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Abstract

This paper explores the process of feeling climate injustice. It aims to situate climate distress as an issue of justice, in order to generate more politically accountable and empowering responses. It firstly situates climate anxiety, solastalgia and climate disaster trauma as symptoms of affective climate violence, where harm that could have been prevented was instead consciously and systematically exacerbated by fossil fuelled political regimes. It articulates witnessing as a practice of affective climate justice, an approach that would recognise climate distress as violence, and offer support, apology and redress for this violence, including through seeking to prevent future climate change. However, the second section outlines how, in perverse efforts to maintain fossil fuel interests, climate distress is often further amplified through practices of greenhouse gaslighting – denying, deriding and dismissing people's experiences of harm. Greenhouse gaslighting is outlined as a patriarchal practice of emotional abuse that is enabled by and seeks to perpetuate white-colonial-extractivism. Thirdly, the paper argues that even within progressive circles, current efforts to witness climate distress potentially fail to enact affective climate justice due to discourses that centre whiteness and privilege, rather than recognising and responding to the different and unequal forms of affective climate violence experienced by diverse peoples.

Keywords

Anxiety anger emotion feminism politics whiteness witnessing

Introduction: Climate distress as an issue of climate injustice

Research is finding that lived experience of climatic ‘shocks’ (e.g. cyclones) and longer term ‘stressors’ (e.g. droughts) can have wide ranging adverse impacts on people's wellbeing. These diverse affective harms, encompassed here under the umbrella term ‘climate distress,’ can include a wide range of emotional experiences such as worry through to post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and chronic anxiety (Cianconi et al., 2020; Hayes et al., 2018; Pihkala, 2022b). They can also include cultural and political harms such as a loss of a sense of identity, sense of place, sense of community and/or sense of agency, as well as existential harms such as a sense of the world ending and your future being stolen (Barnwell et al., 2021; Head, 2016; Tschakert et al., 2019; Verlie, 2022). This affective harm can occur through personal or vicarious experiences of climate change (e.g. evacuating from bushfires, or watching the news about bushfires), or through anticipation of future climate change (e.g. anxiety about future bushfires) (Ogunbode et al., 2022; Pihkala, 2020). As the impacts of climate change increase in intensity and frequency over the coming decades it is likely that a great proportion of the human population will experience significant distress.

How this issue is understood will influence the kinds of responses (or lack of) that are developed, and thus, to what extent and in what manner people are enabled to live with and respond to the escalating impacts of climate change. However, climate anxiety and ecological distress have been predominantly studied from the perspective of the psychological sciences and situated as an issue of individual mental vulnerability rather than from the social sciences and situated as a political issue of systemic injustice (Osborne, 2019). Psychological research offers valuable insights into the strategies individuals can use to cope with their personal experiences of climate anxiety and trauma (Davenport, 2017). However, if not complemented by critical social science research, there is a risk of depoliticising, individualising and pathologizing people's emotional experiences of climate change (Bednarik, 2021; Rhodes, 2021). Although many climate psychologists explicitly state that climate distress is a rational and healthy response to planetary destruction and should not be pathologized (Bhullar et al., 2022; Hogg et al., 2021; Pihkala, 2020), the discourses (i.e. material-rhetorical structures) of late capitalism mean that having feelings about climate change is often seen as an individual's problem which can be measured through psychometric instruments and then treated through privatised mental health services. This reduces the role of the state to one where supposedly benevolent governments can (partially) fund time- and geographically-limited mental health counselling following ‘individual’ extreme weather events and leave it at that, ignoring and downplaying their own role in fuelling the systematic upscaling and compounding nature of these climate crises (e.g. Verlie and Blom, 2021). In addition, these discourses can result in those who do genuinely care focusing their responses on the end of pipe (i.e. counselling for affected individuals) rather than leveraging resources to prevent the causes of this distress (i.e. political advocacy) (Barnwell and Wood, 2022).

As the impacts of climate change are unevenly and unfairly distributed, and lived experience of climate impacts can generate climate distress, it would follow that climate distress is likely to be unfairly and unevenly distributed. As such, it has been noted as an issue of climate injustice (Hickman et al., 2021; Ingle and Mikulewicz, 2020), but the empirical research base needed to confirm or contest the disproportionate distribution of climate distress is lacking (Barnwell and Wood, 2022), and neither is an adequate theorisation of climate distress as injustice available. However, a recent study found that 60% of today's young people are already very or extremely worried about climate change and that 65% believe governments have failed young people on this issue (Hickman et al., 2021). Another found that children born in 2020 are expected to experience, on average, up to seven times more climate disasters than their grandparents (Thiery et al., 2021). Both studies found that these harms – stress from lived experience of climate disasters, stress about future climate crises, and stress about political climate inaction – are unevenly distributed, with poorer communities generally more affected. Such studies indicate that climate distress is likely to escalate in the coming decades, that this will be geographically and economically unequal, and that these issues are deeply political.

As such, there is a critical need to theorise the issues of climate anxiety and ecological trauma in ways that acknowledge their uneven geographies and their enmeshment with political structures. Climate justice is a framework that offers a potential solution; as Kojola and Pellow note, ‘linking environmental justice studies with scholarship on emotions’ can offer ‘a deeper reckoning with … the totality of environmental’ harms (2021: 108). But consideration of emotions, affect and mental health within the climate and environmental justice literatures is relatively recent (Kojola and Pellow, 2021; but see Anguelovski, 2013; Dory et al., 2017; and Norgaard and Reed, 2017 for valuable contributions). Climate justice is an ethical framework that aims to guide analysis and action on climate change. It highlights how the people who are least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions are usually the ones faced with the worst impacts of climate change (Harlan et al., 2015; Jafry et al., 2018). As a political agenda, it advocates for forms of climate action that reduce these unequal dynamics and that contribute to social justice (Porter et al., 2020). Of course, discussions about climate distress do seem to presume that the issue is political and unfair, largely based on the premise that young people are worse affected, and that this makes climate anxiety an issue of intergenerational injustice. However, this is rarely made explicit, and it is usually inadequately articulated. Our failure to explicitly analyse climate distress as a political issue, as one of injustice, fails to hold perpetrators of this emotional violence responsible. It also fails to account for the intersectional differences and the inequalities regarding who experiences climate distress, to what extent, and in what ways. These are issues that I seek to address in this paper.

I am an uninvited white-settler cis-heterosexual woman living on unceded Gadigal Country (on urbanised lands now called Sydney by the settler state of Australia). I write this paper in the aftermath of multiple compounding climate disasters in this region throughout the last few years: most notably the nine-month long ‘Black Summer’ bushfire crisis of 2019–2020 and the ‘triple La Niña’ which led to repetitive flooding from 2020–2022, as well as the landslides, heatwaves, ‘brown rain’ and dust storms that accompanied and intersected with the floods and fires. I draw here on my experiences as a climate change educator, researcher and organiser who has worked with students, climate activists and communities in disaster zones across the last decade. In so doing, in this paper I weave together an argument enabled by multiple forms of ongoing lived experience and interaction with communities and local ecologies, as well as the insights of intersectional feminist, anticolonial, Indigenous, and multispecies theorising. Nevertheless, despite such engagements, my positionality affords many privileges which no doubt prohibits a more thoroughgoing exploration of subjective experiences of affective climate violence. I welcome critiques, advances, complications and refinements of the ideas offered here.

Building on recent assertions in climate psychology that climate distress could be considered a global injustice (Barnwell and Wood, 2022) and a torturous moral injury perpetrated through institutional betrayal (Henritze et al., 2023; Hickman et al., 2021), this paper brings together insights from a range of critical social theories to more rigorously outline the political and structural dimensions of climate distress. With an overall aim of theorising climate distress as injustice, the first section theorises climate distress as political, systemic, embodied, relational, and more-than-human affective violence. Critical to this account of climate distress as climate injustice is the systemically unfair and starkly differentiated experiences of these violences: how Indigenous peoples, people of colour, people experiencing poverty, non-humans and other marginalised groups suffer worse. Witnessing (that is, acknowledging and adequately responding to) people's distress is advocated as a direct and necessary, though not sufficient, remedy to this affective violence.

The second section explores how affective climate violence, rather than being redressed through witnessing and/or structural change, is often amplified through practices of greenhouse gaslighting, a specific form of petro-masculinity (Daggett, 2018) that seeks to maintain fossil fuelled political regimes through negating and trivialising people's lived experiences of climate distress. This section proceeds through a focus on former Prime Minister of Australia Scott Morrison's policy decisions, inactions, and statements during his time in government, which belittled, denied, undermined and derided multiple groups of climate survivors. Greenhouse gaslighting is offered as one example that illuminates the pervasive structural misogyny and racism that create and reiteratively reinforce climate violence and the distress it creates. Across these two sections, the paper argues that feeling climate injustice is a more specific phenomenon than feeling climate anxiety: the unjust politics of climate violence leads to feelings of rage, anger, indignation, abandonment and cynicism, not just worry or grief.

The final section of the paper takes up Ray's (2021a) provocation that climate anxiety is ‘an overwhelmingly white’ phenomenon. In agreement with Barnwell and Wood (2022), it contends that people of colour and other disadvantaged groups are likely to be more distressed by climate crisis, although the evidence base for this may be lacking. It thus grapples with why conversations about climate anxiety seem to centre white and privileged experiences, and the ways in which conceptualisations, methods and practices of understanding and responding to climate distress may need to change to better witness diverse people's differentiated experiences. It contends that if the field of climate emotions fails to do this, it too will enact affective climate injustice through ignoring or silencing those most affected by climate crisis. As such, the paper argues for more inclusive practices of witnessing affective climate violence as a first step towards affective climate justice. That is, we first need better practices of recognition, if we are to implement other forms of climate justice, such as distributional, procedural, and transitional justice.

Affective climate violence

This paper argues that we can understand ‘climate distress’ as an issue of violence and injustice. As used here, climate distress incorporates three overlapping temporalities of climate change induced affective harm. 1) Climate anxiety: future-focused worry about impending climatic changes; 2) solastalgia: loss experienced in the present as ecological crisis unfolds around oneself; and 3) climate disaster trauma: the ongoing reverberations of past catastrophes that continue to be felt in the bodymind. Across these multiple temporal modes, climate distress can include a wide array of painful feelings (Pihkala, 2022b). Much attention has been paid to emotions such as anxiety, grief, despair and hope (Cunsolo and Landman, 2017; Head, 2016; Ojala et al., 2021; Pihkala, 2022a) that feeling climate change generates. In this paper, I attend to feeling climate injustice. The focus on the politics of this preventable crisis enables recognition of why so many also experience feelings of rage, anger, cynicism, outrage, disgust, disappointment, hate, abandonment, betrayal, indignation and of being disrespected (Antadze, 2020; Bray et al., 2019; Hickman et al., 2021; Kleres and Wettergren, 2017; Knops, 2021; Stanley et al., 2021). The knowledge that specific people intentionally orchestrated or chose not to prevent (your and others’) climate suffering creates a qualitatively different register of experience than would occur if the climate crisis was an unfortunate and inevitable tragedy.

To adequately prevent, and also better heal, climate distress, we need our conversations to explicitly and consistently hold governments and their fossil fuel allies accountable as the architects of this harm, and to resist pathologisation and victim blaming in all forms. Framing climate distress as affective climate violence enacted by fossil fuelled governments can enable us to do this work. To do so, we need to assert that the root cause of climate distress is climate change – not individual psychological vulnerability – and that the policies and broader mechanisms of (non)governance that create climate change are violence (Kojola and Pellow, 2021). This should be unsurprising, given that the root cause of climate change is colonial capitalism, itself a profound structural violence that includes the land grabs, displacement, marginalisation, racism and slavery required to access, mine, refine and ship fossil fuels (Davis and Todd, 2017; Liboiron, 2021; Sultana, 2022). In this paper I focus mostly on the affective experiences of climate impacts, however, understood more holistically, affective climate violence includes the bodily, psychic and relational harms experienced throughout the whole climate-changing-life-cycle, from deforestation and fossil fuel extraction through to planetary climate breakdown. These affective climate violences are often part of colonial capitalism, and they can compound on top of colonial capitalisms’ violences, which I address in the third section.

Structural violence occurs when (human and/or non-human) people experience violence, but the cause of the violence is (at least partly) a social structure, rather than (just) an autonomous bad person or persons. Structural violence includes harm that could have been prevented by governments but was not; this can include through creating systems that deny people the capacity to meet their basic needs and rights (Galtung, 1969). Thus, inadequate emissions and adaptation policies that lead to climate crisis can be understood as structural violence (Bonds, 2016; Soron, 2007). Through more frequent and intense heat waves, wildfires, droughts, floods, cyclones, and/or rising sea levels, climate negligence leads to malnutrition, displacement, homelessness, family breakdown, and a whole host of other preventable harms to humans and non-humans. Given the extensive knowledge governments and fossil fuel corporations have had of the causes and impacts of climate change (Supran et al., 2023), the continued extraction, production, distribution and combustion of fossil fuels can be understood as intentionally violent – even if climate change is not their desired outcome, it is still a known and inevitable consequence of their actions. However, structural violence does not require intentionality, maliciousness, or direct body-to-body conflict but simply that some people are systemically exposed to unnecessary and preventable harms (Liboiron, 2021). Climate violence, as a structure, is enacted both through acts of omission (failing to prevent carbon pollution, and failing to implement adequate adaptation) and acts of commission (creating carbon pollution and putting people in harm's way) (Soron, 2007). This violence is not evenly distributed and is typically experienced by those with least capacity to prevent it, which makes it an issue of injustice (Harlan et al., 2015; Jafry et al., 2018).

Climate violence is felt affectively. That is, while climate violence may have many dimensions, such as economic losses or damage to local infrastructure, ultimately these harms matter because of how they are experienced by (human and non-human¹) people. Affective climate violence, as a concept, foregrounds how the multifaceted, cascading and compounding harms of climate change register affectively in people's lives, minds, bodies, relationships, and communities. As I use affect here, it refers to the agencies and feelings generated in and generative of embodied more-than-human relations. Affective climate violence is therefore experienced as the hurt and disempowerment that arises from governments’ failures to prevent climate impacts. Drawing on theories of affect, affective climate violence focuses more widely than the climate emotions of individual people, although this is also considered important. Recognising climate as a set of multispecies relationships (Todd, 2016; Verlie, 2022; Whyte, 2020), the subject of affective climate violence is not individual humans but relational webs of climatic beings. Affective climate violence ruptures reliable, constructive, healthy relationships and in doing so it decomposes life-sustaining collective agencies.

This hurts. It hurts immensely, in many ways (Sultana, 2022; Tschakert et al., 2019). It registers as solastalgia – the sense of desolation as your home is disfigured while you remain in the ‘same location’ (Albrecht, 2005). Post-traumatic stress disorder, following terrifying floods, triggered whenever raindrops patter on rooftops, no matter how gently (Matthews et al., 2019). Hunger and malnutrition as culturally appropriate foods and livelihoods are no longer affordable or achievable (Chao, 2022). Crippling grief when loved ones don’t survive. Survivor guilt because you did (Hayes et al., 2018). Respiratory pain as mould, dust storms and bushfire smoke suffocate (Verlie and Neimanis, 2023). Headaches and kidney failure as chronic heat dehydrates your body. Ontological disorientation as worldviews based on stable relationships crumble (Verlie, 2022). Through these multiple intersecting impacts, affective climate violence renders relational-bodyminds overwhelmed, incapacitated and traumatised as their lifeworlds, imagined futures and personal identities are violated.

Affective climate violence seeks to disempower and to silence. As such, having climatic trauma recognised as violence is an essential and foundational step in the process of enacting affective climate justice. Across many fields, research finds that denial of and/or silence surrounding someone's experience of violence magnifies and compounds the trauma of violence (Parent, 2016; Phillips, 2015). Denial or silence in the wake of violence can therefore be understood as a secondary act of violence. Conversely, witnessing violence begins the processes of healing and reparation (Anderson, 2016; Wyles et al., 2022), processes that are receiving increasing attention in campaigns for climate justice led by those from the Global South, Indigenous peoples and people of colour (Bawaka Country et al., 2020; González-Hidalgo et al., 2022; Táíwò, 2022). Witnessing involves listening and believing someone's account of their experience of violence, trauma and/or injustice, and responding in ways that support that person (Verlie, 2022). I return in the third section to consider what kinds of witnessing are needed to begin the process of affective climate justice, but first I turn to explore the opposite of witnessing affective climate violence: greenhouse gaslighting. Greenhouse gaslighting downplays and derides people's experiences of climate distress, so as to erase and reject the accountability and the obligations that climate violence demands. As such, greenhouse gaslighting amplifies the harm and intensifies the anger that characterises feeling climate injustice as it both enables further climate pollution and refuses to witness people's suffering. Greenhouse gaslighting is therefore both a cause and magnification of affective climate violence.

Greenhouse gaslighting

Over the last few years, a range of different activists, advocates, critics and communicators have used the term ‘greenhouse gaslighting’ to refer to the ways that governments, the fossil fuel lobby, and conservative media negate the scientific evidence of climate change (e.g. Chetwynd, 2019; Nosek and Westervelt, n.d.). In this section, I aim to offer an account of greenhouse gaslighting that more explicitly unpacks its affective misogyny, in line with gaslighting's reference to psychic manipulation as gender-based violence (Stark, 2019; Sweet, 2019). Greenhouse gaslighting, in this account, does not just deny the facts of climate science, but positions climate survivors as hysterical and untrustworthy in order to undermine demands for climate action. Further, building on critical sociological theories of gaslighting that push beyond interpersonal psychic abuse (Ruíz, 2020; Sweet, 2019), I demonstrate how greenhouse gaslighting is enabled by and contributes to the ongoing project of white-colonial-extractivism.

Gaslighting is a patriarchal practice of abusive deception that aims to make someone feel or be perceived as factually unreliable or ‘crazy’ (Latif, 2020; Sweet, 2019). Now popularised as a term in society, gaslighting is studied by domestic violence researchers and others as a technique through which people, usually but not always men, seek to gain power through denying the lived realities of others and positioning others’ concerns as irrational, overreactive and/or insane and therefore not worth believing or caring about (Sweet, 2019). Typically understood to target interpersonal relationships, gaslighting is enabled by and reproduces unequal social structures (Ruíz, 2020; Stark, 2019; Sweet, 2019); to do so it often happens in or enrols publics, in order to position one individual or subgroup as deluded outcasts at odds with the rest of the sane world (Stark, 2019). However, gaslighting can also target the public, with Latif describing political gaslighting as that which aims to ‘destabilise and disorient public opinion’ (2020: 47).

But gaslighting is not just an action individual perpetrators intentionally engage in. Ruíz (2020) argues that gaslighting creates mentally abusive ‘ambiances’: omnipresent social discourses created through deep seated colonial-patriarchal structures, akin to Christina Sharpe's (2016) articulation of racism being so culturally inescapable that it is experienced like the weather. These pervasive affective regimes erase and undermine alternative knowledge-worlds and ensure the terms for truth and recognition are always set by the coloniser. I consider this analysis in conjunction with Simmons (2017) concept of ‘settler atmospherics,’ where racial violences are perpetrated through atmospheric weapons, such as tear gas and pepper spray. Thus, greenhouse gaslighting can become a structure, dispersed through cultural norms and/of polluted airs. This structure so heavily normalises the extractive status quo such that querying colonial-extractive hegemonies results in paranoia, alienation or the perception of insanity (Simmons, 2017).

The term gaslighting takes inspiration from George Cukor's 1944 film Gaslight (itself adapted from a 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton), where a husband secretly toys with the gas-powered lights in his house in order to convince his wife that she is crazy, so that he can have her committed to an institution and therefore steal from her (Latif, 2020). While the notion of ‘greenhouse gaslighting’ may sound like a fun play on words, it is worth bearing in mind that it is not coincidental that the man in this story used covert control of fossil fuels in order to emotionally manipulate his wife and gain power over her. It helps us notice the long-standing mutually-reinforcing relationship between misogyny and fossil capitalism, as discussed by Cara Dagget's work on petro-masculinity (2018) and Stacey Alaimo's on high carbon masculinity (2016). These are literally toxic masculinities that enact multiple forms of gendered, racialized and multispecies violence through manipulating fossil fuel energy which, in turn, further re-asserts white male supremacy. In greenhouse gaslighting, this toxic masculinity operates through a logic of undermining, an insidious practice of eroding someone's integrity through hollowing out their foundations of support.

Climate denial has been discussed as an emotional-epistemological practice which is performed through denying the scientific facts and political implications of climate change and which requires, in one way or another, the suppression of the denier's own emotional responses to climate change (Norgaard, 2011). Greenhouse gaslighting is a particular practice of climate denial that specifically denies the affective realities of others’ experiences of climate change. Greenhouse gaslighting is emerging as a key tool in the fossil-fuelled power holder's toolbox, especially in contexts where negating the scientific facts of climate change is no longer politically viable (and in this sense often accompanies another emerging form of climate denial: delaying climate action). It utilises the misogynistic practices of gaslighting: denying reality, dismissing someone's feelings and denigrating their subjective experience so as to gain control over understandings, narratives, processes and outcomes, and thus, to gain power. Greenhouse gaslighting is the kind of climate denial that might accept that climate change is real and caused by fossil fuel combustion, but refuses to accept that it might be bad, or that the people who say they are adversely affected are right, or that they matter. It denies, erases, and/or undermines people's accounts of their experiences of climate change and perpetuates misogynistic practices of belittling vulnerability and emotion (Sweet, 2019) so as to delegitimise criticism of themselves or the fossil fuel industry. By undermining the trustworthiness of people's anger and hurt, greenhouse gaslighting seeks to build consent for continued fossil fuel extraction through positioning such people as hysterics who are factually wrong and over-reacting.

Greenhouse gaslighting is perpetrated by both individuals and institutions (Ahern, 2018); as an example of both, here I articulate the practice of greenhouse gaslighting through a brief examination of the discourse of former Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, throughout his time in government. The three examples I focus on must be seen as representative of a long running consistent rhetoric and almost a decade of policy that actively sought to heat the climate, through promoting fossil fuels and preventing climate action, both at home and abroad.

One of the most infamous examples of Morrison's greenhouse gaslighting is the ‘lump of coal’ incident. Props are not allowed in Australian parliament, yet in 2017, the then Treasurer procured a large lump of coal from the Minerals Council of Australia, conveniently lacquered to prevent filthy hands. ‘This is coal!’ he shouted across parliament. ‘Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you. It's coal!’ Thus began a tirade about the supposed economic benefit of coal to Australia, and how the Labor opposition was apparently standing in the way of Australian prosperity through opposing coal, despite no major Australian political party ever having sought to seriously slow or stop the extraction of fossil fuels from these unceded Indigenous lands. Morrison continued as the coal was passed around his gleeful front bench (italics my emphasis):

Those opposite have an ideological, a pathological, fear of coal. There's no word for coal-o-phobia officially, Mr Speaker, but that's the malady that afflicts those opposite. But it is that malady, Mr Speaker, that is afflicting the jobs in the towns, in the industries, and indeed in this country because of their pathological, ideological, opposition to coal being an important part of our sustainable and more certain energy future.²

In this performance, Morrison's regular old climate denial – fossil fuels are not bad – is operationalised through a discourse that labels climate action irrational, over-emotional, and mentally-ill. At the same time, he performs in a highly emotional way, in order to gain affective engagement and affinity from his political allies, but his emotion is not noted, let alone criticised (Milton, 2002). As decades of feminist research has demonstrated, in modern-patriarchal cultures, labelling people as ‘emotional’ and ‘hysterical’ is used to dismiss and undermine their position (Stark, 2019). This rhetoric is explicitly gendered, and is used to assert and maintain white, male, imperial power relations (Hamad, 2019; Plumwood, 1993; Sweet, 2019). That is, greenhouse gaslighting not only seeks to enable the immediate continuation of fossil fuel interests but it does this in ways that reinforce the grander social inequalities (heterosexism, racism, ableism, etc) that enable extractivism and which structure the creation of unequal vulnerability to climate impacts.

In another example, in 2019, then in the role of Prime Minister, Morrison was in the midst of pushing the notion that Pacific Islanders are Australia's ‘family’ as a means to establish geopolitical power throughout that region which was also being courted by China. As such he attended the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) in 2019, which he had chosen not to do the previous year. Many Pacific Islands are extremely vulnerable to climate change, due to the threat sea level rise poses to their low-lying lands. Pacific Island leaders position climate change as their greatest challenge and an ‘existential threat’ (Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, 2022: 6); Pacific Islander communities are leaders in climate justice activism for these same reasons (see for example https://350.org/pacific/#warriors1). As such, on arrival at the PIF in Tuvalu, Morrison was greeted by children sitting in water, a visual protest set up to illustrate the existential threat facing the communities of low-lying Pacific Islands from sea level rise. Rather than listen to their message, Morrison took advantage of the Tuvaluan children's politeness and posed for a photo opportunity, re-positioning this protest as though it represented happy, friendly relations. Yet during the PIF negotiations, Morrison pushed for the agreement to remove reference to coal and the term ‘climate crisis,’ repeating his government's continued efforts to undermine emissions reductions agreements around the world.

As former Prime Minister of Tuvalu, Enele Sopoaga, said at the time, Morrison's behaviour at the forum was angering and insulting:

As the PIF chairman I was stunned by the un-Pacific tenor and manner of the Australian Prime Minister to water down the wording of the communique and to limit the concerns about climate change, much against the concerns and the tears that were shed by the Pacific Island leaders. I thought, perhaps too ambitiously, that hosting the 50th PIF in Tuvalu, my country, which is perhaps the most threatened atoll nation due to impacts of climate change, would secure genuine sympathy and loyal understanding on our Tuvalu plea calling for urgent and complete response to climate change. Sadly, making money took precedence over saving lives. (Sopoaga, cited in Lyons, 2019)

As one commentator noted, ‘for Pacific islanders, if you are family, then there are obligations’ (Newton Cain, 2019). Morrison's repeated attempt to suggest Pacific Islanders are Australia's ‘family’ appropriated a cherished cultural mode of relating based on care, instead using the term to hide an exploitative and violent political agenda that sought to maintain his own power. This emotional manipulation perpetuated the patriarchal logics of domestic violence, this time at the level of the nation state, whereby the abuser still seems to emerge positioned as a ‘good guy’ (Smith et al., 2019).

Later in that same year, Morrison had repeatedly refused to meet with firefighting leaders regarding their concerns about the upcoming summer. Subsequently, during the almost year-long national bushfire catastrophe that ensued, Morrison consistently showed little interest in community experiences, most starkly demonstrated by going for a holiday in Hawaiʻi in mid-December (Remeikis, 2020b). Frontline communities, some of whom had lost family members (both human and non-human), homes, and even whole towns, were immensely angry at Morrison for his and his government's lack of action, on both climate policy and disaster response. Rather than listen, express empathy, or take action to help them, Morrison went on the offence. On New Year's Eve in 2019 images of Finn Burns, aged 11, in a gas mask in a tinny (a small boat), piloting his family to safety from the ensuing inferno in Mallacoota, went viral around the world. The horrors at Mallacoota followed on from two young children having lost their fire-fighter fathers earlier in the bushfires. Having stated earlier in September 2019 that kids’ (such as Greta Thunberg and climate strikers’) anxieties about climate change were ‘needless’ because kids in Australia will have ‘an economy to live in’ (Murphy, 2019), on New Year's Day 2020 Morrison stated that Australia was a ‘great place to raise kids’ (Remeikis, 2020a).

Morrison's claim was not accidentally ignorant to the context, but part of a consistent strategy of publicly belittling bushfire survivors and climate activists. This strategy was also evident in his dismissal of the hostile reception he received from residents of Cobargo in January, one of the towns worst affected, who he stated were ‘just feeling raw’ in order to downplay the righteous anger directed at him by locals. As Zena Armstrong and Peter Logue, other Cobargo locals, wrote in the Guardian at the time:

having been through the nightmare of the past week this is why we are angry and why we think others may be. This disaster has been unfolding for several years…The request from 24 former fire chiefs to meet the prime minister in April could have been a turning point if that meeting had gone ahead and if the fire chiefs’ fears had been taken seriously and acted upon…To dismiss these displays of anger as people feeling “raw” is to dismiss the depth of insight and understanding among those of us living through this crisis. Yes, we are feeling raw and yes, we are grieving the losses. There was so much that could have been done ahead of time to help mitigate the extent of the destruction. (Armstrong and Logue, 2020)

Belittling people's distress enables governments and corporations to blame individuals for not being resilient enough, and to limit government liability to simply funding therapy. In the wake of the bushfires, while privatised mental health services were funded for survivors in some communities in some circumstances, Morrison's government continued to fund and expand fossil fuels and also failed to provide any kind of adequate disaster response. As Ruth Haggar, who lost her home in Quaama to the bushfires, wrote a few years later: ‘feeling supported would dramatically improve our mental health. We’re getting mental health counselling because no one will help us – if someone helped us, we wouldn’t need as much mental health counselling’ (cited in Beazley, 2022).

Drawing on misogynistic logics and structures, across these three incidents (and many more), Morrison consistently pursued further fossil fuel combustion, ignored and/or appropriated people's pleas for help, and refused to acknowledge suffering. Through pushing coal while positioning political opposition as mental illness, forcing rhetorics of intimacy on Pacific Islanders to cover extreme disregard for the viability of their lands and cultures, and aggressively belittling climate survivors’ trauma, Morrison's rhetoric and actions illuminate the practices of greenhouse gaslighting.

Greenhouse gaslighting is a colonial-patriarchal practice that attempts to absolve climate criminals of responsibility and to maintain power through violent emotional manipulation. It is a politics of disrespect and abandonment, of abrogation of responsibility. Refusing to acknowledge that people may indeed be genuinely harmed by climate catastrophe amplifies the hurt, by downplaying the significance of their knowledge of their own lives and through indicating that those people's suffering does not matter. It blames people for their suffering, suffering that was largely, though perhaps not perfectly, preventable by governments, while making the situation worse and walking away from offering any tangible help. Insofar as it repeats white-misogynistic logics of denigrating vulnerability and those peoples constructed as emotional (children, women, people of colour), greenhouse gaslighting a) creates the conditions for continued fossil fuel combustion (and thus climate change), b) amplifies the hurt of the disasters that eventuate, and c) further consolidates the social inequalities (sexism, racism, ageism, etc) that magnify climate vulnerability. By refusing to recognise the harms of climate change and thus stymying efforts to prevent or adapt to climate change, greenhouse gaslighting is part of the structure that enables and perpetuates affective climate violence. In the next section, I discuss how important witnessing affective climate injustice is for combatting greenhouse gaslighting, as well as the limitations in our current modes of witnessing climate distress.

From whitewashing climate anxiety to witnessing affective climate injustice

In order to shore up continued consent for the fossil fuelled state, greenhouse gaslighting works to erase, silence and/or devalue certain people's climate distress. Greenhouse gaslighting is not unique to notable petro-misogynists though; unfortunately, it abounds throughout fossil-fuelled societies. Greenhouse gaslighting does not need to be explicit or aggressive, and often unfolds through what does not happen and what cannot be expressed. In this sense, it is as much a structure as a practice, and it contributes to the structural violence of climate distress. For example, in Hickman et al.'s (2021) international survey of young people, they found that although 95% reported that they are at least a little worried about climate change, 19% reported that they do not try to talk to other people about climate change, and of the 81% who have tried to speak to others about climate change, 48% were dismissed or ignored. This follows a more generalised ‘spiral of silence’ surrounding climate change, articulated by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. For example, their 2016 survey found that despite the majority of Americans (60%+) considering climate change to be interesting and important, 43% of Americans only hear others they know speak about climate change once a year or less (i.e. never), and that ‘about seven in ten Americans report that they “rarely” (36%) or “never” (32%) discuss global warming with family and friends’ (Maibach et al., 2016: 6). Case study research can demonstrate the ways these structures of silencing materialise in specific experiences of climate-induced distress. For example, Debra Parkinson's (2014) research found that women's experiences of domestic violence following the Black Saturday Bushfires in Australia (in 2009) were systematically silenced by families, communities, and social services, in part through the discourse of ‘recovery’ that sought to frame everything happening after that day as an upward trajectory of positive progress. Brought together, these diverse findings demonstrate the wider ways in which caring about or being harmed by climate change and its multifaceted impacts is made taboo. Such passive or implicit modes of dismissal and silencing are also part of the structure of greenhouse gaslighting, and the message they send is that you are wrong about your own climate distress and/or your distress does not matter. As such, they are part and parcel of the matrix of affective climate violence.

Recognition and participation are core pillars of environmental and climate justice (Agyeman et al., 2016). As such, practices of affective climate justice would resist greenhouse gaslighting and affective climate violence by recognising people's experiences of affective harm, and by enabling them to participate in conversations about that harm and what to do about it (Verlie, 2022). Indeed, this is a common thread across many approaches to supporting people with climate distress: create a safe space for them to express their feelings, be heard, and explore solutions, including in educational (Verlie et al., 2020), activist and community (Baudon and Jachens, 2021), and psychological responses (Barnwell and Wood, 2022; Hickman et al., 2021). In particular, given that climate distress ‘appears to be greater when [young] people believe that government response is inadequate,’ adequate witnessing ‘would come in the form of having one's feelings and views heard, validated, respected, and acted upon, particularly by those in positions of power’ (Hickman et al., 2021: e871). Witnessing affective climate violence is a necessary first step along the path towards more comprehensive forms of affective climate justice.

However, contemporary practices of witnessing climate distress do not appear to be inclusive of all. In 2021, Sarah Jaquette Ray wrote that climate anxiety was an overwhelmingly white phenomenon; she had noticed that the circles in which climate anxiety was being discussed were even whiter than many other environmental circles (2021a). Ray's critical reflection echoes my experience on the other side of the world, in another anglo-settler-colony. Ray queried why these conversations are so white: ‘Is climate anxiety a form of white fragility or even racial anxiety? Put another way, is climate anxiety just code for white people wishing to hold onto their way of life or … to the comforts of their privilege?’ Relatedly, from an African American perspective, climate justice writer Mary Heglar speaks of ‘existential exceptionalism’ (2019): how anxious white environmentalists feel that climate change is the first existential threat, as if genocide, slavery, and colonialism never existed. Similarly, First Nations scholars around the world emphasise that for their communities, climate change is not a new existential threat, but feels rather like déjà vu (Whyte, 2016), given their centuries-long and still continuing experiences of systematic, multi-dimensional violence (Coleman, 2017; Wildcat, 2009). The crux of these conversations is: does feeling climate anxiety depend on white privilege, and does witnessing climate anxiety therefore re-centre white privilege? I think the answer to these questions is a cautious no; as Kojola and Pellow argue, the violences of environmental injustice that overwhelmingly affect people of colour ‘extend far beyond the often-physical manifestations on the body’ and are almost always accompanied by ‘less visible but long lasting and often irreversible emotional and psychological reverberations’ (2021: 108). Nevertheless, asking these questions helps us unpack important considerations regarding the cultural politics embedded in, and the justice dimensions of, our theoretical and practical responses to climate distress. I cannot address all of these here, but hope to further conversations about this.

Firstly, we have no evidence base upon which to believe that people of colour are not distressed by climate change, or to suggest that they are less distressed than white people. Of course, a reductive binary of white people/people of colour glosses over the many complexities of different forms of privilege and discrimination, including racialisation and other intersecting distributions of power, and the unique forms of spiritual loss that environmental change poses for Indigenous peoples (Cunsolo Willox et al., 2013; Norgaard and Reed, 2017; Rigby et al., 2011). Notwithstanding this critique of simplistic social categories, there is a lack of comparative research that investigates socially differentiated experiences of climate distress. Most studies focus on rich nations and few differentiate between social markers such as race, gender, or class in statistically comparable means or explore qualitative differences in depth (Barnwell and Wood, 2022; Ogunbode et al., 2022). Nevertheless, through a patchwork approach, bringing together different kinds of evidence, it would seem that people of colour/marginalised people are likely to be more distressed. Hickman et al.'s (2021) survey of 10,000 young people from ten countries found that climate anxiety was generally more pronounced in countries in the Global South, with 84% of young people in the Philippines, 68% in India, and 67% in Brazil reporting being extremely or very worried about climate change, compared to 44% in Finland, 49% in the United Kingdom, and 46% in the United States of America. Cunsolo Willox et al. (2013) and Tschakert et al. (2019) demonstrate that Indigenous peoples and people from the Global South experience climate distress in subjectivity-disrupting and world-ending ways, where cultures, ontologies, and identities are at stake, not to mention the more readily documented impacts of lost lives, displacement, destroyed houses, crops, and infrastructure. As Barnwell and Wood argue, given that the Global South, Indigenous peoples and people of colour around the world are more exposed to climate disasters, and are made less resilient through histories of extraction that generate structural inequality, ‘it may be fair to deduce that Global South communities are at increased risk of psychological and mental health consequences due to disproportionate increases in traumatic exposures’ to climate change (2022: 488). Rather than white/privileged people being the most distressed, it is more likely that people of colour/marginalised peoples are distressed in deep and complex, compounding ways, but that their experiences are qualitatively different, represented through different framings, and/or silenced, including through research methods and sampling practices that begin with white/privileged people's experiences, and then frame others’ experiences in relation to that (Agyeman, 2003; Teo, 2010).

Thus, it is unlikely that people of colour/marginalised peoples are less distressed by climate change. However, it is possible that, as Ray argues in a later piece (2021b), the ways climate anxiety has been conceptualised centres white/privileged concerns and that uncritically witnessing these concerns may perversely re-centre whiteness and privilege, rather than contribute to affective climate justice. The reasons for this include the long running nature-culture dualism (Plumwood, 1993) operating in Western/Industrialised societies which considers nature, in this case, climate, to be separate from social and human issues. Thus, the climate in climate anxiety is often taken to exclude social concerns that disproportionately affect black, Indigenous and people of colour: structural racism, police brutality, housing insecurity, colonisation, economic inequality, migration policy. Of course, we can argue that these are all part of the extractive-climate-changing-industrial-complex, yet this is not typically what the term climate anxiety has come to convey. Rather, it tends to be interpreted through a narrower focus on the more novel ecological impacts of carbon pollution: planetary heating, global biodiversity loss, and extremely catastrophic weathers. In this way, this concept may enrol a white, privileged cohort of anxious subjects, people for whom the everyday violences of genocide, colonisation, slavery, displacement, homelessness, food insecurity, and work health and safety have not (often) been existential concerns (Heglar, 2019; Nixon, 2011). Additionally, the anxiety of climate anxiety brings a focus on future calamities, rather than acknowledging that the apocalypse is well underway, having arrived for some peoples many hundreds of years ago (Coleman, 2017; Whyte, 2016).

As such, while I personally am a fan of holistic and multifaceted understandings of both climate and anxiety, it may be that deep seated social logics predispose the term to centre white or otherwise highly privileged subjectivities. Indeed, a critical approach helps us ask, what exactly do distinct groups of people feel is at stake, such that they experience feelings of climate anxiety? For privilege peoples, is it, as Lesley Head (2016) has discussed, grief for the loss of our modern, privileged ways of life – ways of life that have in fact depended on invisibilised labour, exploitation and suffering? Is it the loss of an imaginary of pristine nature, itself a colonial construct that served to dispossess Indigenous peoples? At the crux of such critiques lies the reality that what climate change threatens for people depends on their social location, and as such, their feelings of loss, grief, anxiety (or otherwise) reveal their privileges, resources, disadvantages, and/or cultural assumptions (Ray, 2021b). In summary, ‘climate anxiety’ is a term that potentially centres white-settler-middle-class-developed-world experiences of distress, that does not adequately capture the complex ways in which worry and grief about climate change intersects with existing existential threats faced by marginalised, impoverished and disadvantaged communities.

That those who have contributed least to the problem are likely to be the most emotionally harmed is what makes climate distress an issue of justice. Hence, thinking climate distress as an issue of justice requires comparative research across differentiated groups of people in order to quantify who feels ‘climate anxiety’ (or grief, solastalgia, etc.) the worst, and whether this maps onto markers of dis/advantage. However, it also requires working with the communities most affected to develop language and frameworks that more adequately represent (in both senses of the word: reflect and advocate for) their experiences such that their voices become more legible and that they feel more included and motivated to participate in discussions. How do our languages and practices of engaging with ecological distress need to shift to make space for different experiences, different modes of expression, different modes of healing? As Jade Sasser has noted (2024), if researchers and advocates do not know, have not asked, and do not know how to speak to black, Indigenous and/or people of colour from around the world about how they feel about climate change, well, this is systemic racism in action. Relatedly, thinking critically about whose worldviews are being embedded and centred in the term climate anxiety can help us ask important questions about how the experience of climate anxiety emerges – what social, cultural, political and economic conditions structure people's experiences of climate change, such that they can and/or do feel distressed, and feel enabled and compelled to prioritise discussing this? When white/privileged people talk about their climate distress and we advocate for listening, witnessing, and supporting them, are we re-centring their feelings, their needs, and their privileges? As Ray writes, ‘the white response to climate change is literally suffocating to people of color. Climate anxiety can operate like white fragility, sucking up all the oxygen in the room and devoting resources toward appeasing the dominant group’ (2021a). This mirrors Ruby Hamad's (2019) analysis of how white tears are used to silence, and thus further harm, people of colour. If our efforts at witnessing affective climate violence exclude the most marginalised or prioritise only those who are already privileged, then they perpetuate the violence.

In addition to diversifying the frameworks we use to discuss climate distress, we also need to consider how we can ‘unsettle’ privileged people's climate anxiety, i.e. consider the social and political forces that construct particular situations as worrisome (Ahmed, 2014). I have worked with many white settler young Australians, and feeling ‘unsettled’ is a frequent term they use to describe how they feel about climate change (Verlie, 2022). If climate change is unsettling, it suggests that without climate change, such students (and others like them) could continue to feel settled. But the affective state of feeling settled, and of ‘settling down’, is a driver of (cis-heteronormative) settler colonialism (Kotef, 2020; Ruíz, 2020; Tuck and Yang, 2012) that serves to bring comfort and security to certain people, through active violence and dispossession of others, or at least through the failure to prevent this. At the extreme end of this, privileged people's eco-anxiety can easily be manipulated into white supremacy as eco-fascist mass-murderers’ manifestos, from Aotearoa to Turtle Island, demonstrate (Matei, 2021). As such, interrogating the cultural politics of their own climate distress offers a critical pathway for settlers to grapple with the privileges and violences inherent in their day to day lives, and to generate empathy for others who have been marginalised by the systems that privilege them. If we are to really address the root causes of climate distress, we must tackle these interrelated systems of white supremacy, misogyny, and authoritarian control. Through bringing decolonial, anti-capitalist, intersectional feminist pedagogical tools into our responses to climate anxiety we may be able to support privileged people's emotional vulnerability without excusing their complicity in the violences that enable fossil fuel extraction (Verlie, 2022). Through such approaches, we can hopefully guide the disorientation that climate distress generates towards affective climate justice.

Conclusion

Across this paper I have sought to bring theories of climate justice to bear on the issue of climate distress. A comprehensive theory of affective climate justice or a fuller discussion of different groups of peoples’ experiences of affective climate violence is beyond the scope of this paper. As such, I have focused on three critical threads that can inform future efforts towards this. The first two account for the injustice of climate distress. Firstly, climate change as a whole, and therefore climate distress specifically, are structural violence enacted by fossil fuelled governments. Secondly, climate distress is socially differentiated, and likely to be disproportionately experienced by those with least responsibility for climate change. Thirdly, witnessing diverse people's varied experiences is a first and foundational step towards affective climate justice. Greenhouse gaslighting is a structure that denies and refuses to witness, and in so doing, perpetuates affective climate injustice. That climate distress is caused by structural violence and social injustice is evident in the palpable anger and related affects (indignation, resentment, fury, cynicism, disgust) directed at the political systems that cause climate change.

To appreciate that climate distress is a form of colonial violence, we only need to look at the blunt statistics coming from disasters unfolding around the world: by and large, it is Indigenous peoples, people of colour, people from the Global South, and poor people who lose their lives, whose homes are destroyed, whose survival is threatened, whose cultures are ruptured, whose multispecies relations are harmed. These are multiple, overlapping, cascading forms of structural violence, often layered atop centuries of intergenerational experiences of other forms of structural violence and inequality. This is the ‘unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality,’ to quote Farhana Sultana (2022). To think that this does not generate distress (including anxiety) is to dehumanise, erase and/or objectify such peoples (Heglar, 2022). The climate emotions community (including myself) need to do better at considering, researching, and advocating for these diverse and unjust experiences; if we do this well, we may contribute to affective climate justice. Yet if our research designs, theoretical models, and terminology do not include or resonate with marginalised communities, then they are perpetuating affective climate violence in one way or another. As a consideration here, despite the value I find in the term, I do not think ‘affect’ has much resonance beyond academia and in community settings ‘emotion’ or ‘feeling’ is possibly a more resonant term (hence ‘feeling climate injustice’). More to the point, communities may have their own terminology for representing their experiences.

Nevertheless, I use affect in this academic paper to push our discussions beyond the individualised and depoliticised approach that an uncritical focus on emotions can risk. Affect's attention to the social life of feelings and embodied experiences of agency can offer a clearer analysis of the political structures that create atmospheres of denial, disempowerment and distress. Combined with the political focus of climate justice, a praxis of affective climate justice would begin with witnessing people's diverse experiences of climate distress and acknowledging they are symptoms of violence, and build campaigns for recognition, reparation, redistribution, and regeneration from this. Rather than limiting consideration to how best to help individuals cope with their painful personal experiences, affective climate justice would take the restructuring of social systems as its primary goal, envisioning and acting towards societies in which climate harm is prevented in the first case, and redressed holistically when it happens. As such, the frameworks of climate justice offer our climate emotions scholarship critical tools for not only explaining people's anger and indignation, but for holding political leaders to account and for articulating alternative ways of organising society.

Highlights

Climate distress is outlined as a structural violence enacted by fossil fuelled governance regimes.

Greenhouse gaslighting denies people's experiences of affective climate violence, by positioning them as irrational and overly-emotional.

Feeling climate injustice is often experienced as feelings of anger, abandonment, indignation, betrayal and cynicism.

Witnessing diverse experiences of climate distress is a critical first step in the process of affective climate justice.

‘Climate anxiety’ as a term may not adequately represent diverse people's experiences.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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Feeling climate injustice: Affective climate violence,greenhouse gaslighting and the whiteness of climate anxiety

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction: Climate distress as an issue of climate injustice

Affective climate violence

Greenhouse gaslighting

From whitewashing climate anxiety to witnessing affective climate injustice

Conclusion

Highlights

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

Notes

References