The literature on climate obstruction examines the various ways in which actors seek to slow down or block ambitious climate policies. According to this literature, the role of outright denialism of climate science has diminished, but actors are using more subtle, policy-oriented discourses to obstruct climate policy. However, the recent rise of far-right parties challenges this assumption. In addition, social media tends to amplify extreme opinions that, for example, question the validity of climate science. In this paper, we study the networks and practices of climate obstruction related to climate science on social media in Finland where trust in science has traditionally been high. First, we use network analysis to identify three distinct ideological bubbles and examine the extent to which the sharing of climate science news articles is driven by political partisanship. The bubbles consist of the liberal left, the moderate right, and the conservative right. Second, we use pragmatic sociology to qualitatively analyze which cultural modes of valuation actors invoke in their efforts to obstruct climate policy.
The network analysis reveals how the sharing of climate science news articles is partly determined by partisanship based on both sharing different articles and by interpreting the same stories differently when sharing similar articles. Regarding the sharing of different news stories, the liberal left shares articles dealing with IPCC-reports, while the conservative right and the moderate right share articles interviewing a well-known Finnish climate expert who supports realistic and technology-driven solutions to climate change instead of wider structural changes. The same news stories that the bubbles share deal with forest carbon sinks, but the bubbles take opposing positions, with the conservative right denying the collapse of Finland’s carbon sinks. In other words, there is no outright denialism in the general debate about climate science but in the particular debate about Finland’s carbon sinks. Second, the qualitative analysis reveals how two bubbles, the conservative right and the moderate right, participate in climate obstruction on Finnish social media. The cultural practices of climate obstruction include the use of so-called green-industrial arguments, unmasking, and invoking familiarity. Overall, our results indicate a strong polarization between social media ideological bubbles on climate science based on both selective sharing and biased interpretations of the same sources.
