To protect or to pollute: The gendered and racialised logics of U.S. Presidential climate change narratives

Abstract

Climate change becomes knowable in the stories that are told about what climate change is and what solutions are possible to mediate its effects on the human and non-human world. Presidents of the United States of America have acted as voices of authority in global and domestic climate governance contexts since the signing of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) in 1992. This thesis identifies and deconstructs the climate change narratives produced by Bill Clinton, George W. Bush. Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden over the period 1993-2022 to argue that these narratives are shaped by, and perpetuate, gendered and racialised logics, demonstrating the centrality of gender and race to U.S Presidential climate change discourse over the past twenty-nine years. Through analysis of a unique curated dataset of 971 documents spanning an almost thirty-year period, using a combination of discourse and narrative analysis, this thesis reveals how national security, neoliberal, ecomodernist, and development logics, all of which are gendered and racialised, are embedded in the dominant narratives framing climate change as an issue of security, the economy, and justice. Increased awareness of climate change's disproportionate impact on the world’s most vulnerable populations and the systemic inequalities perpetuating this disparity underscores the urgency of this investigation into the logics that support the climate change narratives of the leader of the world’s largest military and economy. This thesis demonstrates that differences in the varying climate change attitudes of each President are more superficial than substantive, as the climate change discourse of successive U.S. Presidents reproduces the authority and legitimacy of white, masculinist perspectives, thereby contributing to ongoing epistemological and material violence in the climate crisis context.