Narrative Entanglement in Climate Policy

Political narratives on climate policy have turned more skeptical despite mounting evidence of climate urgency. We explain this shift with a theory of narrative entanglement: to appeal to voters, politicians intertwine economic and environmental narratives rather than treating them separately. Hence, shocks unrelated to climate change can impact environmental narratives. We test our theory in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which affected the economic costs of the European Green Deal without changing its impact on emissions. We use large language models to identify climate narratives across all speeches in the 9th European Parliament (2019-2024). Exploiting only variation within each parliamentarian, we show that after the invasion, narratives become both more negative in the cost assessments of climate policies and more skeptical about their environmental impact.