We have spoken throughout this book of climate change as amenable to fruitful analysis as a drama. Nowhere is this claim more obvious than in the case of climate change conferences. Yet as we show in this chapter, the theatricality of climate conferences is surprisingly multifaceted and marked by a high degree of what Victor Turner called “performative reflexivity” (see Chapter 2). These are no mere dog-and-pony shows. Of course, such meetings have bureaucratic and legislative activities that are to some extent hidden or “backstage,” and policy experts are apt to depict this backstage deal making as “where the action really happens.” Still the drama analogy holds along a surprising number of dimensions. We begin by noting that conventions and conferences have ritual aspects. As Lyn Spillman (2012) shows in her discussion of American business association annual meetings, even the most humdrum get together of concrete engineers or rubber glove makers will have a solidaristic and civic component. This is enacted and reproduced through performative gestures like memorials, award ceremonies, charity auctions, and dinner cruises. She writes that in such events, “many contemporary associations demonstrate camaraderie well above and beyond the pursuit of shared interests” (169). So conferences and congresses are like rituals. And from ritual to drama is but a short step, as Nietzsche – echoing Aristotle's prior analysis – showed in his interpretation of Greek civilization.

The analogies are manifold. Indeed, strictly considered, they are not even analogies but shared properties. Like staged dramas, conferences take place in a defined location (a city, a convention center) and exist for a predetermined period of time. These are places where people perform to each other to make claims and to demonstrate their good character. The guaranteed presence of the global mass media makes the effort involved in performing well an even better investment. So politicians and activists work hard to tell stories, to display competence and talent, and to relay facts to the onlooking global audience.

Gus Speth is often called the “Dean of the environmental movement.” In a recent manifesto published in Orion Magazine (2012), this consummate technocrat makes a startling admission:

Regarding the language we use and the messages we seek to convey, I can see clearly now that we environmentalists have been too wonkish and too focused on technical fixes. We have not developed well the capacity to speak in a language that goes straight to the American heart, resonates with both core moral values and common aspirations, and projects a positive and compelling vision. Throughout my forty-odd years in the environmental community, public discourse on environment has been dominated by lawyers, scientists, and economists – people like me. Now we need to hear a lot more from the preachers, the poets, the psychologists, and the philosophers. And our message must be one that is founded on hope and honest possibility.

Speth is not alone in moving from the “hard” world of policy to the “soft” world of culture. In both academic and popular environmental debate, there has been a clear cultural turn of late. Talk of “iconography” and “ideology” abounds; “myths,” “frames,” and “symbols” are common currency. Today it has become something of a clich´e, even in scientific circles, to describe climate change as first and foremost a “cultural problem.”

So culture shapes the perception and politics of climate change. But just how? This is not so clear. Scholars and critics offer a number of competing answers. In this chapter, we try to cut through the confusion by presenting a theory of climate change as social drama. Our approach is deceptively simple. Most theories look to root causes rather than surface effects. Some blame controversy and inaction on conflicting worldviews, value systems, and cosmologies of nature. Others blame the ideological influence of “carbon class power” (Urry 2011), with its deep impacts on commonsense expectations about lifestyle and ethical behavior.

Scientists usually think of climate change as a material process that requires technology if it is to be understood. With thermometers, satellite systems, weather balloons, and consequent computer modeling, they can come to terms with the chemical and physical process through which the planet heats up. They can measure and predict shifts in rainfall, in extreme weather, and in glacial ice distributions. Scholars involved in political science and social policy analysis look closely at practical human responses to risks. For example, they might explore resource conflicts or the impact of initiatives designed to down our harmful emissions. In the previous chapter we set out another way of seeing climate change. This is to take it not only as the product and producer of social outcomes but also as a meaningful social fact. Climate change is something more than a process involving molecules, energies, oceanic currents and solar radiation, human impacts upon nature, and policy responses. It is also a complex cultural field. To make sense of this qualitatively different, non-material dimension of its existence, the approach of cultural sociology is needed.

From the perspective of cultural sociology the natural event of climate change is subject to communicative translation via binary codes, deeply grounded myths, parables, images, characters, performances, and rituals. Together they add up to the social drama of climate change in which legitimacy is contested, moral authority gained, and public opinion formed. In this chapter we begin our empirical investigations by giving emphasis to one Aristotelian theme to this process: genre. In his Poetics Aristotle achieved a major breakthrough by recognizing and documenting the deep structural similarities that underpin various narratives and that lead them to constitute a recognizable genre. Recent work in cultural sociology has built on this insight in three ways that are crucial to our inquiry.