Far-right fossil fuel ignorance: the nostalgia of national-industrial modernity

Far-right climate change obstruction has been widely noticed in the scholarly literature, and both material and ideational factors have been recognised as playing a part in climate policy backlash. By revisiting and adjusting Ulrich Beck’s description of first modernity, and theories of anti-reflexivity used in early work on climate change obstruction, I argue that far-right climate obstruction can be understood as an attempt to create widespread fossil fuel ignorance through a restorative nostalgic vision of a patriarchal, homogenous, and industrially successful national society. A society upheld by firm dualities and where unlimited industrial progress is taken for granted, but which demand ignorance of climate change and the global inequality and oppressional structures sustaining it. Hence, far-right refusal of reflexivity is not just pitted against environmentalism, but against feminist and antiracist movements as well.