Global Warming and Global Politics

Matthew Paterson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415138710
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134772834
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Examines the major theories within international relations, and how these can help us understand the emergence of global warming as a political issue.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Global warming emerged as a significant global political issue in 1988.¹ NASA scientist James Hansen’s statement to the US Congress that ‘it is time to stop waffling so much. We should say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here’ (quoted in Pearce, 1989:1) has often been taken as a defining moment. This came on the back of the biggest drought in the US since the 1930s, as well as freak weather patterns across the world, and the realisation that the six hottest years on record were in the 1980s. These events made claims by scientists such as Hansen about possible global warming increasingly plausible.

The events of 1988 stimulated a flurry of international conferences, and a major scientific assessment of the state of knowledge about global warming, in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). As the momentum was maintained, climate politics ‘matured’, with formal negotiations to an international treaty starting in February 1991. These led to the signing of a ‘Framework Convention on Climate Change’ at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 (United Nations, 1992).² At the same time, many industrialised states adopted unilateral targets to limit their own emissions of the gases believed to cause global warming. After 1992, states continued to negotiate between themselves how to respond to global warming, in particular how to build upon the Framework Convention. They also began to grapple with the practical problems of implementing the commitments they had unilaterally or multilaterally signed up to.

Popular interpretations of the politics of climate change quickly emerged. Some commentators advanced a variety of conspiracy theories. Warren Brookes, writing in Forbes magazine, suggested that ‘just as Marxism is giving way to markets, the political “greens” seem determined to put the world economy back into the red, using the greenhouse effect to stop unfettered market-based expansion’ (1989, cited in Athanasiou, 1991:7). Similarly, although in less conspiratorial tones, Solow and Broadus asserted that it is a ‘policy in search of a problem’ (1990, cited in Hempel, 1993:216). Another conspiracy theory has been that it is a case of ‘environmental colonialism’ (Agarwal and Narain, 1991), whereby the affluent West is trying to pull the ladder up behind it, using climate change as a political tool to stunt Southern development. In direct contrast, Singer suggested that it was a plot by ‘Third World kleptocrats’ to find new excuses to demand money from the West (Singer, 1992a). A final conspiracy theory is that the threat of global warming is manufactured by scientific elites to ensure continued funding for ‘big science’ (Boehmer-Christiansen, 1994a).

Others put forward interpretations not couched in the language of conspiracy. One is that global warming is a classic ‘tragedy of the commons’ (Hardin, 1968; Grubb, 1989:22; Young, 1994:20–1), where the lack of world government means that those resources on which all countries depend but none can control get overused. This of course has strong resonances with dominant realist and liberal traditions within International Relations (IR). Some Greens have seen it as a strategic tool for Western industry to shore up its power and usher in a new era of economic growth (Chatterjee and Finger, 1994). Others have seen it as a metaphor. Bill McKibben wrote eloquently of global warming as a metaphor for the ‘end of nature’, that industrial society has finally humanised nature, literally leaving no part of the biosphere untouched by human intervention:

The temperature and rainfall are no longer to be entirely the work of some separate, uncivilisable force, but instead in part a product of our habits, our economies, our ways of life…By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made [sic] and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature’s independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us.

(McKibben, 1989:47, 58)

In a not dissimilar vein, Paul Ehrlich saw it as an expression of global interconnectedness, stating on Earth Day 1990 that ‘a cow breaks wind in Indonesia, and your grandchildren could die in food riots in the United States’ (quoted in Ross, 1991:198). Andrew Ross suggested that ‘the crusade to claim the whole world as “free” for liberal capitalism is currently locked in step with the campaign to “free” the climate from human influence’ (1991:209). Oppenheimer and Boyle invoked religious imagery, suggesting that it was the ‘wages of industrialisation’ (1990:18, quoted in Ross, 1991:198). However, these interpretations have never been given any sustained examination.

POLICY DEBATES

To illustrate the lack of sustained explanations of climate politics, consider the following policy debates. One good example would be the debate over tradeable permits. This scheme would involve states being allocated permits to emit a particular quantity of CO₂ (and possibly other greenhouse gases [ghgs]) per year which would then be tradeable. The number of total permits distributed could decline over time to achieve overall global abatement targets. The point of the scheme would be that (for most allocation criteria) an industrialised country which emits more than it is given permits for would be able to buy permits from a developing country, should this be cheaper than reducing its own emissions domestically. This would be an economically optimal method of pollution control (by the standards adopted by neoclassical economists), and would facilitate North–South transfers, in the process possibly promoting development in the South which would not be based on fossil fuels. Much of the international policy debate has focused on the relative merits of tradeable permits over targets or carbon taxes, largely with a view to establishing which is the most economically efficient.³ However, there is little in the way of discussion of the political context of the negotiations through which such schemes would have to be introduced. Grubb (1989) provides a notable exception, but even here it remains at a ‘common sense’ level.

Another example would be the debate about equity and North–South relations.⁴ Some of this literature draws explicitly on traditions concerningjustice; for example, the work of John Rawls figures prominently. Oran Young would be representative of many of these writers when he asserts that ‘the availability of arrangements that all participants can accept as equitable…is necessary for institutional bargaining to succeed’ (1989a: 368). But as Grubb, Sebenius, Magalhaes and Subak (1992) point out, concerning global warming there are a number of viewpoints on this question. These positions include: ‘polluter pays’ rationales based either on current emissions or historically accumulated contributions to global warming; an equal entitlements approach, that all individuals have an equal right to use the atmospheric commons; a ‘willingness-to-pay’ justification derived from welfare economics; that each participant should shoulder a ‘comparable’ burden based on their situation; simply that the distributional implications of any agreement should be taken into account (a position which draws explicitly on John Rawls [1973]); and a conservative position that starts with the assumption that the status quo is legitimate in the sense that present emitters have established some common law right to use the atmosphere as they at present do (Grubb et al., 1992:312–13). However, it would again be reasonable to claim that this literature is underdeveloped regarding the political context into which such schemes would be placed (although it is politically more sophisticated than the debate over tradeable permits or institutional questions), and would benefit from a more detailed political analysis regarding that context.

A final example would be the debate over institutional questions. Many of those writing about global warming, and UNCED more generally, suggest that creating new international institutions with particular functions and powers would contribute significantly to ameliorating the problem (e.g. French, 1992; Gardner, 1992; Imber, 1993). But institutions are often conflated with organisations, and there is little analysis of the particular ways in which they can affect political outcomes. For example, Richard Gardner writes that ‘A critical question throughout the UNCED process was what kind of new or improved institutions should be created to assure the implementation of the Agenda 21 program’ (Gardner, 1992:42, emphasis added), implying that institutional arrangements can in some simple fashion assure the implementation of such a huge programme. Hilary French (1992:31–8) argues forcefully for the strengthening of UN institutions to improve the international response to environmental problems, but without any clear analysis of what strengthening means, or what institutions, such as an environmental dimension to the Security Council or a reformed UNEP, could achieve. And Mark Imber (1992) engages in a purely technical account of the changes involved in establishing the Sustainable Development Commission and the resultant changes in UNEP’s role, assuming the importance of these changes without any explicit justification.

A SECOND SILENCE

Alongside the lack of a sustained attempt to explain the politics of global warming, there has been a similar paucity of efforts within International Relations to provide convincing and well developed explanations of the global environmental politics which emerged in the 1980s. The 1980s and the 1990s have seen a great amount of activity within International Relations theory. There have been (for the purposes of this discussion, at least) three major developments of concern here. First, following the publications of Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics (1979), there has been significant debate of great relevance to any study whose focus is on interstate cooperation.⁵ This has been a debate between neorealists on the one hand (such as Waltz), and neoliberal institutionalists (such as Robert Keohane) on the other, over the likelihood and extent of interstate cooperation, and the degree to which the emergence of international institutions mitigates the formal anarchy in the international sphere.⁶

Second, the 1980s witnessed a rise in theories which came from thoroughly different traditions to the essentially positivist approaches of both neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism. Feminism, critical theory, Gramscian thought and poststructuralism, all started to generate a literature specifically on International Relations, which, among other things, focused on a critique of the epistemological presumptions of much mainstream IR theory, and called into question many of the latter’s central assumptions. The debate surrounding the rise of these theories has often been called the ‘post-positivist debate’ (Lapid, 1989; Vasquez, 1995).

Third, the 1980s, and even more so the 1990s, have also seen a resurgence of historical materialism. Variously termed transnational historical materialism, open Marxism or Gramscian International Political Economy,⁷ this resurgence has been despite, or perhaps in part because of, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, which many interpreted as the death knell of Marxism. Much of its rise has been to do with the growing interest in questions of International Political Economy, for example increased concern with processes of globalisation.

However, in none of these debates have environmental problems been an important reference point for discussion. So discussion of global environmental problems has emerged largely without reference to the concurrent developments within IR theory. Almost all theoretical discussion of environmental problems within IR has been within liberal institutionalist frameworks. Within this tradition, there has clearly been some important work done in this area, notably Peter Haas’s Saving the Mediterranean, Oran Young’s International Cooperation: Managing Natural Resources and the Environment and International Governance: Protecting the Environment in a Stateless Society, and Haas, Keohane and Levy’s edited volume Institutions for the Earth (Haas, 1990; Young, 1989b, 1994; Haas et al., 1993).⁸ Work on global warming which has tried to use IR theory has also largely been written from this perspective. The best of these is Ward (1993), who adopts a game-theoretic orientation and emphasises the importance of international institutions. Sebenius (1991) is one of the few others who have used IR theory material (in his case, negotiation analysis based largely on game theory, again broadly within an institutionalist framework), but he simply applies this model prescriptively to global warming, presuming both that the model holds for other areas of international cooperation (without demonstrating it) and that ‘lessons’ in other areas of international politics can be applied to global warming, largely without reflection on the political problems peculiar to global warming.

However, global warming is commonly seen to be such a challenging global environmental problem compared to others, that it is worth reinvestigating the claims made by these writers concerning it. In particular, the central claim of liberal institutionalists is that cooperation can often emerge within the states-system, despite formal anarchy. But if the claim that global warming presents by far the greatest challenge to humanity of all the major environmental problems is convincing, then this may make it more plausible that claims about the importance of institutions will fail to account for climate politics. Alternative explanations within IR will have therefore to be looked for.

A QUESTION OF QUESTIONS

This book tries to go some way to filling these silences. It attempts to do two things. The first is to explain the international politics of global warming, leading up to the First Conference of the Parties of the Framework Convention, which took place in March and April 1995. There are two basic questions involved in such an investigation, corresponding to two distinct processes which have been involved. First, huge scientific uncertainties remained about the timing, extent and likelihood of warming, when no empirical demonstration of a link between observed climatic changes and anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases had been observed. Given this, how and why did global warming become an issue on the international political agenda, which many states took seriously enough on the one hand to announce unilateral mitigating measures, and on the other hand to negotiate a multilateral agreement on the subject? The second question is, how did the processes of cooperation on the issue work, once formal negotiations had started?

The second purpose of the book is to look at strands of IR theory in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Series editors’ preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The historical development of climate on the international agenda
• 3 Before and after Rio: interstate negotiations
• 4 The politics behind the negotiations
• 5 Anarchy, the state and power
• 6 Cooperation and institutions
• 7 Science, politics and global warming
• 8 A political economy of global warming
• 9 Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index