the family’. Within her world, she seeks to be fair, upright and caring. But being asked to contemplate global problems such as war, terrorism, internet fraud or human impacts on the environment makes her deeply uncomfortable, because it challenges her sense of herself as a moral person. Asking her opinions on these issues makes her feel ‘irresponsible’: ‘You know I come away from […] [our research interviews] feeling terrible, don’t you?’, she says.

Rachel is engaged in a constant and active effort to maintain her status quo. Thinking about complex global problems is incommensurable with her emotional need to live in a benign, secure world. Her sense of security relies on belonging to a social group where people have similar attitudes and similar incomes. It is particularly important to her that she is ‘on the same page’ as those around her. Fearing conflict of opinion, she avoids controversial topics. However, she has a lively social life and is actively engaged in her community, hosting barbecues and participating in local government committees. She locates herself in a moderate majority of people with similar opinions and living standards.

I’m just the middle person, I’m not really poor and desperate, and I'm not rich. I’m sort of in that middle, where everything’s fine, you can always do with a bit more money, or a bit less, or whatever. And most of the people I associate with, probably are on that middle. […] And we just seem to, I don’t know, be on the same wavelength of what's happening.

Rachel articulates virtue in being moderate and middle class – not showing off, or seeking power, but conversely not being needy or powerless. Rachel’s strong need for security is expressed in her desire for a world that conforms to rules and understandings of what is right, normal and acceptable. She would like to feel that benevolent, legitimate authorities are ‘calm and […] taking control’. Rules are to her the boundary between order and chaos.

You don’t want to be a totalitarian state, but when you look at places like Singapore, where it’s pretty strict, I think: great place. Love to live there. It’s clean. They’ve got the rules. Everyone abides by the rules because you all know the rules, and so everyone gets on.

Desiring clear boundaries between what is good and bad, Rachel sees Australia’s role in international conflicts as being on the side of ‘the goodies’. While she accepts that western intervention in Iraq, for example, has had negative outcomes, she focuses on the ‘good intentions’ behind it. It is important to her that the social groups in which she invests her identity (e.g. Australians, mothers, Catholics, the middle class) have moral integrity and that their actions can be justified. Because she identifies her own social group as good, she tends to see those outside this group as morally ‘other’. Describing the war in Syria and the conflict with ISIS, she says:

There’s no rules to this conflict, and I think that’s what's so unnerving […] This just has no borders, no edges to it, and so no one knows who the enemy is, and that’s scary. […] that’s why people are labelling [others according to their appearance] because we need to have something to say, ‘This is good and that’s bad’.

Unlike many on the political Right, Rachel does not have an individualist worldview – she would rather live in a highly regulated society. Neither is she motivated by self-enhancement – she would rather maintain stasis than increase her social or economic standing. As a practising Catholic, and a Liberal Party voter, her unconcern about climate change may not feel out of place in a social group that is also represented by climate sceptic Catholic and Liberal Australian Ex-Prime Minister Tony Abbott. Rachel’s husband is also an avowed climate sceptic, and she says that his views have ‘infiltrated’ into her.

The thought that the Earth could be materially changed by humans to the point that it became unstable and potentially unliveable is unthinkably frightening to Rachel – it heightens her fear of change and need for a controlled world. She acknowledges that people’s actions, including her own, are affecting the environment and that this creates moral accountability. However, the range of issues Rachel sees as requiring responsible action is limited to those that easily fit within her lifestyle and do not challenge social authority:

Everyone tries to be responsible, and I think that must help. I know now that plastic bags aren’t as easy to come by as they were. The bin that we have under the sink that all the rubbish goes in, I might’ve emptied it when it was three quarters full and now I have it to the brim.

Within Rachel’s world, this concession takes on a greater scale than might be apparent to others. Like a swan paddling against the current to stay in the same place, she is constantly working beneath the surface to maintain a position in which she can feel secure. It is important to her to feel both virtuous and safe.

Narratives predicting climate change jeopardy are too extreme for Rachel to accept. They undermine her sense of order, fairness and safety. Anthropogenic climate change places a burden of moral responsibility that, if accepted, threatens her sense of her own virtue. In contrast to her generous assumptions about the good intentions of politicians and her social class, she disparages climate scientists as contradicting each other and overstating risks to gain money and renown. She worries that narratives of climate change are becoming pervasive: ‘people [are] getting on the bandwagon and blaming it for everything that’s happening’. Rachel describes her frustration at how even her doctor has jumped on this bandwagon: ‘I’ve been coughing a lot, and the first thing she [the doctor] said, “Oh, it could be the climate change”. Really? It’s in my lungs now? Let’s just blame it for everything’.

In response to climate science, Rachel does not rule out anthropogenic causes entirely, but reframes climate change as natural, benign and gradual: ‘that’s just the way the world evolves and it fixes itself and it goes along’. She imagines a future Tasmania where it will be warmer, ‘not like Queensland, or anything like that. But […] it’d be nice just to be a couple of degrees warmer all the time. Wouldn’t kill anything, it would just be nice’. In this hopeful story of incremental and favourable change, which mirrors modernist narratives of incremental techno-economic progress, Rachel co-opts climatic change into her middle-class world, where it obeys the conventions of politeness and normality by being ‘nice’.

Comfortably numb

Gerald, a chatty, small-business owner in his 40s, seems, at first, to be a socially progressive environmentalist. He supports political action for marriage equality and fairer treatment of refugees in Australia. He describes himself as feeling a ‘kinship’ with nature and values living in Tasmania’s natural environment. Gerald’s career in the SCUBA diving industry emerged from a connection with the sea that started in early childhood, when he would spend holidays snorkelling on Tasmania’s east coast. Now a father, he enjoys sharing his affinity with coastal environments with his young family.

I think if you’re growing up in the bush, or around by the beach […] there’s a natural side of you that wants to be a little bit on the conservation side of things. Because you did it, you want your children to be able to see it.

Gerald has personal experience of climate change, as someone whose boat-based job requires him to pay close attention to the weather. He has also been involved in scientific surveys of marine life and has noticed a lot of change in the marine environment.

We seem to be getting more storms, like dramatic weather events I think are part of climate change. I certainly can’t remember the weather systems we have now, I can’t remember them as we grew up. So I think people need to understand what climate change is […] when people are going, “Oh look I’ve caught a black marlin, that’s really odd” [these species are unexpected in the usually cool waters off Tasmania].

Despite his knowledge, experience and largely progressive views, Gerald is unconcerned about climate change. He sees it as a problem whose consequences are marginalised by other foci of life concern.

At the moment, I’m concerned about running two businesses and having a small child and not spending enough time with my family, they’re my major concerns. You know, climate change? Oh yes, whatever; I’ve just got to get through life at the moment.

Gerald’s unconcern about climate change goes deeper than just having other things on his mind and a finite pool of worry. Material comfort and particularly owning his own home and car is very important to him, as it is to many Australians.

There was a house sold down B— Bay [a nearby neighbourhood] the other day – it’s a shack – for a million bucks. It’s on the beach. It’s nice but not a million dollars nice. We are starting to see house prices similar to Melbourne. And you need to make money, so you can afford that. I want a nice house, I’m sure you want a nice house. Or you want to drive a nice car.

Gerald suggests that these kinds of wants are pleasant but not excessive and appeals to a sense that this level of wealth and ownership is a social norm. His term of reference for value is primarily economic: he sees making money as a sign of good sense and resourcefulness – even as a moral good in itself, as he believes in the social flow of economic benefits. Consider his praise for Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull: ‘He’s made a lot of money on his own. So obviously he must have some sort of strategic mind, to be able to do that’.

Gerald feels some dissonance between his desire to protect environments in which he works and lives and his belief in using resources to generate work and prosperity: ‘One side of me believes very strongly in the environment and the other side of me believes very strongly in making the best of what you’ve got and trying to use that’. He resolves this by downplaying the scale of risk of climate change and focussing on ways to protect his family through financial affluence. However, his views are not so much motivated by personal self-enhancement, as by a belief that the freedom and opportunity to improve one’s financial situation is a right that should be open to all.

I disagree how you have [natural protected] areas: they lock them up and you can’t go into them. They’re a resource that we all own […] so you should be allowed to access to all those things.

His view that protected trees, minerals and fish stocks should be available as economic resources conflicts with the views of some of his friends:

I have this mate who lives in Melbourne who says it is fantastic that Tasmania has locked up its forest; it is really, really good. And I said ‘Why?’ He said it’s great we still have all that forest there, it is there for all Australians. I said, ‘Yes, that’s fine, but the rest of us, I have got to live here, I have got to make a dollar. You shut down industries,’ I said, ‘You can’t shut down industry and lock things up so you can sit here in Melbourne and talk about how wonderful the trees are’.

A framework of economic value dominates Gerald’s thinking about climate change, despite his personal affection for some natural environments. To him, Australia’s coal exports are ethically justified by economics and the personal lifestyles it makes possible:

I suppose we could change in the fact that we’re selling resources to [China and India], such as coal, but then people living in Australia have to have jobs. And let’s face it, we do like our lifestyle down here in Australia. We do love toys, we do love to own a house, we do love to have two cars […] So we all have to have work somewhere, and some of that happens from primary resources.

Gerald is interesting because he shows how people can hold two sets of apparently opposing views at the same time. While conservation is important to him, material comfort based on economic prosperity wins out and also affords him personal access to natural environments that he values. He numbs the ache of this dissonance through conforming to what he sees as dominant social norms, pointing out that he is not alone in putting comfort first – it is part of what it is to be an Australian.

Mourning a lost world

Most afternoons, Doug can be found at the bar of a Returned and Services League Club in the north of Hobart. Here, he meets up with fellow veterans of the Vietnam War for a beer or two and places bets on the horse races. Doug is a retiree and would rather be working, but at 60, his back suddenly gave way, leaving him unable to continue his job in a taxi firm. A working-class man who describes himself as ‘a Laborite’, Doug has always voted for the centre-left Australian Labor Party. In common with the large majority of Labor voters, he accepts the reality of human-induced climate change. He says he can see it for himself, for example, in the dryness of the native vegetation (‘the bush’) leading to wildlife coming onto roads.

Yeah, climate change is affecting things, because there's not as much water in the bush […] More times you see roadkill [wild animals that are run over by cars], that’s climate change. […] My opinion. Nothing scientific about it. That to me is common sense, you know?

But Doug is despondent. He feels that his opinion counts for nothing. Politically disengaged and socially powerless, he withdraws his concern about all but the most personal of issues.

I care about the lives of my family; simple. I believe climate change is happening. I don’t think I’m in a position to help, but there you go. I’m like a million other people, a billion other people. I believe it’s there, but until the powers that be want to do something, no one can do anything. It’s waste of time having protests and stuff like that because that just plays into their hands.

Doug believes in climate change, and as a father of six and a member of a left-wing public, might be expected to be among the climate concerned. Yet, Doug not only resists concern but also resents climate activists, who he says ‘get everyone’s back up’ by making themselves the centre of attention and achieve nothing. However, he empathises with the frustration that leads to protest: ‘It can be heart-breaking if you feel like you don’t make a difference, or can’t make a difference, […] I just can’t see which way to make a difference’. The rules Doug has lived by all his life are socially, if not politically, conservative: work hard, respect others, avoid debt. Asked what work means to him personally, he says: ‘I think it’s a sense of self-satisfaction. I mean, no one’s got to look after you. Then you know you’ve done your bit’. ‘Doing your bit’ implies that by supporting yourself and your family, you are also contributing to the welfare and development of society. Protest is not a form of social action that conforms to Doug’s ethic of social development through hard work.

Doug still sees individual responsibility as part of a larger social effort, but feels that this system of values has been undermined by modern politics. ‘I am like a lot of older people, I don’t think things have changed for the better […] Respect in the world has gone’. Doug’s concept of respect reflects a concern with citizenship – one must have respect for oneself, generated by hard work, and in return society must offer respect to its citizens through opportunity and fairness. He feels this has been lost in a shift toward worship of ‘the almighty dollar’:

The top end [wealthy and powerful] of town has always had too much to say for itself and the gap’s getting bigger. There’s no fairness in our system. Any part of our systems, even our legal system is very biased. I mean the top end of town will always win.

The vitriol Doug puts into criticising political elites suggests that not caring about climate change is a defensive response to feeling powerless in a system that he describes as prioritising the needs of the wealthy over the poor. Doug’s values are more collectivist than individualist – he describes how he is a part of a group of lifelong ‘mates’ who care for each other. He is not motivated by self-enhancement, but by loyalty to his grown-up children and close friends and by conformity to traditional secular values. In his view, his values put him out of step with the modern world. He also feels ashamed that his generation has left a negative social and environmental legacy.

We’ve raped and pillaged the world […] We’re tearing it down. I’m not a greenie, I’ll tell you that now, but I just don’t like the way we develop [buildings and infrastructure] […] I know there are better ways things can be done. Except the profit margin’s not as high if they do it a different way. So not going to change. It goes back to the dollar, doesn’t it?

Doug insists that he is not a ‘greenie’ – a term describing supporters of environmentalist politics such as the Australian Greens party – because they put the welfare of the environment before the welfare of ‘the masses’, and this is counter to his own values. He speculates that the interviewer is a greenie, because of her concern about climate change, suggesting he views climate change as a niche environmentalist issue. It also raises the possibility that his expression of unconcern about climate change may relate to a judgement that despite his feelings of political disenfranchisement, his identity as a left-wing, working-class man does not fit with strong concern about climate change.

Discussion

The three lived stories of unconcern about climate change presented above together encompass all five explanations of a lack of concern we identified in attitudinal research earlier in the paper. Rachel’s unconcern about climate change is self-protective, associated with group-based responses and, to a lesser extent, religious beliefs. Gerald’s unconcern is also focussed on the rights and interests of his social group and thus brings in self-enhancing and ideological responses (although his politics are ambiguous), while Doug’s unconcern also appears to be group-based, self-protective and, to a lesser extent, ideological. Diverse combinations of the existing explanations of lack of concern were evident across all nine participants, as was diversity along a continuum from engagement to disengagement. In reconceptualising unconcern as an expression of focal life concerns that are incommensurable with dominant narratives of climate change, our research moves beyond existing explanations of a lack of concern, to examine the experiential conditions in which concern about climate change is actively resisted. No two participants exhibited the same dynamics of unconcern. Our analysis thus provides insight into the ways in which unconcern about climate change may take a wide variety of forms based upon diverse combinations of multiple elements. Our research points to expressions of climate change unconcern that are aligned with left-wing politics, such as Doug’s, which are not represented in the literature. While right-wing ideology and religiosity are among the strongest explanations for a lack of concern in the literature, they do not represent several of our participants. Only five out of nine participants consistently voted for the right-wing Liberal Party, with the other four including a lifelong socialist, a minor-party voter, a ‘swinging’ voter and someone who did not vote at all. Five participants (four of whom were also Liberal Party voters) avowed religious belief – two identifying as Protestant, two as Catholic and one an adherent of an Eastern spiritual tradition. The prevalence of group-based effects in our analysis also raises the question of whether these may be under-represented in quantitative studies, given the efficacy of qualitative methods in drawing out the ways in which social phenomena are implicated in individual attitudes.

The main contribution of our study, however, lies in providing respectful and textured accounts of the way in which unconcern for climate change is an expression of focal matters of lived and situated concern. These accounts expose the limits of research that assumes, first, that unconcern about climate change is an unequivocal problem for climate change action and, second, that is to be overcome through improved modes of communication about climate change. It is in this sense that we argue that unconcern about climate change be understood as a substantive phenomenon in its own right and not simply as the absence of concern. Apprehending unconcern as a substantive matter opens up possibilities for engaging with it as an expression of legitimate life interests and objectives. Such engagement requires empathetic forms of dialogue within the discursive processes that produce social understandings of climate change. It also raises opportunities for acknowledging the concerns that animate unconcern about climate change do not necessarily imply opposition to climate change action. As Pearce et al. (2017: 725) observe, ‘acknowledging and valuing dissensus would allow a more publicly inclusive and accessible debate over approaches to climate change that do not prematurely foreclose particular policy options’.

From Rachel, we learn how knowledge about climate change may be deeply uncomfortable for those who value social stability and predictability (Rayner, 2012). In other studies, this discomfort has been explained as reactionary conservatism, one often linked to maintaining personal privilege (McCright and Dunlap, 2011; McCright et al., 2016b). However, in Rachel’s story we see that this discomfit belongs at least partly to her efforts to live a virtuous, moral and modest life within tight boundaries. Rather than springing from a lack of care for human and nonhuman others, Rachel’s unwillingness to engage with uncomfortable knowledge about climate change belongs to uncertainty about how to understand moral relationships beyond the bounds of her discrete local world. Her conservative localism has interesting parallels to that advocated by some environmentalists as a necessary move away from the global mobility that is a key driver of climate change. Group-based dynamics including her climate sceptic husband, Catholic background and conservative upbringing link Rachel to right-wing politics. However, she did not express the commitment to economic growth and technological progress often associated with the climate change unconcern of the Right. Her unease lies with more general challenges posed by the consensus on climate change to the security offered by the status quo.

Gerald shows us that unconcern about climate change can be a response to holding together an economic liberalist outlook with a strong affinity for nature. Gerald’s disengagement from issues of climate change is not explained by a lack of knowledge of climate science, a lack of personal experience of climate-induced environmental change or a lack of personal value placed on healthy ecosystems. Rather, his disengagement stems from ideological commitment to liberalist ideals that link economic growth and collective well-being through individual freedom and prosperity (Campbell and Kay, 2014). Gerald explained his commitment to liberalism not simply in terms of self-interest. For example, he justified Australia’s coal-export industry as vital not just to Australia’s prosperity but to overcoming poverty in places such as India. What is intriguing about Gerald’s story is that while he accepts that environmental damage may be a necessary and legitimate side-effect of economic growth, his own individual preferences include having access to attractive natural environments as the basis for his livelihood in the SCUBA industry and for his family’s lifestyle in Tasmania. In this way, appeals for action on climate change that Gerald perceives as inhibiting economic development may be perceived by him as also threatening his private dependence on and access to nature.

Doug’s story sheds light on the ways in which left-wing political orientation may be compatible with unconcern about climate change. In part, Doug’s experience, and particularly his need to dissociate himself from ‘Greenies’, is explained by a recognised rift within the political Left in many Western countries, between the working-class labour movement and middle-class (and predominantly urban) environmentalism (Norton, 2003). Doug values the importance of economic development in providing employment and social welfare provisions, and this underpins his distrust of green politics. Yet, at least as important in his unconcern about climate change is Doug’s perception of entrenched social inequality and his resulting deep disaffection of social elites of all kinds, from business and political leaders to scientific and technical experts. While fed to some extent by his ideological and group-based affiliations, this disaffection also springs from a personal experience of disenfranchisement and disadvantage. In response, Doug restricts his focus to protecting himself and his family and friends from what he perceives as increasing social adversity. Climate change is thus rolled together with a wider disaffection with economic processes, despite the fact that proposed climate change actions, and environmentalist agendas more broadly, may address problems with economic development that trouble Doug.

Each of the lived stories of climate change unconcern in our study is highly particular. At the same time, they offer rich glimpses of social relationships and dynamics that shape the life interests of many. We do not offer our analysis so as to provide a platform on which to construct subtle and potentially intrusive public communication strategies. Rather, our interest lies in inviting those of us who produce and communicate scientific concern about climate change to think more self-reflexively and empathetically about the causes and consequences of both concern and unconcern about climate change. We argue that the social resistance created by diverse focal life concerns is far from being an unambiguous barrier to action. Rather, the dissonance of climate change unconcern with dominant narratives of climate change can usefully be understood as forms of cultural and political agonism with the potential to generate constructive pressure to strengthen public dialogue and policy-making about climate change (Pepermans and Maeseele, 2016). This strengthening promises opportunity to build coalitions of purpose across polarised social groups, and to re-evaluate ways of articulating scientific concern about climate with a greater plurality of lived concerns.

One clear lesson for those that seek social action on climate change through dissemination of scientific and policy consensus is that conventional depictions of polarised conflict between development and environment (e.g. Klein, 2014) mask diverse ways in which apparently opposed perspectives can co-exist in everyday lives without generating the cognitive dissonance that might be predicted by theory (e.g. Stoknes, 2014). None of the participants in our study were unconcerned about climate change because of any inability to comprehend sophisticated knowledge, slavish obedience to tradition or authority, deliberate indifference to the suffering of others, or narcissistic self-interest. People who are unconcerned about climate change cannot be assumed to be less dedicated to living a moral life than those who are concerned. Nor can these individuals be assumed to be suffering a deficit that can be overcome by expertise and education. Framing unconcern as a deficit can have the effect of making individuals feel morally under siege – potentially leading to a ‘boomerang effect’ (Hart and Nisbet, 2011) in which they increasingly situate themselves within social groups that do not place this moral pressure on them. As proposed by Prins et al. (2010), one way past current polarisation is to reframe climate change action in more inclusive ways, by subsuming it within policy aspirations that enjoy wider and less partisan support, such as those focussed on human dignity, human rights and poverty alleviation. More broadly, however, there is a need for discourse about climate change to acknowledge that matters of fact are inseparable from the contested matters of concern that animate differences in the debate. This involves taking the lives of the unconcerned seriously, as we have sought to do here. Advocates of climate action, such as ourselves, are thus called to reflexive attention about the ways in which our own concerns are shaped by the contexts of our lives.

Highlights

Much communication about climate change adopts a ‘concern deficit model’ that frames unconcern about climate change negatively and passively.

Unconcern about climate change is an expression of focal life concerns incommensurable with dominant narratives of climate change.

Five explanations for lack of climate change concern are identified in the research literature: ideological, group-based, religious, self-enhancing and self-protective.

In-depth qualitative interviewing reveals lived expressions of unconcern to be diverse and context-dependent and to have multiple sources.

Respectful engagement with unconcerned publics requires reflexive attention to the contested matters of concern underlying differences in the debate.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

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