ABSTRACT

This chapter outlines the evidence on audience engagement with celebrity campaigning, and examines its implications for how to understand what we identified earlier as the therapeutic emotional appeal of climate celebrities. It looks at the different political and policy solutions that this appeal supports, comparing what have been criticised as the mainstream, post-political prescriptions of figures such as Al Gore, with the ostensibly much more radical alternative proposed by Naomi Klein. Klein's writings and her film, This Changes Everything, not only reject 'market environmentalism' as a response to climate change, but take an explicitly anti-capitalist position, highlighting the effects of climate change and fossil fuel industries on people in 'sacrifice zones' of high pollution and poverty. For some more radical critics, the failure to take an anti-capitalist stance is the core problem with celebrity climate activism and other forms of mainstream environmentalism.