Reframing Climate Change

Constructing ecological geopolitics

Shannon O'Lear, Simon Dalby, Shannon O'Lear, Simon Dalby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138794368
• eBook ISBN: 9781317638643
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"Change the system, not the climate" is a common slogan of climate change activists. Yet when this idea comes into the academic and policy realm, it is easy to see how climate change discourse frequently asks the wrong questions. Reframing Climate Change encourages social scientists, policy-makers, and graduate students to critically consider how climate change is framed in scientific, social, and political spheres. It proposes ecological geopolitics as a framework for understanding the extent to which climate change is a meaningful analytical focus, as well as the ways in which it can be detrimental, detracting attention from more productive lines of thought, research, and action.

The volume draws from multiple perspectives and disciplines to cover a broad scope of climate change. Chapter topics range from climate science and security to climate justice and literacy. Although these familiar concepts are widely used by scholars and policy-makers, they are discussed here as frequently problematic when used as lenses through which to study climate change. Beyond merely reviewing current trends within these different approaches to climate change, the collection offers a thoughtful assessment of these approaches with an eye towards an overarching reconsideration of the current understanding of our relationship to climate change.

Reframing Climate Change is an essential resource for students, policy-makers, and anyone interested in understanding more about this important topic. Who decides what the priorities are? Who benefits from these priorities, and what kinds of systems or actions are justified or hindered? The key contribution of the book is the outlining of ecological geopolitics as a different way of understanding human–environment relationships including and beyond climate change issues.

1
Reframing the Climate Change Discussion

Shannon O’Lear and Simon Dalby

Introduction

On 6 July 2013 a train carrying crude oil derailed in the town of Lac Megantic in Quebec, causing explosions and fires that killed 47 people and destroyed the centre of the town. While petroleum does not usually explode in such a fashion, it turned out that this oil came from the Bakken oil field in North Dakota. At the time, its exploitation was creating an economic boom and causing a rapid demand for workers, housing, and supporting service industries. Because pipelines were not available for the highly flammable Bakken crude, it was being shipped by train. Oil extraction was happening so quickly that it was not even profitable to capture the natural gas, so it was burned off as a waste product. The impacts were visible from space; on colour satellite images taken at night, the natural gas flares near the oil rigs appeared as red lights. Some of these gas flare areas were so big that they competed in size with the lit-up twin cities of Minneapolis and St Paul. The fires in Quebec were also briefly visible from space in July 2013. The amount of natural gas being flared off daily was enough to heat three-quarters of a million homes.

Elsewhere in North America at the same time, many corporations and cities were attempting to trim their carbon footprints to promote the notion of sustainability; and consumers were encouraged to pay a fee that would somehow offset the carbon generated by a plane flight or to otherwise be “green” in their consumption. Even the US military was looking for ways to reduce its energy consumption and costs on bases and posts across the country. Reducing consumption and using fuel efficiently was supposedly the order of the day. At least it was for some of North American society, but apparently not for the petroleum industry in the midst of an economic boom fuelled by high prices. Eighteen months later, as world oil prices plummeted, investments in new oil and gas production slowed. Financial incentives for consumers to reduce fuel consumption and hence slow climate change were substantially reduced, too.

These trends would appear to be working in different directions. How are we to make sense of the various links between human activity and climate change? Larger questions raised by such issues are both profound and troubling. They are profound because we are gradually realizing that humanity is changing the fundamental conditions of its existence. They are troubling because the current ways of thinking seem both inadequate to deal with the new circumstances and trapped in political, social, and economic modes that now seem singularly inappropriate. Climate change apparently requires acting in ways that might prevent at least the most obvious damage and harm to humans and other species in the immediate future, but our modes of thought and political structures work to perpetuate precisely the economic and political arrangements that are causing the potentially dangerous changes to the climate system.

As we try to understand how we have come to this pass and what to do about it, scholars and academic researchers in many of the sciences ought, surely, to have answers and insights as to how to proceed. Yet, even scholarly and scientific approaches to understanding and assessing climate change seem to have become “trapped” by methodological norms, disciplinary boundaries, and a narrow focus on small parts of the problem at the expense of larger synthetic understandings. A quarter of a century of huge and increasingly alarming synthesis reports on the scientific knowledge of climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has produced no effective curbs on the production of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the global economy. Simply presenting the facts and assuming that politicians will behave sensibly in response apparently has not worked. Moral exhortation does not seem to have been any more effective.

The fossil fuel companies, the producers of so many of the GHG products that power the global economy and most urban dwellers’ lives, are focused on continuing their production and their profits, not on how to decarbonize economies rapidly. Competition and consumption are key to capitalist growth and literally drive the global economy. While there are innovative market mechanisms that might move the fuel mix away from reliance on coal and petroleum in particular, current energy transitions seem far too slow to begin the shift to something that might meaningfully be called “ecologically sustainable.”

Addressing climate change through international agreements is also a lagging effort. Promises of some kind of treaty that will be binding on all states have been repeatedly deferred. Only in 2014 did China agree to firm caps on its emissions levels in future decades. This came 20 years after the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Even if ambitious attempts to formulate a climate treaty in Paris late in 2015 come to fruition, most plans suggest that it will enter into effect only in 2020. Many developing states are more worried that such agreements might hamper their economic development than they are about climate changes that they have done little to cause and the course of which they can do little to alter. The more powerful states are, it seems, still more concerned with the traditional questions of rivalries and influence in global politics than they are with what kind of planet we are now collectively making for future generations.

Often, academic approaches to climate change apply methods suited to other problems or build on discourses that now seem to ask the wrong questions. The agendas and findings of the physical sciences are often politicized in ways that favour the status quo (Sarewitz 2004) rather than motivate necessary social and economic adjustment. The social sciences tend to be concerned with practical problems of routine public administration, social stability, and economic growth, rather than matters of how societies can adapt to climate change, much less how we might make sustainable social arrangements that do not rely on fossil fuels for power.

Given the neoliberal times in which we live, where markets are the preferred modes of governance, citizenship is frequently reduced to consumption, and success is assessed in short-term financial measures. Thinking that we can “shop our way to safety” flies in the face of more serious attempts to grapple with the changing ecological circumstances of our times (Szasz 2007). But grapple with these changing circumstances we must, as students, scholars, and citizens of various parts of an increasingly interconnected world.

Climate change and its implications have no obvious analogy in human affairs. Despite this, we mostly continue to apply governance solutions, attempt to securitize it, and frame it within Cold War geopolitical understandings of security, economic calculations of risk, or traditional formulations of environmental governance, such as pollution control. Political analyses often perpetuate the focus on rivalries and power politics by simply adding climate change into the traditional investigations of international regimes, rivalries, and treaty-making rather than thinking fundamentally about how ecological change is remaking the conditions for states, economies, and societies (Hommel and Murphy 2013).

Only rarely, still, is it acknowledged that climate change is an evolving social and physical phenomenon that cannot be addressed by “a” negotiated solution (Hulme 2009). It is precisely the growing cogency of analyses that understand climate change as part of a larger series of physical and social transformations coupled with the recognition that there is no single “solution” to the “problem” of climate change that gives rise to this book.

Welcome to the Anthropocene!

Climate change is but one part of the larger transformation of the planet set in motion by human activities (Steffen et al. 2011). We have already crossed some key boundaries in terms of how the planet works that suggest that humanity is starting to live in circumstances that are now rather different from the ecological conditions that gave rise to human civilization. In the words of the earth system scientists who study the planet as a whole, we are living in a new geological epoch frequently called the Anthropocene (Crutzen 2002). This geological era is marked by significant changes not only to the chemical composition of the atmosphere, but to systems of heat exchange, acidification of oceans, levels of pollution, and alterations to landforms, water flows, nutrient cycles, and flora and fauna dynamics across the planet.

The Industrial Revolution fostered a carbon fuel-powered economy that thrived literally on our ability to “turn rocks into air” (Dalby 2009: 71). As industrial practices diffused and the rate and reach of globalization increased, so did the human impact on the planet. Viewed in this way, we can no longer understand ourselves in modern terms as using our technologies to alter an environment external to ourselves. Instead, we now have to understand ourselves as part of an earth that our actions are rapidly changing. Such insights require rethinking many things, not least our assumptions about a given environmental context within which humanity functions.

This book offers a series of critical examinations of how we understand – or frame – climate change as a scientific, social, and political matter. Such critical perspectives examine commonly held understandings and assumptions in order to assess how and why certain views are promoted and why selected information is prioritized or marginalized. Who benefits from these priorities, and what kinds of systems or actions are justified or hindered? These are underlying questions directed towards climate change throughout the book. More specifically, the project emphasizes spatialities and power dynamics associated with climate change discourse, research, and policy. As with earlier work on resource conflicts, it is important to try to ask the right questions, rather than take the given policy and administrative frameworks for granted as the premises from which to do scholarly work (O’Lear and Gray 2006). While this book may not ask all of the right questions, clearly it is necessary to question rather than simply accept the dominant framings of climate change.

The premise for this book is quite simple: we, as scholars in a number of disciplines, need to reassess how we study, interpret, and respond to climate change so that we can develop more appropriate ways of thinking about society–environment relationships. Climate change is not merely an issue to be measured and understood by scientific means. It is also a deep reflection of political and economic disparities as well as the current spatial connections and disconnections of human activity. A focus on climate change without an understanding of the geopolitical and economic dynamics that have generated unprecedented environmental change – as well as the scientific systems and practices that are used to interpret climate change – cannot fully inform appropriate policy, scholarship, and citizenship. Understanding who we are as citizens, consumers, and scholars, and how existing social, economic, and political structures shape our identities and practices, and how they might be changed, is also key to reframing climate change as a matter of remaking the planet and ourselves simultaneously.

A key contribution of this book is our proposal to rethink these kinds of things under the rubric of “ecological geopolitics.” This approach is suggested to aid understanding of the extent to which climate change is a meaningful focus for more productive lines of thought, research, and action. A focus on ecological geopolitics emphasizes that humanity is an increasingly influential part of the planetary system and that decisions about what gets made, how landscapes are reshaped, how buildings, infrastructure, and commodities are produced, and how species, hydrologies, and chemicals are reassembled in new configurations are creating the planetary context of our times. Ecological geopolitics offers possibilities for different ways of understanding human–environment relationships including and beyond climate change issues. This focus shifts attention to power dynamics that serve to reinforce uneven distributions of human and ecological well-being.

Such thinking urgently needs to be undertaken now, given the failure of conventional social and physical science to tackle the profound questions posed by the Anthropocene. Whenever a major storm disrupts human activities, attention focuses on how to frame questions about the relationships between climate change and extreme events (Trenberth 2012). Sustained attention is needed, however, and the authors of the following chapters contribute to the process of rethinking and reframing climate change that now seems so necessary.

Framing matters

Much discussion of discourse and representation in the social sciences now draws on formulations of framing to investigate how things are constituted in social life (Goffman 1974). We draw on these insights loosely in the pages that follow to emphasize that what is considered climate change is not so obvious. As with the metaphor of frames, what is inside the frame of a picture is a choice. What is focused on, included as part of the image, is distinguished from what is cropped, excluded, left outside the frame. More than that, as anyone who has ever had a piece of artwork “framed” understands, how the frame is constructed – the texture and colour of the matting and the frame itself, as well as the type of glass – emphasizes certain aspects of the image and leads the viewer’s eye to see things in particular ways. While the metaphor can probably be stretched even further, the point here is to emphasize how climate becomes a matter of scientific and social knowledge; how it is talked about, discussed in the media and especially by academics, is a matter of selectivity. Climate change is a social construction (Onuf 2007). It is not a given entity, but something known and disputed in part by how discourses frame the subject matter (Strauss and Orlove 2003).

In policing, law, and discussions of crime, framing has a rather different connotation. Being framed is a matter of being portrayed as guilty as a result of deliberate planting of false evidence, fictitious testimony, or deliberate falsehoods to shift the blame for a crime onto an innocent party. Constructing a prosecution case, which is effectively an argument concerning responsibility and hence guilt, on the basis of manufactured evidence, a “frame” is widely understood as an unacceptable practice, a matter of obstructing justice. Matters are less clear when investigators misinterpret evidence, make mistakes, or jump to conclusions without access to all of the necessary information to develop an accurate understanding of events and responsibilities. Extending the metaphor of framing in these ways suggests that social practices – how things are constituted as entities and put into relationships one with another – are key processes in the social production of knowledge, which in turn is related to how identities and social roles are constructed and matters of responsibility assigned. Such frames may intentionally or unintentionally shape understanding. In discussing climate change, even assuming that this term is an appropriate frame for contemporary circumstances, or an entirely objective condition, is an important consideration.

Our purpose in phrasing matters in this way is not to suggest, as the so-called climate deniers frequently do, that climate science is false, or, in US Senator Jim Inhofe’s infamous phrase, “a hoax.” We emphasize framing because how objects are constituted, and the power dynamics that result from those formulations, is an unavoidable part of the discussion of climate change. Additionally, the role of science, criticism, and knowledge in political dispute is part of what has to be tackled in any attempt to think critically about what is now called “climate change.” The framing metaphor also emphasizes that how stories about climate change are told to spell out who did what, and how responsibility can thus be assigned and with what social consequences, is crucial to discussions of justice, governance, and security.

How security, justice, governance, and economy have been framed in the past matters greatly in understanding how current discourses of climate change play out. The assumptions about the appropriate role of government, how threats to social order are formulated, who is responsible for environmental change, and how it endangers particular peoples and social orders in specific places are all parts of the discussion. As Hulme (2009) makes very clear, disagreements about climate change are not just matters of dispute over scientific fact, but are deeply tied into cultural, political, and religious assumptions about both the larger conditions of humanity’s existence and moral framings of who should act, how, and why in contemporary social arrangements. As the authors aim to tease out in the chapters that follow, these matters run through all aspects of discussions of climate that are unavoidably matters of interpretations, conflicts, claims about justice, and scientific and technological concerns as well as governance broadly construed.

Environmental security?

Climate change matters, so the conventional international framing has it, because it is potentially very dangerous to humanity. In the terms used in the UNFCCC, which was ratified by nearly all UN member states by 1994, it is important to prevent dangerous human interference with the planet’s climate system. While that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1 Reframing the climate change discussion
• 2 Postmodern interpretations
• 3 The climate of communication: from detection to danger
• 4 Disconnecting climate change from conflict: a methodological proposal
• 5 Climate justice: climate change, resource conflicts, and social justice
• 6 Climate change and the insecurity frame
• 7 Geopolitics and climate science: the case of the missing embodied carbon
• 8 Technology and politics in the Anthropocene: visions of “solar radiation management”
• 9 Biofuels: climate solution or environmental pariah?
• 10 Novel framings create new, unexpected allies for climate activism
• 11 Catastrophe insurance and the biopolitics of climate change adaptation
• 12 Resisting the climate security discourse: restoring “the political” in climate change politics
• 13 Towards ecological geopolitics: climate change reframed
• Index