Climate Change Scepticism: a Transnational Ecocritical Analysis
Garrard, Greg. "Climate Scepticism in the UK." Climate Change Scepticism: A Transnational Ecocritical Analysis. By Greg GarrardAxel GoodbodyGeorge HandleyStephanie Posthumus. London,: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 41–90. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 26 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350057050.ch-002>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 26 September 2021, 23:43 UTC. Copyright © Greg Garrard, George Handley, Axel Goodbody and Stephanie Posthumus 2019. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 2 Climate Scepticism in the UK Greg Garrard Before embarking on a detailed analysis of sceptical British texts, I will provide some historical and scholarly context. There have been many studies of anti- environmentalism in the United States (Helvarg; Brick; Ehrlich and Ehrlich; Switzer) and one on the global ‘backlash’ (Rowell), but none focuses exclusively on the UK. The sole treatment of anti-environmentalism within ecocriticism comes from the United States (Buell), just like the various exposés of climate scepticism discussed in the Introduction. As this chapter will show, British climate scepticism is possessed of a prehistory and some distinctive local features that reward closer inspection. Nevertheless, the Anglo-American axis of organized anti-environmentalism is obvious: British climate sceptics such as Christopher Monckton, James Delingpole and Nigel Lawson are darlings of the American conservative think tanks (CTTs) that promulgate sceptical perspectives, while Martin Durkin’s The Great Global Warming Swindle (2007), a British documentary shown on Channel 4, includes interviews with Richard Lindzen, Patrick Michaels and Fred Singer, all prominent American sceptics.
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