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Manuscript to be presented at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association Las Vegas, 2-4 April 2015
JONATHAN SYMONS* & RASMUS KARLSSON**
Green Political Theory in a Climate Changed World
- Dr Jonathan Symons Lecturer in Politics and International Relations Faculty of Arts, Macquarie University Sydney, Australia jonathan.symons@mq.edu.au ** Dr Rasmus Karlsson Senior Lecturer Department of Political Science Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden rasmus.karlsson@umu.se
This article is currently in press with Environmental Politics http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09644016.2015.
ABSTRACT
This paper evaluates some implications for green political theory of the international community’s failure to avert dangerous warming. We identify an emerging conflict between the green-romantic value of restraint and green-rationalist value of protection, between a desire to preserve biotic systems and a distrust of scientific solutions to problems that are intrinsically social. These divisions risk undermining the environmental movement’s influence. In response, we outline approaches that might express impulses toward preservation and restraint in a climate changed world. An ethic of restraint, encompassing non-domination and post- materialist values, can validly be justified without recourse to the threat of ecological catastrophe. Meanwhile, in respect of preservation, we argue that scalable emissions control measures and international cooperation are necessary to make future mitigation efforts politically viable and that this suggests the necessity of accelerated research into low-emissions energy technologies. However, incompatibility with environmental ‘logics of practice’ means technophilic preservationism must build political support outside the traditional environmental movement.
Keywords: Anthropocene, geoengineering, Enlightenment, climate policy, cooperation, breakthrough
greenhouse gas concentrations will ‘overshoot’ beyond safe levels (see Jamieson, 2014; Richardson et al. 2011; Hamilton 2013) While we are sympathetic to pragmatist arguments, we think it is unlikely that division over the desirability of economic growth or technological solutions can be bridged by rational analysis, because participants in global environmental debates hold fundamentally opposed ‘logics of practicality’ (or habitus ) and esteem-linked values (Pouliot 2008; Dickinson 2009). Whereas preservationist arguments for rapid deployment of advanced nuclear technologies and preventative geoengineering are unlikely to persuade most environmental thinkers, critiques of consumerism and economic growth have little resonance in those developing states where GHG emissions growth is fastest and where hundreds of millions of people still lack reliable access to electricity. Environmental choices with planetary implications must be made in a world that is fractured by both stark inequalities and ideological differences. Division created by recognition that environmentalists’ best efforts have failed to avert ecologically destructive climatic change have been most apparent in controversies that followed Paul Crutzen’s advocacy for climate geoengineering (2006) and James Hansen’s defense of nuclear power (2014). Debates over geoengineering and nuclear power illustrate heightening tensions between rationalist and romantic environmental impulses and between associated values of protection and restraint, between a desire to preserve biotic systems and a distrust of scientific solutions to problems that are intrinsically social. This paper’s key contributions are to highlight the increasing incompatibility between preservationist governance and romantic environmentalism and to identify the ‘salience’ and ‘scalability’ as guiding principles for preservationist global climate governance. While our analysis implicitly assumes that green political theory might potentially influence political behaviour we are also aware of its limits, so
we seek to articulate an environmental strategy that is mindful of the relationship between rationality and practice-based logics of action in an era of post-ecological politics (Blühdorn 2013). The paper develops in five sections. The first reviews the ongoing failure of negotiations conducted under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process. We argue that for so long as low-emissions energy sources are not cost competitive it will be nearly impossible to summon political will to put the global economy – including those fast-growing developing states that account for the majority of emissions growth – on a trajectory toward decarbonisation. Looking forward we argue that when climate impacts do begin to mount, geoengineering interventions will gain prominence as an alternative to mitigation. For this reason worsening climate change is unlikely to shock communities into making the kind of dramatic changes long advocated by the environmental movement. In section two we map implications for environmental values. We observe that environmental discourses have simultaneously drawn on Enlightenment rationality through advocacy of science-based conservation policy while also reacting against the Enlightenment’s confidence in human mastery over natural forces by cultivating subjectivities characterised by restraint, humility and non-anthropocentricism (Szerszynski 2007, pp. 338-9). The climate crisis transposes longstanding debates between technophilic rationalists and technophobic romantics over the modernization of production techniques to a new terrain (Brand and Fisher 2013). Radical scientific solutions – which include limiting warming through geoengineering and ‘bright green’ breakthrough energy technologies – now promise to lessen the biophysical impacts of industrial civilisation. These technologies raise invidious dilemmas in which a trade-off arises between protection of the natural world and the hubris of radical technical
of dealing with the world’s most serious ecological crisis’ (2004, p.6) by suggesting that ecological and eco-modernist voices have such irreconcilable epistemologies that they cannot be brought into productive harmony. While technological interventions now hold the best hope for advancing preservationist values, their promoters must look outside traditional environmentalism for political support.
2. Failure of climate negotiations
The challenge facing global climate negotiations is now widely understood. Bill McKibbon’s (2012) Rolling Stone article on ‘Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math’ illustrates why a global political response must ensure that the majority of known reserves of fossil fuels remain in the ground. McKibbon focuses on three numbers: on the consensus that the maximum level of safe warming is 2° Celsius; on the remaining budget of 565 billion tonnes (gigatonnes [Gt]) of CO^2 that might be added to the atmosphere while likely avoiding 2°C of warming; and on the 2,795 Gt of CO^2 stored in known fossil fuel reserves (the fifth IPCC report estimates 469 Gt and 3,000 Gt respectively). A fourth key number – annual carbon emissions of 31.6 Gt in 2012 – explains the time-limited nature of the challenge. If emissions remain unchanged then we will exhaust this entire budget by around 2030. Global mitigation efforts have not simply failed to halt the rise in atmospheric GHG concentrations, they have – at least until 2012 – failed even to slow growth in annual emissions. The average year-to-year growth rate in the 1980s was 1.9%, in the 1990s it fell to 1.0% due to growing energy efficiency in China and deindustrialization of the former USSR, but has roared back to 3.1% per year since 2000 (Peters et al. 2012). If the existing stock of CO^2 -emitting energy infrastructure is not prematurely retired its
operations alone will roughly exhaust the remaining ‘safe’ carbon budget and will see atmospheric concentrations of CO 2 pass 430 parts per million (Davis, Caldeira & Matthews 2010). Indeed, some leading scientists argue that existing atmospheric GHG concentrations have already committed us to in excess of 2°C of warming (Hansen et al. 2008; Solomon et al. 2009). Meanwhile, an additional 1200 new coal-fired power states are currently proposed globally (Yang and Cui 2012). If constructed, these plants will have an anticipated lifespan of 40-80 years (Davis, Caldeira & Matthews 2010). Owners of this infrastructure, and those with rights over known fossil fuel reserves, will fight to preserve their value for as long as thermal coal and other fossil fuels are economically competitive. Existing energy systems are also failing to deliver equitable access to modern energy (Bazilian & Pielke 2013). Today, around 1.5 billion people lack any access to electricity, and approximately 3.5 billion rely on biomass (wood, cow dung etc.) for cooking – the impacts of this energy inequality are severe, particularly for women’s respiratory health (World Bank 2010, pp. 39-40). In the twentieth century global energy production increased approximately 16-fold (Speth 2004, p. 14). If we aspire to a world in which a global population of 7-9 billion people have secure, equitable access to modern energy then – even in the unlikely event that developed states abandon economic growth
- we would likely see global energy production double again over the coming century. Given the dearth of scalable low-emissions energy sources and that most new generation capacity is being installed in the developing world, it is little wonder that even optimistic calculations suggest that two-thirds of the world’s energy supply will still come from fossil fuels in 2050 (Kramer & Haigh 2009, p. 569) and that developing states have resisted binding emissions pledges.
climate change (e.g., the United States) and economic resistance to increased energy prices (see the collapse of the European carbon price, dismantling of Australia’s carbon tax and China’s growing caution about emissions pricing). Internationally, states’ reluctance to surrender economic advantages to their rivals has undermined international cooperation – particularly between the two greatest emitters and great power rivals, China and the United States. These political barriers seem likely to remain until cheap, scalable, low-emissions energy sources disconnect GHG emission levels from state power. Market and political forces will only align with ambitious global climate policy when low emissions energy sources gain a cost advantage; and only at this point will existing energy infrastructure be decommissioned as non-competitive stranded assets. 2.1 Saved by disaster? Some environmentalists acknowledge this dismal logic, but nurture hope that at some point climate harms will shock the international community into action or force transition to sustainability (Schneider-Mayerson 2013). Moreover, a commonly held assumption holds that deep cultural and lifestyle changes offer the surest path to sustainability, as many environmentalists conceptualise climate change as primarily a moral problem, which requires a moral inner solution rather than a pragmatic worldly response. For example, Bill McKibben, has described technological responses to climate change as the moral equivalent of segregation: ‘Just as the old methods of dominating the world have become unworkable, a new set of tools is emerging that may allow us to continue that domination by different, expanded, and even more destructive means….’ (1990, p. 144). Stephen Gardiner (2010, p. 304) echoes this sentiment when he worries that geoengineering will create ‘moral corruption’ if it obviates the need for radical lifestyle change. This argument has, to date, not moved a pluralist world any closer
towards climate stability. Nevertheless, the belief persists that political will to subsidise global deployment of capital-intensive renewable energy will emerge as the impacts of climate change become more severe. For example, Ulrich Beck (2010, pp. 258-9) welcomes the transformative ‘cosmopolitan momentum’ that will be unleashed when climate catastrophe creates an imperative to ‘cooperate or fail’. Adherents of this view have called on Western nations to lead the way and to demonstrate the feasibility of mitigation through unilateral decarbonisation (Maltais, 2013). We identify two key reasons why such hopes are misguided. First, the influence of methodological nationalism over climate policy grounds pessimism over the prospects for global decarbonisation. To date, the political response to climate change – as expressed in both targets set by international negotiations and the demands of environmental activism – has sought to apportion national responsibility for specific levels of decarbonisation. There are very good reasons to make the state the target of political mobilisation, yet, conceptualising decarbonisation as a national problem has led to counterproductive policy responses. Effective mitigation requires that the global economy – including fast-growing developing economies – be placed on a trajectory toward almost complete decarbonisation. If highly motivated states decarbonise using technologies that cannot be scaled up for global application, then the political enthusiasm for climate action might be exhausted without significantly shifting the emissions trajectory of the global economy (Karlsson & Symons, 2015). This appears to be the case in states such as Sweden, the UK and Germany that have used generous subsidies to deploy capital intensive and diffuse energy sources (such as biomass and wind) that it is not technically possible to scale to meet the energy demand of fast-industrialising developing states (Ausubel, 2007; Moriarty & Honnery, 2012; Trainer 2010). If affluent states expend their intellectual and
2010); in the United States influential actors are working to promote a national geoengineering strategy (Bipartisan Policy Center 2011); and a non-governmental Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative is working to link epistemic communities on a global basis (Edney and Symons 2013). While most environmentalists see climate engineering as hubristic, dangerous and unnecessary, influential free-market think tanks are laying groundwork for implementation. Moreover, detailed feasibility analysis has found that several different SRM techniques, that are already within the technological capacity of advanced states, could negate the warming impact of GHGs for under US$ billion per year for the next five decades (McClellan et al ., 2012). It is common for people who care for the health of biotic systems and suffering of vulnerable people to react with horror to the prospect of SRM. Believing that we already have the technologies to avert climate change in hand, they anticipate that communities will accept far-reaching reductions in consumption rates rather than face such risks. Yet, history is replete with examples of unnecessary ecological and humanitarian tragedies that were not prevented. In the last half century 10-30 per cent of all species have been threatened with extinction, approximately 60% of ecosystem services have been degraded, and the biomass of targeted fisheries has been reduced by approximately 90% (MEA 2005). This ecological destruction has occurred alongside the persistent, avoidable malnutrition of about one billion people. We have also become accustomed to living with radical interventions into nature – from genetically modified crops to industrialised animal suffering through factory farming. If SRM offers a ‘solution’ to climate change, which allows present economic and social dynamics to proceed unchallenged, it is likely to command significant support. Risks, such as disrupted monsoons and the loss of coral reefs to acidification are grave, but past experience gives little reason to anticipate that
humanity will shun a hubristic technical solution. Consequently, the political paralysis blocking ambitious climate action may persist for many decades.
3. Lessons from failure: Conflict among environmental values
Climate change has inherent characteristics that make it enormously difficult to address, so the environmental movement’s failure to craft a timely and effective response was perhaps inevitable. Nevertheless, we must now take continuing climatic change as a given, rather than as a threat that can be entirely averted. Governing unsustainability poses invidious choices. For example, bioclimatic modelling suggests that early intervention using SRM would preserve habitats such as coral reefs (and thus species) that will otherwise be lost (Couce et al. 2013). Many environmentalists oppose SRM as a risky intervention in nature, despite scientific modelling predicting benefits for biological diversity. Debates over deployment of SRM must increasingly be seen as a choice between two different sets of anthropogenic climatic changes, rather than as a choice between virtuous emissions constraint and hubristic planetary intervention. In assessing how green political theory should respond, we first briefly map environmental values, and the dominant discourses that seek to enact them. Invidious choices require prioritization; reflecting on these choices highlights the growing conflict between post- ecological ‘rationalist’ preservationist and traditional ‘romantic’ green discourses. John Dryzek’s seminal account primarily distinguishes environmental discourses by their relationship with industrialism – and more specifically whether they advocate radical or reformist, imaginative or prosaic departures from a commitment to ‘growth in the quantity of goods and services’ (1997, p. 12). While Dryzek’s typology captures key features distinguishing environmental perspectives, he posits the ‘imagery of [future] apocalypse’ as a figure that drives the radicalism of some approaches and argues that
emissions to Southern states whose populations for obvious reasons hold strongly ‘materialist’ values, the claimed compatibility between environmental protection and technological restraint also looks increasingly fudgy. Highly technical responses to many environmental challenges promise outcomes that can be predicted to maximise aggregate human or environmental welfare for any given atmospheric concentration of GHGs– yet, the attendant risks of intentional intervention are incompatible with romantic environmentalism. If we have reached a point where ongoing climate change, ocean acidification and biodiversity loss are inevitable, then green political theory must now navigate the period of overshoot beyond ‘safe’ ecological limits by informing choices between different bundles of environmental harms. As Christopher Preston notes, emerging climate threats and the prospect of geoengineering challenge environmental ethicists to confront ‘questions of the relative value of human interests against those of natural processes’ and also the relative values of ‘the integrity of fundamental biogeochemical processes relative to the value of species (and persons) under threat’ (2011, p. 473-4). Key divisions are emerging between environmental realists who advocate accelerated deployment of technical solutions because they assume that developing world demands for ‘modern’ lifestyles make degrowth impossible, and green romantics who resist technological hubris as they assume that interventions in nature (such as genetic modification, next generation nuclear energy and climate geoengineering) will have adverse unanticipated consequences. While Vandana Shiva and Paul Crutzen may both be motivated by environmental concerns, their respective positions reflect their differing relationships with Enlightenment rationality. Green romantics and green rationalists now face off on opposing sides of critical debates.
Eco-modernist discourse that identifies technological innovation as the most politically viable path toward addressing environmental challenges offers an important new perspective. Yet, it has not shifted the energies of the amorphous environmental movement. If anything, there is growing confusion about where to go next and this lack of consensus risks undermining public support for any action. Radical environmentalists of different stripes are inspired by diverse visions: of frugality and sacrifice, adoption of new ‘breakthrough’ energy sources (including generation IV nuclear) and for preservationist technological interventions (e.g., wilderness watched over by satellite guided drones); meanwhile an inadequate governmental response to the ecological crisis grinds on. The UNFCCC negotiation process combines global emissions trading (inspired by Friedrich Hayek) with the old politics of bargained international treaties. A fragmented patchwork of national, regional and global emissions trading schemes create weak incentives toward decarbonisation (Zelli 2011), but are vulnerable to myriad forms of gaming and fraud and have won such minimal public enthusiasm that modest emissions prices have been insufficient to drive significant decarbonisation. Meanwhile, international negotiations are bogged down in great power conflict (neither the US nor China will allow the other comparative gains), north-south conflict (the south claims a right to develop, and the north declines the mitigation bill). Bright green, pragmatist and romantic perspectives all call for change, but have failed to build sufficient consensus around plausible next steps in any direction. If we accept Ulrich Beck's argument (2011, p. 129) that environmentalism will fail if it is not ‘at least as powerful as the modernizing urge’, then we must also consider whether bright green environmental thinking that seeks to harness the modernizing urge, might be failing because it, in turn, is less powerful than traditional environmentalism. Rational analysis is unlikely to dissuade environmentalists from a
If the purpose of global climate governance must be to achieve cooperation around global responses that minimise atmospheric GHG concentrations (assuming SRM is not a preferred response), this raises the question of what institutional arrangements might achieve this outcome. We turn to international law, which has long grappled with the challenges of international coordination, to draw on a principle of 'salience' that Ronald Dworkin (2013) argues should guide progress toward a more legitimate international legal order. Dworkin’s claim is that international law (like climate policy) must engage a world of fractured epistemologies and narrowly conceived interests. Where an area of cooperation arises that achieves a useful purpose (even in a sub-ideal way) there should be a presumption that others join (e.g., carbon trading may be imperfect, but if it is partly effective in promoting cooperation around scalable activities, then it should be supported because there is institutional momentum behind it). Dworkin (2013, p. 19) describes the principle of salience in the following terms: ‘If a significant number of states, encompassing a significant population, has developed an agreed code of practice, either by treaty or by other form of coordination, then other states have at least a prima facie duty to subscribe to that practice as well, with the important proviso that this duty holds only if a more general practice to that effect, expanded in that way, would improve the legitimacy of the subscribing state and the international order as a whole.’
The salience principle provides a reason to support institutional responses that are amassing a critical mass of international support, provided that those responses support scalable solutions to climate threats. This emphasis on salience has the potential to suggest a pragmatic resolution to the long-running debate among economists, environmentalists, and policy makers over the relative desirability of emissions trading schemes, carbon taxes, regulatory measures, environmental education and lifestyle changes, subsidies for low-emission energy and government investment in energy
innovation. All these strategies have some potential and our goal should be to refine and improve those models that are best developed, most politically saleable and most conducive to scalable international solutions. Dworkin’s concept of salience suggests that knowledge of ideal solutions may be of limited relevance to the design of international responses. Some ‘bright green’ or 'realist' thinkers despair of the UNFCCC process and recommend its abandonment while others suggest that climate action is so politically difficult that emissions mitigation should primarily be achieved as co-benefits of more popular projects such as air pollution control (see Victor 2011; Prins et al. 2010). We suspect that those who call for the abandonment of existing governance efforts are making an unattainable ideal the enemy of the good, given the inherent challenges of climate policy, the multiple contradictory possible responses and the complexity of achieving international cooperation amid diverse national interests and perspectives. For all their failings, the IPCC and UNFCCC processes have summonsed an unprecedented global intellectual engagement. For example, one positive outcome of the Cancun Agreements was that it required detailed biennial, developing-state reporting of greenhouse gas emissions (see Breidenich 2011, p. 9-12). As a result, every UNFCCC member state must now develop (with assistance in many cases) the capacity to assess emissions. Building understanding of a problem is a necessary precursor to its solution. 4.2 Scalability Developing world energy demand – whose satisfaction is also prompted by justice considerations – implies that international climate negotiations and institutional responses should focus on promoting solutions that are globally scalable. With around half of the global population relying on polluting biomass for cooking, and lacking sufficient energy for refrigeration, development of scalable, low-cost, low-emissions
