Presenting a Framework to Address Climate Obstruction Through Activism

Open Access
- Author:
- Ulrich, Alysha
- Area of Honors:
- Earth Science and Policy
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Hannah Wiseman, Thesis Supervisor
Timothy Bralower, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- climate change
consumer activism
fossil fuel divestment
climate obstruction
political activism
and risk perception
risk perception - Abstract:
- Climate obstructors are individuals, organizations, and corporations who contribute to the denial, delay, misinformation, deflection, and dismissal of climate science, proposed policies to allay climate change, and/or climate advocacy (Ekberg et al., 2023). The most influential climate obstructors wield a large authority that render citizens feeling as though individual activism efforts have menial effect on combating the climate crisis. This thesis reviews the literature to, first, analyze the influence of climate obstructors on climate inaction and, second, identify climate activism mechanisms relating to (1) consumerism and (2) politics through which citizens can address climate obstruction. From the literature, this thesis identifies voluntary simplicity, boycotts, and buycotts as effectives modes of consumer activism. Effective modes of political activism are fossil fuel divestment and ESG investing. Building from these themes in the literature, the thesis then equips citizens with a solution-based framework that delineates how to participate in each discussed method of climate activism. The thesis concludes with a discussion that addresses potential drawbacks of its presented findings, current knowledge gaps in the literature for climate obstruction and climate activism, and suggestions for further research to inform future mitigation efforts of climate obstruction.