Climate Social Science Network

@cssn.org

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A global network of social scientists focused on political conflicts around climate change, headquartered at Brown University. https://cssn.org/

Title card for keynote speech with Dale Jamieson: "Climate Ethics: The Development of a Field and the Long History of Denialism." EVent is May 19, 2026, at 11am EST.

screenshot of paper titled "Contesting fossil extractivism: Practices of deactivation in Milan and Civitavecchia, Italy", highlighted quote: "The study highlights three critical conditions for successful counter-obstruction: internal realignment of obstructive networks, multi-level strategic practices (discursive, procedural, infrastructural), and temporal alignment with key decision-making moments."

A chart of the most frequent search terms. "Climate control" is by far number one, followed by "green fossil fuels" and "drill baby drill."

screenshot of introduction and login page for CLARA. Text reads: "Hello, I am CLARA!"

cover of Climate Obstruction Across Europe

Screenshot of abstract reading: Populism is multilayered and involves two main dimensions – ideology and strategy – which are employed within and beyond political parties. These dimensions can result in sometimes overlapping but generally divergent backlashes, targeting specific climate and sustainability interventions in cities. This critical commentary presents episodic populist backlashes against urban climate actions by exploring how they create their own political landscapes across the political spectrum in cities against progressive urban climate agendas. Specifically, the article examines how episodic populist backlashes manifest on an urban scale and highlights the need for urban scholars to pay more attention to the phenomenon. The article proposes two complementary explanations for why populism precedes urban climate actions in episodic and thematic ways. These explanations include policy backlashes against diffused global climate norms in cities, and counter-movements and rh

Screenshot of abstract text: Net-zero plans, or the target of negating an organization's carbon emissions by 2050, have proliferated among large oil and gas companies. These plans have led to misleading and unverifiable claims to climate protection and have spurred concerns by researchers about greenwashing. This article examines net zero greenwashing using the case of Pathways Alliance, a coalition of six companies representing 95 % of oil sands production in Canada, one of the world's largest oil reserves.

Drawing on a corpus of documents (n = 183) spanning a two-year period, including materials from the coalition's advertising and public relations campaign, we evaluate Pathways Alliance's public communication for indicators of net-zero greenwashing. We identify instances of selective disclosure and omission, misalignment of claim and action, displacement of responsibility, non-credible claims, specious comparisons, nonstandard accounting, and inadequate reporting. There is also evi

a screenshot of two article titles, "Academic Capture in the Anthropocene" and "The animal agriculture industry, US universities, and the obstruction of climate understanding and policy"

Screenshot of abstract text: Mainstream climate policy discourse obscures power disparities between those who contribute the most to climate change and those who are hit the hardest, particularly in discussions regarding the appropriate targets for intervention, including behavioral change. We reflect and critique this obfuscation of power in policy debates, and as a corrective, we identify actors with high levels of climate responsibility and high capacity for mitigation and adaptation, and that intersect different scales of social organization. We visually map these overlaps to spur productive dialogue and generate new policy ideas to target the worst violators first and encourage action for others where it is rooted in what capacities they have. We include examples of how power disparities reflect and produce complex climate injustices, underscoring the importance of conceptualizing power through a multiscalar lens for fair and effective climate policy.

Screenshot of abstract text: How do nonprofits advocate and shape climate conversations on Twitter? We answer this question by combining computational analyses with thick descriptions of discursive data to analyze message diffusion on Twitter. We first map a temporal message similarity network comprising 298,073 unique tweets sent by climate action and obstruction nonprofits. We then identify four leading nonprofits and trace their message similarity to 2,479 accounts over 2 weeks. Our results suggest that while climate obstruction nonprofits might not be frequent tweeters, their voices are highly reciprocal in the Twitterverse. We also find that messages of either side are most echoed by the public rather than elite audiences. Although diffusion to policymakers is almost absent, we uncover high semantic similarities between messages from climate obstruction nonprofits and bot-like accounts. Our analyses contribute to new theoretical and empirical insights into the roles of nonprofit c

A photo grid of Climate Social Science Network scholars with filters to select areas of expertise and country on top

Flier for "Taking on Climate Obstruction on Loss and Damage and Adaptation" event featuring a photo of Saleemul Huq

Screen shot of abstract text:
The author investigates why some framings of climate change are publicized in American mainstream media while others are not, examining organizational power and cultural resonance as two paths through which messages may gain visibility. First, she uses automated text analysis to identify climate change frames in interest groups’ press releases (𝑁=1,768
), coding frames for features believed to heighten cultural resonance. Then, she uses plagiarism-detection software to identify which messages were publicized in three major newspapers, 1985–2014. She finds that policy messages from structurally powerful interest groups such as business coalitions have received disproportionate media attention in the US climate debate. However, organizational resources alone are not determinative of messages’ success. Political messages are also more likely to receive visibility when they leverage sources of cultural power, such as by appealing to the latent world

Abstract screen shot: The development of country specific decarbonisation pathways is becoming increasingly common as more governments commit to achieving Net Zero. These pathways are critical for setting the direction and pace of decarbonisation.

This article reviews the characteristics of fifteen different UK Net Zero pathways (three government pathways and 12 additional pathways) and shows how the expectation of technology innovation and low-carbon energy abundance closes down the space potential pathways can occupy. In particular, we find that while conceptually different, the three government pathways display a high degree of similarity and that the majority of pathways rely on significant amounts of new clean energy and retain large residual emissions in 2050 which requires the deployment of significant new carbon dioxide removal technologies.

The dominance of high energy and high residual emission pathways is also observed in international scenarios including IPCC's Shared Soc

Text of abstract of the article: Environmental philanthropy is expanding while inequities and disparities among those impacted by environmental degradation are also growing. Little is known about the distribution of funds from environmental philanthropy, that is, who is benefitting and who is excluded? This study analyzes how environmental philanthropy is being distributed among non-profit organizations working on a low-carbon energy transition in Canada. The funding sources of 462 organizations characterized as either diversity-led or conventional-led were analyzed and compared. Organizations that are clearly led by equity deserving communities were classified as “diversity-led” while organizations that provided no indication of diverse leadership were classified as “conventional-led”. The findings indicate that the 356 conventional-led organizations receive philanthropic support from more funders than the 106 diversity-led organizations. The diversity-led organizations, that are more

Flier for What's New in Climate Obstructino event, featuring Brendan Demelle, Viveca Morris, and Dieter Plehwe

Screenshot of the abstract for Energy Citizens “Just Like You”? Public Relations Campaigning by the Climate Change Counter-movement

Book cover of A Strategic Nature, featuring an image of an arrow made of leaves