Against Post-Pandemic Climate Denialism: Countering “Sugar-Coating” Narratives on Climate Change Through Online Social Movement

Abstract

Climate change is not only a material issue regarding the realization of sustainable climate projects but also involves the construction and dissemination of various ideas related to climate change itself. In the middle of a highly interconnected world, there is a dichotomy respecting the international community’s view towards climate change,making them splitin two as “accepters” and “deniers”. Climate denialism among people is not new, but the trend has drastically shifted once COVID-19 strikes. It went from rejecting scientific evidence of climate crisis as an anthropogenic phenomenon into sugar-coating post-pandemic reality, a more subtle mechanism to convince people that the current climate crisis is inevitable and no one will be able to fix it due to dilemmatic situation between saving the earth or saving the economy. The “sweeten reality” narrative is disguisedly counterproductive, fostering logical fallacies and ultimately hindering the attainment of a global collective target to shut climate change down. Addressing this matter, this research aims to analyze how the online social movements could be an effective channel to counter climate denialism post-pandemic. Utilizing Singh and Tourrine New Social Movement theory, this study concluded that online social movement could generate a climate communication space to disseminating accurate and non-confrontational information, responding deniers questions and concerns, and promoting constructive climate discourse.