rhetorical analysis essay climate change

6.4 Annotated Student Sample: “Slowing Climate Change” by Shawn Krukowski

Learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Identify the features common to proposals.
• Analyze the organizational structure of a proposal and how writers develop ideas.
• Articulate how writers use and cite evidence to build credibility.
• Identify sources of evidence within a text and in source citations.

Introduction

The proposal that follows was written by student Shawn Krukowski for a first-year composition course. Shawn’s assignment was to research a contemporary problem and propose one or more solutions. Deeply concerned about climate change, Shawn chose to research ways to slow the process. In his proposal, he recommends two solutions he thinks are most promising.

Living by Their Own Words

A call to action.

student sample text The earth’s climate is changing. Although the climate has been changing slowly for the past 22,000 years, the rate of change has increased dramatically. Previously, natural climate changes occurred gradually, sometimes extending over thousands of years. Since the mid-20th century, however, climate change has accelerated exponentially, a result primarily of human activities, and is reaching a crisis level. end student sample text

student sample text Critical as it is, however, climate change can be controlled. Thanks to current knowledge of science and existing technologies, it is possible to respond effectively. Although many concerned citizens, companies, and organizations in the private sector are taking action in their own spheres, other individuals, corporations, and organizations are ignoring, or even denying, the problem. What is needed to slow climate change is unified action in two key areas—mitigation and adaptation—spurred by government leadership in the United States and a global commitment to addressing the problem immediately. end student sample text

annotated text Introduction. The proposal opens with an overview of the problem and pivots to the solution in the second paragraph. end annotated text

annotated text Thesis Statement. The thesis statement in last sentence of the introduction previews the organization of the proposal and the recommended solutions. end annotated text

Problem: Negative Effects of Climate Change

annotated text Heading. Centered, boldface headings mark major sections of the proposal. end annotated text

annotated text Body. The three paragraphs under this heading discuss the problem. end annotated text

annotated text Topic Sentence. The paragraph opens with a sentence stating the topics developed in the following paragraphs. end annotated text

student sample text For the 4,000 years leading up to the Industrial Revolution, global temperatures remained relatively constant, with a few dips of less than 1°C. Previous climate change occurred so gradually that life forms were able to adapt to it. Some species became extinct, but others survived and thrived. In just the past 100 years, however, temperatures have risen by approximately the same amount that they rose over the previous 4,000 years. end student sample text

annotated text Audience. Without knowing for sure the extent of readers’ knowledge of climate change, the writer provides background for them to understand the problem. end annotated text

student sample text The rapid increase in temperature has a negative global impact. First, as temperatures rise, glaciers and polar ice are melting at a faster rate; in fact, by the middle of this century, the Arctic Ocean is projected to be ice-free in summer. As a result, global sea levels are projected to rise from two to four feet by 2100 (U.S. Global Change Research Program [USGCRP], 2014a). If this rise actually does happen, many coastal ecosystems and human communities will disappear. end student sample text

annotated text Discussion of the Problem. The first main point of the problem is discussed in this paragraph. end annotated text

annotated text Statistics as Evidence. The writer provides specific numbers and cites the source in APA style. end annotated text

annotated text Transitions . The writer uses transitions here (first, as a result , and second in the next paragraph) and elsewhere to make connections between ideas and to enable readers to follow them more easily. At the same time, the transitions give the proposal coherence. end annotated text

student sample text Second, weather of all types is becoming more extreme: heat waves are hotter, cold snaps are colder, and precipitation patterns are changing, causing longer droughts and increased flooding. Oceans are becoming more acidic as they increase their absorption of carbon dioxide. This change affects coral reefs and other marine life. Since the 1980s, hurricanes have increased in frequency, intensity, and duration. As shown in Figure 6.5, the 2020 hurricane season was the most active on record, with 30 named storms, a recording-breaking 11 storms hitting the U.S. coastline (compared to 9 in 1916), and 10 named storms in September—the highest monthly number on record. Together, these storms caused more than $40 billion in damage. Not only was this the fifth consecutive above-normal hurricane season, it was preceded by four consecutive above-normal years in 1998 to 2001 (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2020). end student sample text

annotated text Discussion of the Problem. The second main point of the problem is discussed in this paragraph. end annotated text

annotated text Visual as Evidence. The writer refers to “Figure 6.4” in the text and places the figure below the paragraph. end annotated text

annotated text Source Citation in APA Style: Visual. The writer gives the figure a number, a title, an explanatory note, and a source citation. The source is also cited in the list of references. end annotated text

Solutions: Mitigation and Adaptation

annotated text Heading. The centered, boldface heading marks the start of the solutions section of the proposal. end annotated text

annotated text Body. The eight paragraphs under this heading discuss the solutions given in the thesis statement. end annotated text

student sample text To control the effects of climate change, immediate action in two key ways is needed: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigating climate change by reducing and stabilizing the carbon emissions that produce greenhouse gases is the only long-term way to avoid a disastrous future. In addition, adaptation is imperative to allow ecosystems, food systems, and development to become more sustainable. end student sample text

student sample text Mitigation and adaptation will not happen on their own; action on such a vast scale will require governments around the globe to take initiatives. The United States needs to cooperate with other nations and assume a leadership role in fighting climate change. end student sample text

annotated text Objective Stance. The writer presents evidence (facts, statistics, and examples) in neutral, unemotional language, which builds credibility, or ethos, with readers. end annotated text

annotated text Heading. The flush-left, boldface heading marks the first subsection of the solutions. end annotated text

annotated text Topic Sentence. The paragraph opens with a sentence stating the solution developed in the following paragraphs. end annotated text

student sample text The first challenge is to reduce the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The Union of Concerned Scientists (2020) warns that “net zero” carbon emissions—meaning that no more carbon enters the atmosphere than is removed—needs to be reached by 2050 or sooner. As shown in Figure 6.6, reducing carbon emissions will require a massive effort, given the skyrocketing rate of increase of greenhouse gases since 1900 (USGCRP, 2014b). end student sample text

annotated text Synthesis. In this paragraph, the writer synthesizes factual evidence from two sources and cites them in APA style. end annotated text

annotated text Visual as Evidence. The writer refers to “Figure 6.5” in the text and places the figure below the paragraph. end annotated text

student sample text Significant national policy changes must be made and must include multiple approaches; here are two areas of concern: end student sample text

annotated text Presentation of Solutions. For clarity, the writer numbers the two items to be discussed. end annotated text

student sample text 1. Transportation systems. In the United States in 2018, more than one-quarter—28.2 percent—of emissions resulted from the consumption of fossil fuels for transportation. More than half of these emissions came from passenger cars, light-duty trucks, sport utility vehicles, and minivans (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency [EPA], 2020). Priorities for mitigation should include using fuels that emit less carbon; improving fuel efficiency; and reducing the need for travel through urban planning, telecommuting and videoconferencing, and biking and pedestrian initiatives. end student sample text

annotated text Source Citation in APA Style: Group Author. The parenthetical citation gives the group’s name, an abbreviation to be used in subsequent citations, and the year of publication. end annotated text

student sample text Curtailing travel has a demonstrable effect. Scientists have recorded a dramatic drop in emissions during government-imposed travel and business restrictions in 2020. Intended to slow the spread of COVID-19, these restrictions also decreased air pollution significantly. For example, during the first six weeks of restrictions in the San Francisco Bay area, traffic was reduced by about 45 percent, and emissions were roughly a quarter lower than the previous six weeks. Similar findings were observed around the globe, with reductions of up to 80 percent (Bourzac, 2020). end student sample text

annotated text Source Citation in APA Style: One Author. The parenthetical citation gives the author’s name and the year of publication. end annotated text

student sample text 2. Energy production. The second-largest source of emissions is the use of fossil fuels to produce energy, primarily electricity, which accounted for 26.9 percent of U.S. emissions (EPA, 2020). Fossil fuels can be replaced by solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal sources. Solar voltaic systems have the potential to become the least expensive energy in the world (Green America, 2020). Solar sources should be complemented by wind power, which tends to increase at night when the sun is absent. According to the Copenhagen Consensus, the most effective way to combat climate change is to increase investment in green research and development (Lomborg, 2020). Notable are successes in the countries of Morocco and The Gambia, both of which have committed to investing in national programs to limit emissions primarily by generating electricity from renewable sources (Mulvaney, 2019). end student sample text

annotated text Synthesis. The writer develops the paragraph by synthesizing evidence from four sources and cites them in APA style. end annotated text

student sample text A second way to move toward net zero is to actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Forests and oceans are so-called “sinks” that collect and store carbon (EPA, 2020). Tropical forests that once made up 12 percent of global land masses now cover only 5 percent, and the loss of these tropical forest sinks has caused 16 to 19 percent of greenhouse gas emissions (Green America, 2020). Worldwide reforestation is vital and demands both commitment and funding on a global scale. New technologies also allow “direct air capture,” which filers carbon from the air, and “carbon capture,” which prevents it from leaving smokestacks. end student sample text

student sample text All of these technologies should be governmentally supported and even mandated, where appropriate. end student sample text

annotated text Synthesis. The writer develops the paragraph by synthesizing evidence from two sources and cites them in APA style. end annotated text

annotated text Heading. The flush-left, boldface heading marks the second subsection of the solutions. end annotated text

student sample text Historically, civilizations have adapted to climate changes, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Our modern civilization is largely the result of climate stability over the past 12,000 years. However, as the climate changes, humans must learn to adapt on a national, community, and individual level in many areas. While each country sets its own laws and regulations, certain principles apply worldwide. end student sample text

student sample text 1. Infrastructure. Buildings—residential, commercial, and industrial—produce about 33 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide (Biello, 2007). Stricter standards for new construction, plus incentives for investing in insulation and other improvements to existing structures, are needed. Development in high-risk areas needs to be discouraged. Improved roads and transportation systems would help reduce fuel use. Incentives for decreasing energy consumption are needed to reduce rising demands for power. end student sample text

student sample text 2. Food waste. More than 30 percent of the food produced in the United States is never consumed, and food waste causes 44 gigatons of carbon emissions a year (Green America, 2020). In a landfill, the nutrients in wasted food never return to the soil; instead, methane, a greenhouse gas, is produced. High-income countries such as the United States need to address wasteful processing and distribution systems. Low-income countries, on the other hand, need an infrastructure that supports proper food storage and handling. Educating consumers also must be a priority. end student sample text

annotated text Source Citation in APA Style: Group Author. The parenthetical citation gives the group’s name and the year of publication. end annotated text

student sample text 3. Consumerism. People living in consumer nations have become accustomed to abundance. Many purchases are nonessential yet consume fossil fuels to manufacture, package, market, and ship products. During World War II, the U.S. government promoted the slogan “Use It Up, Wear It Out, Make It Do, or Do Without.” This attitude was widely accepted because people recognized a common purpose in the war effort. A similar shift in mindset is needed today. end student sample text

student sample text Adaptation is not only possible but also economically advantageous. One case study is Walmart, which is the world’s largest company by revenue. According to Dearn (2020), the company announced a plan to reduce its global emissions to zero by 2040. Among the goals is powering its facilities with 100 percent renewable energy and using electric vehicles with zero emissions. As of 2020, about 29 percent of its energy is from renewable sources. Although the 2040 goal applies to Walmart facilities only, plans are underway to reduce indirect emissions, such as those from its supply chain. According to CEO Doug McMillon, the company’s commitment is to “becoming a regenerative company—one that works to restore, renew and replenish in addition to preserving our planet, and encourages others to do the same” (Dearn, 2020). In addition to encouraging other corporations, these goals present a challenge to the government to take action on climate change. end student sample text

annotated text Extended Example as Evidence. The writer indicates where borrowed information from the source begins and ends, and cites the source in APA style. end annotated text

annotated text Source Citation in APA Style: One Author. The parenthetical citation gives only the year of publication because the author’s name is cited in the sentence. end annotated text

Objections to Taking Action

annotated text Heading. The centered, boldface heading marks the start of the writer’s discussion of potential objections to the proposed solutions. end annotated text

annotated text Body. The writer devotes two paragraphs to objections. end annotated text

student sample text Despite scientific evidence, some people and groups deny that climate change is real or, if they admit it exists, insist it is not a valid concern. Those who think climate change is not a problem point to Earth’s millennia-long history of changing climate as evidence that life has always persisted. However, their claims do not consider the difference between “then” and “now.” Most of the change predates human civilization, which has benefited from thousands of years of stable climate. The rapid change since the Industrial Revolution is unprecedented in human history. end student sample text

student sample text Those who deny climate change or its dangers seek primarily to relax or remove pollution standards and regulations in order to protect, or maximize profit from, their industries. To date, their lobbying has been successful. For example, the world’s fossil-fuel industry received $5.3 trillion in 2015 alone, while the U.S. wind-energy industry received $12.3 billion in subsidies between 2000 and 2020 (Green America, 2020). end student sample text

Conclusion and Recommendation

annotated text Heading. The centered, boldface heading marks the start of the conclusion and recommendation. end annotated text

annotated text Conclusion and Recommendation. The proposal concludes with a restatement of the proposed solutions and a call to action. end annotated text

student sample text Greenhouse gases can be reduced to acceptable levels; the technology already exists. But that technology cannot function without strong governmental policies prioritizing the environment, coupled with serious investment in research and development of climate-friendly technologies. end student sample text

student sample text The United States government must place its full support behind efforts to reduce greenhouse gasses and mitigate climate change. Rejoining the Paris Agreement is a good first step, but it is not enough. Citizens must demand that their elected officials at the local, state, and national levels accept responsibility to take action on both mitigation and adaptation. Without full governmental support, good intentions fall short of reaching net-zero emissions and cannot achieve the adaptation in attitude and lifestyle necessary for public compliance. There is no alternative to accepting this reality. Addressing climate change is too important to remain optional. end student sample text

Biello, D. (2007, May 25). Combatting climate change: Farming out global warming solutions. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/combating-climate-change-farming-forestry/

Bourzac, K. (2020, September 25). COVID-19 lockdowns had strange effects on air pollution across the globe. Chemical & Engineering News. https://cen.acs.org/environment/atmospheric-chemistry/COVID-19-lockdowns-had-strange-effects-on-air-pollution-across-the-globe/98/i37

Dearn, G. (2020, September 21). Walmart said it will eliminate its carbon footprint by 2040 — but not for its supply chain, which makes up the bulk of its emissions. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-targets-zero-carbon-emissions-2040-not-suppliers-2020-9

Green America (2020). Top 10 solutions to reverse climate change. https://www.greenamerica.org/climate-change-100-reasons-hope/top-10-solutions-reverse-climate-change.

Lomborg, B. (2020, July 17). The alarm about climate change is blinding us to sensible solutions. The Globe and Mail. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-alarm-about-climate-change-is-blinding-us-to-sensible-solutions/

Mulvaney, K. (2019, September 19). Climate change report card: These countries are reaching targets. National Geographic . https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/09/climate-change-report-card-co2-emissions/

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (2020, November 24). Record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season draws to an end. https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/record-breaking-atlantic-hurricane-season-draws-to-end

Union of Concerned Scientists (2020). Climate solutions. https://www.ucsusa.org/climate/solutions

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (2020). Sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse Gas Emissions. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions

U.S. Global Change Research Program (2014a). Melting ice. National Climate Assessment. https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/report/our-changing-climate/melting-ice

U.S. Global Change Research Program (2014b). Our changing climate. National Climate Assessment. https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/highlights/report-findings/our-changing-climate#tab1-images

annotated text References Page in APA Style. All sources cited in the text of the report—and only those sources—are listed in alphabetical order with full publication information. See the Handbook for more on APA documentation style. end annotated text

The following link takes you to another model of an annotated sample paper on solutions to animal testing posted by the University of Arizona’s Global Campus Writing Center.

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Transcript: Greta Thunberg's Speech At The U.N. Climate Action Summit

Climate activist Greta Thunberg, 16, addressed the U.N.'s Climate Action Summit in New York City on Monday. Here's the full transcript of Thunberg's speech, beginning with her response to a question about the message she has for world leaders.

"My message is that we'll be watching you.

"This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!

"You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

'This Is All Wrong,' Greta Thunberg Tells World Leaders At U.N. Climate Session

"For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.

"You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.

"The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.

"Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.

"So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences.

"To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise – the best odds given by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.

"How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just 'business as usual' and some technical solutions? With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years.

"There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

"You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.

"We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.

"Thank you."

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Original research article, strategic gestures in bill mckibben's climate change rhetoric.

• 1 School of Communication Studies, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA, United States
• 2 Department of Communication Studies, University of Montana, Missoula, MT, United States
• 3 Department of Languages, Philosophy, and Communication Studies, Utah State University, Logan, UT, United States
• 4 School of Public Service, Boise State University, Boise, ID, United States

Although Bill McKibben is widely recognized as one of the leading strategists of the US climate change movement, several observers identify significant limitations to his approach to climate advocacy and politics. These criticisms are based on his reliance upon “symbolic gestures,” such as campaigns to promote fossil fuel divestment and stop fossil fuel infrastructure construction. In this essay we reconsider McKibben's work, drawing specifically on his speeches given in the US from 2013 to 2016 in support of the fossil fuel divestment campaign and campaigns attempting to block the construction of fossil fuel infrastructure, in order to show how McKibben's strategic orientation is grounded in a politics of gesture. His speeches provide a model for how to reconceive gestures and assemble them for political ends, and expand a sometimes narrow focus on policy mechanisms. Beyond the case of McKibben our analysis contributes the concept of strategic gestures to identify and theorize social movement interventions that have significant symbolic and material consequences.

Introduction

In 2006, author Bill McKibben found himself at “the end of my relatively quiet life as mostly a writer and the start of a hectic stint being mostly an activist” ( McKibben, 2016a ). McKibben had been speaking and writing about climate change since his 1989 publication of The End of Nature , one of the most influential books on climate change for a general audience. Despite growing scientific evidence and warnings about the climate crisis, there had been minimal political action and only modest grassroots activism on the issue, and McKibben was frustrated. “I wanted to do something. But there was no real climate movement to join” ( McKibben, 2016a ).

So McKibben set out to launch just such a movement. Starting with a march across his home state of Vermont, McKibben played a central role in a series of efforts to generate a large-scale, influential climate movement. In 2007, he and other organizers coordinated “Step It Up,” a set of climate events in over 1,400 communities in the US, intended as a call for Congressional action to reduce carbon emissions 80% by 2050. This network of activists subsequently formed 350.org, a 501(c)3 group in the US that connects and mobilizes climate activists around the world. Since then, McKibben has been a prominent voice in opposing the Keystone XL pipeline, fostering fossil fuel divestment campaigns, and orchestrating the 2014 and 2017 People's Climate Marches. His 2012 Rolling Stone article ( McKibben, 2012 ), “Global Warming's Terrifying New Math,” received over 14,000 online comments and was reproduced or hyperlinked thousands of times, “making it one of the most widely circulated online articles in Rolling Stone's history” ( Nisbet, 2013 , p. 47). The essay was a galvanizing rhetorical moment in the climate movement. As journalist Mark Hertsgaard (2014) put it, McKibben's efforts pushed “the threat of climate change into the mainstream American political agenda.” Communication scholar Matthew Nisbet acknowledges that McKibben is “arguably the most prominent climate change activist in the United States” ( Nisbet, 2013 , p. 41).

Although McKibben refers to himself as an “unlikely activist” ( McKibben, 2013a ) and resists the label of a movement leader, many observers claim that “he comes up with many of the big ideas about what to do, functioning as a—if not the—major strategist of the US climate change movement” ( Bronstein, 2014 ). Shortly after the 2014 Peoples Climate March, McKibben stepped down as executive director of 350.org, explaining that doing so would leave him “more energy and opportunity for figuring out strategies and organizing campaigns” ( Goldenberg, 2014 ) 1 . In turn, much of the scholarly analysis of McKibben focuses on the strategic dimensions and limitations of his work. For example, a multi-site study of the Step It Up (2007) events provides varying assessments of the efficacy of messages circulating across those sites ( Endres et al., 2008 , 2009 ). J. Robert Cox criticizes McKibben's approach to climate politics as failing to account for the strategic “considerations of effect” that can enable a movement to “contribute to a sustained influence” at the scale necessary to address a problem as significant as climate change ( Cox, 2009 , 2010 ).

Similarly, Nisbet, while acknowledging McKibben's influence, argues that his utopian rhetoric may appeal to the environmental base but has been unable to generate broad support or advance a viable political agenda. McKibben is more style than substance, argues Nisbet; his symbolic actions and political gestures, such as protests and non-violent civil disobedience, do not translate into “a pragmatic set of [policy] choices designed to effectively and realistically address the problem of climate change” ( Nisbet, 2013 , p. 3).

While noting merit in these critiques, we take a different approach to McKibben's work in order to propose an alternative mode of thinking about the strategic dimensions of climate activism and advocacy. Based on an analysis of McKibben's speeches, we offer the notion of strategic gestures as a concept to identify and theorize a rhetorical assemblage of movements, actions, and performances that have significant symbolic and material consequences. Whereas some critics use the label of gesture, or “gesture politics,” to dismiss particular interventions as empty, ineffectual, or “merely” symbolic, we contend that McKibben's speeches provide a model for how to reconceive gestures and assemble them strategically for political ends. In other words, we argue that McKibben's strategic orientation is productively considered in terms of a “politics of gesture.” Our analysis identifies four rhetorical actions that contribute to the strategic potential of gestures: promoting articulation and solidarity, interrupting dominant discourses, enacting alternative futures, and applying leverage at sites of decision making. In turn, the concept of strategic gestures provides scholars and activists alike with new insights into the relationship between rhetoric and social change.

In the subsequent analysis of McKibben's speeches, first we discuss McKibben's role as a strategist and speaker. Then we reconsider criticisms of McKibben made on strategic grounds. As noted above, both Cox and Nisbet argue that McKibben's strategies are inadequate to produce substantive change. In doing so, we review the concerns of those critics before developing our own interpretation of “the strategic” in McKibben's public address. In the third section we define and develop the concept of strategic gestures demonstrating how they can be utilized to build social movements and solidarity, interrupt dominant discourses, enact alternative futures, and apply leverage at local sites of decision making in order to produce wider systemic effects. In the fourth section we discuss practical implications of our analysis of strategic gestures focusing on their potential to produce social change. Finally, we conclude with some theoretical implications for scholars of environmental communication and social movement rhetoric. Ultimately, we present the concept of strategic gestures in order to account for and theorize how disparate acts of resistance and rhetorical interventions can be made to act in concert to produce social change and transform complex systems.

Bill McKibben, Strategist, and Speaker

Given McKibben's prominence, it is not surprising that scholars in environmental communication and related disciplines have closely analyzed his work ( Eckersley, 2005 ; Luke, 2005 ; Yearley, 2006 ; Cox, 2009 ; White, 2011 ; Merrill, 2012 ; Mitra, 2013 ; Nisbet, 2013 ; Ytterstad, 2015 ). However, most scholars have concentrated on his writing or his organizations rather than his speeches. Perhaps this is because McKibben's speeches and speaking style may not seem that notable. He began his 2015 Lannan Keynote Address at Georgetown University by confessing, “And what in some ways I would still most like to be doing…is thinking about things and writing them down.” He also drew attention to his lack of presentational polish by noting, “I may stumble a bit here and there” ( McKibben, 2015a ) 2 . He frequently makes such apologies, adopting humility to disarm and build trust with audiences, and his speeches contain incomplete thoughts, digressions, and apparent contradictions.

However, McKibben's oratory is significant for environmental communication in spite of its seeming lack of artistry. First, compared to his written works, which seek a general readership and rely upon familiar forms of environmental apocalyptic narrative and romanticism, McKibben's speeches are primarily addressed to those who already identify with the climate movement. Rather than minimize this type of rhetoric as simply “preaching to the choir,” we take it seriously as a means of promoting the “mobilization capacity” of the climate movement ( Brulle, 2010 ). When McKibben speaks to activists, he seems to understand that in order to be moved to further action, his audiences need to see how local actions will contribute to the larger goal of “solving” climate change.

Second, this audience-related constraint in the rhetorical situation leads McKibben to foreground his strategic thinking in his speeches. Whereas, his writings tend to focus on framing climate science for general audiences, his speeches provide a context and template for how climate activists might connect the local and the global, and the personal and the political, in ways that attract followers and advance the movement. Movement strategy is especially salient in the speeches we draw upon for our analysis: analyzing 11 publicly available speeches given by McKibben between 2013 and 2016, with particular attention given to his keynote address for the 2015 Lannan Symposium at Georgetown University. Several of these speeches were part of McKibben's 2012–2013 “Do the Math” tour, which sought to mobilize audiences around fossil fuel divestment and the keeping carbon in the ground campaign.

Third, these speeches reflect a moment in which the US climate movement was at a strategic crossroads. Hopes for strong climate action during the Obama administration were dashed by a weak agreement at the 2009 Conference of Parties meeting in Copenhagen and the failure of cap and trade legislation in 2010. However, in the years following, the climate movement also found reasons to be hopeful. In 2014, the rollout of the Clean Power Plan and the significant turnout for the People's Climate March suggested that public awareness was growing and policy action was not far behind. Also, President Obama vetoed legislation that would have forced construction of the Keystone XL pipeline to proceed, eventually denying the permit for its construction in 2016 3 . Thus, McKibben's speeches occur at a critical strategic moment for the US movement, and they can be interpreted as efforts to narrate the movement's successes and chart a path forward. Our findings may have even greater significance in the current period with its heightened political infighting, the US's exodus from global climate agreements, and the backsliding of federal environmental policy, making the need for strategic gestures even more pressing. At the end of this paper, we reflect on what McKibben's work, and our conceptualization of strategic gestures, might mean in the age of Trump.

Because of the compelling environmental rhetorical situation described above, especially the characteristics and motivations of the particular audiences, we chose to focus on McKibben's US speeches for this analysis. That noted, McKibben's work writ large is global and international in content and reach. His presentations reference environmental disputes and climate “wins” from around the globe. The Fossil Free: Divestment website shows activity from religious organizations, NGOs and governments from every continent other than Antarctica. Among those who divest are “some of the world largest pension funds and insurers, dozens of world-class universities, the world's largest sovereign wealth funds, the country of Ireland, major capital cities, as well as philanthropic foundations, health associations and world- renowned cultural institution” ( Hazan et al. ). Equally, the website for 350.org shows it having organizations that exist across the map ( https://350.org ). As is frequently noted by McKibben, each site has its own environmental issues, its own barriers, and its own points of leverage, varying the opportunities for strategic gestures by location.

Climate Advocacy and the Question of the Strategic

Cox advances his notion of “the strategic” as a heuristic for rhetorical invention in two essays that directly analyze McKibben and the Step It Up campaign ( Cox, 2009 , 2010 ). While that campaign appeared to generate interest among far-flung audiences around a consistent message, newly mobilized audiences were not organized to apply political pressure in support of the campaign's goals. Cox (2010) diagnoses the problem with this approach in terms of a faulty belief about how democratic political change takes place—in other words, a problem of strategy:

The implicit, strategic assumption seemed to be that, with news (and images) of enthusiastic and inspiring citizens sounding an alarm, more people would become informed and would—consistent with a democratic polity—rise up and demand that elected officials take necessary steps to protect our life-sustaining planet. (p. 127)

Cox's criticism lies less with the framing of Step It Up's messages or its awareness-raising efforts than with the failure to steer those efforts toward a consequential, systemic impact. This failure to align communication practices with opportunities to transform systems of power is at the heart of Cox's interest in “the strategic.” In his words, the notion of the strategic attempts to “account for communicative effects— how the application of a certain force, and the citizen mobilizations aligned with this, enable or initiate a process of events that influence larger effects within a system of power” ( Cox, 2010 , p. 131).

Nisbet shares Cox's interest in seeing more concrete political effects, but his major criticism lies with McKibben's alleged lack of pragmatism . He develops this argument in an in-depth white paper, tellingly titled “Nature's Prophet,” which surveys McKibben's influence as a “Journalist, Public Intellectual, and Activist” since The End of Nature ( Nisbet, 2013 ). Nisbet's central argument is that, “As a public intellectual, Bill McKibben has failed to offer pragmatic and achievable policy ideas;” throughout the paper, he consistently positions McKibben as having “little tolerance for political pragmatism” and clinging to the utopian values of deep ecology “rather than a pragmatic set of choices designed to both effectively manage the problem and to align a diversity of political interests in support of compromise” ( Nisbet, 2013 , p. 50–54). McKibben's moralistic rhetoric, his desire for small-scale agrarianism, his opposition to certain technologies, and his focus on symbolic acts of protest are marshaled by Nisbet as evidence of the narrow appeal of McKibben's activism. Furthermore, Nisbet argues that when faced with the failure of conventional policy proposals, McKibben refuses to adjust his strategy. “The response…from McKibben and other environmentalists has been to double-down in their commitment to their policy paradigm, attributing failure to the political prowess of conservatives and industry, and to a corresponding lack of grassroots pressure and moral outrage” ( Nisbet, 2013 , p. 50).

Nisbet's focus on pragmatism and Cox's focus on system transformation represent different approaches and assumptions with respect to what might make an intervention “strategic.” Nisbet's concerns emerge from a policy orientation rather than the social movement/pressure group perspective of Cox. Nisbet's (2014 ) critiques also represent an ecomodernist commitment to technological solutions to climate challenges, whereas Cox (2009) is more concerned with transforming the “complex whole” of economic, political, and ideological systems toward a low-carbon society. Likewise, while Cox (2010) is motivated by the need for “changes on the scale and timetable that climate and other system crises require” (p. 125), Nisbet (2013) favors incremental policy reforms; in his view, “breaking down the wicked nature of climate change into smaller, interconnected problems, achieving progress on these smaller challenges becomes more likely” (p. 51).

These differences illuminate some of the considerations and political visions that might inform strategic thinking in climate activism and environmental advocacy more generally. Cox and Nisbet's criticisms surface several key issues for strategizing about political and social change: what breadth and depth of social solidarity is needed to leverage change? To what degree should advocates challenge, or align with, dominant discourses, values, and interests? How do they craft a vision of the future that is both appealing and achievable? And where are the optimal sites for altering systems of power? Such questions are at the heart of strategic thinking about social change.

McKibben's speeches provide a distinctive set of answers to these questions. His take on the strategic is less dismissive of the role of so-called “symbolic” politics than Nisbet's, and his turn toward divestment arguably reflects greater attention to contingent openings in systems of power than was displayed in the Step it Up campaign, which Cox took issue with. Cox's focus is on leverage in economic and energy systems, perhaps at the expense of attention to the ideological and political systems that may also contribute to social and policy change. Strategic gestures, as deployed by McKibben, articulate how economic, political, and ideological systems can be leveraged in concert with each other to produce change. His approach is captured well by Engler and Engler (2013) , who argue that “if they are to spark mass movement, campaigns must be built with symbolic as well as instrumental considerations in mind; they must achieve outcomes that perpetuate further movement-building, even if they do not immediately advance a given policy goal” (online). McKibben's enactment of this principle is a significant instance of this move in social movement strategizing. We argue that it can be productively theorized as a politics of gesture that is orchestrated rhetorically through the assemblage of strategic gestures.

Strategic Gestures

The concept of gesture has traditionally been considered an adjunct to speech and associated with the canon of delivery in the study of rhetoric. However, some rhetoricians are rethinking gestures as part of a broader interest in body rhetoric and its inventional possibilities. Scholars such as Debra Hawhee and Cory Holding recuperate theories that explain how gestures give shape to speech and facilitate connections between bodies, rather than functioning as mere ornaments to rational discourse. Hawhee's (2006 ) reading of Sir Richard Paget, for example, identifies the mimetic and contagion-like character of gesture that not only moves a body to speech, but also facilitates communion with others. “The ability for those movements to ‘catch on' across bodies helped him account for the spread and resulting ‘staying power' of language. Put still more simply, speech gestures are communicative because they are both communicable and communal” (p. 335). Likewise, Holding (2015) re-reads John Bulwer's famed gesture manuals as what could be called a body-positive theory of invention, suggesting that contemporary rhetoricians can use Bulwer to “offer a theory of how gestures communicate, attitudinize, and forge pathways to listening, mutual acknowledgment, and identification” (p. 416).

The generative role of gestures heightens their significance as means for conserving or resisting established relations of power. Hariman (1992) , for example, illustrates how the courtly style relied on the “displacement of speech by gesture” as a form of “social control that makes the decorous body the sign of order” (p. 160). Conversely, Olson and Goodnight (1994) use the social controversy over fur to identify “gestures that widen and animate the non-discursive production of argument” as oppositional rhetorical strategies (p. 252). In their view, “non-discursive arguments work—in the new, ‘free' space of reassociation—to redefine and realign the boundaries of private and public space” (p. 252). More broadly, Phaedra Pezzullo calls attention to the importance of bodies and non-linguistic acts as components of cultural performances that critically interrupt dominant discourses and contribute to “the rhetorical force of counterpublics” ( Pezzullo, 2003 , p. 361).

These perspectives on the inventional and oppositional possibilities of gesture complicate any easy dismissal of gestures and their relevance to politics and social movements. Cambridge Dictionary 4 (online) defines “gesture politics” as “any action by a person or organization done for political reasons and intended to attract attention but having little real effect.” Similarly, Christopher Caldwell (2005) notes, “The expression ‘gesture politics' generally describes the substitution of symbols and empty promises for policy.” In contrast, other critical and cultural theorists position gesture as an important concept for theorizing power and resistance in ways consistent with Pezzullo's perspective. Lindsay Reckson (2014) explains that “cultural studies scholars have understood gesture as both communicative and performative ; gestures can express semantic content, but they can also enact (and reenact) cultural histories, identities, and commitments.” Scholars of performance and performativity, she adds, formulate gestures as “movements that produce, reproduce, and potentially interrupt embodied structures of power” (online). Building on this definition of gesture, we advance the notion of strategic gestures as a rhetorical assemblage of movements, actions, and performances that are intended to generate effects larger than a sum of individual or particular acts in systems of power . This approach to gestures embraces not an empty “gesture politics,” but a politics of gesture that takes seriously the political possibilities of certain kinds of gestures.

This conception of strategic gestures emphasizes the rhetorical processes through which gestures become strategic. Importantly, our plural description suggests that gestures are not necessarily strategic in isolation. Gestures become strategic when they are made to complement and amplify each other to effect systemic change. Because economic, political and ideological systems function in concert with each other to produce, in Cox's (2009 ) words “a complex whole articulated in dominance and resistant to change,” transforming systems necessitates multiple gestures designed to leverage change across the whole (p. 399). Such gestures might include traditional symbolic interventions such as speeches, image events, and protests, and they might include material interventions such as the installation of renewable energy, the use of electric cars, and the divestment of institutional funds from fossil fuel industries. Each of these actions may be perceived as little more than a symbolic gesture, but when assembled together they can function as strategic gestures to produce social movement and systemic change.

The rhetorical actions accomplished through gestures provide another means for considering how gestures become strategic. Our analysis of McKibben's speeches identifies four types of rhetorical action that contribute to the strategic potential of gestures. First, strategic gestures can facilitate articulation , linking different and dispersed groups, causes, and issues to generate social solidarity ( Laclau and Mouffe, 1985 ; Greene, 1998 ; DeLuca, 1999 ; Stormer, 2004 ; Peeples, 2011 ). As Brian Massumi (2015) puts it, “The gesture is a call to attunement. It is an invitation to mutual inclusion in a collective movement” (p. 105–106). Second, strategic gestures can interrupt dominant discourses ( Pezzullo, 2001 ) and “usher into the public realm aspects of life that are hidden away, habitually ignored, or routinely disconnected from public appearance” ( Olson and Goodnight, 1994 , p. 252). Third, strategic gestures can enact and display alternative futures . Massumi (2015) identifies how gestures are both affective, “felt as directly as they are thought,” and speculative, as they “convoke potential and carry alternatives” (p. 207). Strategic gestures capitalize on this to display new modes of being and action as possible and desirable. Fourth, strategic gestures can apply leverage at sites of decision making to alter systems of power relations. Even as the performative and affective power of gestures may signal cultural change, Cox's notion of the strategic helps us consider how gestures produced at the right time in the right place can leverage systemic change.

Assembling Gestures in McKibben's Speeches

McKibben's speeches lean heavily on the scenic construction, first articulated in “Global Warming's Terrifying New Math,” of a melodramatic climate “battle.” In that piece, McKibben squarely positions the fossil fuel industry as “Public Enemy #1” in a battle over the public interest. His Lannan keynote surveys the scene of climate politics as “maybe the most important pitched battle in human history” ( McKibben, 2015a ). The battle is urgent; there is no time for gradualist, market-driven, evolutionary social change. Instead, he argues, “We get, if we get anything, the difficult change that is won by winning power. And for that power to be won, we need a set of weapons that work to our advantage. We can't win it with money, because they have more of it than we do. They have more than anybody” ( McKibben, 2015a ). Because the “other side” has more money “and hence controls more political leverage,” the battle must be fought using non-traditional political means ( McKibben, 2015a ).

This scenic construction opens a space for McKibben to talk about the kinds of interventions that we are calling “strategic gestures.” Because traditional avenues for enacting policy change are closed, McKibben (2015a) makes a case for the creative use of symbolic actions. “Our weapons,” he argues, “have to be the other ones. Passion, spirit, creativity, um, um, our bodies.…The role of the imagination in these fights.” There are two important aspects of McKibben's discussion of symbolic weapons that inform our theorizing of strategic gestures.

First, McKibben (2015a) constitutes the battle as a contest of momentum in which each side attempts to demonstrate what will be inevitable: “It's a particular kind of fight…It's a battle for momentum. A battle for winning the sense of what's inevitable or not. What's the world going to look like. And that battle is, well—that's everything.” Here McKibben lays bare how the climate “battle” is a contest for ideological hegemony, for commonsense understandings not about what the future should look like, but about what it will look like. McKibben's battle lines resonate with Massumi's (2015 ) observation that, “capitalism hardly bothers to assert its rationality any more, contending itself with creating the affective ‘fact' of its inevitability” (p. 111). McKibben's symbolic weapons, then, are utilized both to challenge the affective “fact” of a fossil fuel economy and call an alternative future into being.

Second, the contest for the cultural commonsense about the future is fought with a series of gestures over an extended period of time. In his Lannan speech, for example, argues:

In a fight like that—and here's maybe the crucial word for me for this talk—in a fight like that, each gesture becomes essential. There's a kind of, um, fight of gestures, of images that are brought forward, and, and, and each time a gesture is made, each time—well, each time there's a new solar roof top, that's the kind of easy and obvious one—but each time there's a divested college, or even a strong, beautiful movement for it on a college, um, um, that sense of what's going to happen begins to shift McKibben (2015a) .

In other words, each gesture in the fight for momentum contributes to a larger goal. Social change is produced not in one fell swoop, but over an extended period of time. As such, gestures should not be viewed in a vacuum, but as part and parcel of an extended effort to build solidarity, enact a vision of a low-carbon future, and effect systemic change.

Articulating Solidarity

In almost every speech, McKibben registers a litany of successes related to climate change: acts of individuals and groups, government policies, or technological advances. During a speech in Brooklyn, before the 2016 Climate Talks in Paris, McKibben rallies:

No kidding, no kidding, this is powerful! I mean, look, that one mine that Charlie was talking about. A year ago we were pretty sure it was going to get built, and if it had been, it would have, just that one valley, put 5% of the carbon in the atmosphere necessary to take us past two degrees. One mine. If they have stopped it, same thing all over the world. It's not as if any of us started this movement. Local people, often indigenous people, in defending their land against intrusion for many years. More and more, more and more [clapping]—more and more, they've been winning. Look, in India, fishermen, farmers in the village of Sompeta. They waged a 5-year battle to keep this giant coal mine from destroying their town. Now, they won. They won at the cost of three activists being killed along the way, but they won. South Africa, intense pressure in the last months from local activists persuaded [a] big company, GDF Suez, to pull support for the new coal plant at Thabametsi. We're starting to win.

( McKibben, 2015c )

In other speeches, McKibben includes the Galilee Basin in Australia ( McKibben, 2015b ), Copenhagen and the Tar Sands in Canada ( McKibben, 2015d ), rooftop solar panels ( McKibben, 2013b ), the trial of the Delta 5, and the Lummi Nation and kayaktivists ( McKibben, 2016b ), among many other acts of resistance.

Discussing climate change movement strategies, but also providing insight into his rhetorical tendencies, he states: “There is no one answer to climate change. There is no silver bullet. There may be enough silver buckshot if we gather it all up” ( McKibben, 2013b ). By gathering the buckshot, McKibben is not only providing a sense of momentum; he is also articulating and building solidarity and affiliation with the climate cause.

Massumi's description of gesture as a call to attunement resonates with the concept of articulation as it has been developed in communication scholarship. In particular, it is similar to DeLuca's (1999 ) turn to articulation to interpret the enacted resistance of environmental activism. Articulation is typically understood as a linking of disparate elements that modifies their meaning. This linkage produces “chains of equivalence,” where those elements are constituted as signs of some larger phenomenon and evidence of domination; “each link in the chain remains distinct, but they operate together, in concert…around an agenda of equivalence” ( Purcell, 2009 , p. 159). From this perspective, articulation and chains of equivalence explain how social movements coordinate diverse struggles against hegemonic relations of power.

Although articulation is often associated with the linkage of demands into chains of equivalence, McKibben's rhetoric suggests that chains of equivalence also can be built by linking gestures. Two chains of equivalence are especially significant in McKibben's articulation of climate-related gestures. First, he links seemingly individualistic acts of consumption with collective political activity 5 . For example, in the quote from the Lannan speech above, McKibben compares the gesture of a new solar rooftop to that of a divested college or “even a strong, beautiful movement for [divestment].” In doing so, McKibben not only interpellates individual consumers as part of a collective political struggle, “the fossil fuel resistance,” but also calls attention to the political struggles that are necessary to enable such consumer choices. For example, when accused of not doing enough to support renewable energy policies by a questioner at Columbia University, McKibben folds that work into the “silver buckshot” analogy: “And the part you're talking about [creating policy] is an important part, and a part that people are deeply engaged in all throughout the country that I know of, certainly, every place I go” ( McKibben, 2013b ).

Second, McKibben articulates gestures to help his audience understand that although each gesture has a unique context, together they represent a global movement constituted in solidarity. For example, in the Lannan speech ( McKibben, 2015a ), he describes the Cowboy/Indian alliance, an action in which ranchers, farmers, and tribal communities joined together in Washington, DC, to protest the Keystone XL Pipeline. He encourages his audience to “[t]hink of the power of that gesture with the sort of two of the great romantic, um, um, forces in American history, no longer in opposition but together” ( McKibben, 2015a ). He also links divestment campaigns at Harvard, Stanford, the University of the Marshall Islands, and Swarthmore, the 2014 People's Climate March, the blockade of the world's largest coal port in New Castle, Australia, and Pope Francis' “soon-to-be-released” encyclical on the environment as akin to a “series of gestures with which his papacy has, um, unfolded. Kneeling down to kiss the feet of prisoners…Out amongst the poorest, um, much as he can be” ( McKibben, 2015a ). Here he calls upon his audience to see this “series of gestures” as “helping people re-discover some sense of solidarity with the rest of the world.” He describes organizing senior citizens to engage in civil disobedience to stop the Keystone XL pipeline, and provides the following illustration of an individual act from that event: “And on the last day there was a guy arrested with a sign around his neck that said, ‘World War II vet, handle with care”' ( McKibben, 2015a ).

McKibben's articulation of gestures creates a chain of equivalence across a wide geographic and demographic terrain, constituting solidarity amongst diverse activists around the world. Such a perspective resonates with Robert Asen's (2017 ) discussion of “the prospects for resistance to a neoliberal public through the coordinated action of networked locals” (p. 3). From “Cowboys” and “Indians” to Harvard and the Pacific Islands, McKibben links locals and their gestures in a chain of equivalence, describing the fossil fuel resistance as “spreading in every direction around the world, almost as sprawling and protean in its form as the fossil fuel industry itself” ( McKibben, 2015a ). Although McKibben articulates diverse gestures as comprising the fossil fuel resistance, he does not deny the uniqueness of each gesture. They remain distinct, but the gestures operate together, constituting a movement based on “open-source organizing” in dispersed locales. As McKibben explains with regard to the divestment movement, “everybody knows, in their own place, how best to do it” ( McKibben, 2015a ), (see also Sprain et al., 2009 ).

Each gesture may be vulnerable to critics' claims of it being fanciful, utopian, idealistic, individualist, self-serving or irrational. But McKibben does not leave them as isolated acts to be evaluated in their singularity. He piles up gestures to direct audience attention toward a new future, one that is not dictated by fossil fuel companies, but by the goal-driven actions of diverse organizations and individuals.

Interrupting Inevitability, Enacting a New Future

Critical theorists have long noted that bodily gestures do more than provide semiotic content; they are also the site or “citations” of culture, discipline, and power on the body. From Walter Benjamin's (1968 ) analysis of Brecht's epic theater to Judith Butler's (1990) explication of performative bodies, theorists have established the power of gestures to interrupt the commonplace. “Interrupting gestures,” Benjamin argues, “alienate” audiences from the existing “conditions of life” (p. 150). Similarly, Massumi (2015) contends that “resistance is of the nature of a gesture ” (p. 105). In McKibben's rhetoric, gestures are capable of puncturing the illusion of a preordained future underwritten by fossil fuels. For McKibben, the carbon economy is not simply a brute fact of infrastructure, but rather a relentlessly rhetorical effort to shape public perception of the way things are and always will be, an ideology—a set of beliefs that naturalize a particular set of market and social relations:

The battle, in the end, in this case, is for control of the zeitgeist, for control of how we think about the world, okay? Our sense of what is going to happen. And the other side understands that exquisitely. It's why the fossil fuel industry spends all their time trying to promote the inevitability of continuing down the current path.

( McKibben, 2015a )

McKibben uses gestures to challenge that sense of inevitability. He interprets actions that run counter to the business-as-usual path as gestures that confound this commonsense. “Each time a gesture is made… that sense of what's going to happen begins to shift ” ( McKibben, 2015a ; emphasis added). Multiple gestures build on one another to create a sense of movement and momentum that belies the fossil fuel industry's rhetoric of certitude. McKibben continues, “There's an almost mathematical sense of, of, of, gestures piling up on one side or the other, giving strength to one side or the other” ( McKibben, 2015a ).

McKibben's use of gesture is consistent with Massumi's emphasis on gesture as enactment. When he claims that resistance is gestured into existence and functions as immanent critique, he is suggesting that the exemplary power of gestures enacts alternative modes of engaging the world and invites others to participate, paradoxically altering the course of inevitability. For example, McKibben interprets the Rockefeller family's decision to divest from fossil fuels on the eve of the first People's Climate March as unique, but also as exemplary, as symbolic of an imminent cultural shift:

But just think about what that means. That the first great fossil fuel fortune had now recognized that the moment had come to switch, and the power of that was palpable. Um, it was the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel age that day, between that huge march and that announcement, and the question only is how quickly, how quickly we will make that end come, and whether it will come in time 6 .

( McKibben, 2015d )

This “palpable” switch resonates with Massumi's (2015) reference to C.S. Peirce's notion of “abduction,” or, “thought that is still couched in bodily feeling” to explain the exemplary power of gesture (p. 9–10). Massumi argues gestures of resistance “are thought in the immediacy of enactment,” which elicit affective response in conjunction with thought (p. 207). This way of considering gestures is consistent with the affective, contagion-like approach that Hawhee interprets in Paget, a theory that “figures speech as a bodily, mimetic, even affective art, thereby imagining bodily feeling, gesture, and posture as unconsciously contagious and iterable movements” ( Hawhee, 2006 , p. 336).

This affective quality of gestures, as communicable thinking-feelings in the process of becoming, means that gestures of resistance do not exactly make arguments for an alternative future; rather, they enact different ways of relating and orienting to the world, and thus gesture toward an alternative future. In envisioning a new future for the planet, McKibben differentiates between the vision put forth by the fossil fuel industry and the one that must be called forth by climate activists. “Their job is to make the status quo seem inevitable; our job is to the make the future, the change seem inevitable, and possible, and to get there. Creativity is the absolute most important thing in this fight” ( McKibben, 2015a ). In turn, McKibben emphasizes that “proper gestures, good gestures” are “beautiful, artistic moments” that enable “you to see behind them powerful truths” ( McKibben, 2015a ). For example, with respect to renewable energy, his alternative future integrates the material realities of innovation and engineering with romantic notions of beauty:

The engineers allow us to imagine; if the scientists tell us that we need a fossil freeze, the engineers allow us to imagine a solar farm, and also wind power and the other things that come quickly with it. But to imagine a solar farm, to imagine in the process of doing that, not just a world that might be able to keep from going over, but, but also a world that might work in many ways much more beautifully than the one we live on now.

Part of the beauty of this future is that it is more equitable, as power shifts from fossil fuels which divert wealth into the hands of a few, to a system of energy that rebalances power because of the diffusion of the sun and the wind:

That's the beginning of a different kind of world. So there is real possibility here. A glimmer of possibility. The fortifying thing, given that glimmer, is to see how little we are doing given that maybe an ember is the right, um, message, is the right image, to see how little we are doing to, to blow it into life, to make it spark, to make it spread, to make it blaze, to make it blow up into something big enough to light the world.

This vision may be fodder for criticisms such as Nisbet's—that McKibben relies too heavily on symbolic acts of resistance and romantic and utopian visions of the future. However, these criticisms fail to consider two things. First, that a utopian impulse plays an important role in social movement rhetoric enabling both a reconstructive vision and a reconstructive praxis. In this regard a utopian impulse includes both “critique of existing conditions and a vision of a reconstructed program for a new society” (Dan Chodorkoff, 1983 , see also Jameson, 1981 ). This reconstructive vision need not be limited to literary and philosophical blueprints; when it takes the form of a social movement, it can function as a praxis for concrete social change. Gestures for McKibben, then, function as both immanent critique and indexes of an unfolding inevitable social change, and as a vision for what that change can bring. Second, critiques of McKibben's utopian impulse fail to consider the “pragmatic capacities” of gestures to leverage systems to “achieve tangible effects” ( Foust, 2017 , p. 65).

Leveraging Systems

According to Mohan Dutta (2011) , “the performance of social change is fundamentally directed at articulating change through the disruption of structures” (p. 212). Strategic gestures can enable such articulations. To the extent that gestures are composed with an eye toward vulnerabilities and opportunities within systems of power, they can leverage systemic change. From this perspective, gestures become increasingly strategic as they locate sites for applying leverage to alter a system.

In his speeches and during question and answer periods, McKibben justifies several “symbolic” climate actions by arguing that such gestures are also material interventions intended to alter economic systems or apply political pressure. When one audience member asks him to explain how symbolic gestures are going to create “real” material change, McKibben (2015a) dismantles that distinction: “So let's look at Keystone as an example. It is a symbol, but it's only an effective symbol because it is real, okay?” As a result of the delays created by the campaigns to stop the pipelines, “They're already falling into huge difficulty; the expansion plans to triple and quadruple the draw in the tar sands” is “not gonna happen” ( McKibben, 2015a ). Similarly, when addressing Seattle “kayaktivists” who banded together to blockade fossil fuel infrastructure from leaving port, McKibben (2016b) refers to related efforts in nearby communities as taking advantage of “choke points by which we can stick a cork in the fossil fuel bottle. … If they don't, can't build the port at Cherry Point, and they can't build the port at Longview, then they're not gonna mine the coal in Montana and Wyoming. It's gonna stay underground, alright?”

McKibben's “choke points” discussion mirrors Cox's analysis of the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign, in which he describes the strategic in terms of applying leverage at local sites of decision in order to alter systems of power. For Cox (2010) , this requires that a campaign create “strategic alignment of mobilization and its mode of influence or leverage that can enable wider outcomes or effects” (p. 128). These effects do more than disrupt structures and systems; they literally alter them. Project delays and denied permits are not only symbolic victories, which open space for articulation as Dutta suggests; they also have material, economic effects by producing signals in financial markets to shift investment to renewable energy. Such shifts can reduce the power of the fossil fuel industry and enable more alterations to the built environment that can further influence perceptions of inevitability.

Gestures also provide activists with opportunities to articulate policy agendas and apply leverage in transformed arenas of political discourse. Explaining how the divestment movement successfully influences public discourse, McKibben (2016b) avers: “And now it's not, you know, me in Rolling Stone . Now it's the head of the IMF, the head of the World Bank. It was the head of the Bank of England talking to the world's insurance industry” about the fact that they are “overexposed to what are going to be stranded assets from a carbon bubble.” Strategic gestures can intervene in systems of power by altering the symbolic field and reaching new audiences. McKibben identifies this function of gestures with respect to divestment. “If we can continue this divestment fight, we can call it symbolic if you want, but its huge effect has been to make it far more difficult for people to raise capital to do what they're gonna do” ( McKibben, 2015a ). Here McKibben effectively dissolves the symbolic/material distinction by positioning divestment as a gesture that has both symbolic and material effects.

In this way, gestures contribute to a strategy for social change that aligns with time-honored functionalist approaches to social movement organization and resource mobilization ( Simons, 1970 ): a strategy designed to bring the other side to the bargaining table. For example, McKibben explains how the piling up of gestures can create conditions that are amenable to policy changes:

We're going to have to impose that [carbon] tax in all the ways we can by making it difficult for business as usual to go on. And when we break their power some, then we'll get some kind of carbon tax, you know. They'll start to sue for peace, and we'll see what happens, but in the meantime that's our job. Their job is to make the status quo seem inevitable, our job is to make the future, the change seem inevitable, and possible and to get there.

Gestures can be strategic, then, to the extent that they integrate efforts at ideological transformation with opportunistic intervention in political and economic systems. In McKibben's (2015a ) words, “You want to pick things that have real outcome, and that'll also produce this change in the sense of inevitability, and the zeitgeist, because, you know, control of the zeitgeist is an important asset. It's, you know, in some ways the most important asset.”

Practical Implications

To this point we have argued that strategic gestures can have multiple rhetorical effects. But do such gestures “work?” Under what conditions might strategic gestures be more likely to achieve the kinds of effects that McKibben describes? Some observers have already posed such questions in relation to McKibben's work, specifically with respect to divestment. As Schneider et al. (2016) have argued, “The rhetorical power of divestment, therefore, lies in the movement's ability to change the terms of public discourse about fossil fuel production and incite more discourse about climate change from new and potentially powerful rhetorical audiences” (Schneider et al., p. 122). This argument is bolstered by Schifeling and Hoffman's (2017 ) research which demonstrates that McKibben and 350.org's divestment campaign “expanded the spectrum of the climate change debate and shifted its central focus” via a “radical flank effect,” whereby radical issues enter into a polarized and seemingly intractable debate to disrupt the field of discourse enabling “previously marginalized liberal policy ideas such as a carbon tax and carbon budget to gain greater traction in the debate” (p. 16).

However, our explanation of strategic gestures suggests a more complex account and a more mixed evaluation of the apparent “success” of the divestment campaign. On one hand, divestment activism may have disrupted the prevailing common sense on climate change, reconfigured relationships between activists and financial firms and investors, and created discursive space for discussing a carbon tax. McKibben (2016c) himself understands gestures as creating that space, and he sees such a tax as a necessary but not sufficient gesture toward an alternative future. At the same time, these productive interventions in “the zeitgeist” do not necessarily ensure policy victories, and the jury is still out as to whether the campaign will achieve the same success as other divestment campaigns, such as those around tobacco and South African apartheid.

More broadly, it is worth considering how an assemblage of strategic gestures might influence climate politics under a radically different US presidential administration. Regulatory rollbacks, the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, and the gutting of agencies focused on climate change all interrupt McKibben's buoyant rhetoric of inevitability. This elevates a potential tension between the locus of inevitability that is so central to McKibben's rhetoric, and the locus of the irreparable that is one of Cox's significant contributions to the study of environmental communication ( Cox, 1982 ). For instance, it would be easy for activists today to despair of the rapid dismantling of climate research and Obama-era climate regulations under President Trump's administration, question McKibben's utopian invocations of inevitability, and embrace apocalyptic rhetoric that urges audiences to take extraordinary measures to forestall loss. The latter could be persuasive for McKibben's choir and the 21% of US residents who occupy the “Alarmed” category in Yale's Six Americas research as of March 2018—the largest proportion in the history of that survey ( Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 2018 ). The blithe dismissal of the climate challenge by the Trump administration creates a situation that is ripe for appeals to the irreparable.

Alternatively, despairing activists could resign themselves to the inevitably of climate change, or conclude that the only options available are litigation and procedural maneuvers to forestall and limit the damage until circumstances change. Yet McKibben's rhetoric of inevitability may offer an alternative whose time has come. Like apocalyptic rhetorics that warn of imminent disaster, McKibben's invocations of inevitability “are not to be taken literally. Their aim is not to predict the future but to change it” ( Killingsworth and Palmer, 1996 , p. 41). From this perspective, setbacks and reversals do not disprove McKibben's rhetoric of inevitability. Rather, they heighten the paradox that inevitability is contingent; the future is dependent on human action. Like any social movement, “Which future ultimately comes about … will depend on the ‘people' and their collective actions” ( Stewart et al., 2007 , p. 55). Indeed, shortly after the 2016 election McKibben (2017) reiterated his call for a battle for control of the zeitgeist. “In the end,” he argued, “the real fight is not over a pipeline or a windmill or even a carbon tax. The real fight—all real fights—are over the zeitgeist. They're about who controls the vision of the future.”

Strategic gestures are central to this vision in at least two key ways. First, strategic gestures can pinpoint crucial sites of leverage where systems can be turned against themselves or steered in a more favorable direction. The climate movement recognized the limits of Federal action well before the 2016 election and directed public pressure on states and cities, in addition to targeting fossil fuel investments and infrastructure. In February of 2018 McKibben, once again assembling disparate elements of the climate movement, articulated a Fossil Free US campaign. Its three elements included: 1. Joining the Sierra Club's “Ready for 100” campaign to work at the state and local level; 2. Continuing to block the development of fossil fuel infrastructure; and 3. Cutting off the money that fuels the industry through divestment and lawsuits ( McKibben, 2018 ).

The Sierra Club's “Ready for 100” campaign provides a useful case study of the relevance of strategic gestures in a political landscape altered by the Trump presidency. The campaign persuades local and state governments to pledge to transition to 100% renewable energy by a particular date (usually 2035 or 2050). Similar campaigns have targeted businesses and organizations such as universities. While these pledges have been criticized as little more than symbolic gestures, with one critic referring to them as “misleading and silly” ( McConnell, 2017 , see also Fisher, 2015 ; Roberts, 2017 ), they are nonetheless strategic gestures with the capacity to alter economic, political, and ideological systems. Local governments as sites of decision making are strategic sites for the application of leverage. Commitments to use renewable energy produce more demand for it, which sends market signals and alters the economic system. Further, each pledge is a victory for the climate movement, producing momentum and movement toward an inevitable future and a new zeitgeist. In this regard, strategic gestures like these are like bodily gestures that “catch-on.” They are both communicable and communal. This momentum of victories is further amplified by market changes—literally the increasing presence of renewable energy infrastructure is both evidence of an ongoing transition and productive of the felt experience of “change in the air.”

This gestural momentum enables rhetors, like Van Horn (2018) the Sierra Club's “Ready for 100” campaign director, to invoke the locus of the inevitable . To do so, she both assembles a piling up of gestures, “From big cities like Atlanta and San Diego to small towns like Abita Springs, LA and Hanover N.H., cities are switching to 100 percent clean energy,” and articulates solidarity across difference “More than 150 mayors, Democrats and Republicans, have also pledged to power their cities with renewable energy.” To this she adds that “more than 100 companies have also pledged to source 100 percent of their energy from renewables, including Apple, General Motors, Walmart, and Johnson & Johnson.” These tropes of momentum and solidarity enable Van Horn to situate her audience as already living in the time of transition. As she constructs it, the only contingency is whether it will be a fair and just transition: “As the transition away from dirty fuels continues to take shape across the country, it's up to all of us to determine what a true clean energy economy looks like, who benefits from it, and how we will get there in a way that empowers everyone in our communities.”

The second reason that strategic gestures are central to building an alternative future is that they connect these pragmatic interventions to visions of the future grounded in new relationships and identities, which are needed to alter the political conditions that can make other kinds of interventions possible. The initial response of critics like Nisbet (2013) to McKibben's climate change rhetoric was that it was polarizing and would not appeal to mainstream audiences. This, it was argued, would all but destroy the possibility for bipartisanship and legislative compromise. Whether or not such compromise was possible is debatable ( Nisbet, 2018 ; Roberts, 2019 ; Taylor, 2019 ) 7 . Yet, by 2019, Nisbet himself declared that the battle for public opinion on climate change was over, “The decades-long struggle by scientists and environmentalists to build broad-based support for cutting greenhouse emissions is finally over. Science has won” ( Nisbet, 2019 ). Nonetheless, he warned that the ambitious and potentially-polarizing rhetoric of McKibben and Green New Deal advocates Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey would once again prevent bipartisan legislative action. This is because “galvanized public opinion is not sufficient. History suggests that shifts in polling and the rise of mass movements are at best only able to create windows of opportunity for policy change to happen,” and these windows must be navigated carefully ( Nisbet, 2019 ). Thus, Nisbet once again counseled “a pivot toward policy pragmatism” ( Nisbet, 2019 ).

But what is “pragmatism?” McKibben's approach to movement building and climate change rhetoric certainly deserves much of the credit for the dramatic shift in public opinion and the reorganization of the discursive field of climate change politics. This is a field in which cap and trade policy proposals of the Waxman-Markey variety and Tax and Dividend proposals long championed by the Citizen's Climate Lobby and the Climate Leadership Council now appear to sit squarely in the middle between a Green New Deal on the left and a variety of proposals offered from the right such as Rep. Matt Gaetz's “Green Real Deal” and Sen. Lamar Alexander's call for a “New Manhattan Project for Clean Energy” ( Waldman and Matthews, 2019 ). The extent to which these changes will be enough to get the fossil fuel industry to “sue for peace,” as McKibben puts it, is uncertain. Nonetheless, they serve as evidence that McKibben's approach to climate change rhetoric and the use of strategic gestures are not without merit.

Politics and policy are different but equally important. Critics like Nisbet tend to focus on policy pragmatism in a relatively narrow purview, which focuses on the field of politics as it is: adapting policy and rhetorical invention to circumstances as they find them. In contrast, activists like McKibben are searching for ways to rearrange and reconstitute the context of politics in which policy negotiation can take place. As political scientist Skocpol (2013) writes in her diagnosis of the failure of cap and trade legislation in 2010:

Climate change warriors will have to look beyond elite maneuvers and find ways to address the values and interests of tens of millions of U.S. citizens. To counter fierce political opposition, reformers will have to build organizational networks across the country, and they will need to orchestrate sustained political efforts that stretch far beyond friendly Congressional offices, comfy board rooms, and posh retreats. Compromises with amenable business interests will still be necessary. But insider politics cannot carry the day on its own, apart from a broader movement pressing politicians for change. (p. 11)

From this perspective, strategic gestures can be seen as a vital means for movement activists and policy entrepreneurs to coordinate efforts to increase public pressure for climate action. It is necessary in order to create the conditions in which different kinds of policy compromises can be pursued and better deals can be made. McKibben and other climate activists need to address the values and interests of ordinary citizens and be prepared to make deals when the windows of opportunity open; but at the same time, policy reformers will need to give greater credence to the necessary role that grassroots mobilization plays in achieving their goals.

Theoretical Implications

Our conception of strategic gestures weds existing accounts of the communicative, performative, and affective aspects of symbolic action with considerations of “the strategic” as outlined by Cox in order to advance a theory of social change that is greater than the sum of its parts: symbolic acts of resistance complementing and amplifying systemic interventions, and those interventions leading to new types of symbolic action that promote solidarity and offer new visions of the future. In this way, strategic gestures can engage the “complex whole” of economic, political, and ideological systems that need to be transformed in order to effectively address climate change. This theorization of strategic gestures extends several scholarly conversations in environmental communication and rhetorical studies more generally.

First, this analysis extends and complicates Cox's attempts to revive “the strategic” as a central consideration in social movement rhetoric. His approach enables critics and activists to think about the purpose of social movement rhetoric as something more than producing a “message that cannot be ignored ( Cox, 2009 , p. 409–410).” However, it also tends to characterize communication as the sending of signals in a network of relations. This downplays the ways that rhetoric can transform perception and opinion, and the effects these can have on the transformation of complex systems. Our analysis of strategic gestures acknowledges the fact that complex systems are irreducible—that economic, political, and ideological systems are inextricably bound together—and thus that transformation of those systems requires rhetorical interventions that have symbolic and ideological force in addition to their capacity to send signals within economic systems. To be clear, not every gesture described by McKibben qualifies as a “strategic” intervention; divestment campaigns and efforts to block pipelines certainly do, while others, like driving an electric car, may only become strategic to the extent that they get articulated to larger patterns of symbolic and material change. The concept of strategic gestures enables this distinction and illuminates how gestures can promote social transformation, not just resistance.

Second, the concept of strategic gestures broadens the domain of symbolic actions in several ways. On one level, our analysis points to the gestural as a significant category of symbolic action beyond the verbal/visual binary that has been central to the emergence of visual rhetoric as an area of inquiry 8 . This expansion becomes important as environmental communication scholarship moves beyond image-focused analyses of hyper-mediated environments to new materialist approaches that consider how the built and mediated environments commingle. In other words, critical attention need not be limited to events and acts of resistance that are tailored to media logics (image events, spectacle) or which produce meaning though drama (protest, confrontation). Critical attention can also focus on material aspects of daily lived experience, such as transformations in the built environment. The ever-increasing presence of solar panels and wind power, for example, enact change and provide a reconstituted vision of the future. In addition, strategic gestures invite critics to focus attention on the variety of ways in which gestures build one upon another to produce meanings, affects and effects. Strategic gestures do more than represent an argument, an ideal, or an idea; they also display, transform, and provide opportunities for further articulation.

Third, strategic gestures can be a productive mode for enabling networked publics and generating counterpublicity. As Asen (2017) indicates, “Beyond deliberation, people may employ various forms of rhetoric and communication to recognize mutual standing and facilitate coordinated action. Perhaps through creativity born of struggle, counterpublicity may lend itself to discursive innovation” (p. 5). Strategic gestures can be considered a discursive innovation that is oriented not toward deliberation, but toward articulation and mobilization of loosely networked local publics. McKibben's notion of open-source organizing reflects this orientation toward networked publics, as does Klein's (2014 ) notion of “Blockadia” as “a roving transnational conflict zone that is cropping up with increasing frequency and intensity wherever extractive projects are attempting to dig and drill” (p. 294). To the extent that strategic gestures intervene locally and resonate globally, they open possibilities for new forms of solidarity. This echoes Asen's claims that, “Drawing on the mobility, flexibility, and generativity of interactions in a network, a resurgent critical publicity may emerge through new and reconfigured sites of engagement and human relationships” (p. 13).

Fourth, our analysis shows how a politics of gesture can clarify what is meant by “impure politics.” Referencing Lawrence Grossberg, Pezzullo (2011) explains that because there is no “pure political choice outside the systems we wish to challenge,” there is a need for “contingent and pragmatic practices of social change” (p. 127). Pezzullo's work reminds us to account for the contingent relationships between symbolic and material change, and to pay attention to the constitutive and mobilizing value of symbolic targets and their contribution to the application of leverage at local sites of decision-making. Organizing to stop a pipeline such as Keystone XL is not “merely” symbolic. It provides a movement with opportunities for organizing and getting more people involved in a movement; it can provide activists with opportunities to challenge perceptions of inevitability and gesture toward an alternative future; and it can function as an intervention that can upend economic and political relations of power.

From this perspective, differences over pure and impure politics appear to hinge on differing ideas about what counts as a “pragmatic” practice of social change. Nisbet's criticism of McKibben, for example, seems to position the latter as a purist who takes “no compromise,” “line-in-the-sand” stances on issues, tends to “double-down” on his approach in the face of setbacks, and has “little tolerance for political pragmatism” ( Nisbet, 2013 , p. 50, 52). But from a broader viewpoint, McKibben's attention to gestures is an eminently practical maneuver to transform the discursive field and open up new sites of leverage in the face of recalcitrance and half-measures at the federal level, whereas for Nisbet, pragmatism appears to mean environmentalists compromising with Republicans and moderate Democrats to pass incremental policy reforms. Our theorization of strategic gestures underscores how the limited notion of pragmatism presumed by critics such as Nisbet entails a rather cramped politics, one that conflates politics with policy and is blind to how rhetoric functions as a pragmatic art.

With this essay, we have intended to help environmental communication scholars and advocates observe the “messy environmental, economic, moral, ethical, political, and symbolic dynamics” of strategic gestures and how they communicate “much more than what might be immediately apparent” ( Pezzullo, 2011 , p. 140). McKibben's turn toward gestures as a crucial component of climate activism reminds us that neither rhetoric nor social movements are concerned solely with what is actual. The province of both is the realm of the possible, of moving people from their current situation to that which is yet to be ( Poulakos, 1983 ). Strategic gestures may ground themselves in the actual, yet their potency lies in how they display and produce for their audiences a world in the process of becoming otherwise.

Data Availability

Each author contributed substantially to the ideas and text of this paper. The authors order indicates our assessment of the relative contribution of each author.

Author Contributions

Conflict of interest statement.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the editor and reviewers for their helpful suggestions and guidance. They would also like to thank J. Robert Cox and Katey Castellano for their encouragement and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. A Provost's Summer Research Grant from James Madison University was instrumental to the completion of this project. The authors are grateful to Daniel Vieth for his transcription services and labor.

1. ^ McKibben remains on the board of directors of 350.org.

2. ^ We have attempted to maintain McKibben's speaking style by including the stops, starts and changes in thought direction, as they also reflect his extemporaneous delivery and reflective nature in presentation.

3. ^ This decision was reversed by newly elected President Trump in early 2017. The campaign to stop and delay this pipeline continues as of this writing.

4. ^ Cambridge Dictionary, “Gesture politics.” Available online at: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/gesture-politics

5. ^ In other texts McKibben dismisses individualistic gestures such as installing solar panels or driving a “plug in car” as individualistic gestures incapable of solving the climate crisis. However, he also notes that most people who do those things are also involved in the climate movement. Ultimately, he consistently argues that collective action is the only way to address the climate crisis: “What can I do?” is the wrong question, he argues. Instead, one should ask: “What can we do?” See for example: https://www.ecowatch.com/bill-mckibben-climate-change-2041759425.html

6. ^ This speech was given in Paris on the eve of the Paris Climate Accords meeting. We include it because its audience incudes members of the US.

7. ^ Nisbet provides many examples of the kinds of compromise he believed were possible, such as policies that would have sparked greater innovation in renewables, carbon capture and sequestration technologies, and nuclear power. Many of these did become policy during the Obama and Trump Administrations, such as Tax Credits for renewable energy. Whether larger initiatives could have been cobbled together is questionable. Even if they would have been possible, they would have required compromise from climate activists on core values, which is akin to demanding that climate deniers simply change their stance.

8. ^ For example, in a recent essay with Brunner, DeLuca continues to characterize the symbolic universe within a word/image problematic: “Even if images are always in the world of words, still, the force of images may transgress the limits of textual representation and interpretation. The capacity to transgress textual representations points to the event quality of images. Images are not subsumable to language because the two are fundamentally distinct” ( Brunner and DeLuca, 2016 , p. 294).

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Keywords: articulation, climate change, rhetoric of inevitability, social movements, strategic gestures

Citation: Bsumek PK, Schwarze S, Peeples J and Schneider J (2019) Strategic Gestures in Bill McKibben's Climate Change Rhetoric. Front. Commun. 4:40. doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2019.00040

Received: 19 February 2019; Accepted: 10 July 2019; Published: 19 August 2019.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2019 Bsumek, Schwarze, Peeples and Schneider. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Peter K. Bsumek, bsumekpk@jmu.edu

This article is part of the Research Topic

Critical Approaches to Climate Change and Civic Action

clock This article was published more than  5 years ago

The rhetoric of reaction to climate change

Futility and the Fourth Climate Change Report.

The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts hopes you and yours had a good Thanksgiving break. Everyone needs some time to pay attention to family, friends, turkey-induced naps, holiday sales and whatnot. One cannot spend every single day of one’s life focused on current events, lest one go mad with information overload.

In case you’re just starting to check the news, however, let me just quote the first few sentences from a federal government report that happened to be released the Friday after Thanksgiving: “Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities. The impacts of global climate change are already being felt in the United States and are projected to intensify in the future — but the severity of future impacts will depend largely on actions taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to the changes that will occur.”

That is from the Fourth National Climate Assessment , a congressionally mandated report that the Trump administration released on one of the slowest news days of the year. Here’s some more from The Post’s write-up of the report :

The report’s authors, who represent numerous federal agencies, say they are more certain than ever that climate change poses a severe threat to Americans' health and pocketbooks, as well as to the country’s infrastructure and natural resources. And while it avoids policy recommendations, the report’s sense of urgency and alarm stands in stark contrast to the lack of any apparent plan from President Trump to tackle the problems, which, according to the government he runs, are increasingly dire. The congressionally mandated document — the first of its kind issued during the Trump administration — details how climate-fueled disasters and other types of worrisome changes are becoming more commonplace throughout the country and how much worse they could become in the absence of efforts to combat global warming.

The assessment makes clear that policy responses can mitigate the harmful effects of climate change. Will this report trigger any serious policy response from the Trump administration?

Before I answer that, let’s remember two important facts about President Trump. The first is that he has recently tweeted about climate change:

Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS - Whatever happened to Global Warming? — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2018

The second thing to remember is that Trump does not know a lot about, you know, most areas of public policy. On Sunday, The Post’s Josh Dawsey and Damian Paletta related the following anecdote:

Trump also is often not versed in the particulars of the federal budget. Chief of Staff John F. Kelly has told others about watching television with Trump and asking the president how much the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff earns. Trump guessed $5 million, according to people who were told the story by Kelly, startling the chief of staff. Kelly responded that he made less than $200,000. The president suggested he get a large raise and noted the number of stars on his uniform.

So no, do not expect an actual response from the Trump White House when the president believes that “ the climate will change back again .”

I would also not expect a particularly vigorous reaction from the congressional wing of the GOP either. For one thing, the midterm elections wiped out a lot of moderate Republicans, who are the GOP officials willing to acknowledge that man-made climate change is real and require some responses. As the Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer noted earlier this month, “The 2018 midterm election dramatically shrank the small group of House Republicans who have painted themselves as moderates on climate change."

For another thing, I can already anticipate the reaction, because this is not the first report to make this point this fall. These kind of warnings seem to be issued on a regular basis, almost as if there is something that warrants concern.

Albert Hirschman wrote a great and depressing book titled “The Rhetoric of Reaction” in which he detailed three tropes of argumentation that reactionaries deploy in response to proposals for progressive action. The “perversity thesis” is the argument that any willful action to address the problem will have counterproductive effects. To see that in action with respect to climate change, see the conservative response to this story about proposed geoengineering . The “jeopardy thesis” warns that any action taken will sacrifice hard-won gains. That has been the standard GOP response to climate change, which is that any response is not worth risking U.S. living standards (doing nothing, on the other hand, seems guaranteed to threaten U.S. living standards).

The more dire the warnings get, however, the more I suspect that Trump’s GOP pivot to the “futility thesis” — that the problem is so massive that it is folly to expect any public policy to put a dent in the problem. Or, as Trump would put it, “have fun, everybody.”

It is a truism in Washington that the urgent tends to crowd out the important in policymaking. In the case of climate change, it would be great if officials could take action before matters become urgent.

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• How to write a rhetorical analysis | Key concepts & examples

How to Write a Rhetorical Analysis | Key Concepts & Examples

Published on August 28, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on July 23, 2023.

A rhetorical analysis is a type of essay  that looks at a text in terms of rhetoric. This means it is less concerned with what the author is saying than with how they say it: their goals, techniques, and appeals to the audience.

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Table of contents

Key concepts in rhetoric, analyzing the text, introducing your rhetorical analysis, the body: doing the analysis, concluding a rhetorical analysis, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about rhetorical analysis.

Rhetoric, the art of effective speaking and writing, is a subject that trains you to look at texts, arguments and speeches in terms of how they are designed to persuade the audience. This section introduces a few of the key concepts of this field.

Appeals: Logos, ethos, pathos

Appeals are how the author convinces their audience. Three central appeals are discussed in rhetoric, established by the philosopher Aristotle and sometimes called the rhetorical triangle: logos, ethos, and pathos.

Logos , or the logical appeal, refers to the use of reasoned argument to persuade. This is the dominant approach in academic writing , where arguments are built up using reasoning and evidence.

Ethos , or the ethical appeal, involves the author presenting themselves as an authority on their subject. For example, someone making a moral argument might highlight their own morally admirable behavior; someone speaking about a technical subject might present themselves as an expert by mentioning their qualifications.

Pathos , or the pathetic appeal, evokes the audience’s emotions. This might involve speaking in a passionate way, employing vivid imagery, or trying to provoke anger, sympathy, or any other emotional response in the audience.

These three appeals are all treated as integral parts of rhetoric, and a given author may combine all three of them to convince their audience.

Text and context

In rhetoric, a text is not necessarily a piece of writing (though it may be this). A text is whatever piece of communication you are analyzing. This could be, for example, a speech, an advertisement, or a satirical image.

In these cases, your analysis would focus on more than just language—you might look at visual or sonic elements of the text too.

The context is everything surrounding the text: Who is the author (or speaker, designer, etc.)? Who is their (intended or actual) audience? When and where was the text produced, and for what purpose?

Looking at the context can help to inform your rhetorical analysis. For example, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech has universal power, but the context of the civil rights movement is an important part of understanding why.

Claims, supports, and warrants

A piece of rhetoric is always making some sort of argument, whether it’s a very clearly defined and logical one (e.g. in a philosophy essay) or one that the reader has to infer (e.g. in a satirical article). These arguments are built up with claims, supports, and warrants.

A claim is the fact or idea the author wants to convince the reader of. An argument might center on a single claim, or be built up out of many. Claims are usually explicitly stated, but they may also just be implied in some kinds of text.

The author uses supports to back up each claim they make. These might range from hard evidence to emotional appeals—anything that is used to convince the reader to accept a claim.

The warrant is the logic or assumption that connects a support with a claim. Outside of quite formal argumentation, the warrant is often unstated—the author assumes their audience will understand the connection without it. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still explore the implicit warrant in these cases.

For example, look at the following statement:

We can see a claim and a support here, but the warrant is implicit. Here, the warrant is the assumption that more likeable candidates would have inspired greater turnout. We might be more or less convinced by the argument depending on whether we think this is a fair assumption.

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Rhetorical analysis isn’t a matter of choosing concepts in advance and applying them to a text. Instead, it starts with looking at the text in detail and asking the appropriate questions about how it works:

• What is the author’s purpose?
• Do they focus closely on their key claims, or do they discuss various topics?
• What tone do they take—angry or sympathetic? Personal or authoritative? Formal or informal?
• Who seems to be the intended audience? Is this audience likely to be successfully reached and convinced?
• What kinds of evidence are presented?

By asking these questions, you’ll discover the various rhetorical devices the text uses. Don’t feel that you have to cram in every rhetorical term you know—focus on those that are most important to the text.

The following sections show how to write the different parts of a rhetorical analysis.

Like all essays, a rhetorical analysis begins with an introduction . The introduction tells readers what text you’ll be discussing, provides relevant background information, and presents your thesis statement .

Hover over different parts of the example below to see how an introduction works.

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is widely regarded as one of the most important pieces of oratory in American history. Delivered in 1963 to thousands of civil rights activists outside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the speech has come to symbolize the spirit of the civil rights movement and even to function as a major part of the American national myth. This rhetorical analysis argues that King’s assumption of the prophetic voice, amplified by the historic size of his audience, creates a powerful sense of ethos that has retained its inspirational power over the years.

The body of your rhetorical analysis is where you’ll tackle the text directly. It’s often divided into three paragraphs, although it may be more in a longer essay.

Each paragraph should focus on a different element of the text, and they should all contribute to your overall argument for your thesis statement.

Hover over the example to explore how a typical body paragraph is constructed.

King’s speech is infused with prophetic language throughout. Even before the famous “dream” part of the speech, King’s language consistently strikes a prophetic tone. He refers to the Lincoln Memorial as a “hallowed spot” and speaks of rising “from the dark and desolate valley of segregation” to “make justice a reality for all of God’s children.” The assumption of this prophetic voice constitutes the text’s strongest ethical appeal; after linking himself with political figures like Lincoln and the Founding Fathers, King’s ethos adopts a distinctly religious tone, recalling Biblical prophets and preachers of change from across history. This adds significant force to his words; standing before an audience of hundreds of thousands, he states not just what the future should be, but what it will be: “The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.” This warning is almost apocalyptic in tone, though it concludes with the positive image of the “bright day of justice.” The power of King’s rhetoric thus stems not only from the pathos of his vision of a brighter future, but from the ethos of the prophetic voice he adopts in expressing this vision.

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The conclusion of a rhetorical analysis wraps up the essay by restating the main argument and showing how it has been developed by your analysis. It may also try to link the text, and your analysis of it, with broader concerns.

Explore the example below to get a sense of the conclusion.

It is clear from this analysis that the effectiveness of King’s rhetoric stems less from the pathetic appeal of his utopian “dream” than it does from the ethos he carefully constructs to give force to his statements. By framing contemporary upheavals as part of a prophecy whose fulfillment will result in the better future he imagines, King ensures not only the effectiveness of his words in the moment but their continuing resonance today. Even if we have not yet achieved King’s dream, we cannot deny the role his words played in setting us on the path toward it.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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The goal of a rhetorical analysis is to explain the effect a piece of writing or oratory has on its audience, how successful it is, and the devices and appeals it uses to achieve its goals.

Unlike a standard argumentative essay , it’s less about taking a position on the arguments presented, and more about exploring how they are constructed.

The term “text” in a rhetorical analysis essay refers to whatever object you’re analyzing. It’s frequently a piece of writing or a speech, but it doesn’t have to be. For example, you could also treat an advertisement or political cartoon as a text.

Logos appeals to the audience’s reason, building up logical arguments . Ethos appeals to the speaker’s status or authority, making the audience more likely to trust them. Pathos appeals to the emotions, trying to make the audience feel angry or sympathetic, for example.

Collectively, these three appeals are sometimes called the rhetorical triangle . They are central to rhetorical analysis , though a piece of rhetoric might not necessarily use all of them.

In rhetorical analysis , a claim is something the author wants the audience to believe. A support is the evidence or appeal they use to convince the reader to believe the claim. A warrant is the (often implicit) assumption that links the support with the claim.

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FiveThirtyEight

Jun. 4, 2014 , at 7:01 AM

The Political Rhetoric Around Climate Change … Er, Global Warming

By Harry Enten

John Amis / AP

On Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency  put forward plans to, by 2030, cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by 30 percent from 2005 levels. Putting aside the climate implications of the announcement, it will be interesting to see the wording used by Democrats and Republicans in framing the issue.

Last week, Yale University released a study  showing that people are more likely to fear “global warming” and take part in a campaign to stop it than they are “climate change.” Yale’s report echoed research by George W. Bush pollster Frank Luntz,  who had argued that the Bush White House should use climate change instead of global warming because it sounded less scary. Polling also shows  Democrats are more likely than Republicans to believe the Earth is warming and human activity is the main cause.

But Democrats and Republicans in Congress don’t see seem to be heeding the pollsters’ advice. The Sunlight Foundation’s Capitol Words website tracks the number of times  words or phrases are used in the Congressional Record and by which party. Here are the number of mentions each year since President Obama took office (I prorated the 2014 figures based on the number of days the Senate has left in session).

Democrats have been much more likely than Republicans to use the term climate change during the Obama presidency. Almost three-fourths of climate change mentions — 74 percent — were by members of the Democratic caucus. And four of the five members of Congress who most frequently mentioned it were Democrats . (At the top of the list: Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who has been on a one-man crusade in trying to get Congress to act on climate change.)

Global warming mentions are closer, but Republicans were responsible for 60 percent of its mentions. This majority doesn’t hold for all the years, but even eliminating the GOP’s big advantage in 2009 still leaves the party with 55 percent of the mentions. Four of the five members of Congress to use the term most were Republican . (The person who used global warming most? Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma,  who doesn’t believe  that global warming is man-made.)

Cumulatively, from 2009 through Tuesday, Republicans mentioned global warming 1,338 times and climate change 1,243 times. Democrats mentioned climate change 3,584 times and global warming just 865 times.

This seems to fit the opposite of what the pollsters suggest should be happening, yet it’s a pattern that matches what we’re seeing on cable news as well.

I searched the Internet Archive’s database of TV news transcripts for “ climate change ” and “ global warming ” since 2009. (You can search here ). MSNBC, which is most watched by liberals , has used climate change 3,981 times, with “Hardball With Chris Matthews” and “The Rachel Maddow Show” using it most. Fox News, which is most watched by conservatives , has used it 2,946 times, or about 1,000 fewer times than MSNBC.

Meanwhile, global warming has been used 3,318 times on Fox News (“The O’Reilly Factor” and “Hannity” used it most). MSNBC has only used it 1,959 times.

So, why are Democrats using climate change more frequently? That’s a difficult question to answer, but part of it may be that they are trying to draw attention to the larger implications of a warming planet. Many people use the terms interchangeably, but climate change usually refers to the broader effects brought on by increased greenhouse gases, such as a rising ocean . That’s why NASA and the vast majority of the scientific literature uses the phrase.

The idea of man-made global warming, on the other hand, may be more easily attacked from a rhetorical angle because it’s singular. One might use the logic, it’s cold outside, therefore global warming can’t possibly be happening. Inhofe followed this line of reasoning in January , when pointing out that the cold winter in the East (even as most of the planet was baking ) was a sign that man-made warming is a hoax. He also pointed to political events about global warming that took place in cold weather. It’s more difficult to make that argument when we start talking about rising oceans.

If the polling is to be believed, Democrats, Republicans and the news channels they watch are actually having the opposite effect they are intending. We’ll have to see whether the Yale study makes them reverse course.

Harry Enten was a senior political writer and analyst for FiveThirtyEight. @forecasterenten

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What Is a Rhetorical Analysis and How to Write a Great One

Helly Douglas

Do you have to write a rhetorical analysis essay? Fear not! We’re here to explain exactly what rhetorical analysis means, how you should structure your essay, and give you some essential “dos and don’ts.”

What is a Rhetorical Analysis Essay?

How do you write a rhetorical analysis, what are the three rhetorical strategies, what are the five rhetorical situations, how to plan a rhetorical analysis essay, creating a rhetorical analysis essay, examples of great rhetorical analysis essays, final thoughts.

A rhetorical analysis essay studies how writers and speakers have used words to influence their audience. Think less about the words the author has used and more about the techniques they employ, their goals, and the effect this has on the audience.

In your analysis essay, you break a piece of text (including cartoons, adverts, and speeches) into sections and explain how each part works to persuade, inform, or entertain. You’ll explore the effectiveness of the techniques used, how the argument has been constructed, and give examples from the text.

A strong rhetorical analysis evaluates a text rather than just describes the techniques used. You don’t include whether you personally agree or disagree with the argument.

Structure a rhetorical analysis in the same way as most other types of academic essays . You’ll have an introduction to present your thesis, a main body where you analyze the text, which then leads to a conclusion.

Think about how the writer (also known as a rhetor) considers the situation that frames their communication:

• Topic: the overall purpose of the rhetoric
• Audience: this includes primary, secondary, and tertiary audiences
• Purpose: there are often more than one to consider
• Context and culture: the wider situation within which the rhetoric is placed

Back in the 4th century BC, Aristotle was talking about how language can be used as a means of persuasion. He described three principal forms —Ethos, Logos, and Pathos—often referred to as the Rhetorical Triangle . These persuasive techniques are still used today.

Rhetorical Strategy 1: Ethos

Are you more likely to buy a car from an established company that’s been an important part of your community for 50 years, or someone new who just started their business?

Reputation matters. Ethos explores how the character, disposition, and fundamental values of the author create appeal, along with their expertise and knowledge in the subject area.

Aristotle breaks ethos down into three further categories:

• Phronesis: skills and practical wisdom
• Arete: virtue
• Eunoia: goodwill towards the audience

Ethos-driven speeches and text rely on the reputation of the author. In your analysis, you can look at how the writer establishes ethos through both direct and indirect means.

Rhetorical Strategy 2: Pathos

Pathos-driven rhetoric hooks into our emotions. You’ll often see it used in advertisements, particularly by charities wanting you to donate money towards an appeal.

Common use of pathos includes:

• Vivid description so the reader can imagine themselves in the situation
• Personal stories to create feelings of empathy
• Emotional vocabulary that evokes a response

By using pathos to make the audience feel a particular emotion, the author can persuade them that the argument they’re making is compelling.

Rhetorical Strategy 3: Logos

Logos uses logic or reason. It’s commonly used in academic writing when arguments are created using evidence and reasoning rather than an emotional response. It’s constructed in a step-by-step approach that builds methodically to create a powerful effect upon the reader.

Rhetoric can use any one of these three techniques, but effective arguments often appeal to all three elements.

The rhetorical situation explains the circumstances behind and around a piece of rhetoric. It helps you think about why a text exists, its purpose, and how it’s carried out.

The rhetorical situations are:

• 1) Purpose: Why is this being written? (It could be trying to inform, persuade, instruct, or entertain.)
• 2) Audience: Which groups or individuals will read and take action (or have done so in the past)?
• 3) Genre: What type of writing is this?
• 4) Stance: What is the tone of the text? What position are they taking?
• 5) Media/Visuals: What means of communication are used?

Understanding and analyzing the rhetorical situation is essential for building a strong essay. Also think about any rhetoric restraints on the text, such as beliefs, attitudes, and traditions that could affect the author's decisions.

Before leaping into your essay, it’s worth taking time to explore the text at a deeper level and considering the rhetorical situations we looked at before. Throw away your assumptions and use these simple questions to help you unpick how and why the text is having an effect on the audience.

1: What is the Rhetorical Situation?

• Why is there a need or opportunity for persuasion?
• How do words and references help you identify the time and location?
• What are the rhetoric restraints?
• What historical occasions would lead to this text being created?

2: Who is the Author?

• How do they position themselves as an expert worth listening to?
• What is their ethos?
• Do they have a reputation that gives them authority?
• What is their intention?
• What values or customs do they have?

3: Who is it Written For?

• Who is the intended audience?
• How is this appealing to this particular audience?
• Who are the possible secondary and tertiary audiences?

4: What is the Central Idea?

• Can you summarize the key point of this rhetoric?
• What arguments are used?
• How has it developed a line of reasoning?

5: How is it Structured?

• What structure is used?
• How is the content arranged within the structure?

6: What Form is Used?

• Does this follow a specific literary genre?
• What type of style and tone is used, and why is this?
• Does the form used complement the content?
• What effect could this form have on the audience?

7: Is the Rhetoric Effective?

• Does the content fulfil the author’s intentions?
• Does the message effectively fit the audience, location, and time period?

Once you’ve fully explored the text, you’ll have a better understanding of the impact it’s having on the audience and feel more confident about writing your essay outline.

A great essay starts with an interesting topic. Choose carefully so you’re personally invested in the subject and familiar with it rather than just following trending topics. There are lots of great ideas on this blog post by My Perfect Words if you need some inspiration. Take some time to do background research to ensure your topic offers good analysis opportunities.

Remember to check the information given to you by your professor so you follow their preferred style guidelines. This outline example gives you a general idea of a format to follow, but there will likely be specific requests about layout and content in your course handbook. It’s always worth asking your institution if you’re unsure.

Make notes for each section of your essay before you write. This makes it easy for you to write a well-structured text that flows naturally to a conclusion. You will develop each note into a paragraph. Look at this example by College Essay for useful ideas about the structure.

1: Introduction

This is a short, informative section that shows you understand the purpose of the text. It tempts the reader to find out more by mentioning what will come in the main body of your essay.

• Name the author of the text and the title of their work followed by the date in parentheses
• Use a verb to describe what the author does, e.g. “implies,” “asserts,” or “claims”
• Briefly summarize the text in your own words
• Mention the persuasive techniques used by the rhetor and its effect

Create a thesis statement to come at the end of your introduction.

After your introduction, move on to your critical analysis. This is the principal part of your essay.

• Explain the methods used by the author to inform, entertain, and/or persuade the audience using Aristotle's rhetorical triangle
• Use quotations to prove the statements you make
• Explain why the writer used this approach and how successful it is
• Consider how it makes the audience feel and react

Make each strategy a new paragraph rather than cramming them together, and always use proper citations. Check back to your course handbook if you’re unsure which citation style is preferred.

3: Conclusion

Your conclusion should summarize the points you’ve made in the main body of your essay. While you will draw the points together, this is not the place to introduce new information you’ve not previously mentioned.

Use your last sentence to share a powerful concluding statement that talks about the impact the text has on the audience(s) and wider society. How have its strategies helped to shape history?

Before You Submit

Poor spelling and grammatical errors ruin a great essay. Use ProWritingAid to check through your finished essay before you submit. It will pick up all the minor errors you’ve missed and help you give your essay a final polish. Look at this useful ProWritingAid webinar for further ideas to help you significantly improve your essays. Sign up for a free trial today and start editing your essays!

You’ll find countless examples of rhetorical analysis online, but they range widely in quality. Your institution may have example essays they can share with you to show you exactly what they’re looking for.

The following links should give you a good starting point if you’re looking for ideas:

Pearson Canada has a range of good examples. Look at how embedded quotations are used to prove the points being made. The end questions help you unpick how successful each essay is.

Excelsior College has an excellent sample essay complete with useful comments highlighting the techniques used.

Brighton Online has a selection of interesting essays to look at. In this specific example, consider how wider reading has deepened the exploration of the text.

Writing a rhetorical analysis essay can seem daunting, but spending significant time deeply analyzing the text before you write will make it far more achievable and result in a better-quality essay overall.

It can take some time to write a good essay. Aim to complete it well before the deadline so you don’t feel rushed. Use ProWritingAid’s comprehensive checks to find any errors and make changes to improve readability. Then you’ll be ready to submit your finished essay, knowing it’s as good as you can possibly make it.

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Helly Douglas is a UK writer and teacher, specialising in education, children, and parenting. She loves making the complex seem simple through blogs, articles, and curriculum content. You can check out her work at hellydouglas.com or connect on Twitter @hellydouglas. When she’s not writing, you will find her in a classroom, being a mum or battling against the wilderness of her garden—the garden is winning!

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Rhetorical Analysis Essay Draft

Dr. Jessica O’Hara

October 16 2022

Rhetorical Analysis Essay

Global warming is a very important and pressing issue in today’s world, yet we as a society are very divided on the topic. It has come to a point where one’s view on climate change is already assumed based on their political affiliation. There is a lot of evidence all pointing out that our planet is undergoing severe global warming and climate change, and it is our duty to try and lower the rate. It is no more of a joke when we are losing many species, sea levels are rising, and the overall temperature of our planet is increasing as time passes. This artifact from Adobe hints possible outcomes if we do not lower the rate of climate change and has a variety of lenses that we can view through. On the other hand, the second artifact is the polar opposite of the first artifact. The second artifact deals with the opposing view on climate change, the side that is the reason we are still divided on the topic of climate change and why we are struggling to make a change to lower the rate of it. Former President Donald Trump’s opinions and statements on climate change on media sources like Twitter have completely distorted many people’s view and perceptions on climate change. While it may hurt the economy and taxpayers by investing government dollars into climate relief acts, it is better to spend that money and take the hit monetarily rather than risking the entire planet itself. The small differences and severe differences between the two artifacts explains why we as a society are divided on the issue of climate change and the Earth continuing to heat at an unprecedented rate.

This artifact from Adobe has no background as it is a free template for climate change posters on Adobe’s website, yet it has no author. This means either someone at Adobe created the poster template to spread awareness about climate change, or someone made a poster on climate change using Adobe’s software and an employee decided to place it on the public website. At first glance, the poster looks like a regular global warming or climate change poster. In plain text, it talks about how climate change is real, that everyone needs to start reducing their carbon footprint, and there is even a website at the bottom of the poster for interested viewers to visit. Yet, once you take a deeper look into this ‘basic poster,’ you will find that there are many hidden meanings and messages within the poster. In the cartoon drawing of a planet with green and blue spots, the artifact shows what the Earth could possibly look like if we do not start taking care of it now. Looking at the artifact through a visual rhetoric lens, my attention is pointed towards the blobbiness, the drop underneath the planet, the globe tilted on its axis, and the land and water not being in the correct spots. All of these details are hinting that the Earth is melting from all of the global warming and even turning disoriented because of it. Another piece to look at is the website at the bottom of the poster, kickthechange.org. If you type the website into Google, you will find that it does not even exist. Yet I can tell that the reason the creator still implemented the website at the bottom of the poster is for it to serve as a slogan or concise message of what the poster is about and a call to action of what we need to do in order to help the planet. If I could run the kickthechange.org website, I would include the articles from NASA to prove how climate change is real, implement the climate pledges from Apple and FedEx, and provide tips and ideas of what we can do individually or as a small society to spread awareness of climate change and how to start reducing our carbon footprint ourselves.

The second artifact has a lot more background information, but has a polar opposite perspective on climate change from the first artifact. This artifact discusses former President Donald Trump’s statements on global warming and climate change that have influenced his following’s view on the topic as well. BBC news created this artifact, which is a collage of Trump’s most viral tweets on climate change. In my opinion, if someone were to read these tweets without seeing that a former president wrote them, they would think the author of those tweets is crazy. As BBC puts it, “his views on climate change appear contradictory – and confusing.” Yet, millions of people agree with former President Trump on his opinions on climate change, so he continues to post about it to spread false claims to even more of his supporters. Along with a large variety of other factors, Trump has been banned from many of the largest social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook due to the claims that he puts out on their platforms. Many individuals get their daily dose of news solely from social media, and if they follow accounts similar to Trump’s and other biased sources, their perception on climate change along with a variety of other topics is at risk of being far from the truth. If you look at Trump’s tweets through a logos lens, you will find that many of the tweets in the BBC collage do not logically make sense. The problem is that he makes his claims solely based on his beliefs; he has no source or research to back his tweets. For example, Trump believes that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing goods noncompetitive.” Whereas there is specific evidence from NASA, an independent agency of the U.S. federal government, that states “from global temperature rise to melting ice sheets, the evidence of a warming planet abounds.”

Conclusion: In this final paragraph I will compare and contrast the two artifacts along with providing my final thoughts and a call to action.

Speech outline:

• Address how the artifact looks like a normal climate change poster at first glance but has a lot of hidden meanings and messages within it.
• Talk about how climate change is real and the supporting evidence for it from NASA.
• Look at the artifact through a logos lens and relate it to the climate pledges from Apple and FedEx.
• Look at the artifact through a visual rhetoric lens and see how the Earth is melting, etc.
• Discuss second artifact on Trump
• Elaborate on how BBC made the collage
• Discuss social media presence and eventually getting banned
• Final thoughts and call to action.

4 thoughts on “Rhetorical Analysis Essay Draft”

Hi everyone! Thanks for taking the time to read my boring and confusing essay… I am looking for feedback on if I am headed in the right direction in this essay, or what I need to do in order to change directions. I definitely think my third paragraph on Trump’s twitter needs some work, but I don’t know exactly what to do. Finally, any recommendations are greatly appreciated. In this case, more is better than less!

I agree with you that your third paragraph needs to be revised a bit more. Maybe you could cut down irrelevant information like Trump being banned from social media websites and focus more on the long-term history of his policymaking and their effects on the environment. I liked your comment about the website ‘kickthechange.org’ as it really exemplifies how people need to start taking action to tackle the issue. Great draft, overall!

Great essay Rohan, your speech looks well thought-out too! My only critiques is that for academic essays, try not to use the first person perspective and remove words like I, We, You, etc. Other than that, your thesis statement flows a little awkwardly since you say “small differences & severe differences,” I think you could make it a bit more distinct. Otherwise, great job. I can’t way to see your final version.

Although this is just the draft, I can tell what direction you want to head in with this analysis. However, I feel like using words such as “I” can seem a bit informal when it comes to academic essays. I really liked your analysis on each of the artifacts but I feel like you can expand and articulate on it more.

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Crafting a Thesis Statement

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Climate Change Added a Month’s Worth of Extra-Hot Days in Past Year

Since last May, the average person experienced 26 more days of abnormal warmth than they would have without global warming, a new analysis found.

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By Raymond Zhong

Over the past year of record-shattering warmth, the average person on Earth experienced 26 more days of abnormally high temperatures than they otherwise would have, were it not for human-induced climate change, scientists said Tuesday.

The past 12 months have been the planet’s hottest ever measured, and the burning of fossil fuels, which has added huge amounts of heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, is a major reason. Nearly 80 percent of the world’s population experienced at least 31 days of atypical warmth since last May as a result of human-caused warming, the researchers’ analysis found.

Hypothetically, had we not heated the globe to its current state , the number of unusually warm days would have been far fewer, the scientists estimated, using mathematical modeling of the global climate.

The precise difference varies place to place. In some countries, it is just two or three weeks, the researchers found. In others, including Colombia, Indonesia and Rwanda, the difference is upward of 120 days.

“That’s a lot of toll that we’ve imposed on people,” said one of the researchers who conducted the new analysis, Andrew Pershing, the vice president for science at Climate Central, a nonprofit research and news organization based in Princeton, N.J., adding, “It’s a lot of toll that we’ve imposed on nature.” In parts of South America and Africa, he said, it amounts to “120 days that just wouldn’t be there without climate change.”

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