For the first time, the majority of Americans are in agreement that climate change – or what is increasingly referred to as the “climate crisis” or “climate emergency” – is happening and express concern regarding the near and long-term threat. With editorial boards across the country committing to the Covering Climate Now initiative, Greta Thunberg named the 2019 “TIME Person of the Year,” popular musicians and celebrities such as Grimes and Billie Eilish singing about the “Anthropocene” and “climate apocalypse,” and the writers of Big Little Lies developing an entire episode around kids’ climate anxieties, American media-makers are also clearly interested in the climate crisis like never before.
With this unprecedented level of public concern and media attention regarding the climate crisis coinciding with the 2016 election of President Trump and rising authoritarian tendencies in the United States, how the threats of the climate crisis are represented and also how these representations shape responses are of paramount importance for analysis. Indeed, representations of the climate crisis are intensely fraught and immensely important. Existing scholarship shows how in moments of disruption and uncertainty various state, military, and/or corporate interests seek to harness authority over definition and control over response. Ultimately striving to flatten historical particularities and obscure structural causes of harm, these well-resourced actors – if successful – avoid accountability and systemic change by alienating those who are most impacted and vulnerable…