Mediating climate politics : the surprising case of Brazil

Dayrell, Carmen and Urry, John (2015) Mediating climate politics : the surprising case of Brazil. European Journal of Social Theory, 18 (3). pp. 257-273. ISSN 1368-4310

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Abstract

This paper examines the centrality of Brazil within the future of climate policy and politics. The state of the carbon sink of the Amazon rain forest has long been an iconic marker of the condition of the earth. Brazil has been innovative in developing many non-carbon forms of energy generation and use. And it has played a major role in international debates on global warming since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. We examine various ways in which climate change has come to be centrally important within Brazilian public opinion. Survey evidence shows that Brazilians are the most concerned about issues of climate change – with less climate change scepticism as compared with more ‘advanced’ societies. Through using techniques of corpus linguistics we examine how Brazilian media engendered and stabilised such a high and striking level of climate change concern. We show that the media helped to fix a ‘climate change framing’ of recent often strange weather. The paper analyses the newly constructed Brazilian Corpus on Climate Change, presenting data on a scale and reach that is unique in this area of research.