From ‘Go Slow’ to ‘Gung Ho’? Climate Engineering Discourses in the UK, the US, and Germany

For years climate engineering—the “deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary climate system to counteract global warming”—was a “taboo subject among scientists.”^1,2,3 However, when Nobel Prize laureate Paul Crutzen published an essay on the topic, he instigated an ongoing debate in various countries.^4,5 Several studies have investigated public discourses on or public attitudes towards climate engineering (CE). Drawing on comparative discourse analysis, we offer an alternative approach that broadens the data pool to analyze not only media, but also scientific and political CE discourses. Our analytical approach thereby contributes to the understanding of national differences in highly contested environmental policy areas such as climate change, which has been explored in other comparative discourse studies.⁶ Using new data from different discourse levels across countries, we develop a generic understanding of the CE debate that may be applied to different national and sub-national discourses....