Climate Terror

A Critical Geopolitics of Climate Change

Sanjay Chaturvedi, Kenneth A. Loparo, Timothy Doyle

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780230249622, 9780230249615
• eBook ISBN: 9781137318954
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Biological Sciences

Climate Terror engages with a highly differentiated geographical politics of global warming. It explores how fear-inducing climate change discourses could result in new forms of dependencies, domination and militarised 'climate security'.

1

An Introduction: A Critical Geopolitics of ‘Climate Fear/Terror’: Roots, Routes and Rhetoric

Introduction

On the ‘doomsday clock’ of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which intends to caution ‘how close humanity is to catastrophic destruction’, ‘climate change’ joins the other two alarmist categories, namely ‘nuclear,’ and ‘biosecurity’. At the same time, there is a grudging acknowledgement of the fact, at least by some, that the geopolitics of fear, deployed at diverse sites by different agencies – individually and/or collectively – in pursuit of various interests and agendas, has failed to yield the desired results, including a change in public and private behavior and for that matter the ushering in of radical social movements (Lilley 2012). On the contrary, it appears to have resulted in ‘catastrophe fatigue, the paralyzing effects of fear, the pairing of overwhelmingly bleak analysis with inadequate solutions, and a misunderstanding of the process of politicization’ (ibid.:16; emphasis added). Could this be the reason that some of these multifaceted discourses of fear – that somehow remain open to political contestation and interrogation – are now being scaled up and upgraded by various regulatory agencies and alliances to the discourse of ‘climate terror’? This discourse can only have counter-terror as its Other in order to completely erase the hope (the Other of fear) of re-ordering and regulating spaces and societies allegedly more vulnerable to climate change and its threat-multiplying effects. Is climate terror an apparatus of govern-mentality that aims at erasing not only the collective memories of historically perpetuated environmental injustices by the powers that be, but also hopes to contain growing resistance in various parts of the globe (especially the global North) against the emerging architecture of domination and dependencies? Of course, the separation between North and South is a useful category, marking out the affluent lives of the minority versus those of the less affluent majority. But, like any border (as mentioned in the preface of this book), it is drawn subjectively and imperfectly to demarcate territories (Doyle and Chaturvedi 2010).

As pointed out by Eddie Yuen (2012: 37), ‘The prevalence of fear-based catastrophism reveals the depth of acceptance of the assumption of rational choice theory in both natural and social sciences. The assumption of a certain kind of instrumental rationality undergirds the delusional belief that if only people could understand the scientific facts, they will change their behavior and trust the experts.’ This entails putting a heavy gloss over a set of deeply political and politicizing questions at a time when the lure of the post-political is gaining traction but not without inviting a micro geopolitics of resistance.

Can we say that ‘climate terror’ is the accumulated, collective outcome of steadily proliferating fears, with each fear serving to endow its anticipatory regimes with ‘expertise’ and ‘clinical authority’? What kind of language, imaginaries and metaphors are being deployed to frame and communicate climate change, by whom and why? What is the politics behind the written geographies of climate change, and how and why are largely Afro-Asian places and people being framed and implicated in various geographies of catastrophe and fear? What are the implications that these discourses carry for understanding climate change and choosing ‘appropriate’ policy options and responses? What minimum ethical principles related to equity are needed to ensure that the impacts of policies to address climate change are perceived as equitable by key stakeholders (Giddens 2008: 4) and do not result in further marginalization of the much less fortunate losers of corporation globalization?

Structure of the book and its order of exposition

In Chapter 1 of the book, our key engagement focusing the rhetoric of ‘climate terror’ is pitched at a number of theoretical perspectives that inform ‘critical geopolitics’ essentially as a relentless interrogation of the politics and even depoliticizing politics of domination. While being ‘critical’, we do not dismiss state-centric classical geopolitics out of hand since we believe that nation-states, irrespective of their geoeconomic and geopolitical locations, continue to matter a good deal in international geopolitical economy. For example, low-lying Bangladesh and Maldives are ‘vulnerable’, not only because of their vulnerable physical geographies, but also because of their geopolitical location in the global South.

In this chapter then, we provide a brief historical overview of the engagement of both classical and critical geopolitics with categories of ‘geography’, ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ and their interplay with statecraft. In addition, we argue for expanding the nature and scope of critical geopolitics through engagement with various ‘critical’ perspectives (in contrast with conventional wisdoms) of social sciences and humanities; as well as convergent critical perspectives around the notions of space, scale and power.

In Chapter 2, we investigate the anxieties, uncertainties and denials associated with both the construction and broadcasting of climate ‘Science’ and the politics of knowledge. In this vein, we research the relationship between climate science and the politics of fear, looking at the categories of control and the hegemony of the natural sciences; the science and power of climate change paradigms and mythologies; and diverse cultural understandings found in indigenous knowledge. In this vein, we briefly touch upon controversies over the melting of Himalayan glaciers and pre-Copenhagen East Anglia.

Additionally, we trace the changing discourses of early environmental movements which often directly challenged ‘Enlightenment Science’ and its myths of progress-at-all-costs, to more recent green movements which have become ‘ecologically modernized’, now advocating concepts such as sustainable development and win-win-win political games. The notions of ecological modernization, sustainable development and the scientific knowledge which inform them, we argue, stand co-opted and depoliticized, with the zero-sum games of the finite, hard-earthers now replaced with Plasticine Anthropocene understandings of the Earth as infinitely malleable.

One key argument informing this work is the concept of the post-political, and in Chapters 3 and 4, we discuss the relationships between the post-political and the discourses of neo-liberal globalization. In Chapter 3, after introducing the post-political at some length, we focus on climate territories with their marginalized geographies inherent in post-political constructions of geopolitics, leading us to a discussion of Climate and the Anthropocene (exploring the ‘boundless’ nature of climate change) and critically argue against what we contend is the construction of a ‘Global Soul’ for ‘Global South’ by Northern elites. Finally, in this light, we study space, scale and the politics of making/unmaking places, and in the latter pages we utilize the case of India to illuminate our purposes.

Chapter 4 moves to Climate ‘Markets’, for it is within neo-liberal tropes about climate change that the concept of a post-political, post-material geopolitical reality is most usually found. In specific terms, we endeavor to expose the emergence of neoliberal green economics, providing examples and differences between ETS systems versus carbon taxes (the role of states versus market driven schemes). Of course, climate change has become so omniscient that other economic ideologies and approaches have also responded to its call (not just the neo-liberals), and we seek to provide examples of mercantilist and more classically liberal approaches to climate economics. We strongly argue, however, that climate change emerges from a conservative, right-wing morality, so its relationship with right-wing economic doctrine (in all its forms) is hardly surprising.

Chapters 5 and 6 move to the world of securities and securitization. In Chapter 5, we focus on climate borders: securitization, flows, migration and refugees. In this analysis we cast our critical gaze on the construction of the climate ‘terrorist’; climate cores and peripheries; mobility and circulations; and investigate the realist and/or neo-Hobbesian literature on climate ‘wars’ and conflicts. For much of this chapter, however, our focus is largely on the climate refugee, and in this manner, we concentrate on displacements and migrations, using a detailed Bangladeshi case study to ground our theoretical musings.

Chapter 6 takes this discussion on security one step forward and reifies a theme which has developed right throughout the work: the close connection between geo-securities and geo-economics. Post September 11, and post the 2007–8 financial crisis, in a geopolitical sense, financial limitations continue to justify neo-liberal responses to global security. The Earth (or the Climate) is now increasingly seen by global elites as little more than a collective of post-political citizen/consumers of the core, whose interests to trade in marketplaces need more amorphous and less permanent forms of ‘protection’ (provided by nation-states in the past) from those dwelling in the black holes of market periphery. This chapter looks at the manner in which climate security has been militarized. Case studies of the United States military, and its ‘green defense’ projects are provided in a new and powerful geo-economic/ geo-security region/non-region now referred to as the Indo-Pacific.

In the penultimate chapter, Chapter 7, we extend our thoughts beyond the domain of governments and corporations. We ask the question: how have social movements, non-government organizations, unions and churches responded to the climate change phenomenon? In particular, we provide some explanations as to how more ‘emancipatory’ groups and networks have responded to concepts such as climate justice and climate debt; how these groups who, in spite of also being co-opted by the might of climate change dogma, have attempted to use this global climate moment for more democratic purposes. Although we provide brief cases from both Church groups and the Union movement, we concentrate on how green movements themselves have been impacted upon, and for much of the chapter, we offer an analysis of the largest global green organization: Friends of the Earth International, with branches in over 70 countries, in the global North and South.

In Chapter 8, we conclude with our understandings of climate futures. We provide an overview of climate diplomacy, and investigate notions of common but differentiated responsibilities, respective capabilities and global governance. We also touch upon the geographical politics behind climate engineering.

We revisit notions of power, knowledge and technology and, in the end, advocate the resistance of artificial climate futures. This discussion leads us to one of our final questions: Can climate, as a set of discourses, be utilized for emancipatory ends or, ultimately, is the climate story, regardless of its diverse intentions, a discourse now captured by the affluent North to control the development of the global South? In short, has the emancipatory moment now passed or is there still hope for the re-emergence of subaltern perspectives on climate futures?

Toward a critical geopolitics of anthropocence, global warming and climate change

What emerged during the 1980s within the sub-discipline of political geography was a new approach called ‘critical geopolitics’ with the overall objective of liberating geographical knowledge(s) from the old and the new imperial geopolitics of domination. In the words of one of the leading proponents of critical approaches, ‘The focus of critical geopolitics is on exposing the plays of power involved in grand geopolitical schemes’ (Ó Tuathail 1992: 439). It is aimed at relentless interrogation of the ‘power of certain national security elites to represent the nature and dilemmas of international politics in particular ways. These representational practices of national security intellectuals generate particular “scripts” of international politics concerning places, peoples and issues. Such scripts are part of the make-up by which hegemony is deployed in international systems’ (ibid.: 438).

As pointed out by John Agnew (2010: 569), ‘The hegemonic calculus of the past 200 years has involved the imposition of a set of normative rules and practical constraints on states and other actors, reflecting the uneven distribution of global power and a common “script” of world politics thereby written more in some places than in others. Though this script has had powerful continuities to its core themes, it has also involved important shifts over time with the rise and fall of dominant actors who have brought different conceptions and practices to bear within it.’ Agnew points out that so far most of the scholarship in critical geopolitics has engaged with contemporary United States and the European colonial powers, ‘often as if they were the sole active forces in world politics toying with the docile masses in the rest of the world’ (ibid.).

We have been conscious of, and inspired by, the insights offered by one of the leading proponents of critical geopolitics, Simon Dalby. According to Dalby, geographical knowledges have been used and abused in the past for the purposes of so-called ‘discovery’, enclosures and expropriation during the colonial times and will continue to serve various imperial impulses and neo-colonial projects in various parts of the globe. Matthew Sparke’s (2005, 2007) insistence on geographers using a ‘post-foundational ethic as our guiding principle and collectively challenge the taken for grantedness of these practices’, points out Dalby, could be used to question and critique ‘the violence and transformations we have unloosed in the biosphere’ (Dalby 2010: 280).

This is especially important in the circumstances of our increasingly artificial existence in the urbanized world of the Anthropocene where we are collectively remaking our fate in ways that render traditional notions of a separate nature or an external environment untenable premises for discussing the earth as humanity’s home ... Linking the spatial and natural themes in the discipline puts the most basic questions of politics at the heart of geographical considerations. Are we then to understand ourselves as on earth, squabbling over control of discrete territories and threatening massive violence to our putative rivals in other sovereign spaces, or are we to understand our fate as increasingly a matter of reorganizing a dynamic biosphere in which we all dwell? (ibid.; emphasis added)

From an ethical-normative standpoint, the authors of this book, with a ‘political science’ background, are inclined to be a part of WE that Dalby is alluding to as a critical geographer. Yet we feel slightly uncomfortable with a universalized notion of ‘we’ (while aspiring toward that state of collective socio-spatial consciousness) and would therefore like to introduce in this study critical geopolitical perspectives on and from the global South.

We do agree with Matt Sparke’s contention that geographical grounds of fear and hope need to be critically examined, if only for the reason that these ‘two are huge swirling compulsions with enormous implications for the lives and deaths of every living thing on the planet. False hopes and groundless fears can be of dreadful deadly consequences. And yet justified fears when combined with sensible hopes can open new possibilities and thereby help mobilize change for the better’ (Sparke 2007: 338). He goes on to explain:

We can usefully come to terms with the double vision of fear and hope through recourse to arguments about geopolitical scripting and geoeconomic ‘enframing’. Critical investigations of the imaginative geographies produced by geopolitics and geoeconomics help us to understand how the fears and hopes of those who promoted the war were both groundless and yet at the same time ground changing. (ibid.: 339)

Sparke’s insistence ‘that geopolitics and geoeconomics are better understood as geostrategic discourses’ (ibid.) appears to be quite relevant in the case of the climate change metanarrative. Various geopolitical and geoeconomic strands of the narrative are unfolding – and in some cases in a rather overlapping manner – at various sites, including: national defense-security establishments, ministries and departments dealing with earth sciences and environment; corporation-government partnerships engaged in carbon trading of increasingly territorialized carbon sinks (Lovbrand and Stripple 2006); religious groups; trade unions; nuclear as well as fossil-fuel industries; environmental NGOs with new climate change portfolios; and insurance companies, to name just a few.

Even though the issues raised by Sparke pertain to the Iraq war and not to the geoeconomic framings and geopolitical scripts of climate change, they are helpful in understanding the contradictory double vision of American discourses on climate change. The following official statement released on the eve of President Obama’s pronouncement of national climate action policy through a short video addressed to the citizens of the United States resonates this double vision, anchored in rather multiple oscillating reasonings, quite graphically.

I’ll lay out my vision for where I believe we need to go – a national plan to reduce carbon pollution, prepare our country for the impacts of climate change, and lead global efforts to fight it. This is a serious challenge – but it’s one uniquely suited to America’s strength. We’ll need scientists to design new fuels, and farmers to grow them. We’ll need engineers to devise new sources of energy, and businesses to make and sell them. We’ll need workers to build the foundation for a clean energy economy. And we’ll need all of us, as citizens, to do our part to preserve God’s creation for future generations – our forests and waterways, our croplands and snowcapped peaks. There’s no single step that can reverse the effects of climate change. But when it comes to the world we leave our children, we owe it to them to do what we can. So I hope you’ll share this message with your friends. Because this is a challenge that affects everyone – and we all have a stake in solving it together. (cited in Chris Good 2013)

In the deployment of geopolitics of fear, ‘imaginative geographies’ play an important role. According to Derek Gregory (2004: 17) ‘Imaginative geographies imply, ‘Representations of other places – of peoples and landscapes, cultures and ‘natures’ – that articulate the desires, fantasies and fears of their authors and the grids of power between them and their “Others’’’. Gregory’s critical engagement with a ‘colonial present’ shows how contemporary geopolitical discourses of fear and enmity have both roots and routes in imperialism (ibid.). It is equally useful to note that many imaginative geographies of imperial Orientalism, systematically critiqued by Edward Said, were refurbished and deployed in order to both stage and legitimize the ‘War on Terror’ (ibid.). With the help of global media o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 An Introduction: A Critical Geopolitics of ‘Climate Fear/Terror’: Roots, Routes and Rhetoric
• 2 Climate ‘Science’: Categories, Cultures and Contestations
• 3 Terrorizing Climate Territories and Marginalized Geographies of the Post-Political
• 4 The Violence of Climate ‘Markets’: Insuring ‘Our Way of Living’
• 5 ‘Climate Borders’ in the Anthropocene: Securitizing Displacements, Migration and Refugees
• 6 Climate Security and Militarization: Geo-Economics and Geo-Securities of Climate Change
• 7 Climate Justice: An Attempt at an Emancipatory Politics of Climate Change
• 8 Making ‘Climate Futures’: Power, Knowledge and Technologies
• Bibliography
• Index