Discourses of Climate Delay in American Reddit Discussions

Abstract

Arguments that seek to justify the lack of measures to combat anthropogenic climate change have been identified in public discourse and characterized into four distinct Discourses of Climate Delay. Reddit provides a useful source of data for discourse research. While discourse on other social media platforms is prone to polarization due to echo-chamber effects, the prevalence of these effects on Reddit is disputed. We used the Reddit and pushshift APIs to acquire data from posts on the popular political communities r/democrats and r/Republican. We then used intercoder-validated deductive qualitative content analysis based on the defined Discourses of Climate Delay to identify if Reddit users employ different Discourses of Climate Delay based on their political group affiliation. We find that members of r/Republican tend to employ arguments based on preventing change, while those in r/democrats preferentially use arguments that emphasize the complexity necessary for implementing structural changes.