THE POLITICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE
Books by Anthony Giddens:
Capitalism and Modern Social Theory
Politics and Sociology in the Thought of Max Weber
The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies
New Rules of Sociological Method
Studies in Social and Political Theory
Emile Durkheim
Central Problems in Social Theory
A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism
Sociology: A Brief but Critical Introduction
Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory
The Constitution of Society
The Nation-State and Violence
Durkheim on Politics and the State
Social Theory and Modern Sociology
The Consequences of Modernity
Modernity and Self-Identity
The Transformation of Intimacy
Beyond Left and Right
Reflexive Modernization (with Ulrich Beck and Scott Lash)
Politics, Sociology and Social Theory
In Defence of Sociology
The Third Way
Runaway World
The Third Way and its Critics
Where Now for New Labour?
Europe in the Global Age
Over to You, Mr Brown
Sociology Sixth Edition
Edited Works:
Emile Durkheim: Selected Writings
Positivism and Sociology
Elites and Power in British Society (with Philip Stanworth)
Classes, Conflict and Power
Classes and the Division of Labour
Social Theory Today
Human Societies
On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism (with Will Hutton)
The Global Third Way Debate
The Progressive Manifesto
The New Egalitarianism (with Patrick Diamond)
Global Europe, Social Europe (with Patrick Diamond and Roger Liddle)
THE POLITICS OF
CLIMATE CHANGE
Second Edition, Revised and Updated
Anthony Giddens
polity
Copyright © Anthony Giddens 2011
The right of Anthony Giddens to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2011 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5464-5
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Climate Change, Risk and Danger
The sceptics and their critics
The ‘climate wars’
The radicals
Conclusion
2 Running Out, Running Down?
Peak oil
Sweating the assets
The struggle for resources
3 The Greens and After
The greens
Managing risk: the precautionary principle
‘Sustainable development’
Over-development
Polluter pays
Ungreen themes
The politics of climate change: concepts
4 The Track Record So Far
Sweden, Germany and Denmark
Spain and Portugal
The case of the UK
Climate change policy and the US
Lessons to be drawn
5 A Return to Planning?
Planning, then and now
Changing lives
Foregrounding
A political concordat
State and society: business and the NGOs
6 Technologies and Taxes
Technologies: where we stand
The role of government
Promoting job creation
Carbon taxes
Carbon rationing
The re-emergence of utopia
7 The Politics of Adaptation
Adaptation in the context of Europe
Floods in the UK
Insurance, hurricanes and typhoons
Adaptation: the developing world
8 International Negotiations, the EU and Carbon Markets
Further negotiations
The role of the EU
Carbon markets
9 The Geopolitics of Climate Change
An illusory world community?
The bottom billion
Oil and geopolitics
Coalitions and collaborations
The US and China
India and Brazil
In conclusion: why we still need the UN
Afterword
Notes
References
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work grew out of my involvement in a project organized under the auspices of the think-tank Policy Network and the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics. I should like to thank my colleagues in both institutions for their help and advice during the writing process. My gratitude is due in particular to Roger Liddle, Olaf Cramme, Simon Latham and Jade Groves at Policy Network; and to David Held at the Centre. Anne de Sayrah helped the project in more ways than I can count. Karen Birdsall did a marvellous job for the first edition, checking footnotes and assembling the bibliography. Olaf Corry provided some important feedback on a draft manuscript. I owe an especially large debt to Hugh Compston, who commented in a meticulous way on an early version of the book; and to Johanna Juselius, who did the same at a later point. Victor Philip Dahdaleh generously provided the funding for the collective project, so a big vote of thanks to him. I am indebted to everyone at Polity Press, including especially John Thompson, Gill Motley (as always), Sarah Lambert and Emma Hutchinson. I would like to thank Emma in particular for her attention to detail and for the amount of work she put into the project. Sarah was unfailingly helpful in preparing this new edition. Olaf Corry provided further critical comments. Special gratitude is due to Anna Wishart, whose help and involvement were invaluable; Anna made a major contribution in particular to the section on the US in chapter 4. Tom Hale provided a very valuable critical reading of the manuscript. Sarah Dancy has done an excellent copy-editing job on both editions. I dedicate the work to Indie and Matilda, definitely members of the younger generation, in the hope that it might contribute a little to making the world in which they will grow up less daunting.
INTRODUCTION
This is a book about nightmares, catastrophes – and dreams. It is also about the everyday, the r
outines that give our lives continuity and substance. It is about the warming of our planet – a phenomenon which, if it proceeds unchecked, constitutes an existential threat to our civilization. The changes we are wreaking on the world’s climate will produce increasingly extreme and erratic weather, subject large areas of the globe to drought and eventually make them uninhabitable. Rising ocean levels will have the same effect upon low-lying coastal zones.
The book is a prolonged enquiry into a single question. Why do most people, most of the time, act as though a threat of such magnitude can be ignored? Almost everyone across the world must have heard the phrases ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ and know at least a bit about what they mean. The two terms can be used interchangeably. They refer to the fact that the greenhouse gas emissions produced by modern industry are causing the earth’s climate to warm up, with potentially devastating consequences for the future. Yet the vast majority of people are doing very little, if anything at all, to alter their daily habits, even though those habits are the source of the dangers in store for us.
It is not as if climate change is creeping up on us unawares. On the contrary, large numbers of books have been written about it and its likely consequences. Serious worries about the warming of the earth’s climate were expressed for a quarter of a century or more without making much of an impact. Within the past few years the issue has jumped to the forefront of discussion and debate, not just in this or that country, but across the world. Yet, as collective humanity, we are only just beginning to take the steps needed to respond to the threats that we and succeeding generations are confronting. Global warming is a problem unlike any other, however, both because of its scale and because it is mainly about the future. Many have said that to cope with it we will need to mobilize on a level comparable to fighting a war; but in this case there are no enemies to identify and confront. We are dealing with dangers that seem abstract and elusive, however potentially devastating they may be.
No matter how much we are told about the threats, it is hard to face up to them, because they feel somehow unreal – and, in the meantime, there is a life to be lived, with all its pleasures and pressures. The politics of climate change has to cope with what I call Giddens’s paradox – a theme that appears throughout this text. It states that, since the dangers posed by global warming aren’t tangible, immediate or visible in the course of day-to-day life, many will sit on their hands and do nothing of a concrete nature about them. Yet waiting until such dangers become visible and acute – in the shape of catastrophes that are irrefutably the result of climate change – before being stirred to serious action will be too late. For we know of no way of getting the greenhouse gases out again once they are there and most will be in the atmosphere for centuries.
Giddens’s paradox affects almost every aspect of current reactions to climate change. It is the reason why, for most citizens, climate change is a back-of-the-mind issue rather than a front-of-the-mind one. Attitude surveys show that many of the public accept that global warming is a major threat; yet only a few are willing to alter their lives in any significant way as a result. Among elites, climate change lends itself to gestural politics – grandiose-sounding plans largely empty of content.
What social psychologists call ‘future discounting’ further accentuates Giddens’s paradox – more accurately, one could say it is a sub-category of it. People find it hard to give the same level of reality to the future as they do to the present. Thus a small reward offered now will normally be taken in preference to a much larger one offered at some remove. The same principle applies to risks. Why do many young people take up smoking even though they are well aware that, as it now says on cigarette packets, ‘smoking kills’? At least part of the reason is that, for a teenager, it is almost impossible to imagine being 40, the age at which the real dangers start to take hold and become life-threatening.
There is a high level of agreement among scientists that climate change is real and dangerous, and that it is caused by human activity. A small minority of scientists, however – the climate change ‘sceptics’ – dispute these claims, and they get a good deal of attention in the media. Many other, less expert, contributors have taken their side. Someone can always say, ‘it’s not proven, is it?’ if it be suggested that he should change his profligate ways. Another response might be: ‘I’m not going to change unless others do.’ Yet another reaction could be: ‘Nothing that I do, as a single individual, will make any difference.’ Or else he could say, ‘I’ll get round to it sometime’, because one shouldn’t underestimate the sheer force of habit. I would suggest that even the most sophisticated and determined environmentalist struggles with the fact that, under the shadow of future cataclysm, there is a life to be lived within the constraints of the here-and-now.
Politicians have woken up to the scale and urgency of the problem and many countries have recently introduced ambitious climate change policies. Over the past few years, a threshold has been crossed: most political leaders are now aware of the hazards posed by global warming and the need to respond to them. Yet this is just the first wave – the bringing of the issue onto the political agenda. The second wave must involve embedding it in our institutions and in the everyday concerns of citizens, and here, for reasons just mentioned, there is a great deal of work to do. The international community is on board, at least in principle. Negotiations aimed at limiting global warming have taken place at meetings organized by the United Nations, in an attempt to get global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. They are still continuing, but have produced little in the way of concrete results so far. There has been far more talk than there has been tangible action.
Much of this book concentrates on climate change policy in the industrial countries. It is these countries that pumped most of the emissions into the atmosphere in the first place, and they have to take prime responsibility for controlling them in the near future. They must take the lead in reducing emissions, moving towards a low-carbon economy and making the social reforms with which these changes will have to be integrated.
We do not as yet have a developed analysis of the political innovations that have to be made if our aspirations to limit global warming are to become real. It is a strange and indefensible absence, which I have written this work to try to repair. My approach is grounded in realism. Some authors say that coping with climate change is too difficult a problem to be dealt with within the confines of orthodox politics. Up to a point I agree with them, since quite profound changes will be required in our established ways of political thinking. Yet we have to work with the institutions that already exist and in ways that respect democracy.
The state will be an all-important actor, since so many powers remain in its hands, whether one talks of domestic or of international policy. There is no way of forcing states to sign up to international agreements; and even if they choose to do so, implementing whatever is agreed will largely be the responsibility of each individual country. Emissions trading markets can only work if the price of carbon is capped, and at a demanding level, a decision that has to be made and implemented politically. The one major supra-national entity that exists, the European Union, is heavily dependent on decisions taken by its member nations, since its control over them is quite limited.
Markets have a much bigger role to play in combating climate change than simply in the area of emissions trading. There are many fields where market forces can produce results that no other agency or framework could manage. In principle, where a price can be put on an environmental good without affronting other values, it should be done, since competition will then create increased efficiency whenever that good is exchanged. However, active state intervention is once again called for. The environmental costs entailed by economic processes often form what economists call ‘externalities’ – they are not paid for by those who incur them. The aim of public policy should be to make sure that, wherever possible, such costs are internalized – that is, brought into the mar
ketplace.
‘The state’, of course, comprises a diversity of levels, including regional, city and local government. In a global era, it operates within the context of what political scientists call multilayered governance, stretching upwards into the international arena and downwards to regions, cities and localities. To emphasize the importance of the state to climate change policy is not to argue for top-down government. On the contrary, the most dramatic initiatives are likely to bubble up from the actions of far-sighted individuals and from the energy of civil society. States will have to work with a variety of other agencies and bodies, as well as with other countries and international organizations, if they are to be effective.
One can’t discuss the politics of climate change without mentioning the green movement, which has been a leading influence on environmental politics for many years. It has had a major impact in forcing the issue of climate change onto the political agenda. ‘Going green’ has become more or less synonymous with endeavours to limit climate change. Yet there are big problems. The green movement has its origins in the hostile emotions that industrialism aroused among the early conservationists. Especially in its latter-day development in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, the greens defined themselves in opposition to orthodox politics. Neither position is especially helpful to the task of integrating environmental concerns into our established political institutions. Most green parties have now joined the mainstream. Yet just what is and what is not valuable in green political philosophies has to be sorted out.