A chronological genealogy of environmental thought, narrative conflict, national policy and climate diplomacy

Scope: Global intellectual and political traditions from the rise of fossil-fuelled industrial modernity to 31 July 2026, with representative national policies and international summit outcomes. The report distinguishes ideologies, discourses, policy programmes, emotional registers and media forms; it does not treat every public phrase as a coherent ideology, nor does it attempt an exhaustive history of environmental thought in every language and region.

Abstract

The supplied climate-narratives taxonomy accurately identifies many recurrent frames – scientific consensus, harm, health, security, green growth, justice, denial, delay, doom, techno-fix, individual responsibility and media imagery – but combines phenomena operating at different analytical levels. This report reconstructs that material as a chronological genealogy of climate ideologies. It traces fossil productivism and conservation, planetary-limits thought, deep ecology, ecofeminism, environmental justice, scientific internationalism, sustainable development, ecological modernisation, market environmentalism, climate capitalism, climate justice, security, denial and obstruction, degrowth, just transition, ecomodernism, net zero, rights-based legalism, Indigenous and decolonial approaches, planetary health, collapse narratives, eco-authoritarianism and radical direct action. Each family is connected, where evidence permits, to national policy and climate-diplomacy outcomes from Stockholm and Rio through Kyoto, Paris and COP30 in Belém. The central finding is that climate politics is not a single dispute between science and denial: it is a conflict over modernity, responsibility, scale, property, technology, democracy, time and legitimate action. For The Sunshine Find, this layered map clarifies how panoramic consumption, extraction, climate spectacle, glacial evidence and environmental radicalism become narratively connected without collapsing their distinct histories.

Position in The Sunshine Find / Glacial Archaeology

This report provides the conceptual armature for the project’s ‘archive of narratives’. It clarifies which categories describe evidence, which express a political philosophy, which name a policy technology, and which operate as an aesthetic or emotional mode. Read across the installation, fossil productivism and ecological modernisation illuminate Drill Baby, Drill!, the ice/mining axe and The Cloud Is Not in the Sky!; lifestyle individualisation and green consumerism illuminate Thirst, Edelweiss and Elixir; national security, territorial ideology and climate nationalism illuminate Nations and Citizenship; risk, catastrophe theatre and visual mediation illuminate Glacier Express, Countdown and the Random Archive; climate justice, direct action and the politics of violence illuminate Sunshine, the ELF timeline, No Sprawl, Sabotage and Future. These connections are interpretive. The report does not treat the parafictional ownership history of the objects as verified historical evidence.

Project links and cross-references: The Sunshine Find / Glacial Archaeology website  ·  Archive of narratives on global warming  ·  Exhibition object pages

Method and source policy

The uploaded taxonomy is treated as a project working document and primary editorial source, not as peer-reviewed evidence. Its sixteen narrative types and the shorter archive grouping were compared with scholarship in environmental political theory, environmental sociology, political economy, climate communication, security studies, Indigenous studies and climate law. ‘Ideology’ is used narrowly for an organised account of social order, values, authority, causation and desirable action. ‘Discourse’ or ‘narrative’ names a recurrent way of framing a problem; ‘policy programme’ names an institutional strategy; ‘instrument’ names an operational device such as a carbon price; ‘affect’ names an emotional register such as hope or doom; and ‘medium’ names the channels and visual forms through which any of these circulate. These categories overlap in practice but should not be analytically collapsed.

The numbered Academic Reference List contains only scholarly books, chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles whose publication data were verified. International agreements, national laws, official plans, court records and summit decisions are cited separately as primary or institutional evidence. National cases are representative rather than exhaustive. Policy labels are not assumed to describe outcomes: a net-zero law, green-growth plan or loss-and-damage pledge is analysed as an ideological and institutional commitment, not proof of implementation. Uncertainty is stated where an ideology lacks a single origin or where summit language permits rival interpretations.

Contents

1. Reconstructing the supplied taxonomy
2. Long roots, c. 1600-1945: mastery, conservation and stewardship
3. Planetary limits, 1945-1979: systems, ecology and social critique
4. Climate governance, 1979-1992: science, sustainable development and responsibility
5. Institutionalisation, 1992-2008: markets, justice, security and obstruction
6. Post-Copenhagen reassembly, 2009-2015: resilience, degrowth, transition and techno-fix
7. Climate emergency and polycrisis, 2016-2026
8. Chronological policy and summit concordance, 1972-2026
9. Revised archive taxonomy and tagging protocol
10. Interpretive synthesis: from panoramic modernity to contested action
11. Numbered Academic Reference List
Appendix: User prompts related to this report

1. Reconstructing the supplied taxonomy

The attached research synthesis is a strong inventory of public climate framings. Its categories correspond to well-established fields of research: scientific risk communication; impact, health and security framing; economic opportunity and systemic risk; justice and moral responsibility; polarisation, denial and delay; technological solutionism; individualisation; and media or visual communication. Its final note – that an artefact can be tagged by claim type, implied villains, victims and heroes, and proposed action or inaction – is especially useful for the Random Archive.

The difficulty is categorical rather than factual. ‘Scientific consensus’ is an epistemic position; ‘green growth’ and ‘degrowth’ are political-economic programmes; ‘public health’ and ‘security’ are problem frames; ‘techno-fix’ is a family of solution strategies; ‘lifestyle individualisation’ is a distribution of responsibility; ‘denial’ and ‘delay’ are forms of obstruction; ‘doom’ is an affective and temporal orientation; and ‘media’ or ‘visual narratives’ are modes of circulation. Treating them as equivalent types hides their genealogies and makes it difficult to connect them to laws, institutions and summit outcomes.

Academic source links: Why We Disagree about Climate Change | The Politics of the Earth | Discourses of Climate Delay | Communicating Climate Change: Why Frames Matter

References: [1], chaps. 1-4; [2], introduction and chaps. 1-3; [31], 1-5; [38], 12-23.

2. Long roots, c. 1600-1945: mastery, conservation and stewardship

Climate ideologies inherit older arguments about nature. Early modern European science, capitalist property relations, colonial extraction and later fossil-fuel industrialisation helped establish a powerful image of nature as external, measurable, improvable and available for use. This did not produce one seamless doctrine, and neither Christianity nor the Enlightenment has a single ecological meaning. Nevertheless, the political imaginary of mastery became embedded in industrial development, national wealth and the promise that technical progress could overcome scarcity.

2.1 Promethean productivism and fossil modernity

Historical formation: Seventeenth-century philosophies of mastery; consolidated by coal- and oil-based industrialisation from the late eighteenth century; globalised through empire, developmental states and mass consumption.
Core proposition: Human welfare is advanced by expanding production, energy use, infrastructure and control over natural processes. Environmental limits are treated as temporary technical obstacles or as costs to be managed after growth.
Philosophical and political genealogy: The tradition combines Enlightenment confidence in reason, capitalist accumulation, state-building, colonial extraction and socialist as well as capitalist productivism. It is therefore not reducible to one party family. The modern nation-state measured power through output, mobility, steel, energy and territorial transformation.
Policy and diplomatic expression: The ideology underwrote industrialisation, electrification, road building, aviation, extractive concessions and post-war development planning. It remains visible in energy-security doctrines, fossil-fuel nationalism and slogans that oppose climate policy to prosperity or sovereignty. Paris-compatible policies often coexist with productivist commitments when states seek both decarbonisation and continuous expansion of material throughput.
Critical tensions: Productivism can incorporate environmental efficiency without questioning aggregate growth, unequal extraction or the distribution of harms. Its strongest climate variant is not necessarily denial; it can accept warming while insisting that growth, substitution and future technology will absorb the problem.
Project relevance: This is the background ideology of the Glacier Express, Grossglockner road, SUVisation, Drill Baby, Drill!, the ice/mining axe and data-centre objects: landscape is organised as infrastructure, commodity and energy system before becoming climate evidence.

Academic source links: The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis | The Climate of History: Four Theses | Fossil Capital

References: [3], 1203-1207; [43], 197-222; [44], chaps. 1-4.

2.2 Conservation, preservation and national landscape

Historical formation: Late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in settler-colonial states and imperial forestry regimes.
Core proposition: Conservation seeks rational, sustained use of resources; preservation seeks protection of selected landscapes from industrial use. Both can make nature governable through mapping, zoning, parks, scientific forestry and expert administration.
Philosophical and political genealogy: The family ranges from utilitarian conservation to Romantic and transcendentalist wilderness ideals. It created important limits on extraction but often separated spectacular nature from inhabited and working landscapes. Protected areas could erase Indigenous stewardship and convert lived territories into national scenery.
Policy and diplomatic expression: National parks, heritage regimes, watershed protection and forestry agencies institutionalised these ideas. Later climate adaptation and biodiversity policy inherited their administrative tools. The protected-landscape ideal also became an economic basis for scenic tourism and national branding.
Critical tensions: Conservation can restrain extraction while preserving the political economy that causes it; preservation can protect iconic sites while displacing communities or ignoring industrial sacrifice zones.
Project relevance: The project’s panoramic-tourism objects occupy this contradiction: glaciers are protected and celebrated as national spectacle while transport, hospitality and consumption contribute to the conditions of their retreat.

Academic source links: Environmentalism and Political Theory | Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

References: [4], chaps. 2-4; [45], introduction and chaps. 1-2.

2.3 Religious stewardship and moral trusteeship

Historical formation: Long theological traditions; renewed in twentieth- and twenty-first-century ecological theology.
Core proposition: Human beings are accountable caretakers rather than absolute owners of creation. Climate action follows from duties to neighbours, future generations and non-human life.
Philosophical and political genealogy: Stewardship offers an anthropocentric but responsibility-centred alternative to mastery. Lynn White’s influential critique of Western Christianity also identified neglected Christian resources of humility and kinship. Later religious environmentalism, including Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato si’, connects ecological degradation with poverty and consumerism.
Policy and diplomatic expression: Faith-based climate campaigns have supported national and multilateral action, divestment and climate justice. The moral language of intergenerational responsibility appears in constitutional litigation and parliamentary climate-emergency declarations even when formally secular.
Critical tensions: Stewardship can legitimise care, but it may retain human hierarchy over nature and can be interpreted either conservatively or transformatively.
Project relevance: It belongs to the archive’s metanarratives: myths, belief, morality and evidentiary desire shape how glaciers become signs, as in the Noah’s Ark material, without determining the scientific status of a claim.

Academic source links: The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis | Dark Green Religion

References: [3], 1203-1207; [46], introduction and chaps. 1-2.

Primary / institutional evidence links: Laudato si’

3. Planetary limits, 1945-1979: systems, ecology and social critique

After 1945, nuclear weapons, radioactive fallout, industrial pollution, population debates, satellite images and systems science made the Earth newly imaginable as a single vulnerable system. The 1972 Stockholm Conference translated this planetary consciousness into diplomacy, while social movements challenged who caused environmental damage and who was authorised to define its solution. Several of the most durable climate ideologies emerged in this period.

3.1 Systems ecology, planetary limits and precaution

Historical formation: 1940s-1970s: cybernetics, ecosystem science, Earth-system observation, nuclear risk and the 1972 Limits to Growth debate.
Core proposition: The biosphere is an interconnected system with thresholds, feedbacks and finite assimilative capacity. Rational governance requires monitoring, modelling, scenario planning and preventive action before damage becomes irreversible.
Philosophical and political genealogy: This current joins systems theory with an ecological critique of linear industrial growth. It later supports the precautionary principle and the IPCC’s calibrated risk language. Its political ambiguity is important: the same planetary model can justify democratic coordination, technocratic management or authoritarian control.
Policy and diplomatic expression: Stockholm 1972, national environmental agencies, environmental-impact assessment and later climate-monitoring institutions express this ideology. The UNFCCC and IPCC institutionalise assessment under uncertainty; the Paris temperature goals and Global Stocktake translate system thresholds into governance benchmarks.
Critical tensions: Models can clarify cumulative risk but can also depoliticise it by treating historically unequal societies as one abstract humanity. Aggregate planetary indicators may hide colonial histories, class and differential vulnerability.
Project relevance: Countdown, monitoring archives, comparative glacier photography and glacial archaeology rely on the evidentiary power of measured change. The project also asks who controls the observing apparatus and how data become public authority.

Academic source links: Risk Society | The Politics of the Earth | Why We Disagree about Climate Change

References: [5], chaps. 1-2; [2], chaps. 4-5; [1], chaps. 2-3.

Primary / institutional evidence links: 1972 Stockholm Conference | IPCC history

3.2 Deep ecology, ecocentrism and dark-green spirituality

Historical formation: Term formulated by Arne Naess in 1973; expanded through 1970s-1990s environmental philosophy and nature spirituality.
Core proposition: Non-human beings and ecological wholes possess value beyond their usefulness to humans. Adequate environmentalism requires changes in worldview, identity, consumption and the scale of human interference, not only pollution control.
Philosophical and political genealogy: Deep ecology rejects the ‘shallow’ environmentalism of affluent societies that protects human welfare without challenging domination. Ecocentric political theory and dark-green religion broaden this into ethical and spiritual identification with the living world.
Policy and diplomatic expression: The influence is more visible in movements, education, wilderness protection and rights-of-nature discourse than in summit texts. It informs strong sustainability, biodiversity protection and some constitutional recognition of nature.
Critical tensions: Critics identify vague political prescriptions, romantic wilderness concepts and insufficient attention to class, race, gender, colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty. Universal claims about ‘humanity’ can obscure unequal responsibility.
Project relevance: Deep ecology forms one bridge from glaciers as sublime spectacle to glaciers as entities with intrinsic value. It also belongs to the genealogy of Earth First! and radical environmentalism, while not determining any single tactic.

Academic source links: The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement | Environmentalism and Political Theory | Dark Green Religion

References: [6], 95-100; [4], chaps. 3-5; [46], chaps. 3-6.

3.3 Social ecology, ecosocialism and the critique of hierarchy

Historical formation: Developed from the 1960s onward through anarchist social ecology, Marxist ecology, anti-capitalist environmentalism and later climate-justice movements.
Core proposition: Ecological crisis is produced by social domination: class exploitation, hierarchy, private accumulation, imperial extraction and the treatment of nature as a cheap input. Durable climate action therefore requires political-economic transformation, democratic control and reduced dependence on profit-led growth.
Philosophical and political genealogy: Social ecology emphasises hierarchy and municipal democracy; ecosocialism connects capitalism’s accumulation imperative with metabolic disruption and unequal exchange. Both oppose the idea that environmental degradation can be solved by consumer preference alone.
Policy and diplomatic expression: The current has shaped movement platforms, public ownership proposals, Green New Deal debates and demands to phase out fossil fuels with social guarantees. Its influence at summits is strongest through civil-society pressure, just-transition language and critiques of carbon markets.
Critical tensions: State-socialist productivism demonstrates that public ownership alone does not ensure ecological outcomes. Anti-capitalist analysis must specify institutions, democratic safeguards, technological choices and transition pathways.
Project relevance: This current provides a historical route from extraction objects to direct-action objects: sabotage appears not as an automatic conclusion but as one contested response to the perceived failure of ordinary institutions.

Academic source links: The Environmentalism of the Poor | The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative | Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

References: [47], introduction and chaps. 1-2; [48], 62-69; [45], introduction.

3.4 Ecofeminism and ethics of care

Historical formation: Emerges in the 1970s; diversified in feminist philosophy, political ecology and intersectional analysis from the 1980s onward.
Core proposition: The domination of women, racialised peoples, animals and nature is linked through dualisms that elevate reason over body, culture over nature and masculine-coded control over dependence and care. Climate politics must transform these relations and recognise embodied, reproductive and subsistence labour.
Philosophical and political genealogy: Ecofeminism ranges from cultural/spiritual variants to materialist and postcolonial approaches. Val Plumwood’s critique of rationalism and later intersectional scholarship reject both essentialist claims that women are ‘closer to nature’ and supposedly neutral climate policy that ignores power.
Policy and diplomatic expression: Gender-responsive climate planning, recognition of care work, women’s participation provisions and intersectional vulnerability assessments reflect parts of this tradition. UNFCCC gender action plans institutionalise participation but do not by themselves transform political economy.
Critical tensions: Some early ecofeminist rhetoric universalised ‘women’ or naturalised gender difference. Contemporary work insists on race, class, coloniality, disability, sexuality and geography.
Project relevance: Rape and Assault, cosmetics, water and livelihood objects invite analysis of the gendered language of extraction and purity. The connection is interpretive and should not reduce all ecological harm to metaphor.

Academic source links: Nature, Self, and Gender | Climate Change through the Lens of Intersectionality

References: [7], 3-27; [8], 417-433.

Primary / institutional evidence links: UNFCCC enhanced Lima work programme on gender

3.5 Environmental justice and anti-racist environmentalism

Historical formation: Roots in civil-rights, labour, anti-toxics and Indigenous struggles; named as a movement in the United States in the 1980s and globalised through the 1990s-2000s.
Core proposition: Environmental policy must address distribution, recognition, participation and capabilities. The key question is not only how much damage occurs, but who benefits, who is exposed, whose knowledge counts and who can decide.
Philosophical and political genealogy: Environmental justice challenges wilderness-centred environmentalism and aggregate cost-benefit approaches. It links place-based struggles to structural racism, colonialism, labour and unequal ecological exchange.
Policy and diplomatic expression: It informs national environmental-justice offices, cumulative-impact assessment, Indigenous consultation, climate-finance debates and loss-and-damage demands. The principle of common but differentiated responsibilities in the UNFCCC supplied a diplomatic grammar for unequal historical responsibility.
Critical tensions: Institutional adoption can narrow justice to consultation or targeted compensation while leaving extractive systems intact. Universal climate goals can conflict with locally defined rights and development priorities.
Project relevance: Justice provides a cross-reference among Thirst, Nations, Citizenship, climate migration, military emissions and the later direct-action objects. It also prevents the archive from representing ‘humanity’ as a homogeneous cause or victim.

Academic source links: Defining Environmental Justice | The Environmentalism of the Poor | Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

References: [9], chaps. 1-4; [47], chaps. 1-3; [45], introduction and chap. 2.

4. Climate governance, 1979-1992: science, sustainable development and responsibility

The First World Climate Conference in 1979, the creation of the IPCC in 1988 and the negotiation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992 transformed global warming from a scientific concern into a standing field of international governance. The period did not settle climate ideology. It created a durable compromise among scientific assessment, national sovereignty, development, precaution and differentiated responsibility.

4.1 Scientific internationalism and consensus-based risk governance

Historical formation: Institutionalised through WMO climate programmes, the IPCC from 1988 and the UNFCCC from 1992.
Core proposition: Anthropogenic warming is a transboundary, cumulative risk whose causes and effects can be assessed through organised international science. Policy should respond to the balance of evidence while making uncertainty explicit rather than waiting for absolute proof.
Philosophical and political genealogy: This is not a complete political ideology: science can estimate causes, risks and pathways but cannot decide distributive principles. Its authority rests on peer review, calibrated language, disciplinary diversity and negotiated assessment procedures.
Policy and diplomatic expression: National inventories, observation systems, IPCC assessment cycles, UNFCCC reporting and Paris stocktakes are its main institutions. Many national climate laws translate temperature or emissions budgets into targets while leaving policy instruments to democratic choice.
Critical tensions: Consensus can be misrepresented as unanimity or technocracy. Critics from justice traditions argue that global models can marginalise situated knowledge; obstruction actors portray normal scientific uncertainty as evidence of unreliability.
Project relevance: Discovery of Global Warming, monitoring infrastructures, archives, scenarios and glacial archaeology are located here: material change becomes public knowledge through instruments, standards and institutional trust.

Academic source links: Why We Disagree about Climate Change | The Politics of the Earth | The Politicization of Climate Change

References: [1], chaps. 2-3; [2], chaps. 5-6; [29], 155-194.

Primary / institutional evidence links: IPCC history | UNFCCC Convention documents

4.2 Sustainable development: the Brundtland-Rio compromise

Historical formation: Popularised by the 1987 Brundtland report; institutionalised at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit.
Core proposition: Economic development, poverty reduction and environmental protection can be reconciled by meeting present needs without destroying future generations’ capacity to meet theirs. The concept creates a shared language broad enough for states with different interests.
Philosophical and political genealogy: Sustainable development combines intergenerational ethics, developmentalism, environmental limits and institutional reform. Its ambiguity is politically productive: it permits strong ecological transformation, managerial efficiency or business-as-usual branding.
Policy and diplomatic expression: Agenda 21, the Rio Declaration, the UNFCCC and later Sustainable Development Goals embody this compromise. National sustainable-development strategies and corporate sustainability reporting proliferated after Rio.
Critical tensions: The concept may integrate environment and development, but can also postpone conflict over growth, consumption, ownership and North-South inequality. It became a central vocabulary of greenwashing when claims lacked measurable change.
Project relevance: The project’s commodity and tourism objects show sustainability as both policy aspiration and marketing language. The distinction between verified environmental performance and glacier-branded rhetoric is essential.

Academic source links: Who Sustains Whose Development? | The Compromise of Liberal Environmentalism | The Drivers of Greenwashing

References: [10], 143-180; [12], introduction and chaps. 1-3; [37], 64-87.

Primary / institutional evidence links: Our Common Future | Agenda 21 | Rio Declaration

4.3 Ecological modernisation

Historical formation: Developed in European environmental sociology and policy during the 1980s-1990s.
Core proposition: Modern industrial society can be ecologically restructured through innovation, regulation, cleaner production, institutional learning and cooperation among state, firms, experts and civil society. Environmental protection can become a source of efficiency and competitiveness.
Philosophical and political genealogy: Ecological modernisation rejects both unrestricted productivism and the claim that industrial modernity must be abandoned. It is reformist and technology-positive, but stronger versions include democratisation and institutional redesign rather than simple eco-efficiency.
Policy and diplomatic expression: Germany’s Energiewende, Scandinavian environmental taxation, EU environmental regulation and later circular-economy and industrial decarbonisation strategies are representative. In diplomacy it aligns with technology transfer, mitigation pathways and green-growth coalitions.
Critical tensions: Efficiency gains may be offset by expanding consumption; innovation can externalise mining and manufacturing; consensus-oriented governance may understate conflict. Critics distinguish absolute decoupling at climate-relevant speed from relative efficiency improvement.
Project relevance: Glacier Express, Edelweiss airline, luxury cosmetics and the Sines data campus are cases where modernisation claims need comparison with full-system energy and material effects.

Academic source links: The Politics of Environmental Discourse | The Politics of the Earth | Is Green Growth Possible?

References: [11], especially 73-103; [2], ecological-modernisation chapter; [21], 469-486.

Primary / institutional evidence links: Germany – Renewable Energy Sources Act | Sweden – carbon taxation

4.4 Common but differentiated responsibility and developmental equity

Historical formation: Negotiated in the 1992 UNFCCC from older North-South development and anti-colonial claims.
Core proposition: All states share responsibility for climate protection, but obligations differ because of historical emissions, capacities and development needs. Equality is not identical treatment.
Philosophical and political genealogy: The principle joins sovereign equality, distributive justice, historical responsibility and the right to development. It became a central ideological fault line between industrialised states and the Global South.
Policy and diplomatic expression: The UNFCCC’s Annex structure and Kyoto’s binding targets for developed countries expressed differentiation. Paris universalised nationally determined contributions while retaining equity and ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in the light of different national circumstances’.
Critical tensions: Differentiation is indispensable to legitimacy but disputed in a changing emissions landscape. Historical responsibility, current annual emissions, consumption emissions, income, capability and vulnerability generate different burden-sharing formulas.
Project relevance: Nations, Citizenship, Kiribati, Glacier Republic and climate-migration material become legible through this tension between territorial sovereignty and unequal planetary responsibility.

Academic source links: A Climate of Injustice | Atmospheric Justice | Critical Climate Justice

References: [13], introduction and chaps. 1-3; [14], chaps. 2-4; [24], 118-124.

Primary / institutional evidence links: UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

5. Institutionalisation, 1992-2008: markets, justice, security and obstruction

After Rio, climate politics became a durable international regime. The Kyoto Protocol’s differentiated targets and flexibility mechanisms made carbon measurable as a tradable governance unit. At the same time, climate justice networks challenged marketisation and unequal responsibility, security institutions reframed warming as instability, and organised counter-movements attacked scientific authority and regulation.

5.1 Liberal environmentalism and market environmentalism

Historical formation: Consolidated in the 1980s-1990s; incorporated into the Kyoto architecture in 1997.
Core proposition: Environmental protection should be made compatible with trade, investment and private choice. Prices, property rights, emissions trading and flexible mechanisms can internalise environmental costs while preserving market coordination.
Philosophical and political genealogy: This ideology is the climate form of the broader post-Cold War compromise between environmental institutions and liberal economic order. It treats states as rule-setters and markets as discovery and allocation mechanisms.
Policy and diplomatic expression: Kyoto emissions trading, the Clean Development Mechanism, the EU Emissions Trading System and national carbon taxes are major expressions. Carbon pricing remains prominent in national policy mixes and Article 6 of the Paris Agreement.
Critical tensions: Carbon markets can reduce costs but depend on caps, accounting integrity, additionality and enforcement. Offset systems may displace communities, create speculative assets or permit continued emissions in wealthy sectors. A price signal does not settle justice, infrastructure or phase-out policy.
Project relevance: Countdown and emissions registries make carbon calculable; greenwashing and commodity reports show how measurement can become a reputational asset detached from absolute reduction.

Academic source links: The Compromise of Liberal Environmentalism | Accumulation by Decarbonization | Toward a Different Debate in Environmental Accounting

References: [12], chaps. 4-7; [15], 127-155; [16], 499-534.

Primary / institutional evidence links: Kyoto Protocol | Paris Agreement Article 6

5.2 Climate capitalism, green finance and accumulation by decarbonisation

Historical formation: Late 1990s onward; expanded through carbon markets, renewable investment, ESG, disclosure and green bonds.
Core proposition: Climate constraints can generate new markets, assets, industries and investment opportunities. Capital can be redirected from high-carbon to low-carbon activity through finance, policy certainty, disclosure and innovation.
Philosophical and political genealogy: Climate capitalism extends ecological modernisation and liberal environmentalism into financial governance. Strong versions envisage strategic state investment; weak versions assume portfolio reallocation will substitute for regulation and public planning.
Policy and diplomatic expression: Renewable-energy support, green taxonomies, climate disclosure, sustainable-finance rules and net-zero financial alliances are expressions. The EU Green Deal and Net-Zero Industry Act combine finance with industrial policy.
Critical tensions: Finance can accelerate deployment, but green labels are vulnerable to inconsistent taxonomies, future promises and portfolio accounting. Asset reclassification can coexist with rising absolute emissions, resource frontiers and public underwriting of private risk.
Project relevance: Luxury products, greenwashing, airlines, tourism and AI infrastructure illustrate how decarbonisation becomes a brand, investable promise and contested audit problem.

Academic source links: Climate Capitalism | Accumulation by Decarbonization | The Drivers of Greenwashing

References: [17], chaps. 1-4; [15], 127-155; [37], 64-87.

Primary / institutional evidence links: European Green Deal | EU Net-Zero Industry Act

5.3 Lifestyle individualisation, green consumerism and the carbon subject

Historical formation: Late twentieth century onward; intensified by household carbon calculators, ethical consumption and corporate personal-responsibility campaigns.
Core proposition: Individuals are climate agents whose purchases, travel, diet, recycling and household efficiency aggregate into social change. The citizen is addressed as consumer, carbon accountant and moral subject.
Philosophical and political genealogy: The approach draws on liberal individualism, behavioural economics and traditions of personal ethics. It can empower practical action, but it also relocates responsibility from infrastructures, firms and states to households.
Policy and diplomatic expression: Energy labels, vehicle standards, recycling programmes, dietary guidance and demand-side policy use individual action as one component of governance. National plans often combine these with structural measures.
Critical tensions: Individualisation becomes ideological when it presents consumer choice as sufficient, ignores constrained options, or uses personal inconsistency to discredit collective policy. Systemic and personal action are not mutually exclusive; their institutional weight is the issue.
Project relevance: Souvenirs, cosmetics, bottled water, flights and SUVs are ideal archive objects for tracing how climate responsibility is packaged at the point of consumption while supply chains and infrastructure recede from view.

Academic source links: Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World? | The Drivers of Greenwashing

References: [18], 31-52; [37], 64-87.

5.4 Climate justice, climate debt and loss and damage

Historical formation: Globalised in the 1990s-2000s through environmental-justice, Indigenous, labour, feminist and North-South networks.
Core proposition: Those least responsible for warming often face the greatest harm. Justice requires rapid mitigation by high emitters, equitable access to energy and development, participation, adaptation finance, remedy for irreversible loss and recognition of non-economic damage.
Philosophical and political genealogy: Climate justice extends environmental justice from local exposure to global atmospheric appropriation. Concepts of climate debt and ecological debt connect emissions history to colonialism, trade and unequal wealth.
Policy and diplomatic expression: Justice campaigns influenced the Bali process, the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage in 2013, the Paris Agreement’s recognition of loss and damage, and the COP27 decision to establish a dedicated fund. COP28 operationalised the fund; subsequent finance negotiations remain contested.
Critical tensions: Compensation without mitigation can normalise harm; finance based on loans can reproduce debt; vulnerability categories can become bureaucratic. States disagree over legal liability, contributor base and access.
Project relevance: The reports on water, migration, wars, Antarctica and endangered islands should be cross-read through this ideology rather than through undifferentiated catastrophe imagery.

Academic source links: A Climate of Injustice | Atmospheric Justice | Critical Climate Justice

References: [13], chaps. 1-5; [14], chaps. 3-6; [24], 118-124.

Primary / institutional evidence links: Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage | COP27 loss-and-damage decision

5.5 Climate security and the threat-multiplier frame

Historical formation: Rose in policy prominence from the 1990s, especially after 2003-2007 security assessments.
Core proposition: Climate change can intensify food and water stress, displacement, disaster response burdens and political instability. It is framed as a risk to national security, human security, infrastructure and geopolitical order.
Philosophical and political genealogy: The frame translates environmental change into the language of strategic foresight and emergency preparedness. Human-security variants centre livelihoods and vulnerability; national-security variants centre borders, military readiness and state stability.
Policy and diplomatic expression: Defence climate-risk assessments, security councils, resilience planning and migration policy embody the frame. It helped elevate climate change politically but has rarely generated binding mitigation commitments at summits.
Critical tensions: Threat language can mobilise resources, yet it may militarise adaptation, pathologise migrants and obscure political causes of conflict. Climate change seldom acts as a simple, direct cause of war.
Project relevance: Military-emissions, war, borders, Antarctica and climate-migration objects require a distinction between evidence-based risk assessment and speculative securitisation.

Academic source links: Security and Climate Change | Discourses of Climate Security | From Fearing to Empowering Climate Refugees

References: [25], 7-17; [26], 42-51; [28], 51-68.

5.6 Denialism, contrarianism and organised climate obstruction

Historical formation: Organised strongly from the late 1980s; politically polarised in the United States and diffused internationally.
Core proposition: Contrarian narratives reject or weaken claims that warming is occurring, human-caused, harmful, consensually established or solvable by policy. Obstruction is broader: it includes institutional strategies that block, dilute or reverse action.
Philosophical and political genealogy: Research links organised denial to conservative think tanks, segments of fossil-fuel industry, anti-regulatory ideology and identity polarisation. It manufactures uncertainty by exploiting the difference between scientific openness and policy proof.
Policy and diplomatic expression: National effects include delayed legislation, withdrawal from agreements, weakened agencies and politicised curricula. The first Trump administration announced Paris withdrawal; the second issued a new withdrawal order on 20 January 2025, which became effective on 27 January 2026. Other states combine formal Paris participation with expansionary fossil policy.
Critical tensions: Not all policy scepticism is denial, and opposition may arise from distributional concerns. Analytical precision requires identifying which claim is rejected and whether the actor proposes an alternative path or protects inaction.
Project relevance: Denial and obstruction belong in the archive as institutional histories of manufactured doubt, not as an epistemically symmetrical counterpart to peer-reviewed climate assessment.

Academic source links: The Politicization of Climate Change | Computer-Assisted Classification of Contrarian Claims | Climate Obstruction: A Global Assessment

References: [29], 155-194; [30], article 22320; [32], 1-28.

Primary / institutional evidence links: US presidential order: Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements

6. Post-Copenhagen reassembly, 2009-2015: resilience, degrowth, transition and techno-fix

The weak political outcome of Copenhagen in 2009 and the continuing rise of emissions generated a new ideological landscape. Adaptation and resilience expanded alongside mitigation; climate justice deepened; degrowth challenged green growth; labour movements advanced just transition; geoengineering and negative emissions moved from speculative margins towards formal assessment; and communication shifted between apocalypse, efficacy and solution narratives. The 2015 Paris Agreement reassembled these currents through universal national pledges, a temperature goal and a five-year ambition cycle.

6.1 Adaptation and resilience

Historical formation: Adaptation entered the UNFCCC from the 1990s; resilience became dominant across development, security and urban policy after the 2000s.
Core proposition: Because some warming and damage are unavoidable, societies must reduce vulnerability, absorb shocks, recover and, in stronger formulations, transform the structures that create risk.
Philosophical and political genealogy: Resilience originates in ecology and systems theory, then migrates into disaster management, psychology, finance and security. It can mean persistence of existing systems or transformation toward justice.
Policy and diplomatic expression: National adaptation plans, climate-resilient infrastructure, disaster-risk reduction and the Paris global goal on adaptation institutionalise the current. COP28 adopted the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience; COP30 increased the political emphasis on adaptation finance.
Critical tensions: Resilience can transfer responsibility to communities expected to endure chronic crisis, while avoiding redistribution or mitigation. Adaptation has limits; irreversible loss cannot be fully managed by better preparedness.
Project relevance: Glacial retreat, unstable terrain, water supply and catastrophe-tourism objects demonstrate both practical adaptation needs and the danger of normalising loss as an endlessly manageable condition.

Academic source links: Adaptation to Climate Change | Genealogies of Resilience | From Fearing to Empowering Climate Refugees

References: [27], chaps. 1-3; [33], 143-160; [28], 51-68.

Primary / institutional evidence links: Paris Agreement | UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience

6.2 Degrowth and post-growth

Historical formation: Term has multiple lineages; consolidated as an academic and movement programme in Europe during the 2000s-2010s.
Core proposition: High-income economies should deliberately reduce ecologically destructive energy and material throughput while improving wellbeing, equality, public services and democratic control. The goal is not indiscriminate recession but planned sufficiency beyond GDP growth.
Philosophical and political genealogy: Degrowth joins ecological economics, anti-productivism, feminist care economics, post-development and critiques of colonial extraction. It challenges the assumption that absolute global decoupling can occur fast enough while aggregate output continues to expand.
Policy and diplomatic expression: No major climate summit has adopted degrowth as policy. Elements appear in wellbeing budgets, circular-economy strategies, shorter working-time debates, demand-side mitigation and sufficiency scenarios. National politics generally prefers green growth.
Critical tensions: Critics question feasibility, terminology, political support and implications for lower-income countries. Degrowth scholarship generally restricts planned contraction to high-consumption economies and insists on redistribution, debt reform and expanded non-market services.
Project relevance: It supplies a counterpoint to luxury tourism, SUVs, aviation, cosmetics and data-centre expansion: efficiency is assessed together with scale, induced demand and unequal consumption.

Academic source links: In Defence of Degrowth | Is Green Growth Possible? | A Good Life for All within Planetary Boundaries

References: [19], 873-880; [21], 469-486; [20], 88-95.

6.3 Just transition and labour environmentalism

Historical formation: Originated in trade-union debates from the 1970s-1990s; entered UNFCCC language in the 2010s and the Paris preamble in 2015.
Core proposition: Workers and communities should not bear disproportionate costs of decarbonisation. Climate policy must combine emissions reduction with social dialogue, decent work, retraining, regional investment, public services and democratic participation.
Philosophical and political genealogy: Just transition links labour rights with climate justice. It contests both job-versus-environment rhetoric and top-down green restructuring that reproduces inequality. Competing versions range from targeted compensation to systemic transformation.
Policy and diplomatic expression: The EU Just Transition Mechanism, coal-region plans and Just Energy Transition Partnerships express the idea nationally and internationally. COP30 adopted a just-transition work programme decision, strengthening its procedural place in climate diplomacy.
Critical tensions: The term can become a vague legitimising label without worker power, funding or industrial strategy. Fossil interests may also invoke jobs to delay phase-out.
Project relevance: Mining, coal, oil, SUVs, data infrastructure and ELF-related objects can be read through conflicting transition strategies: organised public planning, market adjustment, community resistance or clandestine economic sabotage.

Academic source links: The Political Economy of the Just Transition | What Is the Just Transition? | Critical Climate Justice

References: [22], 132-140; [23], 74-77; [24], 118-124.

Primary / institutional evidence links: EU Just Transition Mechanism | COP30 Belém Political Package

6.4 Ecomodernism and high-energy environmentalism

Historical formation: Publicly consolidated by the 2015 Ecomodernist Manifesto, with older roots in nuclear advocacy, modernisation theory and technological optimism.
Core proposition: Human prosperity and environmental protection can be reconciled by intensifying efficient production and decoupling human activity from nature through dense cities, advanced agriculture, clean energy, nuclear power and innovation.
Philosophical and political genealogy: Ecomodernism rejects romantic anti-modernism and treats technology as a means to spare land and reduce material pressure. It overlaps with ecological modernisation but is often more explicitly pro-growth, pro-nuclear and sceptical of localist or degrowth politics.
Policy and diplomatic expression: National expressions include nuclear-renewal programmes, clean-energy research, industrial innovation and technology-neutral decarbonisation policy. Summit texts support technology development and transfer but do not endorse the manifesto’s full philosophy.
Critical tensions: Critics argue that decoupling claims underestimate resource frontiers, political power and rebound effects; proponents argue that low-energy austerity cannot meet global development needs.
Project relevance: The project’s techno-fix category, AI, data centre, glacier covering and climate engineering materials should distinguish plausible portfolio technologies from a ‘silver bullet’ narrative that substitutes future innovation for immediate cuts.

Academic source links: The Politics of the Earth | Is Green Growth Possible? | The Meaning of Net Zero and How to Get It Right

References: [2], ecological-modernisation and limits discourses; [21], 469-486; [36], 15-21.

Primary / institutional evidence links: An Ecomodernist Manifesto

6.5 Geoengineering, carbon removal and the techno-fix dispute

Historical formation: Geoengineering debates expanded after 2006; negative-emissions pathways became prominent in 1.5°C scenarios during the 2010s.
Core proposition: Large-scale technological intervention – solar radiation modification, carbon dioxide removal or engineered adaptation – may reduce climate risk when mitigation is insufficient. The techno-fix narrative goes further by presenting one future option as a substitute for social and near-term emissions change.
Philosophical and political genealogy: The family inherits Promethean mastery and modern risk management, but also emerges from fear that ordinary mitigation will fail. Governance questions concern research, consent, reversibility, transboundary effects and moral hazard.
Policy and diplomatic expression: IPCC pathways assess carbon removal; national policies fund direct-air capture, carbon capture and storage, nature-based removal and research. No climate summit has authorised solar geoengineering as a global policy. Article 6 and net-zero strategies create incentives for removals, but accounting rules remain contested.
Critical tensions: Removal is physically and ethically heterogeneous: restoring ecosystems differs from energy-intensive industrial capture. Reliance on speculative future capacity can delay fossil reduction. Solar intervention could redistribute climatic risks without legitimate global consent.
Project relevance: Mythos, Future and the techno-fix archive can use these distinctions: a technology is not inherently ideological, but its promised scale, timing and displacement of political responsibility are.

Academic source links: Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections | The Trouble with Negative Emissions | Negative Emissions and the Long History of Carbon Removal

References: [34], 211-220; [35], 182-183; [40], article e671.

6.6 Apocalypse, alarm, efficacy and climate communication

Historical formation: Long religious and secular histories; climate-specific research expanded from the 2000s with mass media and digital platforms.
Core proposition: Climate futures are narrated through threat, emergency, conflict, hope, solutions and efficacy. These are not separate ideologies: they are affective and narrative forms that can serve justice, technocracy, denial, consumerism or radicalism.
Philosophical and political genealogy: Apocalyptic narratives compress complex causality into a final catastrophe; risk communication uses calibrated probability; solutions journalism emphasises agency; visual culture turns remote change into emotionally legible scenes.
Policy and diplomatic expression: Climate-emergency declarations and 1.5°C campaigns use urgency. Public-health communication presents co-benefits. National campaigns alternate between household responsibility, economic opportunity and threat.
Critical tensions: Alarm can mobilise or overwhelm; reassurance can enable or minimise; ‘doomism’ may describe genuine grief, political resignation or a polemical label applied to radical criticism. Effects depend on audience, messenger, efficacy and context.
Project relevance: The Random Archive, documentaries, popular culture, comparative glacier photography and catastrophe theatre should be tagged by affect and medium in addition to ideological content.

Academic source links: Communicating Climate Change: Why Frames Matter | Reflections on Climate Change Communication | Apocalypse Forever?

References: [38], 12-23; [39], 345-369; [42], 213-232.

7. Climate emergency and polycrisis, 2016-2026

After Paris, climate ideology shifted from the question of whether a global regime would exist to conflicts over implementation, fairness, technology and speed. Net-zero commitments spread; youth strikes and civil disobedience revived movement politics; courts treated climate protection as a rights issue; green industrial policy returned the state to the centre; Indigenous and decolonial thought challenged universal Anthropocene narratives; and far-right as well as authoritarian currents reworked environmental themes. COP28’s transition-away language, COP29’s finance goal and COP30’s adaptation and just-transition decisions demonstrate both institutional movement and persistent conflict over fossil phase-out, finance and responsibility.

7.1 Net zero: carbon-budget governance and temporal substitution

Historical formation: The concept grows from cumulative-carbon science and becomes a dominant national and corporate target after the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Core proposition: Residual greenhouse-gas emissions are balanced by removals so that net additions approach zero. Properly used, net zero translates a finite carbon budget into a long-term endpoint while requiring early, deep gross reductions.
Philosophical and political genealogy: Net zero combines scientific carbon accounting, policy flexibility and technological expectation. Its ideological flexibility explains its rapid diffusion: it can discipline near-term action or permit distant promises and offset dependence.
Policy and diplomatic expression: The EU Climate Law, UK net-zero amendment, China’s carbon-neutrality goal before 2060, and numerous national long-term strategies use net-zero language. Paris does not use the phrase as a slogan but calls for a balance between anthropogenic emissions and removals in the second half of the century.
Critical tensions: Targets differ by gases, scopes, dates, removals and equity. Without interim budgets and implementation, net zero can become delay or greenwashing. Territorial accounting may externalise imported emissions.
Project relevance: Countdown, corporate greenwashing, aviation, luxury commodities and AI infrastructure are sites where net claims should be separated into gross emissions, reductions, removals, offsets and system boundaries.

Academic source links: The Meaning of Net Zero and How to Get It Right | The Trouble with Negative Emissions | Negative Emissions and the Long History of Carbon Removal

References: [36], 15-21; [35], 182-183; [40], article e671.

Primary / institutional evidence links: European Climate Law | UK Climate Change Act 2008 – 2050 Target Amendment | China white paper on carbon peaking and neutrality

7.2 Green growth, Green New Deals and the return of the developmental state

Historical formation: Green growth developed from ecological modernisation; Green New Deal proposals rose after the 2008 financial crisis; green industrial strategy expanded in the 2020s.
Core proposition: Public investment, industrial policy, standards, infrastructure and innovation can decarbonise the economy while creating jobs, energy security and competitive industries. Unlike pure market environmentalism, the state actively shapes markets.
Philosophical and political genealogy: The family combines Keynesian demand management, developmental-state traditions, ecological modernisation and climate justice. Versions differ sharply over public ownership, labour power, growth and extraction.
Policy and diplomatic expression: The EU Green Deal and Fit for 55, US Inflation Reduction Act under the Biden administration, China’s renewable-industrial strategy, Brazil’s 2035 NDC and many national hydrogen, battery and grid plans express variants. COP28’s call to triple renewable-energy capacity reinforced deployment-oriented policy.
Critical tensions: Industrial policy can accelerate change but also produce subsidy competition, new mining frontiers and unequal supply chains. Green growth remains disputed where absolute decoupling and biodiversity impacts are uncertain.
Project relevance: The project’s energy, mobility and data objects can be read as competing industrial visions rather than as a simple opposition between technology and nature.

Academic source links: The Politics of Environmental Discourse | Climate Capitalism | Is Green Growth Possible?

References: [11], 73-103; [17], chaps. 4-7; [21], 469-486.

Primary / institutional evidence links: EU Fit for 55 | Brazil 2035 NDC | COP28 Global Stocktake outcome

7.3 Rights-based climate constitutionalism and litigation

Historical formation: Expands from the 1990s; accelerates after Paris through constitutional, human-rights, corporate and intergenerational cases.
Core proposition: Climate protection is a legal duty grounded in rights to life, health, home, equality, culture, property, a healthy environment or the rights of nature. Courts can require governments or firms to remedy inadequate action.
Philosophical and political genealogy: The ideology translates moral responsibility and scientific risk into justiciable obligations. It includes liberal rights, public-trust doctrine, constitutional environmentalism, Indigenous rights and ecocentric legal personhood.
Policy and diplomatic expression: Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution recognised rights of nature. The European Court of Human Rights’ 2024 KlimaSeniorinnen judgment found Switzerland in violation of Article 8 and Article 6 §1. The International Court of Justice delivered its climate advisory opinion on 23 July 2025, clarifying states’ obligations under international law. National litigation has shaped targets and procedures in several jurisdictions.
Critical tensions: Courts can protect minorities and enforce existing law, but legitimacy, standing, causation, remedy and enforcement remain contested. Litigation can complement but not replace legislation, finance and democratic mobilisation.
Project relevance: Citizenship, Nations, Glacier Republic and the climate-litigation archive show how vulnerable environments and future persons are translated into legal subjects.

Academic source links: Defining Environmental Justice | Atmospheric Justice | Critical Climate Justice

References: [9], chaps. 4-6; [14], chaps. 5-7; [24], 118-124.

Primary / institutional evidence links: Ecuador Constitution 2008 | ECtHR KlimaSeniorinnen judgment | ICJ climate advisory opinion

7.4 Indigenous, decolonial and relational climate thought

Historical formation: Draws on living Indigenous philosophies and sovereignty struggles; gains wider climate-policy visibility in the 2000s-2020s.
Core proposition: Climate change is not an external environmental problem but part of ongoing colonial disruption of relationships among peoples, lands, waters, ancestors and more-than-human beings. Responses require sovereignty, consent, land return, cultural continuity and recognition of knowledge systems.
Philosophical and political genealogy: This family challenges universal stories in which an undifferentiated humanity caused the Anthropocene. It emphasises that colonialism has already produced repeated worlds-ending disruptions and that adaptation may be a continuation of long resistance rather than a novel technical programme.
Policy and diplomatic expression: Indigenous platforms in the UNFCCC, safeguards, land-rights policy and co-governance incorporate elements. The Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform created an institutional space, though representation and power remain limited.
Critical tensions: Institutional inclusion can extract knowledge while avoiding sovereignty or material restitution. Romanticising Indigenous peoples as naturally ecological reproduces colonial stereotypes.
Project relevance: Glacial archaeology, territorial claims, museums, Ötzi, Antarctica and landscape archives should acknowledge that ‘discovery’ and preservation are embedded in ownership, authority and living relations.

Academic source links: Indigenous Climate Change Studies | The Geology of Mankind? | Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

References: [49], 153-162; [48], 62-69; [45], introduction and chap. 4.

Primary / institutional evidence links: UNFCCC Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform

7.5 Planetary health and public-health climate action

Historical formation: Public-health climate framing develops from the 1990s; planetary health consolidates in the 2010s.
Core proposition: Human health depends on stable climate and functioning ecological systems. Climate mitigation is preventive medicine that can reduce heat illness, air pollution, infectious disease, undernutrition and mental-health burdens while producing immediate co-benefits.
Philosophical and political genealogy: The frame broadens biomedical public health into ecological interdependence. It is pragmatic and morally resonant: lives saved now may motivate action more effectively than distant global averages.
Policy and diplomatic expression: Heat plans, clean-air rules, health-sector decarbonisation and national adaptation plans use this frame. WHO reports to COPs and health declarations have raised its diplomatic visibility, though health remains secondary to core emissions bargaining.
Critical tensions: Health framing can depoliticise structural causes or prioritise measurable morbidity over cultural and ecological loss. Benefits and exposures remain unequally distributed.
Project relevance: Thirst, air quality, war, urban heat and glacial-water objects can connect climate evidence to bodies without reducing the crisis to individual wellness.

Academic source links: Why We Disagree about Climate Change | Reflections on Climate Change Communication

References: [1], health and risk discussions; [39], 345-369.

Primary / institutional evidence links: WHO climate change and health | WHO COP29 special report

7.6 Doomism, collapse, survivalism and prefiguration

Historical formation: Climate doom and collapse discourse expands online and in popular culture during the 2010s-2020s, drawing on older apocalyptic, survivalist and limits traditions.
Core proposition: Severe disruption or civilisational breakdown is treated as likely or inevitable; politics turns towards grief, local resilience, mutual aid, retreat, preparation or resignation. Prefigurative variants build desired social relations now rather than waiting for state transformation.
Philosophical and political genealogy: This is a heterogeneous field, not a unified ideology. Collapse analysis may be empirical, spiritual, anarchist, communitarian or reactionary. ‘Doomism’ is often a critical label and should not be applied to all catastrophic risk research.
Policy and diplomatic expression: Mainstream national policy rarely adopts collapse assumptions, though continuity-of-government, food-security and disaster-preparedness planning address related risks. Summit diplomacy remains premised on mitigation and adaptation efficacy.
Critical tensions: Inevitability can suppress action and flatten uncertainty; excessive reassurance can equally deny real loss. Survivalism can strengthen community autonomy or become privatised, exclusionary bunker politics.
Project relevance: Eco-prepping, apocalypse, Noah’s Ark and Future can be tagged by temporal orientation, agency and social boundary: who is imagined to survive, through what institutions, and at whose expense?

Academic source links: Apocalypse Forever? | Risk Society | Why We Disagree about Climate Change

References: [42], 213-232; [5], chaps. 1-2; [1], chap. 7.

7.7 Eco-authoritarianism, climate nationalism and far-right ecologies

Historical formation: Academic debate from the 2000s; greater political salience amid migration, resource-security and far-right mobilisation in the 2010s-2020s.
Core proposition: Ecological limits are governed through concentrated authority, border control, exclusion or national preference rather than universal rights and democratic redistribution. Far-right variants combine environmental protection with ethnonational territory and unequal belonging.
Philosophical and political genealogy: Eco-authoritarian arguments claim democracies are too slow for ecological crisis. Climate nationalism treats decarbonisation as sovereignty, strategic autonomy or protection of the national landscape. Eco-fascist currents racialise scarcity and naturalise hierarchy; they must be distinguished from ordinary conservation or national industrial policy.
Policy and diplomatic expression: Emergency powers, restrictive migration framing, strategic-resource policy and national-security planning can move in this direction, but no major climate summit endorses authoritarian or racial exclusion. International climate law formally rests on cooperation and rights, even when implementation is unequal.
Critical tensions: Technocratic coordination is not identical to authoritarianism. The diagnostic question is whether dissent, rights, plural knowledge and equitable participation are displaced in the name of emergency.
Project relevance: Nations, Citizenship, climate refugees, wars and sabotage reports should track how the same ecological language can legitimise solidarity or exclusion.

Academic source links: The Coming of Environmental Authoritarianism | Discourses of Climate Security | Defining Environmental Justice

References: [41], 276-294; [26], 42-51; [9], chaps. 5-6.

7.8 Radical environmentalism, civil disobedience and sabotage

Historical formation: Radical environmental traditions precede climate politics; Earth First! formed in 1980, the Earth Liberation Front emerged in the 1990s, and mass climate civil disobedience expanded in the late 2010s.
Core proposition: When ordinary institutions are judged structurally captured or too slow, activists may justify disruptive direct action to prevent harm, impose economic costs, publicise emergency or prefigure alternative relations. Tactics range from lawful protest and non-violent civil disobedience to clandestine property destruction.
Philosophical and political genealogy: The field draws on deep ecology, anarchism, animal liberation, environmental justice, anti-capitalism and movement traditions of resistance. These traditions disagree over violence, human safety, property, strategy, accountability and democratic legitimacy.
Policy and diplomatic expression: Summit protest has shaped agendas without formal negotiating power. National policy responses include protest rights, policing, anti-terrorism law and infrastructure-protection statutes. In the United States, the ‘eco-terrorism’ category and Green Scare prosecutions institutionalised a security frame around clandestine environmental sabotage.
Critical tensions: No single ideology or organisation represents all direct action. Legal categories, movement self-description and media labels must be kept distinct. Property damage that avoids injury is still illegal and potentially dangerous; state use of terrorism language is itself an object of analysis.
Project relevance: This is the final movement of The Sunshine Find’s narrative: the report links the ideological field to Sunshine, ELF, No Sprawl, Sabotage, Spiking and Future while keeping documented history separate from parafiction.

Academic source links: Dark Green Religion | The Politics of the Earth | Defining Environmental Justice

References: [46], chaps. 6-8; [2], radical and green discourses; [9], movement and participation chapters.

7.9 Delayism, greenwashing and solution substitution

Historical formation: Delay discourse becomes especially visible after overt denial loses legitimacy in many institutions; scholarship formalises the category from 2020 onward.
Core proposition: Actors accept some climate science while redirecting responsibility, proposing non-transformative solutions, emphasising policy downsides or surrendering to supposed inevitability. Greenwashing uses environmental claims that exceed evidence; solution substitution offers offsets, distant technology or voluntary action in place of structural reduction.
Philosophical and political genealogy: Delay is not a single ideology but a strategic repertoire available to fossil interests, governments, companies, consumers and even climate advocates. It often borrows the language of justice, realism, innovation or pragmatism.
Policy and diplomatic expression: National and corporate net-zero plans can embody real transition or delay depending on interim targets, fossil policy, accounting and enforcement. Summit compromise can enable incremental progress while also omitting contested phase-out language.
Critical tensions: The category should not be used to dismiss legitimate concerns about distribution, feasibility or energy access. The test is whether the argument enables an adequate alternative or repeatedly protects high-carbon systems from timely change.
Project relevance: Greenwashing, boycotts, litigation, luxury cosmetics, aviation, tourism and data infrastructure are direct archive sites for comparing rhetoric with material performance.

Academic source links: Discourses of Climate Delay | The Drivers of Greenwashing | Computer-Assisted Classification of Contrarian Claims

References: [31], 1-5; [37], 64-87; [30], article 22320.

8. Chronological policy and summit concordance, 1972-2026

The following concordance connects ideological families to selected summit outcomes and national policies. It records documentary commitments and policy designs, not an evaluation of implementation. The ideological column identifies the dominant grammar of the instrument; most instruments contain several competing grammars.

Primary / institutional evidence links: Stockholm 1972 | UNFCCC Convention | Kyoto Protocol | Paris Agreement | Glasgow outcomes | COP28 outcome | COP29 outcomes | COP30 Belém Political Package | European Climate Law | ICJ climate case

Policy reading note: summit language is negotiated compromise. The same phrase can perform different ideological work for different actors. ‘Just transition’ may mean worker-centred public planning or compensation within a market transition; ‘nature-based solutions’ may mean ecological restoration or offset supply; ‘technology’ may mean public infrastructure or solution substitution; ‘finance mobilisation’ may mean grants, loans, guarantees or private investment. Archive entries should therefore tag both official wording and the political contest around implementation.

9. Revised archive taxonomy and tagging protocol

The archive should retain the supplied narrative labels because they are recognisable and useful for searching. They should, however, sit inside a layered taxonomy. One artefact may receive one primary tag at each level; multiple tags are appropriate where the overlap is documented.

9.1 Minimum metadata for each narrative artefact

Academic source links: Why We Disagree about Climate Change | Communicating Climate Change: Why Frames Matter | Discourses of Climate Delay | Defining Environmental Justice

References: [1], chaps. 1-4; [38], 12-23; [31], 1-5; [9], chaps. 1-4.

10. Interpretive synthesis: from panoramic modernity to contested action

The chronology reveals that climate narratives are not external commentaries added to a neutral physical phenomenon. They are institutional ways of making the phenomenon governable. Productivism turns landscape into energy, mobility and national development. Conservation separates protected spectacle from sacrifice zones. Systems science renders the planet visible through observation, models and thresholds. Sustainable development and ecological modernisation promise reconciliation. Markets convert emissions into prices and assets. Justice redistributes attention towards history, vulnerability and voice. Security frames instability and borders. Net zero reorganises political time around a future balance. Denial, delay and greenwashing contest or absorb these demands. Radical environmentalism disputes the legitimacy of institutions and property when conventional action appears inadequate.

This sequence corresponds to The Sunshine Find’s movement from panoptic tourism to radical action, but it must not be read as inevitable. The Glacier Express does not mechanically cause the ELF, and climate science does not prescribe sabotage. What connects them is a chain of contested mediations: the landscape becomes scenery; scenery becomes commodity and infrastructure; extraction and combustion generate measurable harm; harm is narrated through science, markets, justice, security or denial; these narratives authorise different institutions and actions. The archive’s role is to show those mediations rather than replacing them with one master explanation.

Glaciers are especially powerful in this ideological field because they can function simultaneously as sublime landscape, national icon, tourist commodity, water reserve, scientific indicator, archaeological archive, threatened life-support system and image of irreversible time. This polyvalence makes them vulnerable to depoliticisation. A retreat photograph can support scientific risk governance, catastrophe advertising, national mourning, green branding, degrowth, geoengineering or direct-action rhetoric. The image alone does not determine the ideology; the caption, institution, causal story, implied subject and proposed action do.

For the project’s parafiction, Sunshine’s imagined archive can therefore be understood as a failed or unstable act of synthesis. It collects mutually incompatible ideologies: scientific consensus and myth; ecological care and technological control; personal purity and systemic critique; legal citizenship and clandestine illegality; grief, survival and sabotage. The background archive must not resolve these contradictions by treating every narrative as equally true. Its pedagogical task is more demanding: verify the histories, identify the structures of power, show the consequences of each proposed action, and make explicit where documentary evidence ends and parafiction begins.

The final curatorial proposition is not that ideology can be escaped. Every climate position – including technocratic neutrality or refusal to act – contains assumptions about value, time, authority and acceptable loss. The practical distinction is between ideologies that expose their premises and remain answerable to evidence, rights and consequences, and those that conceal interests, manufacture doubt, defer responsibility or treat vulnerable lives and environments as expendable. That distinction enables the archive to remain plural without becoming relativist.

11. Numbered Academic Reference List

Chicago bibliography style. This numbered list contains only verified scholarly books, academic chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles. Official agreements, national laws, government plans and court records are linked separately in the report and are not presented as academic scholarship.

1. Hulme, Mike. Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. DOI / scholarly record

2. Dryzek, John S. The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. DOI / scholarly record

3. White, Lynn, Jr. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Science 155, no. 3767 (1967): 1203-1207. DOI / scholarly record

4. Eckersley, Robyn. Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. DOI / scholarly record

5. Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Translated by Mark Ritter. London: Sage, 1992. DOI / scholarly record

6. Naess, Arne. “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary.” Inquiry 16, nos. 1-4 (1973): 95-100. DOI / scholarly record

7. Plumwood, Val. “Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism.” Hypatia 6, no. 1 (1991): 3-27. DOI / scholarly record

8. Kaijser, Anna, and Annica Kronsell. “Climate Change through the Lens of Intersectionality.” Environmental Politics 23, no. 3 (2014): 417-433. DOI / scholarly record

9. Schlosberg, David. Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. DOI / scholarly record

10. Banerjee, Subhabrata Bobby. “Who Sustains Whose Development? Sustainable Development and the Reinvention of Nature.” Organization Studies 24, no. 1 (2003): 143-180. DOI / scholarly record

11. Hajer, Maarten A. The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. DOI / scholarly record

12. Bernstein, Steven. The Compromise of Liberal Environmentalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. DOI / scholarly record

13. Roberts, J. Timmons, and Bradley C. Parks. A Climate of Injustice: Global Inequality, North-South Politics, and Climate Policy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. DOI / scholarly record

14. Vanderheiden, Steve. Atmospheric Justice: A Political Theory of Climate Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. DOI / scholarly record

15. Bumpus, Adam G., and Diana M. Liverman. “Accumulation by Decarbonization and the Governance of Carbon Offsets.” Economic Geography 84, no. 2 (2008): 127-155. DOI / scholarly record

16. Lohmann, Larry. “Toward a Different Debate in Environmental Accounting: The Cases of Carbon and Cost-Benefit.” Accounting, Organizations and Society 34, nos. 3-4 (2009): 499-534. DOI / scholarly record

17. Newell, Peter, and Matthew Paterson. Climate Capitalism: Global Warming and the Transformation of the Global Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. DOI / scholarly record

18. Maniates, Michael F. “Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?” Global Environmental Politics 1, no. 3 (2001): 31-52. DOI / scholarly record

19. Kallis, Giorgos. “In Defence of Degrowth.” Ecological Economics 70, no. 5 (2011): 873-880. DOI / scholarly record

20. O’Neill, Daniel W., Andrew L. Fanning, William F. Lamb, and Julia K. Steinberger. “A Good Life for All within Planetary Boundaries.” Nature Sustainability 1 (2018): 88-95. DOI / scholarly record

21. Hickel, Jason, and Giorgos Kallis. “Is Green Growth Possible?” New Political Economy 25, no. 4 (2020): 469-486. DOI / scholarly record

22. Newell, Peter, and Dustin Mulvaney. “The Political Economy of the ‘Just Transition’.” The Geographical Journal 179, no. 2 (2013): 132-140. DOI / scholarly record

23. Heffron, Raphael J., and Darren McCauley. “What Is the ‘Just Transition’?” Geoforum 88 (2018): 74-77. DOI / scholarly record

24. Sultana, Farhana. “Critical Climate Justice.” The Geographical Journal 188, no. 1 (2022): 118-124. DOI / scholarly record

25. Barnett, Jon. “Security and Climate Change.” Global Environmental Change 13, no. 1 (2003): 7-17. DOI / scholarly record

26. McDonald, Matt. “Discourses of Climate Security.” Political Geography 33 (2013): 42-51. DOI / scholarly record

27. Pelling, Mark. Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation. London: Routledge, 2011. DOI / scholarly record

28. Methmann, Chris, and Angela Oels. “From ‘Fearing’ to ‘Empowering’ Climate Refugees: Governing Climate-Induced Migration in the Name of Resilience.” Security Dialogue 46, no. 1 (2015): 51-68. DOI / scholarly record

29. McCright, Aaron M., and Riley E. Dunlap. “The Politicization of Climate Change and Polarization in the American Public’s Views of Global Warming, 2001-2010.” The Sociological Quarterly 52, no. 2 (2011): 155-194. DOI / scholarly record

30. Coan, Travis G., Constantine Boussalis, John Cook, and Mirjam O. Nanko. “Computer-Assisted Classification of Contrarian Claims about Climate Change.” Scientific Reports 11 (2021): 22320. DOI / scholarly record

31. Lamb, William F., Giulio Mattioli, Sebastian Levi, J. Timmons Roberts, Stuart Capstick, Felix Creutzig, Jan C. Minx, Finn Müller-Hansen, Trevor Culhane, and Julia K. Steinberger. “Discourses of Climate Delay.” Global Sustainability 3 (2020): e17. DOI / scholarly record

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Appendix: User prompts related to this report

Prompts are reproduced chronologically as a research-process record. Spelling and wording are retained.

1. 1. Review the attached materials
2. Make a deep research on the types of ideologies that surrounds the topic of climate change (take the narratives taxonomy as a basis, expand, restructure)
3. contextualise these ideologies in philosophical, historical frame.
4. structure them chronologically
5. connect them with national policies and summit resulotions (when applicable)
6. create an RTF according to standards and criteria