Media and climate justice: what space for alternative discourses?

Abstract

As put by one of the most prominent and vocal climate researchers, climate change is, profoundly, an ethical issue. ‘Today’s changes of atmospheric composition’, James Hansen and colleagues write, ‘will be felt most by today’s young people and the unborn (…) who currently depend on others who make decisions today that have consequences over future decades and centuries’ (Hansen et al. 2011: 22). Awareness is a game-changer in determining the moral (un)acceptability of this and other forms of injustice (e.g. international, inter-class) embedded in climate change: ‘Our parents honestly did not know that their actions could harm future generations. We, the current generation, can only pretend that we did not know.’ (ibid.).