Populism and Climate Discourse in the United States: The Case of Carbon Disclosure

Since the Paris Agreement, governments have assumed an increasingly central role in climate mitigation, with net zero targets and expansive policy portfolios now widespread. At the same time, the rise of populist parties and leaders in many Western democracies has challenged these efforts, often through sceptical discourses that frame climate policy as elitist, costly, or incompatible with national interests. While existing scholarship has extensively documented the impact of populism on climate policy at the level of political leadership and headline commitments, far less is known about how populist rhetoric affects specific governance areas embedded within the broader climate policy subsystem. This paper addresses this gap by examining carbon disclosure, a nested policy area characterised by fragmented governance and strong private sector involvement. Focusing on the United States, we ask whether populist political turnover produces the same degree of discursive disruption in carbon disclosure as it does in executive climate rhetoric and international engagement. Drawing on literatures on populism, advocacy coalitions, private governance, and incrementalism, we advance the argument that political change and subsystem discourse are partially decoupled. Using discourse network analysis across the Obama and Trump administrations, we show that despite abrupt shifts in presidential framing and federal climate policy, the carbon disclosure discourse remained remarkably stable and evolved incrementally over time. This continuity is driven primarily by private actors and business networks, whose interests and framing practices dampen the disruptive effects of populist politics. The paper contributes to politics of climate change by foregrounding continuity, pace, and divergence within policy subsystems, refining incrementalist accounts of policy change, and extending advocacy coalition perspectives to fragmented climate governance. It also advances scholarship on discourse evolution by demonstrating how certain climate related frames endure despite politicised shocks at the executive level.