2025/03/28 by Vincent August, Veza Clute, Charles W. Adams · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Economic and Social Issues
paper · pdf · doi:10.31235/osf.io/ty7j9_v1
openalex publication_date 2025/03/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/14
Climate obstruction is a key research approach to help explain why governments do not achieve climate mitigation goals. The article investigates the still underexplored phenomenon of climate obstruction in Europe and outside the familiar realm of science denial and denialist organizations. We analyze a public debate on a key policy in Germany where an accelerated transition to renewables in the heating sector was successfully obstructed. To investigate obstruction, we performed a framing analysis on the articles of two leading newspapers with strong stances against climate policies (n=142). We find that obstruction framing did not emphasize climate references, shifting the issue from the climate towards personal and collective wealth, liberty, and security. It highlighted costs and damages, excessive regulation, and procedural mistakes, attributed these problems mostly to the Green proponents of the policy initiative, and interpreted the policy and their proponents as an imminent threat. We therefore argue that climate obstruction primarily worked through a scare strategy. We identify four major frames and discuss differences to extant frame typologies from denialist contexts. In addition, we identify two distinct strands of obstruction: a more radical approach stressing state coercion, and a more moderate approach highlighting incompetence and neoliberal policy alternatives. We argue that strategic differentiation allows to address and broker different audiences. With these findings, we provide vital insights into how climate obstruction works in Germany and in wider public debates when science denial is not (yet) a viable strategy.