What's Wrong with Climate Politics and How to Fix It

Paul G. Harris

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745652511, 9780745652504
• eBook ISBN: 9780745670430
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Governments have failed to stem global emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases causing climate change. Indeed, climate-changing pollution is increasing globally, and will do so for decades to come without far more aggressive action. What explains this failure to effectively tackle one of the world's most serious problems? And what can we do about it?

To answer these questions, Paul G. Harris looks at climate politics as a doctor might look at a very sick patient. He performs urgent diagnoses and prescribes vital treatments to revive our ailing planet before it's too late.

The book begins by diagnosing what's most wrong with climate politics, including the anachronistic international system, which encourages nations to fight for their narrowly perceived interests and makes major cuts in greenhouse pollution extraordinarily difficult; the deadlock between the United States and China, which together produce over one-third of global greenhouse gas pollution but do little more than demand that the other act first; and affluent lifestyles and overconsumption, which are spreading rapidly from industrialized nations to the developing world.

The book then prescribes several "remedies" for the failed politics of climate change, including a new kind of climate diplomacy with people at its center, national policies that put the common but differentiated responsibilities of individuals alongside those of nations, and a campaign for simultaneously enhancing human wellbeing and environmental sustainability. While these treatments are aspirational, they are not intended to be utopian. As Harris shows, they are genuine, workable solutions to what ails the politics of climate change today.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Something is terribly wrong with the politics of climate change. The earth’s climate is being altered in profound ways, and there is growing certainty that many communities are facing calamity if we do not change our ways. Yet far too little is being done by the world’s governments and other actors to address the causes and consequences of climate change. If the world does not move aggressively to stem emissions of greenhouse gases, the environment upon which humanity depends for its wellbeing and survival will change in truly profound ways.¹

The year 2010 puts the failure of climate politics in sharp focus: in that year, global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂), the most prevalent greenhouse gas, reached their highest level in human history,² and global surface temperatures reached the highest since record-keeping began.³ Average global temperatures during the decade of 2002–2011 matched that of 2001–2010 (0.46°C above the 1961–1990 average), which was in turn 0.21°C warmer than 1991–2000, which itself was warmer than prior decades, making each succeeding decade warmer than the last, revealing a clear “long-term warming trend.”⁴ This news comes on the heels of scientists reporting that climate change is not just a problem for the future but one that is affecting humanity and the environment right now.⁵ It is much too late to hold back climate change, but the longer we wait to respond to it the more difficult it will be to limit its most adverse impacts, and the more costly it will be to adapt.⁶

Climate change is a political problem every bit as much as it is a scientific one, and arguably its technical dimensions are less important than its political ones.⁷ Governments and other actors, even while expressing increasing interest and concern about climate change, very rarely act in ways that match the scale of the growing environmental and human tragedy. Indeed, things are only getting worse, despite all efforts to date. There are international treaties and an enormous amount of activity at all levels, but we still do not have definitive political agreements for genuinely mitigating, least of all halting, climate change, and not enough national and local communities, industries, and individuals are willing to do what is necessary to make this happen. Put simply, with too few exceptions, the politics of climate change, despite being increasingly energetic, has failed. In the words of Anthony Giddens, “at present, we have no effective politics of climate change.”⁸

What is fundamentally wrong with climate politics? What can be done to fix it? The answers to these questions are nearly as numerous as the experts looking at the problem. Nevertheless, we can identify a few major and chronic “ailments” of climate politics that deserve special attention, and it is to identifying, describing, and treating these ailments that this book is devoted. All of them have a commonality: fundamentally, what ails climate politics is self-interestedness – selfishness of governments, selfishness of politicians, selfishness of businesses, selfishness of other special interests, and ultimately selfishness of individuals. Foremost may be the tendency of the international political and economic systems to perpetuate and even encourage narrowly selfish behavior of nations and other actors, and frequently to forget that human beings are at the root of climate change.⁹

This chapter begins to describe what’s wrong with climate politics and starts to propose some treatments that will be examined in detail in later chapters. It briefly describes the “tragedy of the atmospheric commons” and summarizes some of the important steps that are being taken in response to this tragedy. It identifies some of what is “right” about climate politics, albeit with some significant caveats, before describing what is most wrong with it and what can be done to treat its most chronic and persistent ailments.

The tragedy of the atmospheric commons

The latest science of climate change paints a bleak picture of the future. In its most recent assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that climate change will result in a range of unwanted impacts, such as more frequent, widespread, and severe droughts and floods; an increasing number of severe weather events; accelerating loss of biodiversity and damage to vulnerable ecosystems; and many adverse impacts on human communities, such as water shortages, the spread of disease-carrying pests, harmful effects on fisheries, and loss of inhabited areas and farmland to the sea – among myriad other unwelcome impacts.¹⁰ While the IPCC predicted that many of these adverse effects would occur much later in the century, recent science tells us that they will occur much sooner – and in many cases may be happening already – and will likely be substantially more severe than the IPCC anticipated.¹¹ In short, the IPCC science that underlies international negotiations on climate change and most governments’ responses to it – despite much criticism that the IPCC has overstated the threat – has been, if anything, far too optimistic. Climate change is a bigger problem than most people realize.

Since the start of the industrial revolution in the late eighteenth century, the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ has increased almost 40 percent, rising from about 280 parts per million (ppm) to more than 390 ppm, with most of that increase occurring since the mid-twentieth century.¹² Predictions point to CO₂ in the atmosphere doubling again by the middle of this century,¹³ even as experts tell us that exceeding 350 ppm makes dangerous climate change unavoidable.¹⁴ Indeed, our pollution of the earth’s atmosphere has increased sharply since we became aware of climate change. Incredibly, CO₂ emissions from energy use alone increased 50 percent in only one generation, from about 20 gigatons in 1990 to well over 30 gigatons in 2010, the highest level ever.¹⁵ Despite the global recession, global emissions of CO₂ increased more in 2010 than in any year in history.¹⁶ In 2011, they grew an additional 3.2 percent, reaching their highest level ever – nearly 32 gigatons.¹⁷ Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are now at their highest for the last 650,000 years.¹⁸ Stabilizing carbon emissions at 450 ppm, which some scientists believe is what is needed to limit global warming to 2°C (a dubious benchmark set by governments to avoid the worst effects of climate change), would require cutting global greenhouse gas emissions by 50–85 percent by 2050 (compared to 1990).¹⁹ Yet current trends point to global greenhouse gas emission increasing 50 percent by then, to a level approaching 700 ppm CO₂ equivalent.²⁰ According to the International Energy Agency, there are “few signs that the urgently needed change in direction in global energy trends is underway.”²¹

Climate change is not just unfortunate; it is a human-induced tragedy. What makes climate change especially tragic is that nobody intended it to be this way. It is a problem caused by people and industries and nations working hard to advance economically. The problem lies in the convenient but pernicious reality that everyone is free to use the global atmosphere as a dumping ground. In practice, this means that everyone is free to pollute the atmosphere, and we have done so with abandon for hundreds of years. As with most environmental tragedies, all of this is a byproduct of actors behaving quite normally to promote their perceived interests. Neither the corporations that have most callously encouraged our pollution, notably the world’s coal and petroleum companies, nor other industries dependent on fossil fuel use, such as the automobile makers, want to cause adverse changes to the earth’s climate. Climate change is a byproduct of their business practices. People are the main causes of the problem, whether directly through their use of energy or indirectly by their consumption of products and services. Certainly it was (and is) not the intent of individuals, even the wealthiest, to cause climate change. Harm to the atmosphere and all of the communities and people, not to mention ecosystems and other species, that depend on it now and in the future is an incidental consequence of normal human activities intended to promote the interests of those doing the polluting.

Most tragically, those who will be most harmed by climate change – the world’s poor people and communities – are least responsible for causing it. Climate change is therefore not only an environmental problem; it is also a great injustice.²² Nobody wants to do these people harm, but this lack of intent does not mean that this tragedy of the atmospheric commons is not wrong.²³ Surely much of our pollution has been wrong from the time we realized that it was causing climate change.²⁴ As Stephen Gardiner has described it, climate change is a “perfect moral storm,”²⁵ with affluent nations and their rich citizens able to shape events at the expense of the world’s poor, with current generations able to promote their interests over those of future generations, and with the world lacking a robust theory (or theories) to guide us out of the problem. This storm is building as greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase and the planet continues to warm and undergo other adverse changes from past pollution.

This tragedy of the atmospheric commons has of course not gone unnoticed. The world has gone to work in trying to address it. It is likely that more scientific resources have been put into studying climate change than any other natural problem. This scientific work has had important results. It has played a key role in efforts by many nations and other actors to begin taking action. Scientists, including those supported by governments and those contributing to the IPCC’s work, brought the problem of climate change to the attention of the world and they have been central to helping governments gradually realize its great importance. The inevitable political struggle to decide what is to be done about it – in particular, which nations are most to blame for causing it and therefore are required to take the most action – has resulted in myriad agreements and initiatives among and within nations. However, the politics of climate change have not kept pace with the science. The science – more precisely the changes to the earth’s climate and other adverse manifestations of greenhouse gas pollution – is advancing much faster than the politics, with ever more precise and dire predictions of the unfolding tragedy being revealed while domestic and international politics remain unable to respond forthrightly even to the climate science of previous decades.

To put the problem of climate politics in context and to show how much climate diplomacy in particular lags behind climate science, it is worth bearing in mind that the potential problem of human-induced (unnatural) global warming was first theorized in the nineteenth century.²⁶ By the 1970s, climate change was receiving serious international attention by scientists, and the First World Climate Conference was convened in 1979. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created in 1988 and the Second World Climate Conference was held in 1990. International concern was manifested in the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change (henceforth the “climate convention”), the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to that convention, and many related agreements that have been reached during the intergovernmental negotiating process ever since. These developments show that the problem is far from new and, more importantly, that scientists and governments have been very actively engaged in it for over three decades.

We can take at least three messages away from this evolution of the climate tragedy and related politics. First, warnings about a warming planet and changing atmosphere, with all the impacts for people and societies that they entail, are by no means new. We have known about the problem for decades, with the dangers to humanity having been widely publicized for more than a quarter-century. Second, the science is telling us that the future will likely be miserable for many ecosystems and for many millions (possibly billions) of people. The more we learn about climate change, the bleaker the future appears to be and the more confident we become of that bleakness. The science will always be uncertain about some things, but the danger is very clear. Third, the international politics, diplomacy, and domestic policies surrounding climate change are grossly inadequate to the task. The science improves by leaps and bounds, the dangers of climate change become more profound each year, but the diplomacy and national responses to climate change plod along at a diplomatic pace, falling further and further behind the aggressive responses that are needed to avert the worst effects. International conferences, even those populated by many of the world’s leaders – such as the December 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark – have resulted in tepid agreements that do not match the scale of action demanded by the science and which are most often voluntary and therefore unlikely to be fully realized.

Even as the international politics remain weak, failures to implement strong climate legislation within industrialized polluting nations, such as Canada and the United States, reveal problems domestically. With too few exceptions, businesses continue to make things worse, for example by encouraging people to consume things they do not need (even if on rare occasions they are encouraged to consume “green” products), and environmental nongovernmental organizations have not been up to the task of driving and implementing needed changes on the ground.

James Hansen starkly describes the failure of governments to tackle climate change effectively, even those governments that are doing the most.²⁷ Despite the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to phase out fossil fuel use within a few decades, most of these governments say that they can do this through new international agreements akin to the Kyoto Protocol. To this Hansen responds:

Ladies and gentleman, your governments are lying through their teeth. You may wish to use softer language, but the truth is that they know that their planned approach will not come anywhere near achieving the intended global objectives. Moreover, they are now taking action that, if we do not stop them, will lock in guaranteed failure to achieve the targets that they have nominally accepted.²⁸

How can Hansen be so confident in condemning governments? It is because of what they are doing: allowing construction of many additional coal-fired power plants (and permitting environmentally destructive coal mining), developing tar sand deposits, leasing vast new areas for oil and gas exploration, and encouraging hydraulic fracturing for gas, among a range of other actions that will free up enormous amounts of fossil fuels for combustion – just the opposite of what is required.²⁹ To make matters even worse, governments routinely subsidize these activities, making alternative energies relatively more expensive than they would be otherwise, and of course far more expensive than if the alternatives were subsidized instead.

Thus the tragedy of the atmospheric commons is growing worse, starkly revealing the failures of climate politics.³⁰ Having said this, it would be unfair to say that absolutely everything is wrong with climate politics. Many developments in recent years offer some reasons for hope, and certainly they can be built upon when aiming to overcome obst...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Content
• About the Author
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• Part I: Diagnoses
• 2 Cancer of Westphalia: Climate Diplomacy and the International System
• 3 Malignancy of the Great Polluters: The United States and China
• 4 Addictions of Modernity: Affluence and Consumption
• Part II: Treatments
• 5 People-Centered Diplomacy: Human Rights and Globalized Justice
• 6 Differentiated Responsibility: National and Individual
• 7 Consumption of Happiness: Sustainability and Wellbeing
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index