Silencing Climate Change in Utah Through Extremist Rhetoric and Stakeholder Processes: A Critical Discourse Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper utilizes Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to explore the dimensions of domination and freedom within two significant public forums on climate change in Utah: (1) the resolution HJR 12 passed in the Utah State Legislature in 2010 and (2) the Blue Ribbon Committee on Climate Change (BRAC) process organized in 2006. The resolution HJR 12 reflects an extremist or inflammatory rhetoric point of view, while BRAC presents itself as a beacon of bureaucratic rationality, efficiency, and hierarchy. Forums such as these are force-feeding Americans subtly and not so subtly with divisive discourse and restrictive visions that pollute American politics and weaken the nation's capacity to address and solve its most challenging problems. HJR 12 exemplifies the role interpretive control plays in silencing those who disagree. The BRAC process illustrated how bureaucracy and rationalization may constrain future vision and action, reinforce current power structures, and encourage extreme rhetoric further down the road. This analysis uncovers the idealization of rational power underlying both forums. This idealization creates an unstable ground where powerplays, poorly disguised as rational policy making, dominate while silencing other voices. Scholars, government bureaucracies at all levels, and the American public wishing to deal with today’s complex challenges must purposefully address destructive assumptions associated with idealized rational processes, while recognizing the important role uncertainty, values, worldviews, and interests play in encouraging or discouraging policy change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.027 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".