The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication reports that an average of only 28% of Americans hear about climate change in the news at least once weekly. With this dismal statistic in mind, scholarship on climate and media has often focused on issue salience and popular engagement. By contrast, in Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power, Hanna Morris focuses more on the quality than the quantity of climate journalism. In “a multimodal visual and critical discourse analysis” (p. 4), Morris argues that, between 2015 and 2023, climate journalism merged anxieties about climate change, Donald Trump’s first term as president, and the uprisings of people of color in order to produce a sense of “total crisis.” This precipitated a structure of feeling characterized by an intense nostalgia for World War II and the Cold War era, as well as the fear that climate change would lead to an apocalypse, if the directions of “very smart men” (p. 97) were not heeded. This structure of feeling Morris calls “apocalyptic authoritarianism.”

Morris contends that climate journalism produced apocalyptic authoritarianism using four tropes: American exceptionalism, the planetary scale, the visionary sage figure, and the necropolitical inevitability of the mass death of racialized Others. When activist journalists called for a World-War-II-style mobilization to decarbonize the economy, they used, Morris argues, the paradigm of American Exceptionalism, which invoked “glorious victories over wholly evil enemies in fulfillment of the nation’s God-ordained Manifest Destiny to spread the light of liberty and goodness all over the globe” (p. 31). Such discursive framings represented “responses to climate change as either right or wrong according to a very rigid definition of national identity and fate” (p. 32). Likewise, the planetary trope narrowed the field of possibilities by advancing a singular vision of an American Earth managed by just a few very smart men. Morris suggests that these men (and, in the case of Greta Thunberg, sometimes women) were treated as “visionary sage figures,” a framing which erased activist collectivities and helped form the binary of hero versus villain in climate politics. This binary, according to Morris, devalued the dynamism of different subject positions, closed off pluralistic responses to climate change, and legitimized anti-democratic claims to power. Finally, climate journalism fueled apocalyptic anxieties by “fearmongering” (p. 135) about radical “climate warriors” and Black and brown climate migrants from the Global South, who were portrayed as either uncivilized incursions into the US body politic or inevitably doomed by climate catastrophe.

The strongest element of this analysis is its demonstration that the center-left and the center-right climate press equally derided pluralistic policy responses to climate change—in particular, the Green New Deal (GND)—the 2019 Congressional resolution calling for a just transition to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, the creation of millions of high-wage union jobs, and the participation of historically marginalized groups in climate governance. Misrepresenting the GND as the fantasy of extremists, the centrist climate press never covered the policy platform for what it was: a vision for America’s future that enjoyed solid bipartisan support before it was demonized by Fox News. Morris’ diagnosis of Greta Thunberg’s portrayal as a “visionary sage figure,” rather than a radical activist, is also spot on, its truth evinced by the fact that Thunberg has disappeared from the press now that she protests the genocide in Gaza and makes explicit the links between imperialism, fossil capital, and climate change.

Yet even as it reveals how the centrist media misrepresents climate policy and activism, Apocalyptic Authoritarianism ironically tends to misrepresent the climate crisis itself, demonstrating the limits of the book’s Cultural Studies approach. Morris argues correctly that her four tropes in climate journalism functioned to police the boundaries of political legitimacy along lines of race, gender, and nationality, but she spends almost no time considering how this identitarian gatekeeping shaped the material core of climate politics, which is to say the struggle—taking place in the context of real and accelerating climate impacts—over the state’s capacity either to expand coal, oil, and gas production or to phase out fossil fuels and create a net-zero emissions economy. Opposition to the GND was driven not just by reactionary attempts to ensure the continued supremacy of the white American male subject, as Morris suggests, but also to delegitimize any voice calling for systems change rather than for technological fixes that could supposedly halt global heating while leaving fossil capital in place. Many “visionary sages” were canonized not just because they were white, but also because they promised that innovation would enable us to continue to use fossil fuels while still managing climate change anyway.

Because she predominantly uses the lens of identity, Morris sometimes misconstrues her evidence. For instance, she misreads the multivalence of World War II as a trope in climate discourse. Yes, that trope can produce nostalgia for a lost era of American dominance and reaffirm the ideology of American exceptionalism, in which white men are “like gods.” But it does not only do this. When the climate journalist and activist Bill McKibben called for a “wartime mobilization”—one of Morris’ test cases—he was pointing to a historical example of the state suspending the profit motive and directing the productive forces of the economy so as to rise to the technological, industrial, and economic challenges of defeating Nazism. This sort of state-led mobilization can be construed precisely as a democratic socialist response to a crisis, insofar as such throughgoing state action is accomplished through democratic means and produces widespread, shared public benefits. Indeed, the political work done by the trope of World War II is in no way opposed to the creation of the pluralistic democracy envisioned by the GND. Although Morris’s book does not mention this, the Green New Deal Resolution itself cites World War II as a model for the kind of all-of-government, all-of-society mobilization required for decarbonization rapid enough to halt global warming at a relatively safe level.

But Morris seems largely uninterested in the challenge of decarbonization as such. Apocalyptic Authoritarianism treats climate change not as a physical phenomenon but more like a video projection in front of which struggles over identity and belonging play out. The Special Report Global Warming of 1.5°C, the most influential report ever of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was released in 2018, during the period the book studies. It made headlines around the world. Its content was reported, debated, framed, and reframed over months of coverage. But Morris never discusses the report—or mentions the IPCC at all. To the extent that Morris considers coverage of the causes and impacts of global heating—such as the scientific finding that 16% of species are expected to go extinct at 4.3°C of global heating (p. 135)—she denounces them as mere fearmongering. The possibility that the centrist news media might be downplaying the harms of climate change to normalize business as usual is never considered.

This omission may reflect the fact that the book handles the climate crisis as a manufactured moral panic similar to the mugging crisis fomented by the UK tabloid media in the 1970s, which Stuart Hall and his co-authors exposed and critiqued in Policing the Crisis (1978). Determined to cast reporting on climate impacts as responsible for the production of apocalyptic anxiety, Morris at one point even suggests that there is no evidence that climate migration might contribute to geopolitical conflict, citing a decade-old argument from the climate-contrarian political scientist Jen Selby to justify her claim. Yet after a forceful rebuttal written by climate scientists who study the intersection of climate and conflict, Selby actually acknowledged that “we do not contest the idea that anthropogenic climate change may have been a contributory factor in [past onsets of] civil war” (see Jan Selby, et al. “Climate Change and the Syrian Civil War Revisited: A Rejoinder,” Political Geography, 60, 2017, p. 253). It is, of course, challenging to quantify the exact amount that prolonged droughts contribute to migration, and then, in turn, foment conflict, but the fundamental links between the ecological and social impacts of climate change are still real. Any account of the ways that the legacy climate media might contribute to authoritarianism needs to contend with the reality that people—most often Black and brown people who have done next to nothing to cause climate change—will try to adapt to warming by migrating north. We cannot handwave this humanitarian crisis away by asserting that climate refugees are simply the bugbears of American white nationalism.

There is a material substrate under questions of identity and belonging. People of color are on the front lines of climate change, and they, alongside Indigenous peoples, have been protesting the fossil-fuel system for nearly two decades. The centrist press others them as “radical warriors” not just to construct “whiteness” or even “the nation,” but also to normalize an economic order based on coal, oil, and methane gas and thereby sustain the interests of the business community that constitutes their readership. This economic order will not be transformed merely by “the elevation of intersectional subjectivities” or by offering “radically different reimaginings of climate change” (p. 152). Without a clearer account of the material causes and effects of the climate crisis, the authoritarian forces arrayed against decarbonization, and the role of media discourse in advancing the interests of the liberal capital faction aligned with those forces, it is hard to see how journalism might ever become the terrain for liberatory coalition-building that Morris envisions. Even so, Apocalyptic Authoritarianism points the way forward: to the end of the right-wing and liberal centrist press’s derision of activists and the progressive left and its commitment to fostering robust democracies rooted in climate justice.