Is it really all about framing?
Lakoff assumes that people who believe irrational things can actually be convinced, and I’m not sure framing or facts will ultimately matter that much. Many people who can’t accept climate change are surrounded by others who can’t accept it, so that changing their views would involve rejecting their community (or being rejected by it). Ultimately it will come down to political power, where enough people realize that we have to act that we move ahead without the people who can’t accept the reality of climate change.
Framing and language are important, but at a certain point people need to take responsibility for their inability to deal with facts and evidence. You can’t blame it all on framing, as some of the post modernist people seem to do. I don’t think Lakoff does, but many do. This is why I think it will ultimately come down to political power–we will decide as a society that we’re going to ignore the flat earthers and deal with the real risks that climate change poses to the continued orderly development of human civilization. Wilber would say that we need to transcend and include the legitimate concerns that some have about the means to solve the problem, and then figure out solutions that address those concerns in some way. For the 20-30% of the population that will never be convinced, there’s nothing to be done, and it’s a waste of time to try at this point. We’re out of time and need to get moving.
Some great discussion of framing with references is in this article: Harjanne, Atte, and Janne M. Korhonen. 2019. “Abandoning the concept of renewable energy.” Energy Policy. vol. 127, 2019/04/01/. pp. 330-340. [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421518308280]
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Framing is a process where meanings are constructed (Benford and Snow, 2000). Originally introduced by Goffman (1974), frames can be considered models of interpretation which enable the organization of experiences and occurrences into communicable sets of shared beliefs and meanings that also guide action (Benford and Snow, 2000). Frames are thus essential for the formation and maintenance of institutional logic as well. Frames and framing have mostly been applied in research on social movements, where the interest typically is the role of frames in inspiring and legitimating actions and for mobilizing resources (Benford and Snow, 2000, Granqvist and Laurila, 2011). Among science and technology studies, Rosenberg’s (1976) idea of “focusing devices” that direct research and policy efforts towards a specific subset of technologies, sometimes at the expense of other subsets, resonates with this idea of a framing process. The nature of framing also includes drawing boundaries between what is included in a shared meaning and what is not, and can result in umbrella constructs (Hirsch and Levin, 1999) that organize various theoretical elements of a field into a meaningfully combined concept.
In this paper, we approach the concept of renewable energy as a socially constructed result of framing in the field of energy policy. Since frames are fundamentally constructed in discursive processes (Benford and Snow, 2000) we focus our attention mainly on language and written documents, although we briefly discuss visual discourse (see, e.g. O’Neill and Smith, 2014) as well. Discourse analysis has been widely used in studying the formation of environmental and energy policies (see, e.g. Hajer and Versteeg, 2005; Jessup, 2010; Cotton et al., 2014), and the role of linguistic framing and discourse in energy policy has been discussed in detail by Scrase and Ockwell (2010), who described how framing may serve to sustain the continuation of existing policy positions. It should be noted that while we rely on theory of framing, we refer to renewable energy also as a “concept”, since we believe that this term is more familiar to most audiences.
