How do environmentalists better persuade the general public of green policies? This is a question that any environmental advocate should be concerned with, and answers have been attempted by many politicians and rhetors. Only by analyzing the rhetorical framing of previous major environmentalist politicians can we begin to answer that question. I chose to start contributing to that answer with an analysis of President Obama’s approach to the B.P. oil spill.
More specifically, my work investigates the rhetorical strategies that the Obama administration deployed in response to the B.P. oil spill, and the consequences of those strategies. Including both presidential speeches as well as departmental press releases and writings, my paper traces the ways the Obama administration prioritized non-environmental justifications for addressing the B.P. oil spill, particularly appeals to a need to compete economically with China. Using the B.P. oil spill as a case study, my paper argues that economic and national security appeals as the primary rhetorical framing for environmental policy are ultimately harmful to environmentalist interests.
In President Obama’s first Oval Office address on the B.P. oil spill, he offered several justifications that will be evaluated in this work, with one in particular serving as the impetus for this analysis. He states that “Countries like China are investing in clean energy jobs and industries that should be right here in America.” First and foremost, the B.P. oil spill was caused by a British company within United States waters, neither of which involved China in the slightest. While there might seem to be a tenable link to clean energy given the nature of the oil spill being intrinsically tied into energy concerns, it conflates two distinct ideas. The clean energy jobs and industries mentioned by President Obama are all related to electricity production. Oil is not considered a part of the electricity generating market, given that it is used to generate less than 1% of electricity in the United States. So then, the invocation of clean technology poses a question: Why did President Obama mention Chinese clean energy investments in a speech about oil? This question serves as the guide for this work and will be answered through an analysis of the explanatory affect employed.
The answer to this question, surprisingly, is fairly intuitive- that appeals to competition with China and economic concerns are better received by right-of-center constituents than environmentalist messages are, generally speaking. However, there is a tacit trade-off when choosing to rhetorically frame the B.P. oil spill in this manner, and that trade-off is with broader environmentalist messaging. The Obama Administration consistently situated the B.P. oil spill as primarily a casus belli for competing further with China, which has a direct trade-off with framing the spill in a more directly environmental manner.
Framing clean energy as just another field on which to compete with China upon delegitimizes the environmental value of those emerging technologies and serves to lend further credence to the fossil fuel industry’s arguments. Prioritizing competing with China in this clearly economic sense is functionally justifying environmentalist policy by its positive impact upon the economy. While I do not dispute that clean energy can indeed be beneficial for the economy, prioritizing an evaluation of clean energy’s worth by its economic value is putting the ball squarely in the fossil fuel industry’s court. Economic justifications are what they excel at, continuously hammering in point after point about how their industry is crucial to American jobs and America’s success on an increasingly globalized stage. Through prioritizing economic use-value as a justification for environmentalist policy rather than the environment having its own intrinsic worth, the Obama Administration ceded the framing of the debate to the fossil fuel industry right from the start. It is also a double-edged sword for environmentalists to begin conflating energy sources and their uses. Although this can provide some extended platforming such as how President Obama used the B.P. oil spill to discuss wind energy and solar panels, that approach risks being exploited right back at environmentalists by fossil fuel industries. They have frequently used confusion over science and what technologies actually are to their advantage, with large swaths of climate denialism to attest to that.
Secondly, invoking China as being the entity that America needs to compete with is also damaging to environmentalist goals. Competitive mindsets can be good for industries but are rarely helpful when attempting to tackle global problems that require cooperation such as climate change. China has been making great strides with environmental regulations as well as massively increasing investment in clean energy as President Obama rightfully indicated, but these should serve as calls to partner and cooperate with China rather than as something America needs to defeat China at. This competitive mindset with China is easily co-opted by presidents that are less-than-environmentally friendly such as President Trump in his veritable trade war with China.
This work is not meant to cast a suspicious light on President Obama, but rather to analyze his administration’s rhetorical packaging and framing of an environmental disaster, and what environmentalists can learn from that. As a result of my work, the B.P. oil spill can be looked to as a case study for how environmentalist rhetoric that invokes economic competition with China can cause more long-lasting harm than benefit for environmental policy goals.
Leave a Reply