Abstract

During recent years media discussion over the gravity of climate change has increased rapidly. One of the most used bywords has been ‘carbon footprint’, a concept with a moral appeal to global responsibility and a sense of global environmental togetherness. However, ‘carbon footprint responsibility’ cannot be separated from nationalistically loaded affects and their representations but instead it has effected new articulations that support state-centric ideologies, offering a fresh starting point for re-conceptualizing the theories of nationalism. This article analyses how the Finnish media constructs a contradictory discourse in which the moral debate over carbon footprint responsibility merges with nationalistically loaded argumentation.