Green Affects: Populisms and Passions in Climate Politics

Political debates on climate change have often been approached as technical discussions revolving around technological developments or economic models. Advocates of stringent climate policy have generally offered dispassionate reasons for countering the greenhouse effect, emphasizing the knowledge of experts and the economic benefits in reducing carbon emissions. The result has been interpreted as a depoliticized climate politics in which consensus is expected, alternative perspectives and pathways are marginalised and the possibility of radical transformation is stifled (Machin 2013). More recently, however, researchers have identified and interrogated a ‘populist moment’ in climate politics, in which the climate has become highly politicized (Marquardt and Lederer 2022). Right wing populists, while commonly sympathetic to local environmental issues, have opposed the global climate agenda on the grounds of ‘common-sense’ (Machin and Wagener 2019). Meanwhile Greta Thunberg and other climate activists have been shown to apply a particular narrative frame or Manichean vision of the world in which the people are pitted against the elites, and thus shares some core characteristics of populism (Nordensvard and Ketola 2022; Zulianello and Ceccobelli 2020). Some scholars, most prominently Chantal Mouffe, have promoted the launch of a left populist strategy around the green transition, which she argues could deepen democracy, tackle inequality and work towards social justice (Mouffe 2020; Mouffe 2022). A key aspect in this ‘populist moment’ is the passions that are key to the forming of chains of equivalence and collective identifications (Machin 2022). Literature emphasising the affective dimension of populism (Stavrakakis 2004; Mouffe 2022; Herkman 2022; Eklundh 2024) has been complemented by a growing body of work identifying the specific passions involved in populist politics such as hope, fear, anger, shame, indignation and resentment and their particular dynamics (Demertzis 2006; Rico et al. 2017; Salmela and von Scheve 2017). This paper zooms in on the passions circulating in the populist moment of climate politics. Focusing particularly on the role of forward looking hope and backward looking nostalgia (Ezgi 2024) and drawing on work on affects in populism and environmentalism (Bladow and Ladino 2018), I consider the populist and affective constructions, identifications and antagonisms around climate. I conclude that any political analysis that fails to attend to the populist passions and what I call ‘green affects’ at play around climate today will be unable to adequately grasp contemporary environmental politics.