The ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 brought together leading scholars to examine how populism and climate change intersect—a dynamic that now shapes global governance, political polarization, and environmental policy. Across nine lectures, participants critically explored how populist movements exploit climate debates, from outright denialism to attacks on climate elites and institutions. These sessions highlighted profound tensions: how can we promote equitable, science-based climate action in an era of rising populism, misinformation, and distrust of expertise? The collection of reports and video recordings now available captures these rich interdisciplinary discussions, offering essential resources for researchers, policymakers, and citizens alike. Engage with this unique body of work to better understand the challenges—and possibilities—for climate governance and democracy in the 21st century.
Reported by ECPS Staff
The ECPS Summer School 2025 offered a rigorous, interdisciplinary examination of how populism intersects with the climate crisis—a nexus increasingly shaping politics globally. Climate change is no longer a purely environmental issue; it is deeply entwined with economic, social, cultural, and political dynamics that populist movements actively exploit. Whether through denialism, deregulation, appeals to “the people” against “globalist elites,” or opportunistic co-optation of environmental grievances, populist narratives have reshaped climate debates in ways that complicate international cooperation and local policymaking.
Across nine lectures by leading scholars—including experts in environmental politics, disinformation, conflict studies, political psychology, and critical theory—the program investigated both the challenges and opportunities posed by populist interventions in climate governance. Participants explored key questions: How do populists construct climate skepticism? When can populism mobilize for climate justice rather than obstruct it? What is the role of disinformation infrastructures in shaping climate discourse? And how do structural inequalities, colonial legacies, and class power inflect contemporary climate conflicts?
The summer school addressed the profound tension between the urgent need for global climate action and the populist turn toward polarization, distrust of expertise, and nationalist retrenchment. From analyses of right-wing anti-environmentalism in the Trump era to debates over “eco-populism,” climate-related rural protests, and the technopolitics of AI and climate governance, the lectures illuminated how climate action itself is a contested terrain.
Readers and audiences are invited to access comprehensive reports and video recordings of all lectures—a vital resource for scholars, practitioners, policymakers and citizens seeking to understand the fraught intersection of populism and climate change. The collection not only documents the state of scholarly thinking on these urgent issues but also provides conceptual and practical insights for crafting equitable, democratic, and resilient climate policies in an age of populist challenge.
Watch, read, and engage with these materials to critically examine the pathways forward in one of the defining crises of our time.
In his lecture at the ECPS Summer School 2025, Professor John M. Meyer offered a compelling exploration of the relationship between populism and climate politics. He critiqued authoritarian populism as a threat to equitable climate action while also questioning mainstream climate governance’s elitist, technocratic tendencies. Rather than viewing populism solely as an obstacle, Professor Meyer argued that climate justice movements themselves embody a form of inclusive, democratic populism—centered on equity, participation, and solidarity. Drawing on examples from grassroots activism and Naomi Klein’s concept of “eco-populism,” Professor Meyer proposed that climate action must address material injustices and engage people where they are. His lecture encouraged participants to rethink populism as a political form that, when inclusive and justice-oriented, can help build legitimate, durable, and democratic climate solutions.
Professor Sandra Ricart delivered a timely and insightful lecture on the intersection of climate change, agriculture, and populism in Europe. She explored how structural and demographic challenges, including a declining farming population and economic precarity, have fueled widespread farmer protests across the continent. Prof. Ricart emphasized how these grievances, while rooted in genuine hardship, have increasingly been exploited by far-right populist movements eager to position themselves as defenders of rural interests against European institutions. Her analysis highlighted the pressures created by climate change, policy reforms, and global market dynamics, and she called for more inclusive, responsive, and sustainable agricultural policies. Prof. Ricart’s lecture provided participants with a critical understanding of rural Europe’s evolving political and environmental landscape.
The fourth lecture of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 featured Professor Daniel Fiorino, a leading expert on environmental policy at American University. Professor Fiorino examined how right-wing populism—characterized by distrust of expertise, nationalism, and hostility to multilateralism—combined with entrenched fossil fuel interests to undermine climate mitigation efforts in the United States during the Trump administration. He highlighted the geographic and partisan divides that shape US climate politics and explained how Republican dominance in fossil fuel-dependent states reinforces skepticism toward climate action. Professor Fiorino’s lecture underscored the vulnerability of US climate policy to political polarization and partisan shifts, warning that right-wing populism poses an enduring challenge not only to American climate governance but to global efforts to address the climate crisis.
Dr. Heidi Hart’s lecture illuminated the provocative intersection of art, activism, and climate trauma. Through an interdisciplinary lens, she explored why climate activists increasingly target iconic artworks in museums as sites of performative protest, interpreting these acts not as mere vandalism but as symbolic disruptions challenging elitist cultural values amid ecological crises. Drawing on frameworks from populism studies, art history, and affect theory, Dr. Hart examined how these interventions reflect a passionate response to climate grief and injustice. Her analysis underscored the importance of understanding such protests within broader debates on decolonization, posthumanism, and collective responsibility, encouraging participants to view artistic destruction as both a critique of cultural complacency and a call for ecological transformation.
In his compelling lecture, Professor Erik Swyngedouw offered a radical critique of contemporary climate discourse, describing it as trapped in a “climate deadlock” where knowledge and activism coexist with deepening ecological crisis. He argued that mainstream and radical climate narratives mirror the structure of populism, constructing simplistic binaries while displacing attention from capitalism’s core role in driving environmental destruction. Professor Swyngedouw challenged participants to recognize that the environmental apocalypse is not an imminent future but an unevenly distributed present reality for much of the world. His provocative call to dismantle the comforting fantasy of a unified humanity urged a re-politicization of the climate crisis, demanding systemic transformation and solidarity grounded in confronting global inequalities.
Professor Philippe Le Billon’s lecture critically examined how climate-related conflicts emerge from three sources: the impacts of climate change itself, contestation over climate inaction, and backlash against climate action. He argued that climate change operates as a “threat multiplier,” intensifying pre-existing inequalities and vulnerabilities rather than acting as an isolated trigger of violence. He explored how climate activism—while driven by moral urgency—can be framed as elitist and provoke populist opposition, and how the implementation of climate policy can generate new conflicts when perceived as unjust or technocratic. Professor Le Billon warned that “green capitalism” risks reproducing extractive logics, creating new “green sacrifice zones,” and underscored that climate justice requires confronting colonial legacies, class inequality, and structural power relations.
The eighth lecture of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 was delivered online by Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, a globally recognized expert on misinformation and political psychology. His presentation offered a penetrating analysis of how climate disinformation is fueled by an organized infrastructure of vested interests and amplified by populist politics, which undermine trust in science. Professor Lewandowsky highlighted that ideological commitments—particularly free-market conservatism—strongly shape public acceptance of climate science. He emphasized that communicating the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change can be a powerful corrective but cautioned that disinformation thrives in an environment where politics and identity outweigh facts. His lecture underscored the urgent need to confront these structural and ideological barriers to effective climate action.
In his lecture at the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025, Professor Robert Huber examined how populist parties across Europe construct climate skepticism, emphasizing that populism’s “thin-centered ideology” (as defined by Cas Mudde) pits “the pure people” against “corrupt elites.” This framing makes climate science and policy institutions prime targets for populist critique. Professor Huber’s expert survey of 31 European countries showed a clear trend: the more populist a party, the more skeptical it is of climate policy and climate science, regardless of its left- or right-wing orientation. He cautioned participants to disentangle populism from related ideologies like nationalism or authoritarianism, underscoring that populism’s challenge to climate politics is complex, context-dependent, and shaped by deeper struggles over legitimacy, authority, and representation.
Explore the key debates from “We, the People and the Future of Democracy: Interdisciplinary Approaches,” held at Oxford University in July 2025. The conference brought together leading scholars to examine how “the people” are invoked to both erode and renew democracy worldwide. Now, readers and audiences can access detailed reports and full video recordings of all panels and roundtables—an essential resource for anyone engaged with questions of democratic resilience, populism, identity, and governance. Revisit these rich interdisciplinary discussions and reflect on a central challenge of our time: under what conditions can appeals to “the people” revitalize democracy rather than undermine it? Engage now with the ideas shaping the global conversation on democracy’s future.
Reported by ECPS Staff
Between July 1–3, 2025, scholars, practitioners, and students gathered at St. Cross College, Oxford University, for We, the People and the Future of Democracy: Interdisciplinary Approaches—an intensive programme examining how invocations of “the people” shape democratic resilience and backsliding globally. The ECPS event unfolded against a sobering backdrop: between 2012 and 2024, one-fifth of the world’s democracies disappeared, while rising populist discourse—framing politics through stark “us vs. them” binaries—has undermined social cohesion across many societies.
Throughout the programme, participants explored how the concept of “the people” can both erode and renew democratic life. Panel and roundtables interrogated when this notion acts as a democratizing force and when it becomes a tool for exclusionary majoritarianism. The interdisciplinary and comparative nature of the discussions was key: scholars from history, philosophy, political theory, sociology, law, and the arts examined the interplay between populism, identity, legitimacy, and governance across transatlantic and global European contexts.
Major themes included the conceptual ambiguity of “the people” as a political category; its mobilization in both progressive and authoritarian populisms; the impact of identity politics on liberal democratic institutions; the entanglement of religion, nationalism, and populism; the challenges posed by algorithmic governance and AI; and the resilience or vulnerability of constitutional structures under populist pressure. Sessions addressed populist assaults on democratic checks and balances, the politicization of referenda, the erosion of judicial independence, and contested narratives around belonging, migration, and climate policy.
The event also served as the launch of an extended virtual programme (September 2025–April 2026), designed to continue this dialogue through bi-weekly online workshops, encouraging sustained scholarly exchange on the crisis and promise of democracy.
The programme underscored a central question: under what conditions can appeals to “the people” revitalize democratic politics rather than undermine its pluralistic foundations? By fostering dialogue across disciplines and global perspectives, We, the People and the Future of Democracy offered a critical intervention into one of today’s defining global challenges, illuminating both the fragility and resilience of democracy in the 21st century.
Taking this occasion as an opportunity, ECPS expresses its profound gratitude to St. Cross College for hosting this conference; to our valued partners—the Oxford Network of Peace Studies (OxPeace), Rothermere American Institute, Humanities Division, European Studies Centre at St Antony’s College, and Oxford Democracy Network—for their vital collaboration; and to all our sponsors, whose support made this timely and urgent gathering not only possible but truly impactful.
Readers and audiences can access comprehensive reports and full video recordings of all sessions from the three-day conference below, providing an opportunity to revisit and engage with the rich, interdisciplinary discussions that unfolded throughout the event.
The ECPS Conference 2025 at the University of Oxford began with a timely and thought-provoking opening session that explored the evolving meaning and political utility of “the people” in democratic discourse. Sümeyye Kocaman offered a nuanced welcome, highlighting how the term has been used across history to empower, exclude, and politicize identity. Kate Mavor, Master of St Cross College, underscored the value of interdisciplinary exchange in addressing democratic challenges, noting how the College’s diverse academic environment aligned naturally with the conference’s aims. Baroness Janet Royall then delivered a compelling keynote, warning of the double-edged nature of “the people” as both democratic ideal and populist tool. Her address emphasized the need for inclusion, institutional integrity, civic renewal, and interdisciplinary cooperation in the face of democratic erosion. The session set the stage for critical and globally relevant dialogue across disciplines.
Panel I brought together diverse approaches to examine how democratic legitimacy, resistance, and pluralism are evolving in the face of global democratic backsliding. Chaired by Dr. Lior Erez (Oxford University), the panel featured Professor Robert Johns and collaborators presenting experimental research on public support for human rights under repression; Nathan Tsang (USC) explored how Hong Kong diaspora communities engage in covert resistance through cultural expression; and Simon Clemens (Humboldt University) introduced Isabelle Stengers’ cosmopolitical philosophy, proposing a radical politics of coexistence over consensus. Together, the presentations reflected on how the idea of “the people” is being contested, reimagined, and mobilized across social, empirical, and philosophical registers.
Chaired by Professor Jonathan Wolff, the session explored how “the people” is constructed, contested, and deployed in contemporary European and global politics. Presentations by Professors Martin Conway, Aurelien Mondon, and Luke Bretherton examined the historical resurgence of popular politics, the elite-driven narrative of the “reactionary people,” and the theological dimensions of populism. Together, the contributions offered a nuanced, interdisciplinary account of how populism’s democratic and anti-democratic potentials shape the political imagination and institutional realities of the 21st century.
Panel II explored how digital technologies and algorithmic infrastructures are reshaping democratic life. Co-chaired by Dr. Alina Utrata and Professor Murat Aktaş, the session tackled questions of power, exclusion, and political agency in the digital age. Together, their framing set the stage for two timely papers examining how algorithmic filtering, platform capitalism, and gendered data practices increasingly mediate who is counted—and who is excluded—from “the people.” With insight and urgency, the session called for renewed civic, academic, and regulatory engagement with the democratic challenges posed by artificial intelligence and transnational tech governance.
Panel III gathered five scholars from the Jean Monnet Chair in European Constitutional Democracy (EUCODEM) at the University of Barcelona to explore how populist forces are challenging liberal-democratic norms—and what institutional remedies might resist them. Chaired by Dr. Bruno Godefroy, the session addressed threats to judicial independence, the populist appropriation of secessionist demands, and the theoretical underpinnings of populism as a political strategy. It also examined the role of parliaments and second chambers in preserving constitutional order. Drawing from both comparative and case-specific perspectives—ranging from Spain and Scotland to Canada and the United States—the panel provided a timely and interdisciplinary diagnosis of populism’s constitutional impact and offered potential avenues for democratic resilience in increasingly polarized societies.
Panel IV explored the theme “Politics of Belonging: Voices and Silencing.” Chaired by Dr. Azize Sargın (ECPS), the panel investigated how belonging is constructed and contested through populist discourse and historical memory. Dr. Maarja Merivoo-Parro (University of Jyväskylä) examined olfactory memory and grassroots aid in Estonia’s democratic awakening. Maria Jerzyk (Masaryk University) analyzed how the figure of the child is symbolically instrumentalized in Polish populism, revealing deep continuities with communist-era narratives. Together, the papers offered rich insights into how identity, exclusion, and affect shape democratic participation in post-authoritarian and populist contexts.
Panel V explored how contested constructions of “the people” are shaped by populist discourse across national, religious, and ideological contexts. Co-chaired by Dr. Leila Alieva and Professor Karen Horn, the session featured presentations by Natalie Schwabl (Sorbonne University), Dr. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz (Northeastern University), and Petar S. Ćurčić (Institute of European Studies, Belgrade). The panel examined Catholic nationalism in Croatia, American Christian ethno-populism, and the evolving German left, offering sharp insights into the manipulation of collective identity and memory in populist projects. Bridging multiple regions and disciplines, the panel revealed populism’s capacity to reframe belonging in deeply exclusionary and globally resonant ways.
Panel VI brought urgent focus to the evolving meaning of democratic agency. Chaired by Dr. Max Steuer (Comenius University, Bratislava), the session opened with a reflection on whether democracy and “the people” can be conceptually disentangled. Rashad Seedeen examined how Gramsci’s war of position and Wright’s real utopias intersect in Indigenous civil society initiatives. Jana Ruwayha analyzed how prolonged emergencies blur legal norms, threatening democratic accountability. Özge Derman showcased how the “we” is performatively constructed in Occupy Wall Street and the Gezi movement. Together, the panel offered sharp insights into the plural and contested meanings of “the people” in contemporary democratic struggles.
In 2025, democracy occupies a state of superposition—at once vibrant and eroding, plural and polarized, legal and lawless. Panel 7 exposed this paradox with precision: democracy is not a fixed ideal but a shifting terrain, where power is contested through law, ritual, narrative, and strategy. Whether it survives or collapses depends on how it is interpreted, performed, and defended. The Schrödinger’s box is cracked open, but its contents are not predetermined. As Robert Person warned, authoritarian actors exploit democratic vulnerabilities; as Max Steuer and Justin Attard showed, those vulnerabilities also reveal possibilities for renewal. We are not neutral observers—we are agents within the experiment. Democracy’s future hinges on our will to intervene.
Panel 8 offered a rich exploration of populism, elite transformation, and democratic erosion. Co-chaired by Ashley Wright (Oxford) and Azize Sargın (ECPS), the session featured cutting-edge scholarship from Aviezer Tucker, Pınar Dokumacı, Attila Antal, and Murat Aktaş. Presentations spanned elite populism, feminist spatial resistance, transatlantic authoritarianism, and the metapolitics of the French New Right. Discussant Karen Horn (University of Erfurt) offered incisive critiques on intellectual transmission, rationalism, and democratic thresholds. Together, the panel underscored populism’s global diffusion and its capacity to reshape both elites and “the people,” demanding renewed theoretical and civic engagement. Democracy, the panel emphasized, remains a contested space—never static, always in motion.
Roundtable 3 explored how broken social contracts have fueled populism and democratic disillusionment. The session featured Selçuk Gültaşlı’s summary of Eric Beinhocker’s fairness-based model of democratic collapse, Dr. Aviezer Tucker’s critique of elite entrenchment, Lord Alderdice’s focus on emotional wounds like humiliation and disillusionment, and Professor Julian F. Müller’s call for conceptual clarity around populism. Concluding the session, Irina von Wiese grounded abstract theory in lived inequality and called for renewed trust, dignity, and participation. The panel made clear: rebuilding democracy requires more than policy—it demands empathy, fairness, and respect for those left behind.
In his lecture at the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025, Professor Robert Huber examined how populist parties across Europe construct climate skepticism, emphasizing that populism’s “thin-centered ideology” (as defined by Cas Mudde) pits “the pure people” against “corrupt elites.” This framing makes climate science and policy institutions prime targets for populist critique. Professor Huber’s expert survey of 31 European countries showed a clear trend: the more populist a party, the more skeptical it is of climate policy and climate science, regardless of its left- or right-wing orientation. He cautioned participants to disentangle populism from related ideologies like nationalism or authoritarianism, underscoring that populism’s challenge to climate politics is complex, context-dependent, and shaped by deeper struggles over legitimacy, authority, and representation.
Reported by ECPS Staff
The ninth lecture of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025, titled “Populism and Climate Change: Understanding What Is at Stake and Crafting Policy Suggestions for Stakeholders,” was held online from July 7 to 11, 2025. On Friday, July 11, Professor Robert Huber delivered his lecture on “Populist Narratives on Sustainability, Energy Resources and Climate Change,” offering participants a rigorous exploration of the complex intersections between populist politics and climate discourse.
The Summer School convened scholars, students, and practitioners from around the world to engage in critical discussions about how populism shapes—and is shaped by—the politics of climate change. It provided a unique interdisciplinary forum to analyze these global dynamics and to develop policy-relevant insights for stakeholders navigating the overlapping crises of climate and democracy.
The session was moderated by Dr. Susana Batel, Assistant Researcher and Invited Lecturer at the University Institute of Lisbon’s Center for Psychological Research and Social Intervention. Dr. Batel’s own research focuses on the green transition and its relationship to socio-environmental justice, exploring how climate and energy policies may reproduce or challenge entrenched social inequalities. More recently, she has turned her attention to the relationship between green transition efforts and far-right populism, particularly in Portugal. In her introduction, Dr. Batel underscored the relevance of Professor Huber’s expertise for these pressing questions, noting that his work has become central to ongoing debates on how populist actors respond to climate policies and narratives.
Dr. Robert Huber is Professor of Political Science Methods at the University of Salzburg. His research expertise lies at the intersection of populism, political methodology, and climate politics, and he has become a leading figure in the emerging field studying how populist parties and leaders engage with environmental and energy issues. As Dr. Batel observed in her remarks, Professor Huber has helped illuminate how populist actors contest not only the facts of climate change but also the legitimacy of the processes through which climate policy is made and implemented.
In his lecture, Professor Huber tackled the core question of why populists, both on the right and left, have often adopted a skeptical or adversarial stance toward climate action. He emphasized the importance of distinguishing populism from adjacent ideological forces such as nationalism, authoritarianism, or economic liberalism, arguing that only careful conceptual and empirical work can reveal the mechanisms through which populism interacts with climate skepticism. His lecture offered participants a comprehensive framework to understand the diversity of populist climate narratives, setting the stage for deeper discussion and analysis of this timely and globally significant phenomenon.
Why Populists Target Climate Issues
Installation of Donald Trump’s head by artist Jacques Rival floating on the Moselle River, Metz, France, August 31, 2019. Photo: Kateryna Levchenko.
In his lecture, Professor Huber provided a rigorous and insightful analysis of why populist actors engage with climate issues, highlighting the complexity and nuance often overlooked in popular discussions. Professor Huber opened his talk by reflecting on the emerging nature of this research agenda, noting, “When I started studying populism and climate change back in 2016, there was not much on that—very little research and few opportunities to think about how these two pressing societal issues intersect.”His remarks underscored both the novelty of the topic and the importance of its exploration.
Professor Huber’s central inquiry revolved around understanding the mechanisms through which populist parties and leaders construct skepticism toward climate action. He acknowledged that figures such as Donald Trump inevitably dominate discussions of climate populism, citing one of Trump’s early tweets: “NBC News just called it the great freeze – coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?” While this is a classic example of conflating weather with climate, Professor Huber emphasized that such rhetoric also reflects broader concerns about public spending and government priorities.
To illustrate variation within populist climate skepticism, Professor Huber turned to European populists, including Thierry Baudet, the leader of the Dutch radical-right party Forum for Democracy. Baudet framed climate action as futile and wasteful, complaining that billions were being spent “just to decrease global warming by 0.007 degrees,” which he characterized as “madness.” Similarly, Marcel de Graaff, formerly a member of the European Parliament, attacked EU climate policy as deceitful, claiming that elites benefited financially from “green lies.” Professor Huber observed that while all three cases reflect skepticism toward climate action, they differ in emphasis—Trump’s framing centered on economic competitiveness, Baudet on policy effectiveness, and de Graaff on political betrayal.
These examples led Professor Huber to ask the central question driving his lecture: “Why is it that populist politicians are so often skeptical about climate change?” He insisted that an analytical approach is required to move beyond anecdote and description, seeking instead to understand underlying patterns and causal mechanisms.
Professor Huber introduced the audience to Van Rensburg’s (2015) typology of climate skepticism, which distinguishes between skepticism about the evidence (whether climate change is real and human-caused), the process (whether decision-making and knowledge-production are legitimate), and the response (whether proposed policies are desirable). While populists may sometimes question the reality of climate change itself, Professor Huber suggested that their skepticism more often targets the process and response dimensions—expressing distrust toward scientific expertise, democratic legitimacy, and the distributive impacts of climate policy.
A particularly vivid example of this process skepticism emerged from the “Yellow Vests” protests in France, where demonstrators opposed carbon taxes not only for their economic burden but also because they perceived climate policy as undemocratic and detached from ordinary people’s needs. Professor Huber noted how one protester’s sign declared: “I want my democracy now,” reflecting the sentiment that climate decisions are made by remote technocratic elites without sufficient public input. As Professor Huber remarked, “For some people, climate policy really feels out of touch with their everyday needs.”
Professor Huber emphasized that much of this skepticism appears on the political right but cautioned against equating populism with right-wing ideology. “It may just be that they are right-wing,” he observed, highlighting that climate skepticism among populists could stem from other ideological commitments—such as nationalism, conservatism, or libertarianism—that overlap but are analytically distinct from populism itself.
Nonetheless, Professor Huber acknowledged that left-wing populism can also intersect with climate discourse in distinct ways. He pointed to emerging instances of “green populism” on the left, where actors such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon or Podemos in Spain critique climate policies for failing to address social inequalities or for being captured by corporate interests. Professor Huber explained, “Recent examples suggest that left-wing populists may foster a pro-climate populism that emphasizes social justice and corporate accountability.”
Huber structured his presentation around three guiding questions:
What features of climate change and climate politics make them attractive targets for populist narratives?
Are populists systematically different from non-populists in their climate attitudes?
What recurring patterns can we identify in the narratives that populists employ when discussing climate issues?
He emphasized that populist climate skepticism should be understood as multifaceted and context-dependent. In Western Europe, outright denial of climate science (so-called “trend skepticism”) is rare; more commonly, populists challenge the legitimacy of scientific expertise, international institutions, and the distributive fairness of climate policies. Professor Huber summarized this dynamic: “What we often see is that populists are not necessarily denying climate change itself—they are contesting who makes the decisions and who pays the price.”
However, Professor Huber urged his audience to avoid conflating populism with far-right ideology and to disentangle populism’s distinctive contributions to climate skepticism from other ideological factors. He called for systematic, empirically grounded research that recognizes the diversity of populist climate narratives while remaining attentive to their common thread: a distrust of elites and a framing of climate policy as a battleground between “the pure people” and “corrupt elites.”
Theoretical Explanations for the Populism–Climate Link
Then, Professor Huber delved into the theoretical underpinnings that help explain why populist actors so often engage in climate skepticism. He posed a central question: “What is it essentially about populism that links it to climate change?” His objective was not only to describe the phenomenon but also to dissect its causal mechanisms, emphasizing the need to distinguish populism from overlapping ideologies like nationalism or authoritarianism.
Professor Huber began by outlining three principal ways of conceptualizing populism, noting that each offers different implications for understanding populist positions on climate change.
The first perspective defines populism as a political strategy. Drawing on the work of Kurt Weyland, Professor Huber explained that this approach sees populism as a mode of leadership in which a charismatic leader builds “direct, unmediated, uninstitutionalized support from large numbers of unorganized masses.” This definition, more prevalent in Latin America, highlights the personalistic and anti-institutional nature of populist movements. However, as Professor Huber observed, “this kind of definition doesn’t contain much information about how populist leaders should think about climate change,” suggesting that skepticism in this context may arise from opportunistic attempts to mobilize supporters rather than a core ideological stance.
The second conceptualization frames populism as a political style, a view associated with scholars such as Benjamin Moffitt. Here, populism is performative: it relies on provocation, transgression, and signaling difference from mainstream elites. Populists may adopt a combative tone or deliberately violate elite norms as a way of connecting with “the people.” According to Professor Huber, this style is often visible in populist climate rhetoric, where actors deny climate science not necessarily because they disbelieve it, but as a way of “demonstrating that one is different… to distance themselves from the mainstream elite.” He offered the example of Boris Johnson’s disheveled appearance as a performative signal of outsider status, adding that similar tactics are evident when populists question the legitimacy or value of climate action.
The third and most analytically productive definition, according to Professor Huber, treats populism as an ideology or a thin-centered set of ideas that divides society into two antagonistic groups: the pure people and the corrupt elites. This binary worldview, he noted, is key to understanding the climate-populism link. Populists “excel at framing politics as a struggle between good and evil,” and thus are predisposed to portray climate elites—whether scientists, international organizations, or bureaucrats—as self-serving actors imposing policies that harm ordinary citizens. As Professor Huber explained, “It’s here where we can most clearly see how populism might shape climate skepticism: elites are seen as either failing to implement climate action or doing so at the expense of the people.”
However, Professor Huber emphasized that many factors commonly associated with populism are distinct causal forces that must not be conflated with populism itself. “We often fall into the trap of saying populism and meaning the far right,” he warned, underscoring the importance of disentangling populism from other ideological dimensions such as authoritarianism, nationalism, or economic left-right positions. For example, he noted that nationalist skepticism toward international climate agreements arises not from populist anti-elitism but from a preference for national sovereignty. Similarly, authoritarian discomfort with lifestyle changes required by climate action (e.g., promoting veganism) stems from a rigid adherence to tradition, not necessarily from populist ideology.
Professor Huber also observed that left-wing populists might oppose climate policy from a different ideological position: they may view climate measures as economically regressive or damaging to the working class. Thus, left-wing and right-wing populist critiques of climate policy differ in content but share a populist framing that pits “the people” against elites.
Moreover, Professor Huber called for analytic precision in research on populism and climate politics: “We need to disentangle what is populism and what are other things that are related to populism but are not necessarily the same thing.” His careful mapping of different conceptualizations and mechanisms underscored the value of distinguishing populism from adjacent ideologies when explaining its impact on climate discourse—a message of particular relevance for scholars seeking to understand the heterogeneity of populist climate narratives.
Empirical Evidence: The Expert Survey
During his lecture, Professor Huber also presented original empirical findings from an expert survey he conducted with two colleagues across 31 European countries. The survey, fielded in 2023, sought to provide systematic insights into how populism relates to political parties’ climate positions, shifting the discussion from anecdotal observations to measurable patterns.
Professor Huber began by stressing the survey’s scope and methodology. He explained that experts—primarily political science scholars—were asked to rate the degree of populism and the climate positions of parties in their own countries. The goal was to move beyond speeches and manifestos to capture a broader and more nuanced reputational assessment of where parties stand. “This is not an absolute measure of where parties stand, but rather what experts think where this party stands,” he clarified, noting that reputational measures offer insight into parties’ perceived orientations while acknowledging their limitations in detecting recent or subtle shifts.
Populism in the survey was operationalized through a widely used definition: attitudes towards elites, attitudes towards “the people,” and belief in a unified popular will. For climate positions, the survey asked about two dimensions: (1) the extent to which parties prioritized long-term climate gains over short-term socioeconomic costs, and (2) whether parties supported a stronger role for climate science in policymaking. These two questions, he explained, were designed to tap into different aspects of skepticism: what he termed “response skepticism” (about policies) and “process skepticism”(about science and institutions).
Professor Huber then turned to the findings. Presenting a scatterplot, he pointed out that “the more populist parties get, the more climate-skeptic they get in terms of not supporting climate policy.” A clear downward-sloping trend line indicated a negative relationship between degree of populism and support for climate action. This pattern was echoed when looking at parties’ support for the role of climate science: populist parties tended to express greater skepticism about scientific expertise, too.
However, a more granular analysis yielded even more striking insights. When Professor Huber divided parties into three ideological families—left, center, and right—he found that in all groups, increased populism correlated with greater climate skepticism. “What I find quite stunning,” he remarked, “and what runs a bit against this narrative of left-wing populist parties being a force for climate action, is that in all three groups we see a negative slope.” In other words, while right-wing populist parties were the most skeptical overall, even left-wing populists displayed less enthusiasm for climate action than their non-populist counterparts on the left.
This nuanced finding complicates common assumptions that left-populists are natural allies of ambitious climate policy. Professor Huber acknowledged that this pattern might partly reflect comparisons between left-populist parties and strongly pro-climate Green parties, but insisted it was a meaningful result nonetheless: “On average, left-wing populist parties are not that much more progressive when it comes to climate action than conservative or centrist parties that are not populist.”
Turning to right-wing populist parties, Professor Huber observed that these were the most skeptical of climate policy and science, but emphasized that this reflected their right-wing ideological orientation as much as their populism. “That’s not the effect of populism—that’s the effect of left-right orientation,” he cautioned, reiterating a key theme of his lecture: the need to disentangle populism from adjacent ideological factors such as authoritarianism, nationalism, or economic liberalism.
Professor Huber also reflected on the broader literature, acknowledging a “Western Europe focus” in both his own data and much existing research. He pointed out that this geographic concentration raises questions about generalizability, noting, for example, that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi represents a case that does not fit typical European populist patterns.
To illustrate how populist narratives manifest in practice, Professor Huber concluded by revisiting some familiar and varied examples. Tweets by Donald Trump highlighted skepticism framed around economic competitiveness and confusion between weather and climate. French Yellow Vest protesters exemplified resistance to climate policies perceived as unfair to working-class citizens, captured in the now-famous phrase “end of the world vs. end of the month.” Meanwhile, left-wing populists like Bernie Sanders and Spain’s Podemos criticized elites for blocking strong climate action—what Professor Huber termed “pro-climate populist frames.” However, he cautioned that such pro-climate populism remains relatively rare empirically. “Empirically, as the expert survey data shows, we don’t see this that often—it seems to be more isolated,” he concluded.
Professor Huber’s closing reflections emphasized the complexity of the populism-climate relationship. Populism’s “thin-centered” nature allows it to take multiple forms—right, left, pro-climate, or anti-climate—depending on context and adjacent ideologies. The task for scholars, he urged, is to avoid simplistic conflations and instead carefully disentangle the multiple drivers behind populist parties’ climate positions: “There is a lot of variation, and we need to systematically analyze this and disentangle the different underlying reasons for these narratives and frames.”
Conclusion
Professor Robert Huber’s lecture offered participants of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 a deeply analytical and empirically grounded understanding of the complex relationship between populism and climate politics. His key contribution was to disentangle populism from adjacent ideologies—such as nationalism, authoritarianism, and economic left-right positioning—insisting on analytical precision when examining why populist actors often exhibit climate skepticism.
Importantly, drawing on the work of Cas Mudde, Professor Huber distinguished populism as a “thin-centered ideology” that frames politics as a moral struggle between the “pure people” and “corrupt elites,” providing fertile ground for contesting the legitimacy of climate science, policy processes, and institutions. Populism’s anti-elitist orientation predisposes it to target those perceived as technocratic or detached from “the people,” such as climate scientists, international organizations, and bureaucratic policymakers. However, as Professor Huber emphasized, this predisposition manifests differently depending on ideological context: while right-wing populists typically reject climate action as a threat to national sovereignty, tradition, or economic competitiveness, left-wing populists may frame climate policy as failing to address social justice concerns or as captured by corporate elites.
Professor Huber’s empirical findings, drawn from an original expert survey spanning 31 European countries, provided systematic evidence that higher degrees of populism correlate with greater climate skepticism across left, center, and right ideological groups—a pattern that challenges assumptions that left-wing populism is inherently pro-climate. His analysis revealed that while right-wing populist parties are the most climate-skeptic overall, even left-wing populists tend to express less support for climate policy and climate science than their non-populist counterparts.
Professor Huber’s closing call for researchers to avoid simplistic conflations and instead carefully disentangle the multiple drivers of populist climate narratives underscored a central lesson for Summer School participants: populism’s engagement with climate change is multifaceted, context-dependent, and inseparable from broader struggles over democracy, legitimacy, and trust in expertise.
The eighth lecture of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 was delivered online by Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, a globally recognized expert on misinformation and political psychology. His presentation offered a penetrating analysis of how climate disinformation is fueled by an organized infrastructure of vested interests and amplified by populist politics, which undermine trust in science. Professor Lewandowsky highlighted that ideological commitments—particularly free-market conservatism—strongly shape public acceptance of climate science. He emphasized that communicating the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change can be a powerful corrective but cautioned that disinformation thrives in an environment where politics and identity outweigh facts. His lecture underscored the urgent need to confront these structural and ideological barriers to effective climate action.
Reported by ECPS Staff
The eighth lecture of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025, titled “Climate Change, Populism, and Disinformation,” took place online on July 11, 2025, as part of a week-long program dedicated to exploring the intersection of populism and climate change under the theme “Populism and Climate Change: Understanding What Is at Stake and Crafting Policy Suggestions for Stakeholders.”The lecture was delivered by Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, a globally renowned cognitive scientist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Bristol.
ProfessorLewandowsky’s research spans political psychology, misinformation, and the relationship between human cognition and digital media, focusing particularly on how misinformation about critical issues—such as climate change—takes hold and persists. His expertise has earned him numerous accolades, including fellowships from the Royal Society and the Academy of Social Science, a Humboldt Research Award, and election to the prestigious German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina). He has authored hundreds of scholarly publications, many of which appear in leading journals, and is a frequent contributor to policy discussions and media commentary on the challenges posed by misinformation to democracy and public understanding.
Moderating the session was Neo Sithole, a Research Fellow at ECPS, whose work focuses on the relationship between populist politics and global governance.
Professor Lewandowsky’s lecture addressed one of the most urgent and challenging phenomena of our time: the proliferation of disinformation in the climate domain and its entanglement with populist politics. The lecture provided participants with a comprehensive framework structured around four key themes: (1) contextualizing today’s “post-truth” condition; (2) examining the supply side of climate disinformation, including the institutional and financial networks that propagate it; (3) analyzing the demand side—why certain segments of the public are receptive to misinformation; and (4) exploring potential strategies to counteract the spread and influence of climate-related falsehoods.
In doing so, Professor Lewandowsky offered a penetrating analysis of how populism not only fosters skepticism about climate change but also contributes to the erosion of the very idea of factual truth itself. His presentation challenged participants to think critically about the deeper cultural, political, and epistemological forces at play in shaping public attitudes toward climate change, making it an essential contribution to the Summer School’s interdisciplinary exploration of populism’s global impact.
Populism, Propaganda, and the Collapse of Truth
Donald J. Trump, the 47th President of the United States, at his inauguration celebration in Washington, D.C., on January 20, 2025. Photo: Muhammad Abdullah.
Professor Lewandowsky began by setting the scene with a trenchant analysis of today’s so-called “post-truth world.” He described this condition as exemplified by US President Donald Trump, who “during his first presidency made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims—about one an hour, 24/7 for four years.” Yet despite this unprecedented torrent of misinformation, Professor Lewandowsky noted a striking paradox: “About three-quarters of his voters considered him to be honest during that time, and that to me is a real conundrum.”
This conundrum, he argued, reveals that misinformation today is not simply about factual disputes but reflects a deeper collapse in the very notion of truth itself. He illustrated this through the infamous controversy surrounding Trump’s inauguration crowd size. Using photographs that plainly demonstrated that Obama’s inauguration had far higher attendance, Professor Lewandowsky posed the question: “The falsehood is so easily disproven that you wonder why anybody would even bother with this.” The answer, he suggested, lies in what has been termed “shock and chaos disinformation”—an intentional blizzard of lies whose purpose is not to persuade but to undermine the very idea of factual reality.
Indeed, a revealing study conducted immediately after Trump’s inauguration showed that “Trump voters, and in particular those who are highly educated, were more likely to pick the wrong picture.” This led Professor Lewandowsky to conclude that this behavior reflects “participatory propaganda,” where individuals knowingly repeat falsehoods to signal political allegiance rather than out of ignorance. “They knew there were fewer people attending Trump’s inauguration, but it didn’t matter, because they wanted to support him,” he explained.
Professor Lewandowsky then situated this phenomenon within a broader critique of populism. At its core, populism asserts an artificial and often arbitrary division between “the people” and “the elites,” a division which, he noted, “negates pluralism because any opposition to the people is by definition bad, so it is anti-democratic.” Crucially, he highlighted that populism undermines epistemic standards by elevating intuition and “common sense” above empirical evidence. Citing Trump’s baseless attribution of a plane crash to diversity hires in air traffic control, Professor Lewandowsky observed: “There’s no evidence for that—complete, utter nonsense—and when he was asked about it, he said, ‘Well, it’s common sense.’”
This epistemological posture, he argued, renders populism “by design incompatible and in constant conflict with science,” because it rejects the principle that “evidence matters to adjudicating the state of the world.” As a result, even in contexts where survey data show that a majority of Americans accept anthropogenic climate change, Professor Lewandowsky cautioned that “what this obscures is the amazing divergence… less than a quarter of Republicans think climate change is a big deal or should be taken seriously.” He concluded that the Republican Party had “mutated into this populist-slash-fascist organization that has little resemblance to the Republican Party that I’m used to when I was living in the United States.”
Through this analysis, Professor Lewandowsky made clear that contemporary climate denialism and disinformation cannot be understood apart from the populist assault on truth itself. His lecture highlighted how misinformation serves as a political identity marker, shielding adherents from empirical falsification and entrenching ideological divides.
The Supply Side: The Infrastructure of Climate Disinformation
Illustration: Shutterstock / Skorzewiak.
In his incisive lecture, Professor Lewandowsky devoted significant attention to what he termed the “supply side” of climate disinformation—the institutional, financial, and rhetorical infrastructure fueling public misunderstanding about climate change. He began by posing critical questions: What forces drive disinformation? Who is shaping the narratives that mislead the public? Drawing on empirical research, he argued that climate disinformation is not random but anchored in a visible network of organizations operating predominantly in the United States and Europe. This infrastructure, while “in broad daylight,” often escapes the public’s attention.
At the core of this infrastructure is a striking financial commitment from vested interests, particularly fossil fuel industries and their affiliates. Professor Lewandowsky observed that these actors receive almost a billion dollars annually—a figure that, though not exclusively devoted to climate denial, reflects the depth of resources sustaining disinformation campaigns. In addition, lobbying efforts aimed at blocking climate policy in the US Congress account for approximately two billion dollars more, illustrating the immense scale and persistence of attempts to distort climate discourse.
Professor Lewandowsky highlighted a study by Justin Farrell that mapped relationships among organizations engaged in climate denial. This research demonstrated that institutions known to be funded by Exxon or the Koch Brothers tend to occupy central positions in these disinformation networks. This finding underscores how denial campaigns are not simply ideological but orchestrated, with financial and strategic backing from corporate interests.
He turned next to media dynamics that amplify this disinformation. Professor Lewandowsky critiqued the enduring journalistic tendency toward false balance: while balance is appropriate in political contexts, it becomes problematic when applied to science, where the balance should be “between evidence and not between opinions.” He illustrated how mainstream media for years gave equal time to climate scientists and fringe voices opposing the science, sometimes to absurd extremes—such as featuring an astrologist predicting cats’ personalities while dismissing climate change as a hoax.
Although this problematic media practice has improved marginally, Professor Lewandowsky argued that a disproportionate voice is still granted to contrarians. He pointed out that press releases from conservative think tanks attacking climate science continue to receive more media attention than university research highlighting the scientific consensus.
Having described this infrastructure of disinformation and amplification, Professor Lewandowsky turned to the disinformation content itself. He acknowledged that it is commonly assumed—sometimes too casually—that the claims spread by think tanks are inaccurate, but he insisted on demonstrating this rigorously. He introduced a taxonomy of science denial rhetoric, highlighting cherry picking as one of the most pervasive techniques.
To illustrate cherry picking, Professor Lewandowsky described a notorious example: a British opinion piece that cited a short-term drop in global temperature between two Januarys in 2007 as proof that climate science was wrong. This claim ignored long-term warming trends in favor of a trivial fluctuation—a classic instance of cherry picking. Professor Lewandowsky explained that natural variability, when isolated from broader trends, can be rhetorically exploited to mislead, despite the overwhelming evidence for global warming.
Recognizing that simply pointing out such fallacies often fails to persuade in a polarized environment, Professor Lewandowsky recounted a creative study he and colleagues designed to test denialist reasoning in an ideologically neutral way. They translated climate-denialist claims into an unrelated context—village population trends—and presented these translated claims, accompanied by corresponding graphs, to professional statisticians. The statisticians overwhelmingly found that the denialist interpretations were inaccurate and not suitable for informing policy, whereas the scientific consensus interpretations aligned with the data. This experiment compellingly demonstrated that denialist arguments fail not because of political contestation but because they are empirically incorrect.
Professor Lewandowsky concluded this portion of his lecture with a sobering observation: the public is being actively denied the right to accurate information about an existential risk. This is not simply a matter of competing narratives, he argued, but a profound ethical and political problem. The public is being misled through a coordinated and well-funded campaign, obstructing collective action on one of the most urgent challenges of our time.
Overall, Professor Lewandowsky’s analysis exposed a sophisticated, well-resourced, and tightly coordinated infrastructure of climate disinformation, showing that climate denial is not simply ignorance but an orchestrated political project closely tied to populist movements and vested interests. His lecture called on participants to recognize the structural forces behind disinformation and underscored the need for rigorous, empirically grounded responses that hold these forces accountable.
The Demand Side: Why People Believe Climate Misinformation
In this part of his lecture, Professor Lewandowsky explored the “demand side” of climate disinformation, focusing on the question of why significant segments of the public are receptive to misinformation about climate change. Rather than attributing this to simple ignorance or lack of information, Professor Lewandowsky argued that the primary driver is ideology: people’s deeply held worldviews and political identities shape how they interpret and accept information, including scientific evidence.
He began by underscoring a striking pattern from decades of research: attitudes toward climate change are strongly determined by an individual’s ideological orientation, particularly their endorsement of free-market principles. Whether measured as conservatism, libertarianism, or party affiliation, the relationship is consistent globally: individuals who favor small government and deregulated markets are much more likely to reject the scientific consensus on climate change. As Professor Lewandowsky summarized, this pattern is “pervasive,” observed not only in the United States and other English-speaking countries but also in diverse contexts worldwide.
One particularly counterintuitive finding Professor Lewandowsky emphasized was that increased education does not necessarily reduce skepticism about climate change; instead, it amplifies existing ideological divides. In the United States, for example, more educated Democrats are more likely to accept climate science, while more educated Republicans become even more dismissive. This suggests that higher education may provide the cognitive tools for individuals to selectively reinforce beliefs aligned with their political identities—a phenomenon known as “motivated reasoning.”
Professor Lewandowsky encouraged participants to think not only about political ideology but also about the relationship between science itself and certain ideological outlooks. He pointed out that science, over the centuries, has displaced humanity from its perceived centrality in the universe, challenging beliefs in human exceptionalism. For those who maintain strongly anthropocentric or hierarchical worldviews—a tendency more common among conservatives—this can be profoundly unsettling.
Moreover, Professor Lewandowsky highlighted how the core norms of science may conflict with conservative values. Drawing on classical sociological analysis, he explained that science rests on principles such as universalism, communal sharing of knowledge, and disinterestedness. He noted that even the language—terms like “communism” and “universalism”—can sound alien or even threatening to those who value national sovereignty, individualism, and hierarchy. This creates a deeper tension: resistance to climate science may not only reflect skepticism about a particular set of facts but discomfort with the very norms and practices of scientific inquiry.
To substantiate this, Professor Lewandowsky described empirical work examining correlations between individuals’ conservatism, their acceptance of scientific norms, and their attitudes toward climate change and vaccination. The results revealed that people who strongly endorsed conservative values were less likely to accept both climate science and vaccines and were also less likely to endorse the core norms of science itself. This association existed independently of exposure to specific scientific findings, suggesting that a general distrust of the scientific enterprise plays a significant role in shaping attitudes.
Professor Lewandowsky also noted that this distrust is exacerbated by the policy implications of climate science: addressing climate change requires government interventions in the market, such as carbon pricing or emissions regulations—policies fundamentally at odds with libertarian or free-market worldviews. Thus, opposition to climate science is often inseparable from opposition to perceived threats to economic freedom.
Communicating Consensus and Political Realism
In the final part of his lecture, Professor Lewandowsky addressed possible strategies for countering climate misinformation, with a focus on the communication of scientific consensus. He began by acknowledging a fundamental challenge: simply providing accurate information is often ineffective in today’s polarized environment. Ideological commitments, he noted, strongly shape whether people accept or reject scientific evidence, meaning that facts alone are unlikely to change minds.
Nevertheless, Professor Lewandowsky argued that one communicative strategy stands out as particularly promising—emphasizing the overwhelming consensus among climate scientists. To illustrate this point, he used an analogy: “Would you eat oysters if 97 out of 100 microbiologists told you they were contaminated and unsafe to eat? I wouldn’t touch these damn things,” he remarked, underscoring how consensus messaging taps into a basic human intuition about expert agreement.
Professor Lewandowsky stressed that the scientific consensus on climate change is similarly robust: over 97 percent of climate scientists agree that human activity is driving global warming, a level of agreement comparable to other widely accepted scientific facts. Importantly, he explained, communicating this fact has been empirically shown to be effective. “Consensus information can be a very powerful tool to shift people’s perceptions,” he noted, citing meta-analyses and recent studies across 27 countries that found this approach particularly helpful in reaching audiences with low institutional trust and right-leaning ideological commitments.
He highlighted his own collaborative work, including the production of a handbook explaining how consensus messaging works, why it matters, and how it can be deployed effectively. However, Professor Lewandowsky offered a sobering caveat. “Everything I’m saying about communication needs to be assessed against the harsh political realities we’re facing,” he warned. These realities include the global retreat of democracy and the increasing concentration of power among unaccountable elites who actively oppose climate action, even when market-based.
In this context, he cautioned against overestimating what better communication can achieve: “We’re living in a world in which people aren’t waiting for scientists to inform them. It’s a political battle. It’s about power, not science or communication.” While communicating consensus remains a useful tool, he concluded, it is not a panacea. The struggle over climate change is ultimately embedded in larger political and ideological conflicts that extend far beyond the reach of scientific expertise.
Professor Lewandowsky’s closing reflections captured the dilemma facing climate communicators today: opportunities exist, particularly because most people still trust scientists, but these must be pursued with humility about the limits of persuasion in a polarized and increasingly illiberal political environment.
Conclusion
Professor Stephan Lewandowsky’s lecture provided a powerful analysis of how climate denialism is rooted not simply in ignorance or confusion but in the intersection of populist politics, ideological worldviews, and deliberate disinformation campaigns. His four-part framework—contextualizing the post-truth environment, analyzing the disinformation infrastructure, understanding ideological drivers of belief, and offering communicative responses—equipped participants of the ECPS Academy Summer School with critical tools for diagnosing and confronting climate denial.
At its core, Professor Lewandowsky’s argument underscored that the climate crisis is as much a political and epistemological challenge as it is a scientific one. As he emphasized throughout, combating disinformation will require more than facts—it will require confronting the ideological and institutional forces that weaponize misinformation to obstruct climate action.
His insights resonated deeply with the Summer School’s overarching theme, illuminating the complex entanglements between populism and climate politics in an age of disinformation. The lecture not only dissected the mechanisms of denial but also pointed toward the political struggle ahead, reminding participants that defending climate science ultimately means defending democracy itself.
Professor Philippe Le Billon’s lecture critically examined how climate-related conflicts emerge from three sources: the impacts of climate change itself, contestation over climate inaction, and backlash against climate action. He argued that climate change operates as a “threat multiplier,” intensifying pre-existing inequalities and vulnerabilities rather than acting as an isolated trigger of violence. He explored how climate activism—while driven by moral urgency—can be framed as elitist and provoke populist opposition, and how the implementation of climate policy can generate new conflicts when perceived as unjust or technocratic. Professor Le Billon warned that “green capitalism” risks reproducing extractive logics, creating new “green sacrifice zones,” and underscored that climate justice requires confronting colonial legacies, class inequality, and structural power relations.
Reported by ECPS Staff
The seventh lecture of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025—titled “Populism and Climate Change: Understanding What Is at Stake and Crafting Policy Suggestions for Stakeholders”—took place online on July 10, 2025. The day’s featured lecturer was Professor Philippe Le Billon, an esteemed scholar of political geography and political ecology at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Prior to joining UBC, Professor Le Billon worked with prominent institutions including the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), as well as with environmental and human rights organizations. His research has long focused on the political economy of natural resources, extractivism, and the connections between environment, development, and security—especially in conflict settings. His current work engages closely with environmental defenders, small-scale fisheries, and the socio-political dimensions of the so-called “green transition.”
Though Professor Le Billon modestly framed himself as “not a major expert on climate change,” his extensive scholarship on the political economy of resource sectors, conflict, and environmental governance provided a compelling framework for analyzing climate-related conflicts in relation to populism. His lecture, titled “Climate Change, Natural Resources and Conflicts,” examined how climate-related conflicts increasingly shape and are shaped by populist mobilizations globally.
Professor Le Billon invited participants to think critically about climate conflict through a tripartite analytical lens: conflicts driven by the impacts of climate change; conflicts driven by perceived climate inaction; and conflicts triggered by the implementation of climate action itself. Framing his talk within what he described as the current era of “polycrisis”—marked by intertwined crises of climate, inequality, and governance—Professor Le Billon emphasized that climate change must be understood as a political issue embedded in structures of power, inequality, and historical injustice.
By drawing on case studies from around the world, his lecture challenged participants to reflect on the multifaceted relationship between populism and climate politics, showing how climate change is at once a driver of conflict and a contested arena where competing visions of justice, sovereignty, and socio-ecological futures play out.
Conflicts over Climate Impacts: From Environmental Stress to Political Violence
Hundreds of climate activists lie down in front of News Corp Australia headquarters in Sydney calling the Murdoch press liers on January 31, 2020.
Professor Le Billon reflected on the prevailing focus in academic and policy circles on conflicts attributed to the material impacts of climate change itself. He framed this discussion within the literature that examines how climate-induced environmental stress—particularly droughts, altered rainfall, and extreme weather—affects resource availability and contributes to tensions over land, water, and livelihoods.
As he explained, “generally, the drivers have been portrayed and naturalized as fitted with things like higher temperature, altered rainfall patterns, more frequent and intense disasters, sea level rise, etc. So droughts in particular have been a major focus.” To this list, he added lesser-discussed ecological dynamics such as “shifts in resources—so grassland seasonality, but also fish migrations. Every fish species has a temperature range that they like, and so they’ll migrate as temperatures warm up or cool down, and that can lead to fishing conflicts.”
Professor Le Billon was careful to emphasize that while climate change is an important contextual factor, it is rarely the sole or primary driver of violent conflict. He invoked the now widely accepted notion that climate change acts as a “threat multiplier,” noting that it “amplifies existing vulnerabilities” where poverty, inequality, livelihood insecurity, and political exclusion already prevail. He stressed that scholars and policymakers must avoid simplistic causality and instead attend to these intersections as the crucial sites of analysis.
To illustrate this argument, he cited several case studies, including the recurrent droughts in Syria, which “had a nasty effect on communities in Syria, and would have been part of the lead-up to the Syrian civil war. Of course, this is by far not the only factor, but it would have been an aggravating one.” He similarly highlighted the Sahel, where tensions between farmers and herders reflect a long history of land disputes now exacerbated by environmental pressures.
Professor Le Billon also drew attention to lesser-known cases of ecological disruption, such as fisheries conflicts prompted by species migration as ocean temperatures change. These examples underscore that climate change is interwoven with complex social and economic dynamics rather than being an external or autonomous driver of violence.
Critically, Professor Le Billon challenged dominant frameworks for analyzing these conflicts, identifying two key forms of reductionism: the naturalization of climate change itself and the culturalization of conflict. He argued that “what it has done also is generally depoliticized the inequalities that are at play in those countries, the kind of colonial legacies that have led to the type of property rights or absence of property rights,” and the “type of extractivist legislation that is in place.” Such framings, he cautioned, obscure the historical and structural conditions that have made many communities in the Global South so vulnerable to environmental shocks in the first place.
This depoliticization, he warned, enables securitized responses, particularly in the Global North, where governments increasingly treat climate-affected populations as threats—especially potential climate migrants—rather than as subjects of justice and solidarity. As Professor Le Billon put it, “many of these conflicts take place in, and affect, populations in the Global South which are the least responsible for what has happened.” Yet Northern discourse tends to focus on fears of migration, feeding into anti-immigration agendas and populist narratives of external threat.
Professor Le Billon’s intervention here was also a normative one: he argued that these conflicts should not be framed as technical problems requiring security solutions, but rather as calls for climate justice. He proposed that “rather than seeing [them] as a conflict,” these phenomena “should be seen as a call for justice rather than a call for militarized protection from Northern societies against those climate and conflict migrants.”
Moreover, he drew attention to the way populist actors at the domestic level have manipulated identity politics to escalate these conflicts. In many contexts, governments have “legitimated violence against those groups,” by framing nomadic herders or marginalized populations as scapegoats for broader socio-economic grievances. He noted that this dynamic is mirrored at the international level, where right-wing populists in the Global North leverage the specter of mass climate migration to bolster anti-immigration policies.
Conflicts over Climate Inaction: The Rise of Climate Activism and Eco-Populism
No Mining protest sign in Kaeo, New Zealand, September 15, 2013. While coal mining produced 5.3 million tonnes in 2010, acid mine drainage remains a serious environmental problem. Photo: Rafael Ben Ari.
The second broad category explored by Professor Le Billon concerned conflicts motivated by perceived inaction on climate change. These conflicts, while often nonviolent and institutional in form, represent an important and increasingly contentious terrain of political struggle. Professor Le Billon traced the rise of protests, demonstrations, and civil disobedience aimed at governments and corporations failing to address climate change. These movements, such as Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion, have emerged as potent social forces, demanding rapid action to avert climate catastrophe and often invoking the urgency of saving humanity and the planet. As Professor Le Billon put it, these movements are driven by “concerns for current and future impacts of climate change… it’s often a call for saving humanity and the planet in general, and in itself it can be sometimes quite problematic.” This universalist framing, he noted, is both rhetorically powerful and politically vulnerable.
While recognizing the moral force and legitimacy of these movements, Professor Le Billon offered a critical reflection on their social composition and political rhetoric. “Very often the people participating in the protests also have a relatively privileged background, and so it’s relatively easy to frame them as essentially privileged elites not being too preoccupied with the immediate concerns of some of the other population,” he observed. This tension, he argued, can be—and often is—instrumentalized by populist actors who portray climate activists as out-of-touch elites imposing burdens on ordinary people.
At the same time, Professor Le Billon highlighted the distinctive populist inflection of much climate activism itself, particularly in its critique of fossil fuel lobbies, global corporations, and corrupt elites. In this framing, “the climate inaction is framed as a result of decisions made by corrupt elites, greedy corporations, elitist global institutions that are done at the expense of local communities and the planet.” Thus, progressive eco-populism casts “the people” as aligned with the planet against an oligarchy of corporate and political actors who block meaningful climate action. This framing frequently intersects with indigenous and peasant movements, as seen in opposition to pipelines and extractive projects in North America and beyond.
However, as Professor Le Billon noted, these movements are not without internal tensions and external challenges. He pointed out that their demands often shift toward more radical critiques of the underlying political economy: “Essentially when people start not only to claim that there is climate inaction on the part of governments, but that the current system means that the government is incapable of acting… thus there is a need for a system change—that’s when we see a lot of violence taking place in different ways.”
This dynamic helps explain why such movements are subject to escalating repression and criminalization, particularly when they adopt disruptive tactics such as blockades and sabotage. Professor Le Billon discussed how governments in liberal democracies such as Australia, the UK, and Norway have responded with “very high arrest rates… while police violence has tended to be relatively low,” in contrast to countries like France, South Africa, or Peru, where “the rate of arrest is very low but the rate of police violence is very high.”
He emphasized that repression tends to correlate with movements that shift their critique beyond specific policies to systemic structures of capitalism and fossil fuel dependence: “It’s essentially when they start to challenge the system itself that we see an intensification of violence and repression.” Thus, his lecture illuminated the complex relationship between climate activism, eco-populism, and state repression. Professor Le Billon’s analysis underscored both the promise and the perils of contemporary climate movements, situating them as key arenas where conflicts over climate inaction are contested not only between activists and the state but also within broader struggles over privilege, legitimacy, and systemic change.
Conflicts over Climate Action: Green Transitions and Class Struggles
Protest against lithium mining in Belgrade, Serbia, August 10, 2024. A protester holds a placard reading “Stop Rio Tinto” during a demonstration opposing the company’s lithium mining plans. Photo: Dreamstime.
The third type of conflict examined by Professor Le Billon concerned resistance to climate action itself. Paradoxically, he noted that even as climate movements demand urgent measures, the implementation of climate policies can generate backlash and new sites of conflict—especially when these policies are perceived as unjust, unequal, or technocratic. As he remarked, “it’s common sense to intervene and change our system so that we’ve got more climate action—but the common sense also is that this transition cannot happen overnight,” capturing the contested terrain of climate policy.
He discussed the removal of fossil fuel subsidies in countries such as Nigeria, where the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and climate policy imperatives have converged in advocating for subsidy reforms. While the removal of subsidies might advance climate objectives on paper, they also provoke protests from populations who view them as essential to their livelihoods and who see such reforms as anti-poor. “Many people see material well-being and the imperative of social reproduction as being very important,” he observed, underscoring why such reforms often spark resistance.
Similar tensions have emerged around carbon taxes, electric vehicle subsidies, and renewable energy projects. In Canada, for example, carbon taxation became a major electoral issue in 2025, with fierce populist opposition portraying it as an attack on the working class. In France, Marine Le Pen’s far-right party has opposed offshore wind farms, portraying them as an imposition on local fishing communities—a populist strategy that, Professor Le Billon noted, mirrors narratives used in the American context around coal miners and oil workers. He pointed out that such movements tap into a grievance that “green liberalism puts a lot of focus on individual responsibility,” leading to perceptions that environmental policies disproportionately burden working-class populations while privileging elites.
Professor Le Billon introduced a critical perspective on what he termed “green capitalism” and “green extractivism”: the reproduction of extractive logics in the pursuit of green growth. Renewable energy infrastructure and low-carbon technologies, he observed, rely heavily on critical minerals such as lithium, often extracted from indigenous lands or ecologically sensitive regions in the Global South. These new “green sacrifice zones,” as he put it, “frame the climate crisis as resolvable through resource-intensive technological fixes” while perpetuating inequality and ecological harm. He noted that “about 70% of the energy transition mineral projects are near land that can be qualified as sites with indigenous people or traditional peasants,” a statistic that lays bare the colonial patterns embedded in the green transition.
He referenced resistance movements in the Andes, where lithium extraction has threatened fragile ecosystems and indigenous communities, as well as protests in Serbia against a Rio Tinto mining project. These conflicts illustrate how green transitions, if pursued within the existing capitalist framework, may perpetuate old injustices even as they address carbon emissions. As one protester quoted by Le Billon put it, “Green mining doesn’t exist… Politicians need to stop trying to get rid of pollution in cities by polluting our villages instead,” a vivid expression of the local-global tensions animating these struggles.
Professor Le Billon argued that the articulation of populism in these conflicts often turns on competing definitions of “the people.” In some cases, populist rhetoric is mobilized from the right, defending local or national sovereignty against globalist green agendas. In others, it emerges from the left, articulating an anti-elite critique of corporate greenwashing and imperialism. Both forms, he suggested, reflect deeper class struggles over who bears the costs and reaps the benefits of the energy transition: “We see a kind of two main categories… one is a critique of green liberalism… and the second one is against green extractivism, pushing back against the so-called extractivist imperative.”
In sum, Professor Le Billon’s analysis illuminated the complex and often contradictory ways in which climate action itself generates conflict, highlighting how struggles over green transitions are increasingly shaped by narratives of class, sovereignty, and justice. His lecture invited participants to recognize that without attention to these underlying dynamics, climate policy risks reproducing precisely the inequalities and exclusions it seeks to remedy.
Conclusion
In concluding his lecture, Professor Le Billon underscored the importance of understanding climate conflicts in all their complexity—not simply as environmental disputes but as deeply embedded in histories of inequality, structures of capitalism, and struggles over power and justice.
His three-part framework highlighted that conflicts emerge not only from the material impacts of climate change but also from contestation over climate inaction and from the contested implementation of climate policies themselves. Across these domains, populism plays an ambivalent role: sometimes reinforcing reactionary politics and obstruction, sometimes animating progressive alliances around climate justice.
Throughout the lecture, Professor Le Billon emphasized the need to critically examine the political economy of the green transition. He warned against narratives that frame climate mitigation as a purely technocratic project, disconnected from questions of inequality, colonialism, and class power. Without confronting these deeper structures, he argued, climate action risks reproducing the very injustices it seeks to redress.
His analysis also illuminated the paradoxical dynamics at play: climate policy can simultaneously be a site of progressive mobilization and conservative backlash; climate discourse can empower grassroots movements but also invite repression; and the pursuit of sustainability can generate new forms of extractivism and environmental sacrifice.
In sum, Professor Le Billon’s lecture made an invaluable contribution to the ECPS Summer School’s exploration of the nexus between populism and climate change. It provided participants with critical tools for understanding how climate conflicts are not simply about environmental degradation but also about contested visions of justice, sovereignty, and the political future. His call to recognize the uneven and contested terrain of climate politics resonated with the overarching theme of the Summer School: the urgent need to craft policy responses that are attentive not only to ecological imperatives but also to the demands of social and global justice.
In his compelling lecture, Professor Erik Swyngedouw offered a radical critique of contemporary climate discourse, describing it as trapped in a “climate deadlock” where knowledge and activism coexist with deepening ecological crisis. He argued that mainstream and radical climate narratives mirror the structure of populism, constructing simplistic binaries while displacing attention from capitalism’s core role in driving environmental destruction. Professor Swyngedouw challenged participants to recognize that the environmental apocalypse is not an imminent future but an unevenly distributed present reality for much of the world. His provocative call to dismantle the comforting fantasy of a unified humanity urged a re-politicization of the climate crisis, demanding systemic transformation and solidarity grounded in confronting global inequalities.
Reported by ECPS Staff
The sixth lecture of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025, titled “The Climate Deadlock and The Unbearable Lightness of Climate Populism,” was delivered as part of the broader program, “Populism and Climate Change: Understanding What Is at Stake and Crafting Policy Suggestions for Stakeholders,” held online from July 7 to 11, 2025.
The lecture was presented by ProfessorErik Swyngedouw, a globally respected scholar in the fields of political ecology and critical social theory. He is Professor of Geography at the University of Manchester and Senior Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Change. His work interrogates the political dimensions of environmental crises, urbanization, and social power. Among his major publications are Promises of the Political: Insurgent Cities in a Post-Democratic Environment (MIT Press), Liquid Power: Contested Hydro-Modernities in 20th Century Spain (MIT Press), and Social Power and the Urbanisation of Nature (Oxford University Press). His forthcoming book Enjoying Climate Change (Verso), co-authored with Lucas Pohl, extends his critical inquiry into the paradoxes of contemporary climate discourse.
Moderating the session wasJonathan White,Professor of Politics at the London School of Economics. Professor White is a prominent scholar of democracy, political temporality, and European politics. His books include In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea (2024), Politics of Last Resort: Governing by Emergency in the European Union(2019), and The Meaning of Partisanship (2016, with Lea Ypi). As moderator, Professor White introduced the speaker, contextualized the discussion within contemporary debates on populism and climate change, and facilitated a lively and thoughtful discussion by drawing connections between climate discourse, democratic politics, and visions of the future.
In his lecture, ProfessorSwyngedouw advanced a provocative and unsettling critique of contemporary climate discourse. He argued that despite widespread scientific consensus, institutional action, and activist mobilization, the condition of the planet continues to deteriorate—a paradox he termed the “climate deadlock.” Drawing on a psychoanalytically informed, Marxist perspective, Professor Swyngedouw contended that mainstream climate discourse functions in ways structurally parallel to populism, constructing binary narratives of virtuous “people” versus villainous “elites” or “external threats” (such as CO₂), while masking the real systemic drivers of ecological catastrophe: capitalism’s relentless imperative for accumulation and growth.
Professor Swyngedouw’s central claim—that both liberal and radical climate discourses reproduce depoliticization by focusing obsessively on carbon emissions as a fetish object—challenged participants to rethink familiar narratives. He argued that the obsessive focus on CO₂ reduction displaces attention from the deep class antagonisms and material inequalities at the root of the climate crisis, allowing societies to “act as if” they are responding to climate change while leaving intact the socio-economic structures that cause environmental destruction. This displacement, he explained, generates what he termed the “unbearable lightness of climate populism”—an empty consensus that obscures the political transformations truly required.
This lecture, rich in theoretical rigor and critical insight, provided a powerful contribution to the Summer School’s objective of fostering critical debate about populism and climate change. It invited participants to reflect on how even well-intentioned environmental discourses can perpetuate depoliticization and obstruct radical action, urging a re-politicization that directly confronts the systemic drivers of ecological crisis.
Focusing on the Climate Obscures the Politics
Flooding in Bangladesh’s delta region: Villagers on Charkajal Island endure rising waters, sea-level rise, and intense monsoon rains—making Bangladesh one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations. Photo: Dreamstime.
In his lecture, Professor Erik Swyngedouw delivered a provocative opening that set the tone for his critical analysis of climate discourse. Speaking with characteristic wit and candor, Professor Swyngedouw began by emphasizing a paradoxical but central claim: if we truly want to take the climate crisis seriously, we must stop focusing on the climate itself. This counterintuitive assertion framed his argument that the mainstream climate consensus—shared across liberal, radical, and even activist sectors—has become trapped in what he described as a “climate deadlock.”
According to Professor Swyngedouw, this deadlock emerges not from ignorance but from a deep structural dynamic. While knowledge and consensus about the seriousness of climate change are widespread, genuine transformative action remains absent. He argued that climate discourse today is structured in ways that parallel populist discourses: it constructs a binary narrative of virtuous “people” versus villainous “elites” and simplifies complex socio-economic realities by reducing them to fetishized objects—greenhouse gases like CO₂, methane, and nitrous oxides.
Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Professor Swyngedouw contended that greenhouse gases have come to function as a “fetish” in the classic sense: a symbolic object that absorbs collective anxiety while allowing the underlying socio-political structures that drive ecological crisis—especially global capitalism and accumulation—to remain intact. In this view, the obsessive focus on CO₂ reduction serves as a form of displacement that assures that nothing fundamentally changes. Thus, Professor Swyngedouw’s core proposition was that mainstream and even radical climate discourses have become part of a pervasive depoliticization process, obscuring the real sources of the crisis while creating the illusion of action.
Mapping the Climate Deadlock
Professor Swyngedouw offered a penetrating analysis of what he termed the “climate deadlock,” a paradoxical condition in which global awareness and consensus about climate change coexist with mounting environmental degradation and policy failure. Professor Swyngedouw underscored that, despite widespread knowledge, sophisticated technologies, radical activism, and repeated calls for urgent action, climate parameters continue to worsen, with greenhouse gas emissions rising relentlessly. He framed this as a profound political and psychological impasse demanding a different conceptual lens.
To illuminate this impasse, Professor Swyngedouw employed a Marxist-Lacanian, psychoanalytically informed perspective, focusing especially on the psychology of those most committed to climate action: radical activists and conscientious citizens alike. He argued that many such actors—while passionately advocating for change—are caught in forms of what psychoanalysis calls “surplus enjoyment” and “hysterical acting out,” manifested in both symbolic protests and personal lifestyle adjustments, such as reducing air travel or adopting vegetarianism. These practices, while seemingly transformative, actually sustain an underlying attachment to the existing socio-ecological order.
Fetishistic Disavowal and the Object Cause of Desire
Drawing inspiration from the French philosopher Alain Badiou, Professor Swyngedouw suggested that the dominant climate discourse operates as a new “opium of the people”: a depoliticizing ideology that channels political energies into managing “the climate” as a technical object while obscuring the deeper power structures—especially capitalism—that drive ecological crisis. Central to this critique is the concept of “fetishistic disavowal,” where societies simultaneously acknowledge the reality of climate change yet act as if they do not know, displacing transformative political struggle onto the technical management of greenhouse gases, which have been fetishized as the primary cause of crisis.
Professor Swyngedouw thus identified a dangerous cognitive dissonance: even as greenhouse gas concentrations reach record highs, mainstream discourse congratulates itself on partial regional successes, such as EU emissions reductions, while ignoring how these reductions are offset by increases elsewhere to sustain global consumption patterns. This displacement allows societies to avoid confronting the “real” socio-political antagonisms and material inequalities embedded in the climate crisis.
Professor Swyngedouw argued that climate discourse and activism are not only shaped by the urgent need to address ecological breakdown but also marked by a libidinal attachment to the very socio-ecological order they critique. He suggested that many climate activists, while sincerely desiring a socially just, democratic, and environmentally sustainable world, displace this larger, daunting desire onto a “small object” that stands in for systemic transformation: the reduction of CO₂ emissions.
Professor Swyngedouw likened this displacement to the structure of fetishism in psychoanalysis, where desire attaches to a fragment or object—such as a shoe—allowing the subject to avoid confronting the whole, more difficult reality of a relationship. In this case, he contended that CO₂ becomes the “little object of desire,” the symbolic focal point around which hopes for ecological and social renewal revolve. This focus allows activists and institutions alike to engage in practices like recycling, dietary changes, and ethical consumption—actions that offer partial satisfaction but ultimately fail to address the root cause of the crisis: the capitalist drive for endless growth.
Professor Swyngedouw maintained that this fetishization ensures that the true trauma at the heart of the climate crisis—the need for radical political and socio-economic transformation—remains disavowed. By focusing on CO₂ as the manageable object, climate discourse paradoxically enables enjoyment of critique and activism while leaving intact the structures that produce ecological harm, thereby sustaining the status quo under the guise of transformation.
The Unbearable Lightness of Climate Populism
Respect Indigenous Peoples’ Rights: A group representing Indigenous communities marches during a climate protest in Copenhagen, Denmark. Photo: Dreamstime.
Professor Swyngedouw advanced a critical argument about what he termed “the unbearable lightness of climate populism.” He began by asserting that, despite widespread calls for change, many subjects do not truly desire a different socio-ecological order. Instead, their desire becomes articulated around CO₂ reduction as the privileged object of action. This displacement, Professor Swyngedouw argued, leads to a discourse whose architecture mirrors the logic of populism—a framework typically associated with right-wing nationalism but, in his analysis, equally at work within liberal and even radical climate discourses.
Professor Swyngedouw described how climate populism unfolds through the consensualization of the climate question, the mobilization of an apocalyptic imaginary, and the reliance on technocratic and managerial solutions. Central to this process, he contended, is the commodification of greenhouse gas emissions, the encouragement of individualized responsibility and guilt, and a focus on technical fixes rather than systemic change. In this way, climate discourse parallels right-wing populism’s structure, even as it espouses different substantive aims.
He outlined that both right-wing populism and mainstream climate discourse frame their arguments around a virtuous “people” threatened by a dangerous “other”—whether migrants or greenhouse gases—while externalizing the root causes of crisis. Both deploy narratives of existential threat and call for decisive action but stop short of confronting the real systemic drivers of inequality and ecological degradation. In Professor Swyngedouw’s formulation, this amounts to a profound depoliticization, where urgent rhetoric masks an incapacity to challenge the socio-ecological status quo.
Professor Swyngedouw summarized the hegemonic view underlying climate populism as a narrative where a global humanitarian threat—caused by idle elites or external invaders like CO₂—requires urgent mitigation using precisely the market-conforming technologies and governance structures that caused the crisis in the first place. This narrative sustains the illusion that catastrophe can be averted, that humanity can be saved, and that a lost Arcadian socio-ecological harmony can be restored if CO₂ levels return to 300 parts per million (ppm)—a formulation that he dismissed as a populist fantasy.
Expanding on this critique, Professor Swyngedouw presented twelve theses illustrating the structural parallels between right-wing populist discourse and climate populism. He invited his audience to imagine substituting the term “migrant” for “CO₂” to recognize the architectural similarity. Both discourses invoke “the people” or even “humanity” as a whole, presupposing a unity that he argued does not exist, as demonstrated by the vast disparities between, for instance, Gaza or Ukraine and wealthier regions. Both posit a direct relationship between public participation and the legitimacy of governance while short-circuiting genuine political conflict by reframing structural issues as matters of technical management.
Professor Swyngedouw pointed out that climate discourse has no privileged subject of transformation—no agent akin to the proletariat for socialists or women for feminists. Instead, it defines the enemy in externalized, fetishized terms: CO₂ becomes an ambiguous, socially empty, homogenized object that obscures the historical and material conditions of its production. A ton of CO₂ is treated as identical regardless of its source or context, encouraging a depoliticized response aimed at trimming “excess” emissions so that business-as-usual can continue.
He warned that dominant climate policies express demands addressed to elites to “act decisively,” rather than seeking to transform the elites themselves or the structures of accumulation and inequality that they defend. As an illustration, Professor Swyngedouw cited the exponentially expanding energy demand driven by artificial intelligence, whose corporate proponents are already ensuring that energy provision—including nuclear energy—will meet future AI growth. This example, he argued, epitomizes how climate discourse moves problems around rather than solving them.
Professor Swyngedouw then probed the appeal of climate populism, asking why so many—from radicals to mainstream actors—are drawn to this discourse. He suggested that its attraction lies in its function as a form of fetishistic disavowal: it allows individuals and societies to take the climate question seriously while avoiding the need for fundamental change. It enables solutions to be located within the familiar contours of technical and managerial governance arrangements while preserving existing socio-ecological power relations.
He cited Alain Badiou’s claim that environmentalism has become the “new opium of the people,” a soothing discourse that ensures things can go on as normal. The result is a climate debate that depoliticizes environmental matters by shifting attention away from what Professor Swyngedouw called “the mad dance of accumulation and its constitutive class dynamics”—the real drivers of climate breakdown. Instead, focus is displaced onto the symptom: CO₂, a fetish object that can be measured, traded, and managed, while the systemic causes remain unchallenged.
Professor Swyngedouw concluded that this logic leads to forms of “obsessive or hysterical climate activism,” which he characterized as “impotent acting out”—a pattern of behavior that allows society to appear engaged while keeping the underlying disease intact. He argued that this practice is supported and reproduced through the deployment of “empty signifiers” like sustainability, mitigation, adaptation, transition, and resilience. These terms enjoy universal approval yet lack substantive content, generating a hollow consensus that depoliticizes the climate question even further.
For Professor Swyngedouw, this configuration exemplifies the depoliticizing and uncannily populist phantasmic narrative and practice of what he termed “the climate catastrophe consensus.” His critique invited participants to reflect critically on the ideological architecture of mainstream climate discourse and the ways in which it allows a destructive socio-ecological system to persist under the guise of environmental concern.
The Real of the Climate Condition
Then, Professor Swyngedouw turned to “the real of the climate condition,” aiming to expose the systemic drivers of climate breakdown often concealed by mainstream discourse. He began by emphasizing the near-perfect correlation between GDP growth and greenhouse gas emissions. For Professor Swyngedouw, this relationship reflects how economic growth—understood as capitalist accumulation—is not merely an obsession but a structural necessity for the sustainability of modern societies. Without growth, crises ensue; thus, attempts by eco-modernists to claim that economic expansion can be decoupled from environmental degradation are, in his words, “fantasy land.” This illusion is starkly challenged by phenomena such as the environmental footprint of artificial intelligence, whose rapid rise portends escalating energy and resource demands.
To illustrate the material reality underpinning climate change, Professor Swyngedouw provided examples that disrupt the common narrative of an immaterial, post-industrial economy. Internet use, often celebrated for replacing carbon-intensive travel, accounts for approximately 2% of global climate emissions, rivaling aviation. The proliferation of smartphones and tablets adds to this footprint: each device represents 22 kilograms of CO₂ emissions, with over 3.5 billion devices globally. Their manufacture also embodies grim socio-ecological consequences, notably in Central Africa, where coltan mining—vital for ICT equipment—occurs under exploitative and violent conditions, often at the hands of militias and through the involvement of Chinese corporations. Professor Swyngedouw noted the irony that while Western societies discuss “decolonization,” they outsource contemporary extractive imperialism elsewhere, absolving themselves of direct responsibility.
Furthermore, he pointed to the extreme inequality of emissions: the top 10% of emitters are responsible for nearly half of global energy-related CO₂ emissions, while the poorest 10% contribute a mere 0.2%. The richest 0.1% alone emitted ten times more than the rest of the richest 10% combined, exceeding 200 tons of CO₂ per capita annually. These empirical facts reveal a deeply unequal, class-driven structure at the heart of the climate crisis. Yet, Professor Swyngedouw argued, this “real” is systematically disavowed in public discourse, displaced onto fantasies centered on technical management and abstract targets.
This fetishistic disavowal, Professor Swyngedouw explained, allows societies to “know very well” the facts of climate breakdown while continuing to “act as if we do not know.” In this paradox, knowledge itself becomes complicit in maintaining a socio-ecological order premised on endless growth, inequality, and environmental destruction. He warned that unless this structure is confronted, climate discourse will remain trapped in what he called a “populist climate fantasy.”
To move beyond this impasse, Professor Swyngedouw identified two key fantasies that must be transgressed. The first is the dystopian imaginary of an imminent catastrophe that can still be averted. For decades, climate narratives have proclaimed that we are five minutes to midnight, yet never past it, perpetuating an atmosphere of fear that serves neoliberal governance by depoliticizing conflict and presenting climate breakdown as a universal humanitarian threat. This framing enables techno-managerial responses while disavowing the combined and uneven realities of climate impact, where some communities are already experiencing collapse.
The second fantasy revolves around the idea that “humanity” itself is at risk. Professor Swyngedouw questioned the very notion of a singular humanity, pointing to stark global inequalities and conflicts that belie the fiction of a unified global subject. By invoking the danger to an imagined humanity, dominant discourse displaces recognition of the structural antagonisms that produce ecological catastrophe and directs political attention toward generalized, abstract fears.
Professor Swyngedouw underscored that rejecting the apocalyptic narrative—asserting instead that for many, the catastrophe has already occurred—is a necessary step toward politicizing the climate condition. Only by confronting these repressed traumas and dismantling the fantasies that sustain depoliticization can we begin to envision a genuinely transformative ecological politics.
Toward Political Ecologies
Drought in Indonesia: Residents collect murky water from a well in the dried-up reservoir of Kradenan village, Central Java. Photo: Dreamstime.
In this concluding section of his lecture, Professor Swyngedouw advanced a stark and provocative argument: the environmental apocalypse so often framed as an impending future catastrophe has, in fact, already occurred—but unevenly. For many across the world, especially in vulnerable regions, the dystopian conditions of climate collapse are not abstract scenarios but the lived reality of water conflicts, food insecurity, forced displacement, extractivism, and unlivable environments. These conditions, he argued, demonstrate that the “socio-ecological embroglio” has long passed the point of no return.
Professor Swyngedouw insisted that it is precisely this realization—that the apocalypse is both “combined and uneven”—that must become the foundation for any future politics. The comforting idea of returning to some lost Arcadian climate balance, or maintaining a stable global environment, he rejected as a fantasy that displaces the real conflicts and inequalities underlying ecological crisis. Even ostensibly sustainable practices in affluent societies, such as driving an electric vehicle in Amsterdam, are entangled in ecological destruction elsewhere—a global interdependence often obscured.
He then addressed what he termed the second “fantasy”: the very idea of “humanity” as a singular global subject deserving salvation. Drawing on Maurice Blanchot’s critique from the Cold War era, Professor Swyngedouw argued that this notion of humanity is itself a construct, masking deep antagonisms of class and geopolitical violence. From Gaza to Ukraine, the fractured, conflict-ridden nature of the world belies the fantasy of a coherent, unified human community. Professor Swyngedouw called for the construction of a “real humanity”—a project that does not presuppose unity but seeks to forge solidarity from division. Referencing Blanchot, he described this task as “Communism”: the transformative political process of creating humanity where it does not yet exist.
Conclusion
In concluding his incisive lecture, Professor Erik Swyngedouw left participants of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 with a profound and challenging set of reflections. His critique of contemporary climate discourse invited attendees to reconsider how mainstream and even radical environmental narratives have become complicit in reproducing a depoliticized consensus—a consensus that sustains the very socio-ecological structures responsible for the crisis. By exposing the fetishization of CO₂ reduction as a displacement of attention from systemic drivers like capitalist accumulation and class inequality, Professor Swyngedouw urged a reframing of the climate challenge as a fundamentally political, not merely technical, struggle.
Central to his lecture was the insistence that the environmental apocalypse often depicted as a looming future catastrophe is, in fact, already here—unevenly distributed and deeply entangled with global inequalities. He argued that for millions across the Global South and other marginalized communities, the dystopian conditions of water scarcity, extractivism, forced migration, and environmental degradation are an everyday reality, not an impending threat. Recognizing this uneven, ongoing catastrophe is essential for any honest and transformative political response.
Professor Swyngedouw’s provocative claim that “humanity” itself is a fantasy—masking deep divisions and antagonisms—challenged the audience to reject the comforting notion of a unified global subject requiring salvation. Instead, he called for the active construction of a “real humanity”: a project of solidarity forged from division, attentive to class, geopolitical violence, and the histories of imperialism and exploitation that underpin today’s ecological breakdown.
In sum, this lecture pushed participants to interrogate the ideological architecture of climate populism and reflect on what genuine politicization of the climate condition would entail. It provided not only a critique of prevailing discourses but also an invitation to imagine and enact a more radical, just, and emancipatory ecological politics.
Dr. Heidi Hart’s lecture illuminated the provocative intersection of art, activism, and climate trauma. Through an interdisciplinary lens, she explored why climate activists increasingly target iconic artworks in museums as sites of performative protest, interpreting these acts not as mere vandalism but as symbolic disruptions challenging elitist cultural values amid ecological crisis. Drawing on frameworks from populism studies, art history, and affect theory, Dr. Hart examined how these interventions reflect a passionate response to climate grief and injustice. Her analysis underscored the importance of understanding such protests within broader debates on decolonization, posthumanism, and collective responsibility, encouraging participants to view artistic destruction as both a critique of cultural complacency and a call for ecological transformation.
Reported by ECPS Staff
On the third day of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025—titled “Populism and Climate Change: Understanding What Is at Stake and Crafting Policy Suggestions for Stakeholders”—took place online from July 7–11, 2025, participants were treated to a rich and thought-provoking lecture by Dr. Heidi Hart, who offered an interdisciplinary perspective on a particularly provocative theme: the intersection of art vandalism, populist performance, and climate trauma.
Dr. Hart is an arts scholar, curator, and practitioner with a deep commitment to exploring the affective dimensions of ecological crisis through cultural forms. She is based between Copenhagen and North Carolina and holds a Ph.D. in German Studies from Duke University (2016). Her scholarly trajectory spans environmental humanities, climate grief, sound and music in ecological narratives, and the artistic aesthetics of destruction. Among her major works is the recently published monograph Climate Thanatology, which examines artistic engagements with death, loss, and creative transformation in the shadow of climate collapse. Her current research project, Instruments of Repair—supported by the Craftford Foundation—extends this inquiry into the ecological afterlives of musical instruments, analyzing how materials and sound objects decay, renew, and reenter cycles of natural transformation.
Framing the Inquiry
In her lecture, titled “Art Attacks: Museum Vandalism as a Populist Response to Climate Trauma?” Dr. Hart asked two provocative and interrelated questions: Can climate-motivated attacks on cultural heritage be understood as populist interventions? And are such acts animated by collective trauma in response to escalating ecological collapse?
Drawing on her intellectual background in German studies and arts-based environmental research, Dr. Hart invited participants to think critically about what lies behind these acts of museum vandalism—actions that, at first glance, may seem merely destructive but are laden with symbolism and ambiguity. In doing so, she framed her lecture around key themes that set the tone for further discussion: populism, affect, trauma, artistic disruption, and cultural elitism. Through this framing, she encouraged participants to interrogate how contemporary protest blurs boundaries between art and activism, and how cultural heritage itself becomes a site where competing visions of justice, grief, and ecological survival play out.
Dr. Hart began by situating her own intellectual journey—from early research on music as resistance during the Nazi era, where she explored how art could disrupt authoritarian propaganda’s narcotic appeal, to her current focus on the affective and symbolic power of art in the context of environmental crises. This personal trajectory underscored a continuity in her work: a persistent interrogation of how artistic practices can interrupt complacency, provoke reflection, and mobilize engagement.
In today’s context, she argued, museum vandalism by climate activists invites interpretation beyond its surface-level appearance as mere destruction. While many view these actions as disruptive irritations—summarized in a tongue-in-cheek remark she recalled from a recent Oxford symposium, “Everyone hates climate activists”—Dr. Hart challenged participants to probe more deeply: why and how are these interventions disruptive, and could they be productive in drawing attention to the climate emergency?
She acknowledged that her presentation, though informed by her expertise in sound and music, would focus more on visual art, reflecting the prominence of museum spaces as recent sites of climate protest. The lecture’s key themes—populism, trauma, and the aesthetics of disruption—were introduced as analytical frames through which to interrogate these acts of vandalism. Dr. Hart signaled that she would offer preliminary thoughts while leaving ample space for dialogue, emphasizing that these questions remain open and contested.
By foregrounding her inquiry in this way, Dr. Hart set the stage for a rich exploration of not only whether climate activist vandalism constitutes a populist response but also how it may serve as an expression of collective climate grief and a critique of cultural elitism. This framing invited participants to think critically about the ambiguous and provocative role of art in times of ecological crisis and political polarization.
Museum Vandalism as Performative Protest
Dr. Hart discussed recent attacks on artworks, including pink paint on Picasso’s Le Tête in Montreal, pea soup on Van Gogh’s The Sower in Rome, and black paint on Klimt’s Death and Life in Vienna.
In her lecture, Dr. Hart has drew attentions to a striking phenomenon that has emerged in recent years: the vandalism of iconic artworks by climate activist groups. Framing these incidents as potential cases of “performative protest,” Dr. Hart explored not only their aesthetic shock value but their underlying motivations and rhetorical strategies, situating these acts within broader cultural and political debates.
She began by providing concrete examples of such actions. In 2022, museum vandalism became a prominent feature of climate activism, with protesters targeting cultural masterpieces in acts carefully calibrated for visibility. Dr. Hart discussed a recent attack in Montreal, where pink paint was thrown at Picasso’s Le Tête. Other high-profile incidents included activists hurling pea soup at Van Gogh’s The Sower in Rome, and black paint splashed on Gustav Klimt’s Death and Life in Vienna. These actions, though dramatic, typically did not cause irreversible damage. As Dr. Hart noted, most of these targeted paintings were protected by glass or varnish, meaning the interventions were more symbolic than materially destructive.
Yet, the symbolism itself was deeply provocative. The activists’ chosen targets were canonical works—artworks regarded as cultural treasures—imbued with historical and aesthetic value. The protests’ visual violence demanded attention but also raised questions about the meaning of “treasuring” art in an age of ecological collapse. Dr. Hart highlighted the activists’ rhetorical position: Why admire art while the planet burns? For these groups, art becomes a symbol of elitism and privilege, and their interventions serve to challenge that perceived complacency.
Who perpetrates these actions? Dr. Hart shared that the vast majority—about 95%—are carried out by organized groups, typically operating within their own countries and avoiding long-distance air travel for environmental reasons. Three major groups—Ultima Generazione in Italy and the Vatican, Just Stop Oil in the UK, and Letzte Generation in Germany—account for over half of such incidents globally. These groups share coordination mechanisms, including networks like “A22,” and their communications reflect a shared sense of existential urgency. As their manifesto proclaims: “The old world is dying. We are in the last hour. What we do now decides the fate of this world and the next.”
Dr. Hart unpacked the dramatic language used by these groups, noting how their invocation of being the “last generation” implies both despair and futurity. On one hand, their rhetoric signals apocalyptic loss—both ecological and cultural—while on the other it invokes protection of generations yet to come. Their critique extends beyond climate change itself to the cultural frameworks that structure inaction: museums and artworks become proxies for a broader critique of elite indifference to planetary crisis.
The lecture also probed the deeper ideological terrain of these protests, linking them to contemporary struggles over rights discourse. Dr. Hart reflected on how activist groups claim an “inalienable right” to protest through disruptive means—a phrase that resonates with the language of populism on both the left and right. In today’s polarized context, she observed, concepts like “freedom” and “rights” are highly contingent, shifting according to political alignment. Where once calls for “freedom” in the US were often heard from right-wing movements opposing government regulation, the post-2024 political landscape has seen left-leaning groups appropriating the same rhetoric to resist new authoritarian currents.
Thus, these acts of museum vandalism reflect not only artistic disruption but also a contest over language itself—over what rights mean, who can claim them, and in what contexts. Dr. Hart emphasized that the activist invocation of freedom and rights is part of a wider populist dynamic that questions authority and elite cultural spaces, even as it seeks to defend collective planetary futures.
Dr. Hart’s exploration of climate activist vandalism revealed these actions as complex, ambiguous performances: visually disruptive yet materially restrained, symbolically powerful yet ideologically contested. By probing their underlying motivations, rhetorical strategies, and populist dimensions, she invited participants to view these protests not simply as acts of destruction but as calls for attention to deeper crises of climate, culture, and democracy itself.
Populist Dynamics and Iconoclash
Dr. Heidi Hart shared insights from her forthcoming book Piano Decompositions, exploring how broken or abandoned instruments—burning pianos, rotting harps—become ecological sites.
In her lecture, Dr. Hart also offered an expansive reflection on the relationship between contemporary climate activism, populist dynamics, and artistic practice, emphasizing how recent acts of vandalism against artworks in museums embody complex cultural and ideological tensions. Dr. Hart examined why some climate activists engage in such performative protests, throwing substances on masterpieces as a way to challenge the cultural hierarchies that museums symbolize.
She framed this as a populist gesture, drawing on arguments in the Encyclopedia of New Populism (2024), which describe left-oriented populist activists viewing museum art as symbolic of elitism. These artworks, attributed with immense monetary and cultural value, are seen to set apart a privileged cultural elite (“them”) from the general public (“us”). For these activists, museums become metaphoric “ivory towers,” and vandalism functions as a provocative performance rather than a reactionary outburst. In this framing, the splashing of paint or soup on a painting is not mere destruction, but a deliberate disruption aimed at exposing what they perceive as misplaced societal priorities in a time of environmental crisis.
Dr. Hart then broadened this inquiry by situating these acts within an evolving discourse in the art world itself. Museums today are increasingly sites of reflection on their own complicity in colonial histories, leading to active debates about “decolonizing the museum.” Many institutions are critically reassessing their collections—particularly artifacts acquired during imperial periods—and grappling with ethical questions of provenance and restitution.
Closely linked to these debates is the burgeoning discourse of posthumanism, another current Dr. Hart identified as central to understanding the contemporary art world. Posthumanism, she explained, takes two key forms: one engages with technological transformation, contemplating the future of humanity in an age of AI and bodily augmentation; the other de-centers humans as the central agents in history and culture, emphasizing human entanglement with non-human animals, ecosystems, and material forces. This second strand, Dr. Hart noted, deeply informs the proliferation of artworks today that abandon traditional materials like oil paint and canvas in favor of organic or ephemeral substances—horsehair, moss, soil, cultivated bacteria—all signaling a shift away from an anthropocentric worldview.
In this context, Dr. Hart suggested that climate activist vandalism tends not to target contemporary works that already embrace this ecological sensitivity. Instead, activists have focused on older, canonical works of art that are emblematic of human exceptionalism and Western aesthetic traditions. Their interventions thus function as a critique of a cultural legacy that they see as complicit in ecological extraction and exploitation.
Returning to the theme of populism, Dr. Hart introduced the work of political theorist Chantal Mouffe, whose book Toward a Green Democratic Revolution: Left Populism and the Power of Affects argues that left populism is a vital mode for mobilizing collective political will in the face of ecological collapse. For Mouffe, affective energy—passion, anger, grief—must be harnessed not just as protest but also channeled into institutional processes like voting and policymaking. Dr. Hart affirmed that Mouffe’s ideas offer a strong theoretical justification for interpreting climate activist actions as populist interventions aimed at reconfiguring democratic priorities around ecological survival.
However, Dr. Hart was careful to draw an important distinction between left populist climate activism and right-wing eco-fascism. Though both can appear populist in form, their ideological contents diverge dramatically. Eco-fascism, she observed, is often animated by a Malthusian impulse to restrict human populations, frequently tied to racialized or exclusionary worldviews—a “protection of the earth” that serves a narrowly defined community, often coded as white. In contrast, left populist climate activism typically expresses solidarity with all humans and non-humans alike, animated by a vision of ecological justice that centers collective responsibility and inclusivity.
An instructive example here is the “seven-generation principle,” drawn from Indigenous philosophies, which advises that every decision be made with consideration for its impact on seven generations to come. Dr. Hart explained that this principle encapsulates a form of temporality and collectivity that stands in stark opposition to the extractive logic of neoliberal capitalism. Where eco-fascists would advocate reducing populations to “protect” the earth, left populists call for an expanded, solidaristic ecology that embraces future human and non-human lives alike.
Dr. Hart then turned to the language of passion and affect in this context. While critics often dismiss passion as unstructured and chaotic, Mouffe and others argue that passion is essential for building a political project powerful enough to challenge entrenched structures of extraction and domination. Activism in museums, from this perspective, should not be seen as mindless vandalism but as part of a broader affective politics—a politics that seeks to reorient collective attention from cultural elitism to planetary emergency.
Dr. Hart continued her lecture by introducing the provocative concept of iconoclash, coined by French philosopher Bruno Latour. Distinct from “iconoclasm,” which implies a clear intent to destroy sacred images, iconoclash suggests a productive ambiguity: an act that simultaneously destroys and provokes reflection. When activists splash paint on canonical artworks, they may not seek to obliterate their cultural value outright but to force a public reconsideration of what those values signify at this moment of ecological precarity.
This framing resonates with Dr. Hart’s own scholarly and artistic work. She shared insights from her forthcoming book Piano Decompositions: The Ecology of Destroyed and Decaying Instruments, co-authored with Beata Schirrmacher, which explores how broken or abandoned instruments—burning pianos, rotting harps—become ecological sites in their own right. A decaying harp in her own backyard, she explained, has become home to spiders and plants, its strings transformed into webs, its wooden frame absorbing rain and wind. Such work re-embeds cultural artifacts into natural cycles of decay and regeneration, proposing destruction itself as a mode of ecological engagement.
In this light, Dr. Hart suggested, climate activist attacks on canonical artworks might also be understood not simply as negations but as attempts to transform how society values cultural and material artifacts—raising questions about what should be preserved, what should be mourned, and what should be allowed to return to the earth.
Trauma, Affect, and Eco-Populism
Dr. Heidi Hart reflected on the power of artistic ambiguity to address ecological crisis, highlighting the Icelandic film Woman at War and its eco-warrior protagonist’s complex duality.
Moreover, Dr. Hart addressed the psychological and emotional dimensions underlying acts of climate activism that target cultural institutions, focusing on the role of trauma and affect. She posed a central question: Are these destructive actions simply about drawing attention to the climate crisis, or do they emerge from an emotional intensity—what Chantal Mouffe describes as a passion driven by collective hurt and grief over ecological loss?
Dr. Hart cited Catherine Stiles’s work on destruction art as a useful lens, noting that such artistic interventions can be seen as a visual expression of the trauma of survival itself. According to Stiles, destruction art embodies the precarious condition of human survival in the 20th and 21st centuries, echoing broader existential anxieties that are increasingly acute amid escalating climate disruptions.
Dr. Hart also referenced Ian Kaplan’s Climate Trauma, a study exploring dystopian narratives across film and fiction, as further evidence of how popular culture processes this collective sense of impending ecological catastrophe. She observed that dystopian imaginaries reflect an implicit recognition that the world as we know it has already ended—a powerful backdrop for understanding the emotional logic of activist vandalism.
Drawing connections to current events, Dr. Hart emphasized that even those not directly affected by disasters like recent floods in Texas experience a form of mediated trauma through relentless news coverage. This ambient, cumulative distress, particularly among younger generations contemplating their futures, helps explain why destructive activism may increasingly be motivated not only by strategic intent but also by genuine emotional exhaustion and eco-anxiety.
In concluding her lecture, Dr. Heidi Hart offered a compelling reflection on the potential of artistic ambiguity and creative narratives to engage with ecological crisis in ways that transcend binary thinking. She highlighted the Icelandic film Woman at War (2013) as an exemplar of this approach, noting how its protagonist—a passionate eco-warrior—embodies a complex duality: she actively sabotages industrial infrastructure in Iceland while also serving as a beloved choir director in Reykjavík, deeply invested in her community and the arts.
Dr. Hart described how the film explores the interplay between destruction and creativity, emphasizing the ambiguity at its core. Throughout the film, a roving ensemble of musicians appears in unexpected settings—on hillsides, in the protagonist’s apartment, at an airport runway—blurring the lines between reality and imagination, and inviting viewers to question the role of art and music during times of crisis. This device creates a distancing effect that allows for reflection on art’s relevance when ecological and social structures are under threat. She also pointed out how the film weaves in another narrative thread: the protagonist’s pending adoption of a child from Ukraine, adding further layers of ethical complexity around responsibility, personal obligations, and global injustice.
Dr. Hart praised the film’s ability to offer hope without sacrificing complexity or humor. She encouraged participants to consider creative, less binary ways of thinking about activism, destruction, and repair, and left them with key questions: Can we understand these acts as a form of left-wing populism? Are they rooted in trauma? And can artful destruction productively draw attention to planetary crisis?
Conclusion
Dr. Heidi Hart’s lecture for the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 offered participants a rich and provocative framework for understanding contemporary climate activism’s engagement with art, populism, and trauma. By tracing the phenomenon of museum vandalism through multiple analytical lenses—political, cultural, and affective—she challenged easy dismissals of such acts as mere nihilism or spectacle. Instead, she invited participants to interpret these performative protests as complex interventions that reflect an urgent critique of cultural elitism, a contest over the meaning of “rights” and “freedom,” and a passionate response to collective eco-anxiety.
Throughout her talk, Dr. Hart emphasized the importance of nuance and ambiguity. She invoked Bruno Latour’s concept of “iconoclash” to describe how these interventions simultaneously destroy and provoke reflection, suggesting that climate activist vandalism compels society to reconsider what it treasures, preserves, or lets decay. Drawing on her own research on the ecology of destroyed instruments, she extended this theme to propose that destruction itself can become a creative act—reembedding human culture within natural cycles of decay and renewal.
In concluding, Dr. Hart highlighted the Icelandic film Woman at War as a hopeful model for thinking beyond binaries of destruction versus creativity, or human versus nature. She encouraged participants to explore how affective politics, populist passion, and artistic ambiguity might offer new modes of engaging with ecological crisis.
The fourth lecture of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 featured Professor Daniel Fiorino, a leading expert on environmental policy at American University. Professor Fiorino examined how right-wing populism—characterized by distrust of expertise, nationalism, and hostility to multilateralism—combined with entrenched fossil fuel interests to undermine climate mitigation efforts in the United States during the Trump administration. He highlighted the geographic and partisan divides that shape US climate politics and explained how Republican dominance in fossil fuel-dependent states reinforces skepticism toward climate action. Professor Fiorino’s lecture underscored the vulnerability of US climate policy to political polarization and partisan shifts, warning that right-wing populism poses an enduring challenge not only to American climate governance but to global efforts to address the climate crisis.
Reported by ECPS Staff
The fourth lecture of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025, held online under the theme “Populism and Climate Change: Understanding What Is at Stake and Crafting Policy Suggestions for Stakeholders” (July 7–11, 2025), featured Professor Daniel Fiorino,one of the United States’ most respected scholars on environmental and energy policy. His lecture, titled “Ideology Meets Interest Group Politics: The Trump Administration and Climate Mitigation,” explored how right-wing populism and entrenched fossil fuel interests intersect to shape and undermine climate policy in the United States—a subject deeply relevant not only for US politics but for global climate governance more broadly.
Professor Fiorino is currently based at American University’s School of Public Affairs in Washington, DC, where he serves as the founding director of the Center for Environmental Policy. Prior to his academic appointment in 2009, he had a distinguished career at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), where he worked in policy development and environmental governance. Professor Fiorino’s work is both theoretically rigorous and policy-relevant, addressing some of the most pressing governance challenges posed by the climate crisis.
His published books include Can Democracy Handle Climate Change? (Polity Press, 2018), which examines the compatibility of democratic systems with effective climate action; A Good Life on a Finite Earth: The Political Economy of Green Growth (Oxford, 2018), which explores pathways toward sustainable prosperity; and The Clean Energy Transition: Policies and Procedures for a Zero-Carbon World (Polity, 2022). Professor Fiorino is also currently writing a book on the evolution of the EPA, further cementing his authority on American environmental policy.
In this lecture, Professor Fiorino provided participants with a critical framework for understanding how the Trump administration became emblematic of the global rise of right-wing populism and its impact on climate policy. He contextualized his analysis by drawing attention to the defining characteristics of right-wing populism—namely, distrust of scientific expertise, skepticism of multilateralism, and nationalist economic priorities—and how these traits directly contradict the requirements for effective climate mitigation, which depends on science, international cooperation, and long-term policy consistency.
Through this lens, Professor Fiorino examined how the Republican Party’s longstanding relationship with the fossil fuel industry became fully aligned with right-wing populist ideology during the Trump years. His lecture traced not only the Trump administration’s concrete policy reversals—such as rolling back EPA regulations and undermining international climate agreements—but also the broader cultural and institutional dynamics that entrench resistance to climate action in the US.
Professor Fiorino’s contribution offered participants a nuanced and empirically grounded insight into one of the most acute cases of populism’s challenge to climate governance today, setting the stage for a wider discussion on how democratic societies can respond to these intersecting threats.
Trust in Government and Political Polarization
Participants in the Hands Off March in Silver City, New Mexico, on April 5, 2025. On this day, men, women, and children gathered at over 1,000 locations across the United States to protest the Trump administration. Photo: Arienne Davey.
In his lecture, Professor Fiorino offered an incisive introduction to the political landscape surrounding climate change in the United States, situating it within broader international patterns. Professor Fiorino framed his presentation with a candid declaration of his own critical stance toward Donald Trump, whose administration he described as emblematic of right-wing populist dynamics globally.
Professor Fiorino began by outlining the structure of his talk, which sought to explain how ideology and interest group politics intersect in the US context, particularly around climate mitigation policy. He distinguished between left-wing populism—which tends to emphasize protection of vulnerable groups and acknowledges climate threats—and right-wing populism, which he characterized as deeply skeptical of climate science and resistant to mitigation policies.
A core theme of Professor Fiorino’s lecture was the alignment of the Republican Party with the interests of the fossil fuel industry. He argued that while this alignment has long defined Republican political economy, it is now reinforced by a populist ideology marked by distrust of expertise, nationalism, and hostility to multilateralism. This convergence of interests and ideology, Fiorino suggested, has resulted in a Republican Party that is uniquely resistant to climate action among conservative parties worldwide.
To illustrate this context, Professor Fiorino presented data on declining trust in government, highlighting that confidence in the US federal government fell from over 50% in the early 1970s—when foundational environmental laws were enacted—to approximately 20% today. This erosion of trust reflects a broader trend in Western democracies but is especially acute in the United States.
Professor Fiorino underscored that climate change has become a highly polarized political issue, with public concern split sharply along partisan lines. He noted that while general surveys might suggest widespread concern about climate change among Americans, this concern is overwhelmingly concentrated among Democrats and those who lean Democratic. By contrast, Republican voters and leaders exhibit skepticism toward climate policy and its scientific foundations. He illustrated this divide with historical data showing that partisan gaps on climate issues, which stood at approximately 36% around 2009–2010, had widened to over 50% in recent years.
Professor Fiorino traced this widening divide back to the 1990s and highlighted that, unlike their conservative counterparts in many other countries who acknowledge the necessity of climate action, Republican leaders in the US have cultivated or tolerated a strong climate denial movement. He emphasized that even when some Republican figures concede that human activity contributes to climate change, they often reject mitigation efforts as too costly or harmful to other national interests.
Professor Fiorino’s analysis portrayed a political environment in which climate and environmental issues have become deeply entangled in cultural and partisan identity. He argued that this entrenched polarization represents a significant barrier to effective climate policy, reflecting not just interest group influence but a broader ideological shift that has positioned climate skepticism as a core feature of right-wing populism in the United States.
Geography, Economy, and Political Alignment
Moreover, during his lecture, Professor Fiorino examined the intricate relationship between US geography, economic structure, and political alignment, especially as it pertains to climate politics. He traced a geographic realignment of American political parties over recent decades, emphasizing how the Northeast and West Coast have become reliably Democratic, while much of the South—including states that were part of the Confederacy—along with the rural Midwest and interior West, have become Republican strongholds. This realignment has contributed to the sharp partisan polarization around issues such as climate policy.
Professor Fiorino noted that this polarization has coincided with a growing identification of the Republican Party with specific economic sectors, particularly mining, energy, and farming. Drawing on the work of political scientist David Carroll, Professor Fiorino highlighted that by 2015, Republican representation of these sectors had markedly increased, deepening party-aligned divisions around resource development and climate mitigation. While elite polarization on climate issues began first among policymakers, Professor Fiorino explained that these divisions quickly diffused to the broader electorate, making attitudes toward climate action increasingly partisan.
A key insight from Professor Fiorino’s analysis concerned the connection between a state’s economic dependence on fossil fuels and its political attitudes toward climate mitigation. Though definitive causal studies remain limited, Professor Fiorino observed a clear pattern: states with economies heavily reliant on oil, gas, or coal—such as Texas, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Louisiana, Wyoming, and Alaska—have tended to lean strongly Republican and exhibit skepticism or hostility toward climate mitigation policies. Even among the top nine mining-intensive state economies identified in a Brookings Institution study, most are Republican-dominated and resistant to aggressive climate action.
Exceptions to this pattern, such as New Mexico and Colorado, underscore the complexity of regional politics. New Mexico’s large Native American and Latino populations, Professor Fiorino noted, contribute to its Democratic leanings despite its extractive economy. Overall, Professor Fiorino concluded that states’ economic dependence on fossil fuels is a powerful predictor of their political alignment and climate policy stance, reinforcing the geographic and partisan divides shaping US climate politics today.
Interest Groups and the Ideological Foundations of Right-Wing Populism
In his lecture, Professor Daniel Fiorino also examined how the intersection of interest group politics and right-wing populist ideology has shaped US climate policy, particularly during the Trump administration. Professor Fiorino began by noting that while scholars often overemphasize the role of campaign contributions in presidential politics, campaign finance remains a revealing indicator of partisan alliances. He pointed to data showing that during recent election cycles, approximately 92% of oil and gas industry contributions to US Senate campaigns and 85% to House campaigns went to Republican candidates, underscoring the fossil fuel sector’s deep alignment with the Republican Party.
Professor Fiorino then turned to the ideological features of right-wing populism and their relevance for climate politics. Drawing on his involvement in a special issue of Environmental Politics (2021–22), he identified three defining characteristics of right-wing populist movements: hostility toward elites and experts, skepticism of multilateral institutions, and a strong nationalist orientation emphasizing reliance on domestic resources. He explained that these attributes directly clash with the core requirements of effective climate action, which depend on scientific expertise and international cooperation to address a global challenge.
Professor Fiorino observed that the Trump administration embodied these populist traits, with President Trump declaring an “energy emergency” on his first day in office and promoting an aggressive policy of oil, gas, and coal development. Despite the irony that renewable resources such as wind and solar are also domestic, this nationalist framing ignored those alternatives in favor of traditional fossil fuels.
This ideological posture aligned seamlessly with the Republican Party’s long-standing alliance with the fossil fuel industry—a relationship further strengthened by geographic realities. Professor Fiorino explained that Republican political dominance is concentrated in states where fossil fuel extraction is economically significant, such as West Virginia and Wyoming (coal) and Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Alaska (oil and gas). These states have consistently resisted climate mitigation policies, reflecting both economic interests and the populist-nationalist narratives advanced by Republican leaders.
Finally, Professor Fiorino highlighted a key legal development shaping the regulatory framework for climate policy: the 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, which established that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide could be regulated under the Clean Air Act if found to endanger public health and welfare. Professor Fiorino warned that one priority of the Trump administration was reconsidering this “endangerment finding,” thereby undermining the scientific and legal basis for federal climate regulation—a testament to how deeply right-wing populist ideology and fossil fuel interests converged during this period.
The Trump Administration’s Climate Policy Record and Future Prospects
Professor Fiorino provided a critical overview of the Trump administration’s climate policy record, emphasizing its ideological and institutional efforts to roll back climate mitigation initiatives. Professor Fiorino began by highlighting the significance of the “endangerment finding”—a scientific determination under the US Clean Air Act that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare. While the first Trump administration did not formally challenge this finding, Professor Fiorino noted that there is growing discussion within conservative circles about overturning it, a development that would severely undermine the federal government’s authority to regulate carbon emissions.
Professor Fiorino also discussed the social cost of carbon, a metric developed through interagency collaboration to quantify the economic harm of each additional ton of carbon dioxide emitted. Under Trump, this metric was effectively discarded: the interagency working group responsible for calculating it was disbanded, and agencies were directed to ignore it in decision-making processes. This represented a major departure from the approach of prior administrations, which had used the social cost of carbon as a benchmark for evaluating the benefits of climate regulations.
Another key policy reversal under Trump targeted the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which Professor Fiorino described as being under unprecedented assault, even more so than during the Reagan era. The Trump administration reconstituted the EPA’s Science Advisory Board, weakening the role of scientific expertise in policy evaluation, and sought to dismantle many components of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), despite the fact that more than 80% of the IRA’s benefits flowed to congressional districts represented by Republicans.
Professor Fiorino framed these developments within a broader pattern of policy oscillation, where President Obama had advanced climate action to the extent possible, only to see these efforts reversed by Trump, with Biden again reinstating them—illustrating a deeper challenge for US climate policy: the lack of consistency and durability.
Looking ahead, Professor Fiorino offered a sober assessment of prospects. He emphasized that while Donald Trump may eventually exit the political stage, the populist, anti-elite, and anti-science sentiments he amplified remain deeply embedded among American voters. This division is exacerbated by the United States’ closely balanced partisan coalitions and severe polarization, making sustained climate action difficult.
Professor Fiorino also noted that state-level policies matter but reflect this national divide: progressive states like California and New York continue to advance mitigation efforts, while roughly half of US states remain disengaged or actively opposed. He concluded by identifying the rise of right-wing populism as one of the principal threats to global climate action, warning that climate disruption itself could fuel political instability, including immigration pressures and social unrest, further complicating the path toward coherent climate governance.
Conclusion
Professor Daniel Fiorino’s lecture at the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 offered participants an incisive and comprehensive analysis of the intersections between populist ideology, interest group politics, and climate policy in the United States. His examination of the Trump administration revealed how right-wing populism—characterized by distrust of expertise, nationalist rhetoric, and hostility toward multilateral governance—has compounded the Republican Party’s long-standing alignment with fossil fuel interests to obstruct meaningful climate action.
Professor Fiorino’s lecture illuminated the structural and ideological forces that have rendered climate change one of the most polarized issues in contemporary American politics. By contextualizing partisan divides within broader geographic and economic patterns—highlighting how fossil fuel-dependent states have become Republican strongholds skeptical of climate mitigation—he underscored that resistance to climate policy is not simply a matter of individual attitudes but is deeply embedded in economic structures and political identities.
A key takeaway from Professor Fiorino’s analysis is the vulnerability of US climate policy to abrupt reversals driven by partisan shifts. His account of the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle environmental regulations, challenge the scientific basis for climate action, and undermine institutions such as the EPA illustrated the fragility of policy gains in the face of ideological polarization and institutional instability. Even major legislative initiatives like the Inflation Reduction Act, Professor Fiorino warned, remain at risk due to the cyclical nature of US partisan politics.
Looking forward, Professor Fiorino’s concluding reflections pointed to enduring challenges: while Donald Trump himself may eventually leave the political stage, the populist sentiments he amplified—skepticism of expertise, resentment of elites, and climate denial—remain entrenched among significant segments of the US electorate. This dynamic, coupled with a deeply divided federal landscape and uneven state-level engagement, poses significant obstacles to sustained and effective climate mitigation efforts.
In closing, Professor Fiorino emphasized that the rise of right-wing populism constitutes not only a domestic American challenge but also a global threat to coherent climate governance. His lecture provided participants with a sobering but necessary understanding of these intersecting forces, encouraging critical reflection on how democratic societies might navigate these headwinds to craft resilient and effective climate policy.
Professor Sandra Ricart delivered a timely and insightful lecture on the intersection of climate change, agriculture, and populism in Europe. She explored how structural and demographic challenges, including a declining farming population and economic precarity, have fueled widespread farmer protests across the continent. Prof. Ricart emphasized how these grievances, while rooted in genuine hardship, have increasingly been exploited by far-right populist movements eager to position themselves as defenders of rural interests against European institutions. Her analysis highlighted the pressures created by climate change, policy reforms, and global market dynamics, and she called for more inclusive, responsive, and sustainable agricultural policies. Prof. Ricart’s lecture provided participants with a critical understanding of rural Europe’s evolving political and environmental landscape.
The session was moderated by Dr. Vlad Surdea-Hernea, postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Forest, Environmental and Natural Resource Policy at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna. Dr. Surdea-Hernea’s research on the intersection of populism, climate, and democracy provided a fitting context for introducing Professor Ricart’s work.
Prof. Sandra Ricart is a Professor at the Environmental Intelligence for Global Change Lab within the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. A geographer by training, she holds a PhD in Geography – Experimental Sciences and Sustainability from the University of Girona (2014) and has held research positions in Spain, Italy, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United States. Her research focuses on climate change narratives, farmers’ perceptions, adaptive capacity, and participatory environmental governance. She is also Assistant Editor for the International Journal of Water Resources Development and PLOS One, and serves as an expert evaluator for the European Commission.
At the outset of her lecture, Prof. Ricart emphasized that her presentation was grounded in a collective, collaborative research tradition—a reflection of shared knowledge developed through interdisciplinary and cross-national scholarly networks. Acknowledging the diversity of her audience’s expertise, she framed her lecture as both a conceptual overview and an empirical analysis, blending theory with practical illustrations drawn from recent European developments.
Her talk was organized around several key themes: an overview of the structural and demographic features of European agriculture, public and farmer perceptions of climate change and agricultural policy, the socioeconomic challenges farmers face, and the role of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) as Europe’s primary agricultural governance framework. She explained how these structural factors intersect with climate change impacts, shaping both agricultural livelihoods and political discourses.
A central theme of Prof. Ricart’s lecture was how recent farmer protests across Europe reflect not only deep-seated socioeconomic grievances but also how these grievances have been increasingly co-opted by far-right populist movements. She raised the critical question of whether this emerging nexus between agricultural discontent and populism represents a transient political episode or the early stages of a deeper realignment in European rural politics.
Throughout the session, Prof. Ricart’s analysis provided participants with a nuanced, multi-scalar understanding of how climate change, policy pressures, and populist narratives are converging on European farming communities, offering a timely foundation for further reflection and debate on rural Europe’s evolving political landscape.
Structural and Demographic Features of European Agriculture
In this section of her lecture, Prof. Sandra Ricart provided a thorough examination of the structural and demographic characteristics of European agriculture, establishing a foundation for understanding the current crisis in the farming sector and its relationship with populist politics. She began by presenting an overarching picture of European agriculture today, emphasizing that while European farms continue to supply the essential public good of food production, their demographic base is in decline. One of the key concerns, Prof. Ricart explained, is the significant reduction in the number of young people entering the farming profession—a worrying trend that raises doubts about the future viability of agriculture across the continent.
This demographic challenge is not only contributing to the fragility of the sector but has also become a recurring theme in farmer protests and critiques of policy frameworks like the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Prof. Ricart highlighted that farming is no longer as attractive as other sectors to younger generations, who are drawn instead to professions perceived as more innovative or economically viable. The absence of generational renewal within farming communities threatens to exacerbate the structural weaknesses of European agriculture, an issue that populist movements have readily exploited.
Turning to structural characteristics, Prof. Ricart observed a striking duality in European agriculture: on the one hand, very small farms, and on the other, large-scale agribusinesses. This dual structure shapes debates around policy and representation. Small farmers, who often feel excluded from decision-making processes and inadequately represented in policy outcomes, have become increasingly vocal in their grievances—grievances that, as Dr. Ricart noted, form fertile ground for far-right political movements seeking to mobilize rural discontent.
Land ownership patterns further complicate this picture. Prof. Ricart emphasized that ownership versus tenancy is a critical determinant of farmers’ capacity to plan for the future and adapt to challenges such as climate change. Farmers who own their land generally have more autonomy to invest in sustainable practices or infrastructure, while tenant farmers must navigate complex relationships with landlords, making long-term planning and adaptation more difficult. Access to land, and the sense of security it brings, is thus a central theme in both farmer protests and wider rural political discourse.
Geographically, Prof. Ricart provided a comparative overview of farming’s importance across European countries, noting that countries such as France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Poland dominate agricultural production. Unsurprisingly, it is in these countries that farmers’ protests have been most intense and visible. However, she also noted that smaller agricultural producers such as Belgium have played outsized roles in protest dynamics, in part because of their political significance as hosts of EU institutions—a symbolically powerful site for expressing Europe-wide grievances.
Prof. Ricart drew attention to the uneven distribution of farming activity in both crop production and livestock rearing, noting that this structural diversity partly explains national differences in protest intensity and focus. For instance, she pointed out that livestock farming has been particularly vulnerable to recent regulatory pressures concerning animal welfare, further fueling discontent in sectors already under demographic and economic strain.
Another central theme in Prof. Ricart’s analysis was the economic precariousness of the farming sector. While agricultural productivity in some areas remains high, farm incomes across the EU have stagnated or declined over the past 15 years, despite increasing demands on farmers to comply with new environmental, health, and quality standards. This trend, she argued, is pushing many farmers toward poverty and fueling the perception that the sector is in structural crisis. Dr. Ricart noted that this growing economic pressure is also a focal point for populist messaging, with far-right parties seeking to position themselves as champions of “forgotten” rural communities whose economic contributions are undervalued and whose livelihoods are threatened.
Prof. Ricart then turned to a discussion of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) itself, providing participants with a succinct history of this keystone of European agricultural governance. The CAP, she noted, is over sixty years old and reflects an evolving set of priorities, including ensuring fair incomes for farmers, guaranteeing food quality and security, and increasingly, delivering environmental public goods such as biodiversity protection and landscape conservation. Yet, despite this broadening policy remit, she emphasized that much of the farming community continues to view the CAP as insufficiently responsive to their day-to-day struggles and future uncertainties.
She detailed how the CAP operates through three principal instruments: direct payments to farmers, market regulation mechanisms to stabilize prices and ensure quality standards, and rural development measures aimed at supporting sustainable and resilient agricultural practices. While these instruments theoretically provide a safety net for farmers and a policy framework to navigate market volatility and environmental pressures, Prof. Ricart noted that many farmers feel excluded from the design of these instruments and find them too bureaucratic or insufficiently tailored to their realities.
Finally, Prof. Ricart encouraged participants to reflect on the broader societal role of agriculture. Beyond producing food, she argued, farmers maintain landscapes, provide ecosystem services, and sustain rural ways of life that are part of Europe’s cultural heritage. Yet these broader contributions, while rhetorically valued, are not always matched by policy support or financial compensation.
In sum, this section of Prof. Ricart’s lecture painted a complex portrait of European agriculture as a sector at once economically vital, socially significant, and deeply troubled. Demographic decline, structural dualities, insecure land tenure, uneven income trends, and rising regulatory demands all combine to create a sense of existential threat among farmers—a sentiment that far-right and populist movements have been quick to harness. Prof. Ricart’s analysis offered participants a critical foundation for understanding how these material and structural conditions form the backdrop against which agricultural grievances are expressed and politicized in contemporary Europe.
Climate Change Impacts and Farmer Perceptions
After discussing the demographic and structural features of the agricultural sector, Prof. Ricart shifted focus to how climate-related concerns, perceptions of fairness, and economic pressures are shaping farmer reactions across Europe—culminating in recent protests and increasing alignment with far-right narratives.
Prof. Ricart began by highlighting key findings from the latest Eurobarometer survey, which collects European citizens’ perceptions of agriculture and the CAP. She emphasized that across Europe, there is broad recognition among the public that farmers play a vital role in providing a common good: safe, reliable, and sustainable food production. Yet this recognition comes with expectations. Citizens increasingly call for farming that is not just productive but also healthy, safe, and environmentally sustainable. Prof. Ricart explained how this demand for responsibility intersects with the pressures farmers face today. While the farming sector remains foundational for European societies, farmers increasingly feel they are being asked to meet high standards without receiving sufficient support or understanding from policymakers and consumers.
This dynamic, Prof. Ricart noted, feeds directly into the tensions underlying farmer protests and far-right mobilization. The narrative of an “us versus them” divide—between farmers and urban consumers, between national farming sectors and EU-level regulators—has become central to both farmer grievances and far-right political messaging. Farmers are not only demanding fairer prices or simpler regulations; they are questioning the fairness of a system that expects sustainability but struggles to compensate the costs associated with these demands.
One critical source of tension has been the perceived destabilization of agricultural markets due to imports from outside the European Union. Prof. Ricart observed that many European farmers feel exposed to unfair competition from imports that may not meet the EU’s rigorous environmental, safety, or labor standards. Coupled with broader concerns over food security and living standards, these anxieties have animated recent protests and provided fertile ground for far-right groups eager to position themselves as defenders of national farming communities.
Prof. Ricart then introduced the European Green Deal (EGD) as a policy framework that, while ambitious, has intensified these debates. The Green Deal, launched in 2020, aims to make Europe climate-neutral by 2050, setting interim targets for 2030. Its requirements have direct implications for agriculture, from reducing pesticide and fertilizer use to expanding organic farming and ensuring sustainability throughout supply chains. Prof. Ricart acknowledged the policy’s laudable goals but underscored the dilemma it creates for farmers: many feel that the timeframes imposed are too short, the costs too high, and the support mechanisms insufficient.
For example, Prof. Ricart pointed out that transitioning to organic farming entails fundamental changes to farm structures and practices, requiring new equipment, training, and often a reorientation of entire business models. Likewise, reducing pesticide and fertilizer use demands investment in new technologies or methods, which smaller farms especially may struggle to afford. These requirements arrive amid other pressures such as fluctuating commodity prices, demographic decline within the farming population, and challenges related to land tenure, which collectively threaten the long-term viability of small and medium-scale farms.
The core of Prof. Ricart’s analysis centered on how climate change itself magnifies these difficulties. Drawing on survey data from research directly engaging with farmers, she illustrated how climate impacts—such as rising temperatures, more frequent and severe droughts, heatwaves, and increasingly erratic rainfall—are already deeply felt by farmers across Europe. These environmental stresses compound the pressures from policy reforms, making adaptation both urgent and costly.
Notably, farmers’ perceptions of climate change reflect a mix of acknowledgment and anxiety. Most farmers accept that climate change is happening and that it is affecting their livelihoods. However, their capacity to respond is constrained by the intersection of environmental change with market conditions, regulatory burdens, and infrastructural limitations. This complexity explains why climate-related grievances have become entangled with broader frustrations about agricultural policy and governance.
In concluding this section, Prof. Ricart emphasized that climate change acts as an overarching factor, reshaping every challenge farmers face and intensifying old grievances while generating new ones. While environmental sustainability is an essential goal, the pathways toward that goal must recognize the diversity and vulnerability of agricultural systems across Europe. For many farmers, the question is not whether to pursue sustainability but how to do so while maintaining livelihoods and ensuring intergenerational continuity in farming communities.
Prof. Ricart made clear that understanding farmer protests and far-right populist responses requires attention to this nexus of environmental pressures, policy demands, and lived economic realities. Climate change is not an abstract concern for European farmers; it is a daily challenge that intersects with perceptions of fairness, justice, and recognition—making it a central terrain on which political struggles over the future of European agriculture will continue to unfold.
Examining the Widespread Farmers’ Protests
View of the A15 motorway near Paris, where the demonstration of farmers in tractors, are blocked by the police on January 29, 2024. Photo: Franck Legros.
Prof. Ricart also examined how the farmer protests that erupted across Europe in late 2023 and early 2024 reflected a deeper and widespread crisis in agricultural policy and governance. These protests, Prof. Ricart noted, were not isolated or confined to any single country or grievance; rather, they represented a growing pan-European tendency where farmers across national contexts expressed similar frustrations and demands. The protests became an important transnational phenomenon, with farmers mobilizing around shared grievances and converging symbolically in Belgium, home to European Union institutions, to amplify their voices at the continental level.
Prof. Ricart highlighted three core drivers motivating the protests: falling food prices, increasingly stringent environmental regulations, and a growing perception that European agricultural policy was failing to address national specificities. Low food prices, often a result of global market pressures and import competition, squeezed farm incomes, exacerbating rural economic insecurity. Simultaneously, farmers faced new and challenging environmental regulations associated with the EGD and climate action objectives. These regulations demanded significant changes in production methods, often imposing costs that smaller farmers in particular struggled to meet.
The third factor, Prof. Ricart emphasized, was a nationalist framing of grievances that far-right populist movements readily exploited. By portraying European Union policy as a detached elite imposition and emphasizing the loss of national sovereignty, populist actors framed the discontent in binary terms: a struggle between “us,” the farmers and citizens, and “them,” the distant European policymakers and foreign competitors. The far right’s message was that only national governments—not European-level institutions—could defend farmers’ interests, a rhetoric that found resonance among frustrated agricultural communities.
Prof. Ricart also pointed to widespread farmer criticism of the CAP, which has been revised repeatedly since its inception in 1962. Many protesters argued that successive CAP reforms had failed to resolve longstanding issues while introducing additional bureaucratic burdens. Farmers felt caught between contradictory pressures: on one hand, to modernize and adapt to environmental goals; on the other, to survive in a competitive market that undermined their income and livelihoods.
In countries like France, where agriculture has historically been a politically privileged sector, Prof. Ricart noted that many farmers nevertheless felt marginalized at the European level. This perceived disconnect between national pride in agriculture and EU-wide agricultural governance became a further source of frustration and mobilization. The protests, Prof. Ricart concluded, reflected not just sectoral discontent but broader tensions between rural communities and European integration, exacerbated by the politics of populism.
Farmers’ Protests and the Rise of Far-Right Populist Actors Across Europe
Tractors with posters of farmers protesting against the government’s measures at the Ludwig Street in Munich, Germany on January 8, 2024. Photo: Shutterstock.
In her lecture, Prof. Ricart also explored how recent farmers’ protests across Europe intersect with the rise of far-right populist actors, revealing complex political dynamics. Prof. Ricart underscored that while farmers’ grievances are rooted in real economic, environmental, and policy challenges, the far right has increasingly sought to instrumentalize these frustrations to expand its influence.
She began by highlighting how the farmers’ protests that erupted across the continent in late 2023 and early 2024 were not isolated events, but part of a transnational pattern. Farmers in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and other countries took to the streets, expressing concerns over falling food prices, rising costs, burdensome environmental regulations, and trade competition. While these protests expressed legitimate anxieties about livelihoods and rural futures, Prof. Ricart pointed out that they have become fertile ground for far-right populist narratives.
One key theme Prof. Ricart identified was the way far-right actors strategically differentiated between national and supranational representations of farmers. In France, for instance, far-right politicians emphasized that while the French state historically recognized and honored its farmers, European-level governance failed to acknowledge their unique role and plight. This narrative enabled far-right movements to portray themselves as defenders of national agricultural traditions against what they framed as an out-of-touch European elite.
Prof. Ricart emphasized that this trend was not confined to France. In Germany, while farmers’ unions and associations initially led protests with non-partisan messages, far-right parties quickly appropriated these discourses, tailoring them to appeal to rural voters. These actors often moved faster than traditional political parties, repackaging farmers’ demands into simplified, emotive slogans, aimed at mobilizing disaffected segments of the rural population.
In Italy, Prof. Ricart observed similar patterns, citing protest slogans such as “We are farmers, not slaves” as emblematic of the populist rhetoric. Such messages resonated with farmers’ sense of marginalization, but also opened the door for far-right narratives that positioned themselves as authentic champions of “the people” against technocratic elites. Across these contexts, Prof. Ricart noted how the far right’s involvement blurred the boundaries between farmers’ legitimate protests and politicized mobilizations aimed at electoral gain.
A notable point in Prof. Ricart’s analysis was how far-right actors framed these protests as the “beginning” of a broader rural revolt. Farmers’ actions were reinterpreted as symbolic of a wider societal struggle, fueling a narrative of grievance that transcended agricultural policy and encompassed broader themes of national sovereignty, identity, and distrust of transnational governance structures. Prof. Ricart emphasized that this framing intensified the division between “us” (the nation’s people) and “them” (European bureaucrats and elites), reinforcing nationalist populist logics.
Prof. Ricart also addressed how environmental and climate change policies—particularly those associated with the EGD—became a focal point for far-right mobilization. She explained that climate-related regulations, such as pesticide and fertilizer restrictions or the promotion of organic farming, were recast by populist actors as evidence of elite detachment from the material realities of rural life. In this context, far-right rhetoric constructed a powerful image of embattled farmers struggling to comply with costly, unrealistic demands imposed from Brussels, appealing to a broad coalition of discontented rural and peri-urban voters.
Further, Prof. Ricart noted that the far right’s engagement with farmers’ protests coincided with the European Parliament elections, a crucial opportunity for these actors to expand their electoral base. By framing themselves as responsive to farmers’ frustrations—while traditional parties appeared slow or ambivalent—the far right strengthened its foothold in rural regions. In countries such as France, Italy, and parts of Eastern Europe, this alignment translated into electoral gains and a consolidation of populist influence over rural political discourse.
Toward the conclusion of this section, Prof. Ricart reflected on the broader implications of this intersection between protest and populism. She warned that while far-right parties appropriated farmers’ grievances to gain visibility and votes, their actual policy platforms offered few substantive solutions to address the underlying economic and environmental challenges facing agriculture. In contrast, she emphasized that farmers themselves were primarily concerned with ensuring the sustainability of their livelihoods and agricultural traditions, rather than endorsing a particular ideological agenda.
Ultimately, Prof. Ricart argued that this dynamic illustrates how populist politics can exploit genuine socio-economic discontent while offering simplistic narratives that obscure the structural complexities of agricultural transformation in an era of climate crisis and globalized markets. As farmers continue to grapple with these pressures, the interplay between their protests and far-right populist strategies will remain a critical area for further analysis and political reflection.
Conclusion
Prof. Sandra Ricart offered participants of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025,a nuanced analysis of the evolving relationship between climate change, agriculture, and populist politics in Europe. Her presentation revealed that European farming communities today face a convergence of pressures: demographic decline, economic precarity, regulatory demands, and intensifying climate-related challenges. These stresses have not only shaped farmer perceptions and protests but have also provided fertile ground for far-right populist actors who seek to frame rural discontent in nationalist and anti-European terms.
Prof. Ricart emphasized that while farmers’ grievances are real and rooted in structural inequalities and policy shortcomings, the appropriation of these grievances by far-right movements raises important questions about the politicization of rural discontent. She underscored that populist narratives tend to simplify complex agricultural challenges, presenting an “us versus them” logic that pits national farmers and citizens against distant European elites and external competitors, while offering few substantive solutions for the sector’s long-term sustainability.
At the same time, Prof. Ricart acknowledged the legitimacy of farmers’ frustrations, particularly their concerns over falling incomes, generational decline, and a perceived disconnect between European policy frameworks and the lived realities of rural communities. Her analysis called for a more inclusive and responsive agricultural policy that better reflects farmers’ needs, supports adaptation to climate change, and ensures economic viability while promoting environmental sustainability.
Ultimately, Prof. Ricart concluded that the future of European agriculture will depend on addressing these multifaceted challenges without allowing populist actors to monopolize the narrative. Her lecture encouraged participants to think critically about how governance frameworks, political discourse, and climate adaptation strategies must evolve in tandem to protect both Europe’s rural communities and the democratic structures that underpin them.
In his lecture at the ECPS Summer School 2025, Professor John M. Meyer offered a compelling exploration of the relationship between populism and climate politics. He critiqued authoritarian populism as a threat to equitable climate action while also questioning mainstream climate governance’s elitist, technocratic tendencies. Rather than viewing populism solely as an obstacle, Professor Meyer argued that climate justice movements themselves embody a form of inclusive, democratic populism—centered on equity, participation, and solidarity. Drawing on examples from grassroots activism and Naomi Klein’s concept of “eco-populism,” Professor Meyer proposed that climate action must address material injustices and engage people where they are. His lecture encouraged participants to rethink populism as a political form that, when inclusive and justice-oriented, can help build legitimate, durable, and democratic climate solutions.
Reported by ECPS Staff
Climate change intersects with numerous issues, transforming it into more than just an environmental challenge; it has developed into a complex and multifaceted political issue with socio-economic and cultural dimensions. This intersection makes it an appealing topic for populist politicians to exploit in polarizing societies. With the global rise of populist politics, climate change has increasingly become part of populist discourse—whether as a scapegoat for economic grievances, a symbol of globalist overreach, or an arena for nationalist contestation.
Populist politics present additional barriers to equitable climate solutions, often framing global climate initiatives as elitist or detrimental to local autonomy. As a result, populism in recent years has profoundly impacted climate policy worldwide, encompassing a wide spectrum—from the climate skepticism and deregulation of leaders like Donald Trump to the often ambiguous and contradictory stances of left-wing populist movements.
We are convinced that this pressing issue not only requires an in-depth understanding but also demands our combined effort to seek innovative and just solutions. Against this backdrop, the ECPS Academy Summer School on “Populism and Climate Change: Understanding What Is at Stake and Crafting Policy Suggestions for Stakeholders,” held online from 7 to 11 July 2025, aims to critically examine these themes. The program sought to foster a deeper understanding of the tension between economic, political, and environmental interests in populist ideologies, with a particular emphasis on the key conclusions from the Baku Conference on climate justice and populism (2024), which foregrounded the impact of authoritarian and populist politics in shaping global climate governance.
In this context, the second lecture of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025, titled “Climate Justice and Populism,”represented a major conceptual pivot. It was masterfully moderated by Dr. Manuela Caiani, Associate Professor of Political Science at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Italy, whose own scholarship on right- and left-wing populism, new authoritarianism in Europe, and the politics of emotions provided an ideal framing. Dr. Caiani’s introduction emphasized how populism, climate justice, and ecological transition intersect in her ongoing research projects. She underscored that these issues occupy overlapping analytical terrains and encouraged participants to re-examine prevailing assumptions about the relationship between populism and environmental politics.
The lecture was delivered by Dr. John M. Meyer, Professor in the Departments of Politics and Environmental Studies at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. Professor Meyer’s work as a political theorist seeks to illuminate how social and political values and institutions shape—and are shaped by—our relationship to the environment. His scholarship includes influential contributions such as Engaging the Everyday: Environmental Social Criticism and the Resonance Dilemma (MIT Press, 2015) and The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory (Oxford University Press, 2016), both regarded as foundational texts in environmental political theory.
Between 2020 and 2024, Professor Meyer served as editor-in-chief of the prestigious journal Environmental Politics, where he promoted interdisciplinary dialogue on environmental governance, justice, and democracy. In this lecture, Professor Meyer foregrounded theoretical and normative questions over empirical case studies, inviting participants to rethink fundamental assumptions about populism, climate change narratives, and policy frameworks. His intervention challenged the view that populism is inherently an obstacle to climate action, instead offering a nuanced analysis of how climate justice movements themselves may embody a form of progressive, democratic populism.
This lecture not only set an intellectual benchmark for the ECPS Summer School but also provided a critical lens through which to engage with the central themes of populism and climate governance for the remainder of the program.
Structure of the Lecture
Professor Meyer organized his presentation into three interrelated thematic strands:
Authoritarian Populism as a Threat to Climate Justice
Mainstream Climate Action as Anti‑Populist
Climate Justice as a Manifestation of Inclusive Populism
These three themes, Professor Meyer argued, should be understood sequentially and relationally, with each offering a reframing of the politics of climate change in contemporary democracies.
Authoritarian Populism as a Threat
In the opening analytical section of his lecture, Professor Meyer turned his attention to what he termed authoritarian populism as a threat to climate policy and action. Speaking from a conceptual standpoint, Professor Meyer carefully clarified that while he sought to illuminate the ways in which authoritarian populism undermines climate governance, he did not intend to suggest that populism itself is the core problem. Rather, he argued, authoritarian populism should be understood as a significant manifestation of a broader political challenge to climate justice, while populism as a mode of politics might also contain emancipatory potential.
Professor Meyer outlined key characteristics of this authoritarian populist threat, situating it primarily among right-wing and, in some cases, explicitly fascistic parties and leaders. These actors, he observed, routinely frame climate policy as an elite-driven and globalist project, leveraging this framing to claim that they are defending “the people” against perceived external impositions. Yet, Professor Meyer noted that the conception of “the people” advanced by authoritarian populists is deeply homogenizing—constructed in a way that deliberately excludes as many as it purports to represent, marginalizing pluralism and dissent.
An important distinction Professor Meyer drew was between authoritarian populists’ selective embrace of environmental concerns: many such actors profess to defend local or national environments—protecting land, waterways, or rural communities within their conception of the “homeland”—while simultaneously attacking global climate change mitigation efforts. This selective environmentalism serves to bolster nationalist narratives while rejecting multilateral climate agreements and policies.
Professor Meyer further emphasized that authoritarian populist parties and movements often deny or express skepticism about the very existence, causes, or urgency of climate change. This skepticism politicizes climate change itself, framing it as a contested, ideologically loaded topic rather than a shared global challenge grounded in scientific consensus.
While acknowledging these dangers, Professor Meyer stressed that authoritarian populism’s climate denialism and obstructionism should be understood in context—not as an indictment of all populist politics, but as one specific configuration that climate justice advocates must confront. This framing set the stage for his subsequent analysis of mainstream climate policy and the potential for democratic populist alternatives.
Mainstream Climate Action as Anti‑Populist
In this significant portion of his lecture, Professor Meyer offered a penetrating critique of what he characterized as the mainstream climate action framework, which he argued functions as a form of anti-populism. Beginning with an overview of the institutional landscape—anchored by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its annual Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings— Professor Meyer drew attention to the global policy architecture and its regional manifestations, notably the European Green Deal and the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
Professor Meyer suggested that this mainstream approach, despite institutional diversity, shares a common political imaginary steeped in technocratic elitism. It is dominated by establishment actors—mainstream parties, legacy media, global NGOs—who are routinely cast as “elites” in populist discourse. He suggested that this framework is shaped by a nostalgic vision of politics, one that emphasizes civility, pluralism, respect for scientific expertise, and globalist ethics, typified by UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ oft-cited appeal that “we are all in this together.” While these values have guided international climate discourse, Professor Meyer argued that they also drive a political culture that instinctively rejects populist critiques as dangerous politicization.
This elitist imaginary, Professor Meyer contended, is reflected in the dominant policy instruments. For over three decades, mainstream climate policy has revolved around carbon pricing mechanisms, including cap-and-trade schemes and carbon taxes. More recently, policies such as the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the European Green Deal have moved toward industrial policy approaches centered on state incentives and partnerships with private industries to foster green innovation. Yet Professor Meyer highlighted a key limitation: the political invisibility of these policies. The IRA, for instance, delivered substantial subsidies and jobs to economically disadvantaged, Republican-leaning regions in the US, yet beneficiaries were largely unaware of the policy’s role due to its technocratic and opaque design. This invisibility, Professor Meyer suggested, made these reforms politically vulnerable to rollback efforts such as Donald Trump’s successful campaign to dismantle key elements of the IRA.
Turning to the discursive landscape, Professor Meyer cited recent commentary—including from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change—which emphasized that mainstream actors must reclaim climate debate from “campaigners” and instead promote pragmatic, outcome-driven solutions. Tony Blair’s framing, Professor Meyer noted, epitomizes an explicit anti-populist stance, doubling down on elite-driven governance while treating public skepticism and populist critique as obstacles to be neutralized rather than symptoms to be understood. Similarly, scholars like Eduardo Campanella and Robert Lawrence, while encouraging better climate storytelling, advocated narratives rooted in entrepreneurial genius and open trade—further exemplifying the technocratic ethos of the mainstream.
Professor Meyer argued that this anti-populist orientation constitutes a political trap. Rather than defusing populist critique, it reinforces the binary at the heart of populist discourse: a moral division between elites and “the people.” By implicitly casting technocratic expertise as virtuous and popular sentiment as irrational, mainstream climate governance aligns itself with elite politics and alienates the very publics whose support it requires. Citing Jonathan White’s distinction between a politics of necessity and a politics of volition, Professor Meyer noted that mainstream discourse tends to present climate action as an imperative dictated by science—a domain where policy options are viewed as objectively correct and public deliberation as an impediment.
However, this technocratic framing, Professor Meyer observed, fails on two critical fronts. First, it overlooks the deep injustices inherent in both the causes and impacts of climate change. Marginalized and impoverished communities—whether in the Global South or within advanced economies—bear the brunt of climate harms despite having contributed the least to global emissions. Second, mainstream climate policy often exacerbates these injustices, imposing disproportionate burdens on precisely those least equipped to bear them while offering inadequate mechanisms for redress or participation.
Professor Meyer further noted that this anti-populist imaginary tends to misconstrue populism itself as inherently exclusionary, skeptical of climate science, and therefore an existential threat to climate action. While authoritarian populists often engage in climate denialism and evidence skepticism—ranging from rejection of warming trends to downplaying human causation and impacts— Professor Meyer emphasized that skepticism can take other forms as well. Drawing on von Rensburg’s typology, he distinguished between evidence skepticism and process skepticism. Notably, while many climate justice movements accept the scientific consensus on climate change, they remain deeply critical of the processes by which climate knowledge is produced, who gets included or excluded in decision-making, and the equity of proposed policy responses.
Professor Meyer observed that some right-wing populist movements in Europe and North America have increasingly adopted critiques of climate policy process and response—not to advance climate justice but as part of their broader assault on liberal governance. This convergence of critique from vastly different ideological poles underscores the complexity of the political terrain.
Ultimately, Professor Meyer’s analysis warned that mainstream climate policy’s anti-populist reflex may undermine its own legitimacy by failing to engage with these deeper political, social, and ethical concerns. Instead of depoliticizing climate action, Professor Meyer suggested that a more inclusive, participatory approach attentive to justice and popular grievances is essential for achieving both legitimacy and effectiveness in climate governance.
Climate Justice as Inclusive Populism
In the final—and most innovative—section of his lecture, Professor Meyer turned his attention to a theme that he framed as pivotal to rethinking climate politics: climate justice as a manifestation of populism. This focus represented both a conceptual intervention and an effort to challenge dominant narratives that either marginalize or misunderstand climate justice movements. Professor Meyer argued that climate justice movements represent an alternative, democratic populism. If populism is understood simply as a political form that pits “the people” against “the elites,” then climate justice activists, indigenous movements, and youth-led campaigns embody a progressive populism rooted in solidarity, justice, and inclusivity.
Professor Meyer began by clarifying a key distinction: climate justice movements should not be conflated with climate policy writ large, nor should they be treated as an add-on or afterthought to conventional policy mechanisms. He warned that policymakers often make the mistake of assuming that technocratic tools—such as carbon taxes or cap-and-trade systems—can be implemented first, and then some portion of the resulting revenues can be redistributed to marginalized communities to compensate for inequitable impacts. This “compensatory” logic, Professor Meyer emphasized, misreads what climate justice movements themselves seek to achieve. Rather than viewing justice as a supplemental objective, climate justice movements embed questions of equity, inclusion, and systemic critique at the very core of their agenda.
Professor Meyer identified five defining features of climate justice movements that, in his view, mark them as distinctively populist. First was their inclusive conception of “the people.” Unlike the exclusionary and homogenizing populist rhetoric characteristic of many authoritarian right-wing movements, climate justice movements articulate a broad, pluralistic vision of “the people.” This vision centers on those most directly affected by environmental harms: marginalized communities in both the Global South and Global North, Indigenous populations, youth activists, and other groups on the frontline of ecological disruption. Drawing on examples such as the Climate Justice Now coalition in Brazil—organizing a “People’s Summit” ahead of COP30—Professor Meyer illustrated how this inclusive populist imaginary juxtaposes “the people” against polluters, corporations, and political elites.
A second core feature is the rejection of “false solutions.” Professor Meyer noted that climate justice activists frequently deploy this language to critique policies that may appear progressive but fail to address root causes or distribute benefits equitably. He referenced prominent critiques from activist networks and figures like Greta Thunberg, whose characterization of empty climate promises as mere “blah blah blah” captured the impatience of youth-led movements with elite foot-dragging and performative commitments.
The third characteristic Professor Meyer discussed was a distinctive understanding of expertise. Climate justice movements elevate Indigenous, local, and community-based knowledge systems, particularly in the realm of climate adaptation. Professor Meyer stressed that this should not be misunderstood as a wholesale rejection of scientific knowledge but rather as a critique of how dominant climate science and policymaking processes have historically marginalized or ignored situated expertise. By foregrounding these alternative epistemologies, climate justice actors contest the monopoly of elites over what counts as legitimate knowledge and authority.
The fourth feature is a commitment to meeting people “where they are,” recognizing and engaging with their immediate material conditions and everyday struggles. Rather than demanding that communities subordinate their pressing concerns to abstract climate imperatives, climate justice movements insist that effective and just climate action must be grounded in, and responsive to, those lived realities.
Finally, Professor Meyer highlighted the movements’ investment in building cooperative and institutional structures that can sustain long-term commitments to justice and equity. This organizational orientation reflects an ambition to institutionalize solidarity and embed democratic accountability into the very fabric of climate governance.
Throughout this section of his lecture, Professor Meyer implicitly challenged prevailing academic frameworks that define populism narrowly as a phenomenon of electoral politics or demagoguery. Referencing scholars such as Nadia Urbinati, who tend to disregard social movements as “not unusual” and therefore outside the purview of populism studies, Professor Meyer argued that climate justice movements reveal a more complex, inclusive, and potentially emancipatory form of populist politics—one that foregrounds horizontal solidarity, material justice, and epistemic pluralism. In sum, Professor Meyer’s analysis offered a powerful reconceptualization of climate justice not as a peripheral adjunct to mainstream climate action but as an alternative paradigm rooted in participatory populism, critical of elite-driven processes, and attentive to social and environmental equity at every level.
‘Fascist Flip’ in Post‑Disaster Communities
In the final section of his lecture, Professor John Meyer turned to what he identified as a crucial focus of climate justice movements: engaging people where they are now and constructing durable, cooperative structures to sustain solidarity over time. To illustrate this principle, Professor Meyer invoked the recent work of Naomi Klein, highlighting her concept of eco-populism as an alternative political approach capable of countering the dynamics that foster exclusion and reactionary backlash.
Professor Meyer drew on Klein’s 2025 lecture titled “Fascism or Eco-Populism: Our Stark Choice,” in which she revisited the tragic aftermath of the 2018 Camp Fire—the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history. The fire had devastated the town of Paradise, destroying more than 18,000 structures and leaving over 30,000 people homeless. Many of these displaced residents sought refuge in nearby Chico, California—a city of approximately 100,000 people—which initially greeted them with warmth and compassion. Early on, Klein reported, there was a collective spirit of welcome, described by some as a “blanket of love and comfort” extended to these climate refugees.
But as Professor Meyer recounted, Chico’s initial solidarity eroded over time. The city’s limited housing stock, strained schools, and overwhelmed social services could not sustainably absorb such a sudden population increase. This material strain gave way to a political backlash: new conservative officials were elected, and crackdowns on homelessness followed. What was especially notable, Professor Meyer emphasized, was that these refugees were neither immigrants from distant countries nor culturally alien populations—they were displaced residents from a neighboring town. Their rejection underscored how even solidarity rooted in geographic proximity can fracture under economic and infrastructural pressure.
Klein, Professor Meyer noted, described this shift as a “fascist flip”—the transformation from empathy to hostility when societies fail to build the material and institutional foundations necessary to sustain care over time. According to Klein, only eco-populism can counteract this dynamic: a politics rooted in universalism, material equity, and the creation of cooperative structures that ensure no group is scapegoated or left behind.
Professor Meyer highlighted Klein’s praise for figures like Zohran Mamdani, a New York City politician who exemplifies this approach. Mamdani, representing a racially diverse and economically marginalized community where many residents paradoxically supported Donald Trump, did not dismiss or condescend to his constituents. Instead, he listened to their material grievances—stories about broken elevators in public housing and perceived inequalities in the treatment of immigrants. Rather than responding by retreating from migrant solidarity, Mamdani concluded that the left must “raise the floor” for everyone, fighting for universal access to housing, transportation, food, and healthcare.
This vision of eco-populism, Professor Meyer observed, embodies a politics of meeting people where they are—politically, economically, and emotionally. It does not ask individuals to overcome their immediate material insecurities in the name of an abstract climate imperative. Instead, it insists that justice-oriented climate action must address those insecurities as an integral part of building an equitable and sustainable future.
For Professor Meyer, this example crystallized the core lesson: without institutions and structures that can translate compassion into durable material support, solidarity remains fleeting. But with such structures, there exists the possibility—though never the guarantee—of sustaining care, fostering democratic participation, and bridging divides that reactionary forces seek to widen.
Professor Meyer closed this section by emphasizing that climate justice as populism offers an alternative political logic to both authoritarian populism and elite technocracy. It politicizes climate action not through denialism or obstruction, but by challenging whose knowledge counts, whose voices are heard, and whose needs are prioritized. It calls for participatory, bottom-up governance that reinforces solidarity and delivers concrete improvements to people’s everyday lives.
Ultimately, Professor Meyer’s analysis invited his audience to rethink not only climate policy but also their understanding of populism itself. In this reimagining, populism need not be defined solely by exclusion, demagoguery, or authoritarianism. Instead, climate justice movements reveal the potential of an inclusive, egalitarian, and democratic populism—one rooted in solidarity, dignity, and sustainability. As Professor Meyer concluded, this vision does not offer easy guarantees but opens up crucial possibilities for the future of both democracy and the planet.
Conclusion: Toward Eco‑Democratic Renewal
Professor Meyer’s lecture, “Climate Justice and Populism,” delivered as part of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025, provided a profound conceptual intervention into the nexus between populism and climate politics. By critically interrogating both the exclusionary tendencies of authoritarian populism and the elitist reflexes of mainstream climate governance, Professor Meyer advanced a compelling alternative: understanding climate justice movements as a form of inclusive, democratic populism.
Professor Meyer’s analysis cautioned against simplistic binaries that frame populism as inherently antagonistic to climate action or that valorize technocratic expertise while marginalizing public concerns. He argued that mainstream climate policies, deeply shaped by anti-populist sensibilities, often fail to address the disproportionate burdens faced by marginalized communities. Their tendency to depoliticize climate action by presenting it as a matter of technical necessity, grounded solely in scientific expertise, not only alienates segments of the public but also risks exacerbating the very injustices that climate policies should redress.
In contrast, Professor Meyer’s portrayal of climate justice movements illuminated their emancipatory potential. These movements do not treat justice as an afterthought or compensatory gesture but embed demands for equity, solidarity, and participatory governance at the heart of climate politics. Their inclusive notion of “the people,” attention to material conditions, valorization of indigenous and local knowledge, and critique of “false solutions” all point toward a populism that is pluralist, democratic, and responsive.
Importantly, Professor Meyer’s lecture underscored that climate justice as populism offers a path forward: one that politicizes climate policy not to obstruct but to democratize it, ensuring that climate action is socially just, politically legitimate, and broadly supported. As climate change intensifies and populist pressures grow, this reframing may prove indispensable—not only for advancing climate goals but also for renewing democratic life itself.
