I am going to have a lecture he 3rd Prague Populism Conference between 22 and 23 May 2017. In this year the populism conference concerns Current Populism in Europe and the Role of the Media.
My lecture is dealing with post-truth and climate change.
Populism and Climate Change in the Era of Post-Truth
Post-truth (PT) and post-factual politics (PFP) has increasingly been core pillars of our public and media sphere. This can be analyzed in the broader context of the politics, which shows that the core nature of politics has changed: emotions, enemies, political personalities have been moved in to the center of the politics. Facts, institutions, experts, law- and right-based approach begin to lose their importance. On the one hand, populist forces felt this political shift; on the other hand, they have begun to force and push these tendencies. I will put forward here a hypothesis concerning the relationship between the populist turn of politics and the climate change. Climate skepticism and climate change denial were existing and flourishing phenomena before the populist era of PT and PFP, but the law- and expert-based neoliberal politics tried to handle this situation with transnational agreements (most recently with the Paris Agreement). Unfortunately, populist (mainly on the political right) forces are attempting to use PT and PFP techniques to attack environmental measures and self-evident facts concerning the climate change. According to my hypothesis this combat can not only be seen as result of a political strategy to support industry donors, but also the massive anti-climate policy based on the concept of political sovereignty. The nationalist populist right (from Donald Trump to Viktor Orbán) recognized that the adaptation and mitigation in the context of the Anthropocene and climate change need to have a new concept of sovereignty. I will investigate here the roots of PT/PFP and fake news politics and I am elaborating the concept of biopopulism concerning the climate change. After all I will conclude some assumptions how to protect the climate against the populist post-truth regimes.
