Where ideology meets private interest: the three-part composition of climate obstruction in the United States

Abstract A network of organizations working to oppose climate action, called the climate change countermovement (CCCM), has long been a critical yet highly opaque subject of study for social scientists concerned with climate politics. We leverage a new combined dataset of boards of directors, financial contributions, and texts produced by CCCM members to characterize its sources of support and social structure. We show that foundations tend to make more frequent and larger donations to CCCM nonprofits when they are linked through a board member. We also show that CCCM nonprofits which are more distant from each other in the social network of board members produce different climate change discourses. Community detection methods robustly detect three communities within the CCCM: conservative think tanks (CTT), oil and gas trade associations, and utility, coal, and manufacturing trade associations, each with unique goals within the countermovement. The findings suggest that the climate countermovement is an interface among these communities which together ensure that climate action obstruction is achieved on different but complementary fronts, through both discursive and more concrete policy efforts. This paper also introduces a new way of understanding organized climate obstruction and makes significant methodological contributions in the study of social movements and countermovements.