Introduction
By the normal practices of international politics, many of the speeches made by world leaders at the Paris climate summit in December 2015 were exceptional. Not only was this the largest meeting of heads of state and government from all over the world that had ever taken place, but it was used to recognise that the growing threat of climate change could, as President Barack Obama put it, ‘define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other’, resulting in ‘submerged countries, abandoned cities , fields that no longer grow, political disruptions that trigger new conflict, and even more floods of desperate peoples seeking the sanctuary of nations not their own’. The summit’s host, President François Hollande , put it even more starkly: ‘never—truly never—have the stakes of an international meeting been so high. For the future of the planet, and the future of life, are at stake’. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon agreed: ‘We have never faced such a test. … Paris must mark a turning point. We need the world to know that we are headed to a low-emissions, climate-resilient future, and that there is no going back.’
This is not the first time that humanity faced global catastrophe: the threat of nuclear annihilation loomed over the Cold War world. But the world’s leaders were correct in describing the threat now facing us as the greatest test ever since it is caused not by the triggering of nuclear bombs, a technological devastation that can be avoided by political action, but by a series of complex threats to the fragile ecosystem on which all our lives depend. These threats cannot be so easily avoided and, indeed, even the most radical and decisive action taken immediately could not avoid the reality that we have already altered the climate and destroyed many species with consequences we don’t fully understand. What is new about this situation is, firstly, that we are facing grave threats of a kind humanity has never before experienced and, secondly, that the origin of these threats derives from key elements of the ways in which we organise and provision our societies, particularly their high levels of dependence on energy much of it generated through fossil fuels . As the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) put it succinctly: ‘Our development model is bumping up against concrete limits’ (UNDP 2011: 15).
Though awareness of the dangers posed by climate change has been growing over recent years, informed by the increasing urgency expressed in the 4th and 5th assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 and 2013/2014 respectively (IPCC 2007a, b, c, d, 2013, 2014a, b, c), public perception of its gravity has been manipulated and diluted by the activities of climate deniers (Jacques 2012). As a result, hugely disproportionate media attention has been given to individuals and organisations with little or no relevant expertise, making fallacious and inaccurate statements. These often challenge altogether the now well accepted scientific evidence that global temperatures are rising or that it is anthropogenically caused, or minimise the significance of its impacts and exaggerate the costs of its remedy. This deeply corrupted practice is strikingly similar to that which occurred with the link between smoking and cancer. Involving many of the same organisations, and using the same tactics, the aim is to keep the controversy alive by spreading doubt and confusion among the public when the scientific debate has already been sufficiently settled (Oreskes and Conway 2012). However, despite this distraction, the science is fully accepted among governments, scientists and science institutions and the public, policy and technical discourse is indeed evolving. The science of climate change , both in terms of understanding the unequivocal statement in the 5th assessment report of the IPCC that ‘human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history’ (IPCC 2014c: 3) has helped move the debate into a sharper focus on the dangers posed to human civilisation and a recognition, as expressed in the 2015 Paris Agreement, of the important role that ‘sustainable lifestyles and sustainable patterns of consumption and production’ must play in addressing climate change (UNFCCC 2015: 20).
The debate on climate change is now moving from having a predominant focus on techno-economic means to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to a focus on achieving a low-carbon society by 2050. Such a focus is at last consistent with the recognition that it is lifestyles, particularly of the affluent (such as the patterns of consumption and mobility) and the forms of social organisation (industrial scale production of goods, including food, and the governance structures that support them) that require radical change; technology offers some of the tools to effect the necessary change but it cannot address all of the necessary drivers and such tools cannot be divorced from the social context in which they are developed and implemented. Yet, as the focus moves from technology to society, large new debates are beginning to open up related to pathways 1 to a low-carbon society. This is the subject matter of this book. To set the context, this first chapter moves in its next section to outlining the complex dimensions of the problem we face before then examining the dominant responses that have emerged and their inadequacy to the scale of the problem. The subsequent section will analyse the tension between scientific evidence and socio-political ideology that characterises the disjuncture between the scale of the problems being faced and the meagre responses being given. The final section outlines the rest of the book, focusing on the nature of the ‘profound shift’ now facing society throughout the world.
A ‘Wicked Problem’ of Many Dimensions
Though we talk about the problem of ‘climate change’ , this is in effect shorthand for a much larger set of interconnected issues that pose major challenges for society worldwide, of which changes in climate are just one manifestation. Different aspects have caused concern at different periods since the nineteenth century but together they constitute what social scientists often call a ‘wicked problem’, namely, one that resists definition and is not amenable to resolution. The label ‘environmental’ offers a category that encompasses the many dimensions of the problem but offers little by way of diagnosis or prescription.
While ‘environmentalism’ as a social movement is dated back to the 1960s, modern Western concerns about environmental limits and the need for conservation of nature and wildlife date back to the second half of the nineteenth century with the establishment of conservation organisations in Britain and attempts at conservation in European colonies. For example, a conference of European powers with colonies in Africa (Britain , Germany , France , Portugal , Spain , Italy and Belgium ) met in London in 1900 to sign a Convention for the Preservation of Animals, Birds and Fish in Africa while an International Congress for the Preservation of Nature was held in Paris in 1909 (Adams 2009: 31–33). Contemporary concerns with loss of biodiversity can be traced back to these efforts through such organisations as the International Office for the Protection of Nature (IOPN: 1934), the International Union for the Protection of Nature (IUPN: 1948) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF: 1961).
In conjunction with concerns about conservation , the science of ecology was developed to analyse patterns of change in natural systems and the impact of human societies upon these. From this the concept of the ecosystem emerged, now much used in contemporary discourse , but it was understood in a more technocratic way relating to the management of nature (Botkin 1990). Ecology helped inform development thinking, alerting to the effects of development on the environment and formulating principles of environmental impact assessment to manage them. An early application of these in the 1960s was in the building of dams. However, beyond the technocratic concern with avoiding the worst effects of development on the natural environment emerged two major concerns that related more centrally and in a more challenging way to features of the dominant model of development.
One was what Paul Ehrlich called ‘the population bomb’, the title of his book which warned that population growth was going to outstrip the capacity of nature to support it and result in mass starvation (Ehrlich 1972). Often called neo-Malthusian after Thomas Robert Malthus whose 1798 essay on population predicted that its growth would eventually outstrip food supply, these concerns with population have receded in prominence. However, influential authors like James Lovelock, who c...