Introduction: agenda-setting

To be successful, a regime that seeks to forestall the onset of damaging climate change will need to address current processes and patterns of energy production and consumption, given that these are intrinsically bound up in the manufacture and release of greenhouse gases. At the moment these concerns do not feature highly on the international agenda in relation to climate change. Instead of being regarded as a symptom of the unsustainability of contemporary modes of industrial production in Western states, global warming has come to be viewed as an environmental problem much like any other, whose resolution can easily be accommodated within the context of existing political and economic practices.

This chapter sets out to chart and account for global warming's presentation before policy-makers and the public alike, as a problem deserving only of incremental policy responses. It does this by discussing the role of the media as agenda-setting players in the politics of global warming. A link is suggested between conceptions of the global warming problématique as it is constructed by the mass media, and the nature of policy responses at the international level. In order to do this it draws on agenda-setting work in the media studies literature, which explores the consequences of the mass media determining which issues, from a range of possibilities, are presented to the public. This will help to show how media coverage of global warming and the policy responses that are considered necessary are not independent and unrelated.