Politics, culture, rhetoric, global warming: From local to global realities

Abstract

The politics of global warming represents a dialectic of conservative and progressive agents that respectively deny the existence of global warming and believe it is an existential threat to humankind. This paper relies on ideas suggested by Antonio Gramsci to argue that culture conceived as a political tool provides a means to mitigate the risk of global warming. It reveals how conservative agents at the local level of human communities and governments have used culture as a tool to convince social categories in the United States that global warming is not a problem. Progressive agents fail to use the power of the culture concept to contradict conservative arguments and develop cultural practices that might enable mitigation. The failure of local level practices to mitigate global warming may stimulate the development of an alternative global form of government dedicated exclusively to mitigation to forestall an environmental and human catastrophe.