Reimagining Climate Change

Paul Wapner, Hilal Elver

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317370208
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Economics

Responding to climate change has become an industry. Governments, corporations, activist groups and others now devote billions of dollars to mitigation and adaptation, and their efforts represent one of the most significant policy measures ever dedicated to a global challenge. Despite its laudatory intent, the response industry, or 'Climate Inc.', is failing.

Reimagining Climate Change questions established categories, routines, and practices that presently constitute accepted solutions to tackling climate change and offers alternative routes forward. It does so by unleashing the political imagination. The chapters grasp the larger arc of collective experience, interpret its meaning for the choices we face, and creatively visualize alternative trajectories that can help us cognitively and emotionally enter into alternative climate futures. They probe the meaning and effectiveness of climate protection 'from below'—forms of community and practice that are emerging in various locales around the world and that hold promise for greater collective resonance. They also question climate protection "from above" in the form of industrial and modernist orientations and examine large-scale agribusinesses, as well as criticize the concept of resilience as it is presently being promoted as a response to climate change.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, global environmental politics, and environmental studies in general, as well as climate change activists.

1 Introduction

Reimagining climate change

Paul Wapner

Humanity has been trying to respond to climate change for over three decades. During this time, many well-meaning people, organizations, and governments have put their noses to the grindstone and worked to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, enhance sinks, and otherwise attempt to address the intensifying reality of global warming. What have we to show for it?

When the international community signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the world annually emitted roughly 24 billion tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere. Carbon concentrations stood at 364 ppm, and temperatures had risen about a half of a degree Celsius over preindustrial levels. Today, the world annually emits 36 billion tons of CO₂ – with the expectation that this will continue to rise 3 percent each year – and CO₂ concentrations stand above 400 ppm. Global average temperatures have risen 0.8 degrees Celsius since the industrial revolution and, despite international agreement to keep temperatures from rising over 2 degrees Celsius, the going consensus is that the world will push through that threshold over the next few decades. Things are not good. Indeed, we seem to be at an impasse.

The impasse, it should be clear, is not one of inactivity. Plenty of people and organizations are dedicating their careers and indeed lives to addressing the climate challenge. The problem is that such efforts lack traction. There are at least two reasons for this. First is simply the sheer magnitude and complexity of transitioning from a carbon-based economy. Carbon pervades almost all of our lives. It literally fuels our existence. Almost everything we eat, drink, purchase, or otherwise consume has a carbon footprint. Given current energy systems, one cannot write these words without drawing on fossilized life in one form or another, and indeed few cannot get through their days without tapping into the rigs, mines, or pumps lodged into the earth’s belly. Our carbon-fueled lives are so ubiquitous that it is inaccurate to say simply that we have a carbon-based economy; rather, we live inside a carbon world. Everywhere we turn, carbon.

Many have acknowledged the immensity and complexity of the climate challenge, and analyzed the power relationships that animate humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels and carbon’s ubiquity. The authors of this volume focus on a second but related explanation for the current impasse. We concentrate on the efforts being taken to address climate change themselves. There is an assumption these days that all the right pieces are in place to tackle climate change, we simply lack the ability to scale them up. That is, while the challenge is immense, we actually have the knowledge and capability to delink ourselves from carbon. We have, for instance, the technological competence, market mechanisms, cultural understandings, and governing tools to transform our fossil fueled civilization; we simply cannot generate enough will, momentum, or collective thrust to enable them to do their work. We live, in other words in an “if only” moment. If only markets could capture full climate costs; if only states could find common ground and agree to appropriate international measures; if only technological innovation was given fuller reign and renewables could compete on a level playing field; if only rationality and scientific evidence could root out ignorance or superstition; if only we could stop consuming so much; if only … on and on. Framed in this manner, it appears that our climate woes involve the pace, intensity, and scale of our efforts, not their quality, direction, or ultimate destiny. It is as if the main task is merely to accelerate current mitigation and adaptation efforts. Time is running out; we better get on with it.

The authors of this volume question what “getting on with it” means. Rather than sounding yet another alarm and warning that we have to move our feet that much faster to implement the solutions at hand or at least those in the works, we focus on the encrusted character of the so-called “solutions” themselves and their attendant mechanisms of execution and employment. We question the entire climate regime – what we refer to as “Climate Inc.” – the routinized system of response that has evolved to address climate change. We do this because getting out of the carbon world is not simply a matter of severing ties to certain industries or particular forms of collective behavior, but envisaging and reformulating first principles.

All of us suffer from what could be called, “hardening of the categories” – the reification of understandings and practices. This is also the case with responding to climate change. Over the years, we have established certain approaches that constitute the landscape of climate response. These are so well known or obvious that they have retreated into the background and now structure climate affairs by streaming through our institutions and practices largely unseen and certainly untheorized. Nonetheless, they have fixed certain horizons and committed us along particular trajectories. Such hardening has thus narrowed the range of possibility for thought and action, and has concentrated attention on the instrumentality rather than the ends of climate measures. This has caused the current climate regime to see the challenge of responding to climate change mainly as a lack of time, commitment, or momentum.

The authors of this volume focus not on scarcity of will, weakness of motivation, or lack of dedication, but on failures of imagination. The scarcest resource these days, in other words, is the ability to unleash the mind, heart, and spirit to envision, entertain, and develop hitherto neglected possibilities. Climate Inc. works against this. Most efforts and even proposals for addressing climate change subscribe to conventional political, economic, and cultural understandings and practices. They mimic the larger society of which they are a part and rarely question underlying suppositions. One reason for this has to do with the seeming necessity to appear practical and realistic. No one wants to be accused of being naïve or irrelevant. Starry-eyed utopians rarely find a “seat at the table.” Being practical wins one credibility and, even more, widens the degree of resonance within public discourse. One can be understood when talking about, for instance, cap and trade, international negotiated emissions ceilings, technological innovation and technology transfers, and low carbon lifestyles. These fit into existing forms of governance, economic practices, scientific understandings, engineering possibilities, and everyday activities. They can be adopted without major systemic adjustments. The world becomes more tone-deaf when the language switches to, for instance, questions of social justice, the distortions of capitalism, moving beyond mitigation and adaptation, and critically assessing modernity. These latter objects of attention occupy, at best, the periphery of current political consideration. More often than not, they exist completely outside climate conversations and thus beyond the realm of worthy consideration. They involve wholesale change that is either not in the political cards or representative of what the established order deems irresponsible thinking. If one wants to be relevant these days, one needs to adhere to prevailing assumptions of what is possible. Climate Inc. serves as a gatekeeper to relevance. It implicitly polices the content of climate responses by disciplining ideas and deliberations. To be sure, it does so not through authoritative individuals or institutions conducting litmus tests – although this sometimes happens – but through a socializing process that everyone who wants to address climate change goes through in trying to be taken seriously.

The same socializing process takes place at a higher level of abstraction. Beyond determining who gets a seat at the table, Climate Inc. sets the paradigmatic boundaries for thinking itself. Today, many of us assume that our cognitive, emotional, and spiritual lives enjoy infinite extension. That is, we can think, feel, and experience anything we want. The Internet fuels this permissive sentiment as we witness ideas soaring around the planet in micro-seconds and thus believe we inhabit an endless cultural terrain. Proof of this is the seemingly profound multiculturalism that has marked global life for the past decade or so. The world has never enjoyed such a globalized moment wherein cultural containers no longer protect people from external influence. But, as should be obvious, such cultural sharing is not a love fest of democratic expression with limitless possibilities. Rather, it represents a certain form of exchange that is itself bounded by structures of power. Material and ideational systems – encapsulated in, what some call, epistemes, discourses, or simply modes of life – establish the contours of thought and practice. Contemporary multiculturalism, for instance, contains hierarchical structures that privilege certain cultural expressions over others. Racism, sexism, First World-ism, and anthropocentrism, for example, mark global cultural life despite a thick veneer of progressive cosmopolitanism. Furthermore, even the most enlightened cosmopolitanism has limits insofar as we all live in socio-historical contexts that, by definition, circumscribe thought and behavior. Similarly, Climate Inc. lays down certain parameters and authoritative protocols for addressing climate change. These correspond with broader socio-political structures that dominate and establish the originality of the current age. Largely unnoticed, most people internalize such structural constraint and are thus bounded as they wrestle with the challenge of climate change.

Given the constraints of Climate Inc., this volume offers an exercise in what James Rosenau (1990) calls “jailbreaking” – the attempt to unshackle political life from established categories. Jailbreaking, in the context of Climate Inc., involves liberating thought and action from conventional approaches to climate change. It seeks to set to one side the discourses that presently structure standard responses to climate change, explain inherent limitations, and offer alternative orientations. It does this in the service of moving beyond the current political impasse. If the world were on track to reduce carbon emissions anywhere near what scientists say is required to ensure climate safety, Climate Inc. would be something to celebrate. After all, Climate Inc. involves the participation of innumerable institutions, billions of dollars of investment and practice, and the creation and alteration of countless programs in and across various sectors. No one can persuasively argue that the effort is unimpressive. The problem is that, for all its steam and momentum, its achievements are disappointing, to put it mildly and, more consequentially, grossly insufficient. They have taken us into a troubling cul-de-sac in which the efforts may be multiplying and gaining greater public acceptance, but are also circling around, what is essentially, a political dead-end. No one genuinely believes that current measures, even if dramatically scaled up, will provide an effective response to climate change. It is time to move on – to stand back from Climate Inc., understand the ultimate direction towards which it is leading, and chart a new course. As will become clear, doing so requires not simply cosmetic adjustment to current practices, but wholesale reformatting and a transformative outlook. This is what successful jailbreaking ultimately means.

An immediate question arises in this kind of exercise, one that has plagued thinkers throughout time: how can one gain conceptual distance from established categories to criticize them and seek alternative arrangements? How can one practice reflexivity deep enough to disrupt the constant chatter and reproductive mechanisms that set the terrain for social thought in the first place? How can one think outside the proverbial box? There is, of course, no single answer to such questions but at the heart of any explanation lies the potentials of the imagination. Imagination represents the ability to dream, envision, conjure, and otherwise subvert existing, conceptual classifications. It involves flights of awareness in which the mind and heart take license to leave the seeming “realities” and “feasibilities” that are supposed to frame experience. Untied to existing mores and selfconsciously devoted to poking through conceptual walls, one can go, to use Rilke’s words, “a little further, beyond the last of the billboards” (Mitchell 1984, 205), and there recognize not only that one has been imprisoned but also envision and explore empowering alternatives. The imagination, put differently, enhances reflexivity by liberating one from habitual thinking and practice, and opening up the conceptual space to notice the means by which one is structurally incarcerated. To be sure, there are limits to imagination given the inescapable difficulty of completely transcending one’s historical age. One can push the very edges, however, and that is the intention of the present volume.

Getting outside of Climate Inc. is somewhat distinctive in that it involves not simply the imagination per se but what C. W. Mills calls the sociological imagination. For Mills, the sociological imagination is not merely a flight of fancy but the ability to grasp the larger arc of collective experience and interpret it’s meaning for the choices we face. It involves stepping away from everyday occurrences, contextualizing them historically, and seeking patterns that render them social in nature and political in possibility rather than personal and individualistic. In other words, the sociological imagination requires a level of abstraction that enables one to see the collective, structural roots of particular encounters, feelings, and thoughts. It allows one to see one’s experience and the experiences of others not as natural conditions written into the nature of the universe but as the consequence of broader socio-historical forces. One gains an appreciation for, as Mills puts it, “the larger historical scene” (Mills 1959, 5) that shapes not simply material conditions but also the inner life. With regard to Climate Inc., this involves disciplined inspiration, creativity, and ingenuity that can help contextualize and render strange and questionable existing responses, and cognitively and emotionally allow for criticism and the proposing of alternative futures with radical implications. In this sense, unleashing the sociological imagination in the service of climate protection is an exercise in teleological reflection. It involves scrutinizing the circumscribed trajectories along which the current regime is unfolding and asking fundamental questions that reveal alternative first principles about how to respond to climate change.

The chapters that follow offer radical ideas. As Marx famously wrote, “To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter.” Politically, this involves identifying the origins rather than symptoms of particular social or political challenges. Climate Inc. peddles in symptoms. To mix metaphors, it attends to the capillaries of climate change, leaving the heart of the matter unexamined. Such an enterprise can take us far. At a minimum, current adaptation plans and measures can certainly prevent much hardship by responding to rising sea levels, droughts, and intensifying storms even though these are the expression, rather than the cause, of climate change. Moreover, conventional mitigation schemes can certainly reduce, to a degree, carbon emissions and thus may make a dent in the severity of future climate suffering. Yet, it is important to keep in mind that these represent merely nibbles at the tip of carbon civilization and leave the structural causes of climate change untouched. As the authors of this book make clear, the politics of symptomatic engineering has limits. It will never do the heavy lifting required to shift the tectonic plates – fundamental levels of injustice, technological hubris, economistic faith, and modernist narratives – that drive climate change. To get at this level of engagement, one must critically assess the industry and ideational support structure that have grown up around climate change. One must step outside the complex of commercial, governmental, and activist enterprises aimed at climate protection. One must interrogate Climate Inc., noticing the ways in which it itself traps us within deeper dynamics that cause climate intensification.

By adopting a radical orientation, Reimagining Climate Change destabilizes a number of core elements of the current climate regime to create space for unorthodox thinking and action. Its authors step back from the solution-sets societies are pursuing and show that such “answers” are themselves strictures limiting rather than advancing promising climate alternatives. The chapters go even further, however. In form and content, they exhibit the experimental quality of the sociological imagination. As should be clear, imaginative thinking can deeply move minds and hearts, but it cannot provide a tried and true road to collective salvation. That’s simply not its role. Rather, it works to unhinge and subvert conventional orientations, and this is always a form of experimentation. As the reader will no doubt see, the chapters that follow are investigational forays. They provoke, test, question, and may even irritate. This doesn’t always make for comfortable reading. In A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold writes that the “modern dogma is comfort at all costs” (1949, 71). The pages that follow provide little comfort in the usual sense. They offer not sweet stories that edge one softly toward alternative arrangements but defiant ideas that pose a challenge to appreciate. To assist in this, the reader is encouraged to relax her own standards of “realistic,” “practical,” and “policy-relevant.” The political impasse referred to above stands not as a blip on the screen but a fundamental and predictable result of the causal dynamics of climate change. A shared conviction of this volume is that the world will make little headway addressing climate change until it comes to terms with these dynamics.

Reimagining Climate Change uncovers such dynamics. It unfolds in the following manner. In Chapter 2, Matthew Paterson reminds us that imagination is not reserved solely for social criticism but is part of the reproduction of contemporary thought and practice. He shows, for instance, how the effort to take carbon out of the economy and adopt low carbon lifestyles – conventional approaches to climate change – are themselves forms of imagination insofar as they represent inventive social discourses. There is nothing innate or necessary about decarbonization or lifestyle adjustment; rather, certain social forces came together to constitute these as proper, appropriate responses to climate change. Paterson’s contribution rests on reimagining decarbonization and low carbon lifestyles. Enlisting the sociological imagination, he contextualizes the two efforts within a broader historical arc and explores what it would take to enable them to hasten the kind of radical shifts that appear necessary to address effectively climate change. Paterson shows how decarbonization and carbon dieting, although relatively tame in their approaches and certainly compatible with existing structures of power, can tap into and ignite critical reflection on broader political arrangements. For example, he explains how decarbonization can, if conceptually enlarged, call into question the privileged status of fossil fuel companies within the economy and be used as a tool for battling corporate power. Likewise, he shows how the interrogation of low carbon lifestyles can reveal the pervasive individualism that drives consumerism and the kind of self-regarding attitude at the heart of high carbon societies. In short, Paterson demonstrates how reimagining climate change must necessarily arise out of existing practices, subjectivities, and political life, and explains what it would take to turn such an exercise into an instrument of radical change in the service of climate protection.

Chapter 3 reimagines the historical setting of climate change and therewith provides an alternative way to understand security in a climate age. Simon Dalby begins his contribution by contextualizing climate change within the broad historical setting of the Anthropocene. He demonstrates that climate change did not usher in the geological era of the Anthropocene, but that humans have long been altering the planetary conditions of life – including atmospheric carbon concentrations – ever since the Agricultural Revolution and significant urbanization of the human species. In this sense, climate change is not the cause but another effect of longstanding human practices that render Homo sapiens participants in shaping planetary ecological conditions. This is significant because it allows us to see climate change not as a catastrophic “end time” but as another wrinkle in a pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: reimagining climate change
• 2 The sociological imagination of climate futures
• 3 Climate security in the Anthropocene: “scaling up” the human niche
• 4 Climate change, policy knowledge, and the temporal imagination
• 5 Modernity on steroids: the promise and perils of climate protection in the Arabian Peninsula
• 6 Overcoming food insecurities in an era of climate change
• 7 Reimagining climate engineering: the politics of tinkering with the sky
• 8 Climate of the poor: suffering and the moral imperative to reimagine resilience
• 9 Reimagining radical climate justice
• 10 The promise of climate fiction: imagination, storytelling, and the politics of the future
• Index