Defending Liberty: Constructing Climate Denialism through Collective Identity

Abstract

In the global climate transition, social movements have emerged as new actors who actively oppose this development. The purpose of this study is to examine one such movement, Bränsleupproret, a Swedish reactionary movement on social media, and how collective identities are formed to counter this transition. To meet the challenge of analysing large amounts of unstructured Facebook data, a new method, Hybrid CDA, has been developed in this thesis. This method combines Critical Discourse Analysis and Large Language Models (LLM) to not only analyse complex data sets, but also to illuminate how the movement mobilizes by correlating moral principles and emotions. These results summarise significant correlations between Liberty and Anger, Safety and Fear, and Community and Trust. The results also indicate that participants use strategies such as “echo of moral shock” to create and reinforce an us-versus-them dynamic. The movement portrays an anti-climate discourse by portraying climate policy as ‘terror politics’, which threatens individual and national security, as well as the survival of rural areas, and positions itself as a defender of democratic rights and the social contract. Through these discourses, the movement appears as a reactionary force within the broader Climate Change Reactionary Movement (CCRM) by advocating fossil liberal values and opposes climate policy. In addition to the empirical findings, the paper also makes a methodological contribution by introducing Hybrid CDA as a tool for analysing large data sets in the social sciences. In this way, new perspectives are presented on how moral principles and emotions work together within Bränsleupproret.