The Art of the Pillory: Naming the Narratives of Climate Delay

Climate change is a hard subject for storytellers. It has no place where it happens and no moment in which it occurs. It has no turning point and no villain. It began generations ago and will outlast us by generations. The Climate Media Factory has worked with that problem for years.

Stories and Narratives

Working with climate scientists brings another insight. Many of them hold a quiet conviction: state the facts, and the job is done. But people are not receivers waiting for the next data delivery. They have habits, fears, loyalties and a lived reality that is not measured in degrees Celsius. A fact that finds no place in that reality tends to bounce off. How something is said is not decoration. It can decide the fate of what is said.

There is no single right form. Linear stories allow a kind of rehearsal: viewers watch others decide and feel the consequences without bearing them. Interactive tools allow intervention: whoever turns the dials of a decarbonisation pathway experiences trade-offs as resistance. The subject deserves both, and everything in between.

All of this still holds. But it may no longer describe the most urgent problem.

Today it is not only about stories, but about narratives: not only the films we watch, but the frames we think in. The public debate on climate is shaped less by storytelling than by discourse. And that discourse has names.

Discourses of Delay: How Delay Works

Researchers speak of "discourses of delay". Those who want to stop climate action rarely deny climate change anymore. They delay. Perfectionism demands so much of every measure that none can pass. Technological optimism points to future solutions that will fix everything and so excuses us from acting now. Research suggests that the mere promise of future technology reduces willingness to act today.

Then come the populist simplifications. They invoke common sense to offer solutions too simple for complex problems, and they divide the world into honest people and an aloof elite. Climate policy becomes collateral damage in a larger fight against expertise and openness. Germany's far-right AfD, in its 2025 manifesto, rejects any policy that invokes "so-called climate protection". In September 2025, the US president called climate change a "con job" before the UN General Assembly, and since January 2026 the United States is no longer party to the Paris Agreement.

Others present the outdated as worth preserving. Scholars speak of "retrotopia": utopia migrates from the future into a past that never existed in that form. Whoever defends the combustion engine then defends not a technology but a way of life, an identity, a feeling of how things used to be.

And finally there is outrage as a permanent state. Moral and emotional language demonstrably spreads better on social networks than factual language. In 2023, a campaign against Germany's so-called "heating hammer", driven largely by the tabloid Bild, relied on exaggeration and smears against the politicians behind the law. The building energy law was subsequently watered down and delayed.

This list is far from complete, and the groups on it differ in motives and methods. What connects them is the deliberate use of narratives, either by those who push them or by those who are seduced by them.

The Silent Majority Is Not Theirs

The narrative that most people oppose climate protection seems hard to sustain. Right-wing populists like to claim that they speak for the silent majority. In Germany's 2025 federal election, the AfD won 20.8 percent of the vote. Four out of five voters chose otherwise. Even in polls in which the party now leads, almost three quarters choose something else.

Of course, many AfD voters reject current climate policy, or they would hardly vote for the party. But they are not a majority. Nor does a vote against the AfD automatically mean support for every climate measure, and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise. Still, to claim to speak for "the people" while working to end climate policy is presumptuous. The majority is not silent, merely quieter, and the division may be, to a large extent, manufactured.

Whoever shapes the narrative increasingly shapes a society's sense of direction.

Manufactured Doubt: The Opponents Have a Face

Some of these narratives have a well-documented origin. In Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway showed how a small group of influential scientists systematically sowed doubt for decades, on tobacco, acid rain, the ozone hole and climate change. The pattern came from the tobacco industry, whose guiding principle was: "Doubt is our product." Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes analysed ExxonMobil's communications between 1977 and 2014. About four fifths of the company's internal documents and scientific papers acknowledged human-caused climate change. In its paid newspaper advertorials, the figure was twelve percent, and 81 percent expressed doubt. Their conclusion is brief and unambiguous: ExxonMobil misled the public.

Those who sow doubt can afford to simplify. Those who take climate change seriously cannot spare themselves complexity, but they can spare themselves ambiguity. Complex in substance, unequivocal in stance and in naming: that may be where the room to manoeuvre lies.

The Art of the Pillory

One approach could be an art of the pillory. The word evokes the stocks of the Middle Ages, and it is chosen deliberately, as a provocation. It would not mean the wagging moral finger, which has rightly fallen into disrepute in sustainability communication. The difference lies in direction. The finger points at the audience and lectures it. The pillory points at those responsible and could make the audience an ally, standing beside it rather than above it. The line it draws runs between actors and their documented actions, not between groups of people.

Nor would it mean the outrage the other side trades in. Whoever criticises permanent agitation should not feed it. Such an art would have to live on precision rather than volume: a few named actors instead of a scandal by the minute, evidence instead of assertion. Whoever names names must be able to prove what they say. A corporation that knows in private and doubts in public hardly needs commentary. Placing the two voices side by side may be enough.

This is political communication, not journalism, and it is not bound by journalistic norms of balance. But it should hold itself to the same standards of verification: sources, proof, a willingness to be corrected. The alternatives, after all, would be silence or going unheard.

The Rules of the Arena

None of this needs to remain defensive. Research has long explained why outrage spreads faster than sober argument, how frames work, how algorithms weigh content and how attention is made. These mechanisms have been described and measured, but rarely applied in climate communication.

The engine rooms of the internet are open to everyone: social media, search engines and now the AI systems whose answers are fed by what is on the web. The other side has long been feeding them tirelessly. Climate communication could do the same, perhaps with more skill, without adopting their means of deception but with the same persistence. Good content that no one finds changes nothing. Good content that knows its way can change a great deal.

Inoculation: Strengthening the Audience

The most important point may be this one. The goal is not only to expose opponents, but to make audiences harder to fool. Research on so-called inoculation shows that people become more resilient to disinformation when the technique of deception is laid bare: the fake experts, the false balance, the petition supposedly signed by tens of thousands of scientists. The linguist George Lakoff recommends the "truth sandwich": first the truth, then briefly the lie, then the truth again, so that the lie never sets the frame.

Showing who acts with which narrative, and how, could be a form of enlightenment in itself. It is not a departure from facts but their completion. Facts matter. Holding the responsible to account matters. Communicating a position not only with dignity but with skill matters. And all of it can stay committed to the ideal of enlightenment, by strengthening the ability of audiences to see through false narratives. It is not either-or, but as well. This text hopes to contribute a little to that.

The Limits of Courtesy

A story without place or time may find its settings and characters here. Climate change itself may not become tellable, but the struggle over it could: the boardrooms where people knew and kept silent, the campaigns that sold doubt. Perhaps the narrative centre of gravity lies not in the apocalypse or the idyll, but in this conflict.

That asks for a stance many in the field find difficult. Climate communication is used to being balanced, inviting, mediating. That remains right towards the audience. Towards those who knowingly act against better knowledge, it may be the wrong stance. Whoever damages the climate for power or profit may deserve scrutiny, and not necessarily courtesy.

Whether an art of the pillory would change the debate, no one knows. What seems clear is that the other side has long been telling its story, and telling it well. The question is whether a polite silence can still be afforded, and whether the groups addressed can be made more resilient to the stories told to them.