- Missoula, Montana, United States
Steve Schwarze
University of Montana, Communication Studies, Faculty Member
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“The Technological Shell Game” examines the industry’s persistent use of the “clean coal” trope to resist environmental regulation. The chapter interprets “clean coal” as a case of strategic ambiguity in which the industry invokes... more
“The Technological Shell Game” examines the industry’s persistent use of the “clean coal” trope to resist environmental regulation. The chapter interprets “clean coal” as a case of strategic ambiguity in which the industry invokes different definitions of “clean coal” to play a “technological shell game” with audiences, offering the promise of clean coal while hiding what exactly is meant by clean coal. This rhetorical strategy can unite disparate audiences in support of “clean coal,” but it obfuscates the coal industry’s resistance to regulation by appearing to work voluntarily and proactively toward technological solutions to environmental problems. The shell game enables the industry to finesse contradictions between its neoliberal calls for smaller government and deregulation, and its demand that the federal government subsidize carbon capture and sequestration technologies.
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“Hypocrite’s Trap” examines the coal industry’s response to the fossil fuel divestment movement. Using a realist style of rhetoric, the coal industry and its allies in the oil and gas industry, conservative think tanks, and conservative... more
“Hypocrite’s Trap” examines the coal industry’s response to the fossil fuel divestment movement. Using a realist style of rhetoric, the coal industry and its allies in the oil and gas industry, conservative think tanks, and conservative media set a rhetorical trap for divestment advocates, the “Hypocrite’s Trap.” Three moves set the trap: establishing ignorance, exposing complicity, and naming hypocrisy. Industry advocacy characterizes the divestment movement as idealistic and unrealistic, elitist and dangerous, and hypocritical and immoral. In so doing, the hypocrite’s trap thus reinscribes divestment activists as individual consumers, rather than members of a collective movement. It also positions itself as a heroic provider of energy for the poor. This strategy positions the advocates of divestment as hypocrites but also reasserts the neoliberal reality, reasonableness, and virtue of the market.
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This book examines five rhetorical strategies used by the US coal industry to advance its interests in the face of growing economic and environmental pressures: industrial apocalyptic, corporate ventriloquism, technological shell game,... more
This book examines five rhetorical strategies used by the US coal industry to advance its interests in the face of growing economic and environmental pressures: industrial apocalyptic, corporate ventriloquism, technological shell game, hypocrite’s trap, and energy utopia. The authors argue that these strategies appeal to and reinforce neoliberalism, a discourse and set of practices that privilege market rationality and individual freedom and responsibility above all else. As the coal industry has become the leading target and leverage point for those seeking more aggressive action to mitigate climate change, their corporate advocacy may foreshadow rhetorical strategies available to other fossil fuel industries as they manage similar economic and cultural shifts. The authors’ analysis of coal’s corporate advocacy also identifies contradictions and points of vulnerability in the organized resistance to climate action as well as the larger ideological formation of neoliberalism.
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After generating half of the electricity in the US annually for nearly three decades, coal’s share dropped below 40% in the spring of 2012 and is expected to continue falling. The coal industry in Appalachia has responded by waging a... more
After generating half of the electricity in the US annually for nearly three decades, coal’s share dropped below 40% in the spring of 2012 and is expected to continue falling. The coal industry in Appalachia has responded by waging a multi-front corporate advocacy campaign, and is attempting to unify a range of people who are “speaking with one voice” about coal. Using theories of voice and appropriation, we argue that the coal industry’s rhetoric operates through a process that we term corporate ventriloquism. In this rhetoric, the industry appropriates elements of neoliberal and neoconservative ideology, adapts them to the cultural circumstances specific to coal, and “throws” this voice through “front groups” to create the impression of broadly based support for coal. Through corporate ventriloquism, the coal industry masks its own influence over the spaces and conditions for “voice” and undermines the value of voice in public discussions about the future of coal. Unpacking the im...
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Although Bill McKibben is widely recognized as one of the leading strategists of the US climate change movement, several observers identify significant limitations to his approach to climate advocacy and politics. These criticisms are... more
Although Bill McKibben is widely recognized as one of the leading strategists of the US climate change movement, several observers identify significant limitations to his approach to climate advocacy and politics. These criticisms are based on his reliance upon “symbolic gestures,” such as campaigns to promote fossil fuel divestment and stop fossil fuel infrastructure construction. In this essay we reconsider McKibben's work, drawing specifically on his speeches given in the US from 2013 to 2016 in support of the fossil fuel divestment campaign and campaigns attempting to block the construction of fossil fuel infrastructure, in order to show how McKibben's strategic orientation is grounded in a politics of gesture. His speeches provide a model for how to reconceive gestures and assemble them for political ends, and expand a sometimes narrow focus on policy mechanisms. Beyond the case of McKibben our analysis contributes the concept of strategic gestures to identify and theor...
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Rhetorical scholarship and cultural commentary have demonstrated that environmentalist voices are consistently associated with apocalyptic rhetoric. However, this association deflects attention from the apocalyptic rhetoric that comes... more
Rhetorical scholarship and cultural commentary have demonstrated that environmentalist voices are consistently associated with apocalyptic rhetoric. However, this association deflects attention from the apocalyptic rhetoric that comes from industry and countermovements to environmentalism. This essay seeks to remedy that oversight by proposing the concept of “industrial apocalyptic” as a signifıcant rhetorical form in environmental controversy. Based on analysis of the rhetoric of the U.S. coal industry, we fınd that these industrial apocalyptic narratives rely on a burlesque frame to disrupt the categories of establishment and outsider and thus thwart environmental regulation. Ultimately, we argue that industrial apocalyptic co-opts environmentalist appeals for radical change in the service of blocking such change and naturalizes neoliberal ideology as the commonsense discourse of the center.
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ABSTRACT This essay interprets Cox's keynote as a call for environmental communication to reorient itself as a form of ideological criticism and identifies the potential pitfalls of heeding that call. First, the author revisits... more
ABSTRACT This essay interprets Cox's keynote as a call for environmental communication to reorient itself as a form of ideological criticism and identifies the potential pitfalls of heeding that call. First, the author revisits key arguments surrounding the practice of ideological criticism in Communication Studies and articulates their relevance to discussions about the mission and purpose of environmental communication. Second, he suggests that an uncritical embrace of the rationale for a “crisis discipline” may perpetuate problematic assumptions about communication, both as a social practice and as a scholarly discipline. Third, he argues that such problems may be sidestepped by making environmental crisis itself a central concept and object of environmental communication inquiry, such that environmental communication does not merely respond to crisis but becomes a discipline of and about crisis. A focus on the dynamics of crisis, the author concludes, entails a persistent concern with judgment in its political, scholarly, and pedagogical contexts.