In this interview, Kjell Vowles discusses his research and findings of the recent article in Environmental Politics – Far-right fossil fuel ignorance: The nostalgia of national-industrial modernity.
Congratulations on your recent article! What is the key message that you hope people take from this publication?
Thank you! Most importantly, the article theorizes how different far-right ideological tendencies can be understood as a nostalgic longing for a patriarchal, homogenous, and industrially successful nation-state, which promised lifelong employment, continued economic growth, and ever-expanding national welfare. This society was – and to a degree is – built on fossil fuels and environmental and human exploitation. While environmental, feminist, and anti-racist movements are trying to acknowledge and dismantle these oppressing structures, many far-right actors in the Global North are instead trying to reassert and naturalize them.
You argue that far-right climate obstruction is not just about denying science, it is about recreating fossil fuel ignorance. Could you elaborate on this?
The theoretical argument in the paper grew out of earlier empirical work that I did for my PhD-dissertation regarding climate discourses on digital far-right media in Sweden. What was clear in that work, was that in most cases the science wasn’t discussed, rather a discourse was created where it was taken for granted that climate change was more or less a hoax. Also, climate only became a prominent issue on these digital sites as a reaction to Greta Thunberg and the heightened media attention that climate change got at the end of the 2010s. So, the idea of recreating widespread fossil fuel ignorance is simply to try to push climate change mitigation off the political agenda, in order to continue unabated the burning of fossil fuels.
The concept of “restorative nostalgia” suggests the far right is trying to rebuild an idealized 1950s-60s past that required systematic ignorance. What was being ignored then that they want to ignore again?
Restorative nostalgia is a concept developed by Svetlana Boym, who argues that it is about trying to restore a lost home – a nation – to a supposedly true state. And for many far-right actors today, the supposedly true state was these post-second-world-war-decades which saw record economic growth in many industrialized nation-states.
To answer the question of what was being ignored, I need to explain the concept of anti-reflexivity. In my article I revisit early work on climate change denial by scholars such as Riley Dunlap, Aaron McCright, Nathan Young, Anline Coutinho and Peter Jacques, who connected denial and anti-environmentalism with anti-reflexivity. The term anti-reflexivity signaled a backlash to what sociologist Ulrich Beck (among others) described as a reflexive turn in modernity, in which modernity would turn against itself and develop into a more reflexive version. This version would be more equal and could handle risks associated with, for example, environmental degradation. More recently, Irma Allen, in her dissertation Dirty Coal, also connected far-right denial of environmental problems and opposition to changing family-gender norms with a broader backlash to this reflexive turn.
The first modernity of Beck, which I call national-industrial modernity, was also a society synonymous with the nation-state, and where engineering and perceived masculine rationality would guarantee technological progress and increased welfare to national citizens. However, this society was structured around gender inequality, global unequal exchange, and environmental exploitation and degradation – including climate change. These facts were not unknown, but they were often conveniently ignored. And this is what much of the far right wants to ignore again today – an immoral system can be more easily upheld if its immorality can be ignored.
With far-right parties gaining power globally, what does your framework tell us about the future of climate action and social justice movements?
Something that most scholars in the field are struggling with, I think, is to understand the wide appeal of the far right. The nostalgia of national-industrial modernity can help explain part of it, as it is a longing for an idealized past that has two sides. On the one hand, it is a longing for a time when life was perceived to be easier for those enjoying the environmental and gender-based privileges of being a white male in an industrialized country, on the other, it is a longing to a less individualized society when income inequality within industrialized nations was generally a lot lower than today. It will certainly be tumultuous to stop burning the fossil fuels that kept our societies running since the birth of industrialization, but climate and social justice movements must try to create appealing visions of inclusive future societies, to counter the nostalgic visions of the far right.
Finally, what’s next? Are you publishing more on this topic?
Later this year, the anthology Global far-right ecologies: Trends, issues and responses, which I’ve co-edited with my colleagues in the PEFR-network (Political Ecologies of the Far Right), is due to be published. Apart from that, on a personal level, the article is in many ways an endpoint to the work on far-right climate obstruction which I began when I started my PhD in 2019. Now I am planning to do more research on the connection between nationalism and climate change beyond the far right. However, as outlined at the end of the article, I think nostalgia – as well as identity and interests – connected to large-scale national industries can be important across the political spectrum.
Bio
Kjell Vowles is an environmental social scientist and a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology and Work Science at the University of Gothenburg. He is also a member of IFORCED (the Institute for Research on Climate obstruction and Disinformation), CSSN (the Climate Social Science Network) and PEFR. He defended his PhD, Fuelling denial – The climate change reactionary movement and Swedish far-right media in 2024, and has published his work in journals such as Environmental Communication and the Nordic Journal of Media Studies. His work centers around why we, on a societal level, are still not doing enough to stop the burning of fossil fuels. As a former climate journalist, he is dedicated to spreading his research outside of academia. He regularly writes popular science articles and essays for Swedish magazine and newspapers, and he has co-written two popular science books in Swedish.
