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August 14, 2026Discourse & Society

Climate whataboutism at work: How Danes discursively redirect responsibility for action

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Authors

SNSøren Beck Nielsen

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Overview

Discourse analysis reveals how speakers use category contrasts to redirect climate responsibility in public debates, suggesting local emission reduction efforts are framed as futile.

Key Points

  • To examine how climate whataboutism is constructed discursively to redirect responsibility for climate action in political and public debates.
  • Conducted membership categorization analysis on a corpus of written and oral Danish conversations and debates concerning climate action and policy.
  • Examined interactions across political actors, interest groups, and private individuals.
  • Speakers construct climate whataboutism by pairing and maximizing contrast between higher-emitting external categories and lower-emitting categories they identify with.
  • Conversational whataboutism is deployed across both affiliative and antagonistic contexts to argue that local emissions reductions are pointless, deflecting accountability.

Cite This Study

Søren Beck Nielsen (2026) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/6a7ec79cb70b84ec8b914105https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265261471173
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