| Title | Subtitle | Author | Publish Date | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Climate Leviathan | A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future | Geoff Mann & Joel Wainwright | 2018.02 | Buy here |
- Why that wealthy minority did nothing, and what that means for our political futures, are crucial questions we address in this book.
- This book offers a political theory of our planetary future. Our work on these ideas began in the heady days before the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, a time when we each spoke publicly on these matters. This project emerged as an attempt at self-critique and clarification from within the climate justice movement.
- Our point is not that global warming will simply cause everything to change or collapse. Instead, we argue that under pressure from climate change, the intensification of existing challenges to the extant global order will push existing forms of sovereignty toward one we call “planetary.”
- Much of this work has been inspired by Agamben’s claim that “the declaration of the state of exception has gradually been replaced by an unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government.” The ecological crisis has been largely excluded from this discussion. This is a pity because the regulation of security under exceptional conditions is increasingly a planetary matter.
- To reiterate, our aim is not to develop a taxonomy of the world’s futures, whence to decide where to place our bets. Rather it is to capture the significance of these crucial dimensions of the future in these broad trajectories, in an effort to grasp how the world is moving in the face of a necessary conjuncture which is nothing but a product of contingency (since the course of history is not predetermined).
- Climate Leviathan is defined by the dream of a planetary sovereign. It is a regulatory authority armed with democratic legitimacy, binding technical authority on scientific issues, and a panopticon-like capacity to monitor the vital granular elements of our emerging world: fresh water, carbon emissions, climate refugees, and so on.
- The Paris Agreement of December 2015 is a legal and political foreshadowing of Climate Leviathan’s form (page 41).
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To begin, consider two very difficult clusters of questions.
First, if the world is to achieve the massive reductions in global carbon emissions we know are necessary, how might we do so? What political processes or strategies could make that happen in anything resembling a just manner? In other words, can we conceive of revolution(s) in the name of climate justice, and if so, what do they look like?
Second, if carbon emissions do not decline adequately (as seems highly likely to us, for reasons explained below), and climate change reaches some threshold or tipping point at which it is globally impossible to ignore or reverse, then what are the likely political-economic outcomes? What processes, strategies, and social formations will emerge and become hegemonic? Can the defining political-economic formation of the modern world—the capitalist nation-state—survive catastrophic climate change? If so, how, and in what form? Do we have a theory of how capitalist nation-states are transforming as a consequence of planetary change?
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It will be useful to begin to lay the ground for our theoretical framework by identifying four core propositions upon which we build our argument.
- There is no legitimate basis for debating climate change as such. The climate is changing because of anthropogenic modification of the chemical composition of our atmosphere. The knowledge we have of these changes, distilled from scientific research, is crucial for calibrating our understanding of the future, and we should support further scientific analysis. At the same time, we must beware of expecting too much from science politically.
- Rapid climate change is sure to have dreadful and often deadly consequences, particularly for the relatively weak and the marginalized (both human and nonhuman). A political or ethical analysis is therefore of the utmost urgency.
(Just saying) The authors cited in the past few pages all agree with these first two points. Important divergences stem from the third and fourth.
- The political-ecological conditions within which decisions about climate change are being (and will be) made are marked fundamentally by uncertainty and fear; there are no real climate decisions, only reactions. Humanity may or may not have time to drastically mitigate carbon and, therefore, slow climate change. Given the complexity of the world’s climatic system, however, we can only ever know this retrospectively. We assume that we may not yet be past the point where rapid climate change is unstoppable; however, as we will elaborate, there are strong political- economic reasons to believe that we are not going to avoid this fate. In other words, we agree with Jamieson and Scranton (this book mentioned their views in the previous part) —and others, like Alyssa Battistoni and Andreas Malm —that the time has come for an analysis that anticipates (even as it fights against) a rapidly warming world.
- The elite transnational social groups that dominate the world’s capitalist nation-states certainly desire to moderate and adapt to climate change— not least to stabilize the conditions that produce their privileges. And yet, to date, they have failed to coordinate a response.26 Thus climate change poses direct and indirect challenges to their hegemony, processes of accumulation, and modes of governance. In light of this, we must expect that elites will increasingly attempt to coordinate their reactions, all while sailing seas of uncertainty and incredulity.
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We posit that two conditions will fundamentally shape the coming political- economic order.
The first is whether the prevailing economic formation will continue to be capitalist or not. While a great deal of diversity can be found within and between capitalist societies, they all are shaped by what Marx called the general formula of capital: M-C-M ́. Whether this circuit of capital continues to expand—that is, whether the value-form will continue to shape social life—is a fundamental determinant of the emerging order.
The second condition is whether a coherent planetary sovereign will emerge, that is, whether sovereignty will be reconstituted for the purposes of planetary management. What we call Climate Leviathan exists to the extent that some sovereign exists who can invoke the exception, declare an emergency, and decide who may emit carbon and who cannot. This sovereign must be planetary in a dual sense: capable of acting both at the planetary scale (since climate change is understood as a massive collective action problem) and in the name of planetary management—for the sake of life on Earth. A task of biblical proportions, amounting to an impossible global accounting of everything, like determining "a weight for the wind and apportion[ing] the waters by measure."
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In a sense, the diplomats succeeded in Paris. The agreement signed mid-day on December 12, 2015, is the new international law on climate change. French president at the time François Hollande called the Paris Agreement “a major leap for mankind”; for his part, then British prime minister David Cameron claimed the elites had “secured our planet for many, many generations to come.” The major news media followed suit. (
⤵️ )(⬆️) This is hyperbole. George Monbiot (also writing in the Guardian) provided a more balanced evaluation: "by comparison to what it could have been, [COP21 was] a miracle. [But] by comparison to what it should have been, it’s a disaster."
The “miracle” in this view is the existence of the first global agreement on climate change. The “disaster” is the tragic failure the agreement represents: no binding limits on carbon emissions and no commitment to do the one thing absolutely necessary: keep fossil fuels in the Earth’s crust. Here is, arguably, the fundamental statement in the 31-page Paris Agreement, paragraph 1 of Article 4:
In order to achieve the long-term temperature goal set out in Article 2 [i.e., to keep the global mean temperature increase only 1.5 or 2oC relative to pre-industrial levels], Parties [i.e., practically all the world’s governments] aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, recognizing that peaking will take longer for developing country Parties, and to undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with best available science, so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century, on the basis of equity, and in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty.
The Paris Agreement does not separate party-states into groups with different commitments based on wealth or income .... The language in Article 4 of the Paris Agreement indicates a compromise between core capitalist states (led by the United States and the European Union) and developing countries (effectively represented by China and India). (
⤵️ )(⬆️) Every country promises cuts — "to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible" — but levels and timelines are left undefined, and the inclusion of language about equity, poverty, and delayed peaking of developing country emissions reflect the success of China, India, and their bloc in defending their "carbon space" or "right to emit."
(⬆️) The critical element here is the goal of the agreement: to "achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks ... in the second half of this century." This seems to suggest the world will be carbon neutral some time between 2050 and 2100. This is improbable at best, at odds with the present trajectory and impossible to square with the lack of language on fossil fuels.
(The comments on this)
Pablo Solón, former Bolivian ambassador to the UNFCCC, ridiculed the gap between rhetoric and action:
[T]hanks to the “contributions” of emission reductions presented in Paris, global emissions of greenhouse gases that in 2012 were 53 Gt CO2e, will continue to climb up to around 60 Gt CO2e by 2030. If governments really want to limit the temperature increase to less than 2°C they should commit to reduce global emissions to 35 Gt of CO2e by 2030. Governments know this and yet do the opposite and even shout: "Victory! The planet is saved!" Is [this] not a particular type of schizophrenia?
Naomi Klein offers a more colorful metaphor:
It’s like going: "I acknowledge that I will die of a heart attack if I don’t radically lower my blood pressure ... I therefore will exercise once a week, eat four hamburgers instead of five ... and you have to call me a hero because I’ve never done this before and you have no idea how lazy I used to be."
The Paris Agreement admits its own failures.
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The increasing proportion of certain trace gases in the Earth’s atmosphere (in round numbers, carbon dioxide [CO2] has risen from 250 to 400 parts per million, methane [CH4] from 700 to 1700 parts per billion) means a larger proportion of the sun’s energy remains in the Earth’s seas, land masses, and atmosphere, changing the movement of heat energy through the world’s climatic system.
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The vast proportion of historical greenhouse gases have been emitted as byproducts of the choices and activities, not of the masses of ordinary people, but rather of a wealthy minority of the world’s people.
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The world is getting hotter fast, and the rapid, large-scale carbon mitigation the world needs is impossible without radical change in the existing political-economic structure.
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Unfortunately, the prospect of rapid environmental change has generally produced an insufficient theoretical response among mainstream “progressive” thinkers. Most of it is pious utopianism (“ten simple ways to save the planet”), an appeal to market solutions (“cap and trade”), or nihilism (“we’re fucked”). These are false solutions.
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the Left has rarely done much better, too often treating the climate as peripheral to struggles for democracy, liberty, equality, and justice, when it is precisely these ideals that make the climate struggle so fundamental. They are the core goals of the struggle for justice in a world that will be radically transformed by climate change.
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Consequently, our goal is to make climate more political. That requires a theory—a way to conceptualize our conjuncture and understand the relationship between the categories we use to make sense of it ... That kind of theory should embrace science’s analysis of environmental change but not expect too much of it politically; it should try to understand the world’s possible political-ecological futures without lapsing into environmental determinism; and it should anticipate the coming socio-ecological transformations as a moment of transition in natural history. We offer this book as a contribution toward that theory and the struggles it might inform.
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Anyone who spends some of their time thinking about climate change and about the politics of the world it is producing (and there are a lot of people like that) knows that the going is often tough, the future looks very bleak, and the nights are sometimes sleepless. At times, it is hard not to want to hide away. The more one knows and the longer one stares into the abyss, the more one may be tempted to abandon all hope.
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What will become of sovereign security under conditions of planetary crisis? Is a warming planet “fierce enough to rouse” Leviathan? Or will Leviathan “beg for mercy”?
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Capital’s drive for profit locks in policies for growth, whatever the cost. One clear signal since 2007–2008 is that elites everywhere, faced with prospects of slow economic growth, are prepared to act swiftly and commit bottomless public funding to prime the pump. The need for profit also locks in infrastructure with devastating climatic implications.
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In 2012 the International Energy Agency, hardly a revolutionary outfit, warned that without a change of direction, by 2017 the world would have energy infrastructure that “locked in” emissions at a scale that closed “the door” on the possibility of limiting global warming to non-disastrous levels.
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The political problems we face cannot be fixed by simply delivering science to the masses. If good climate data and models were all that were needed to address climate change, we would have seen a political response in the 1980s. Our challenge is closer to a crisis of imagination and ideology; people do not change their conception of the world just because they are presented with new data.
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Despite the many dire signals, most people in the global North still find comfort in the belief that the worst consequences — scarcity of food and water, political unrest, inundations and other so-called “natural disasters” are far enough away or far enough in the future that they will not live to experience them.
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On one hand, the almost imperceptible background noise of rising seas and upward ticking of food prices, punctuated, on the other hand, by the occasional pounding of stochastic events. ... There is no part of the world that has not changed dramatically. Yet as soon as unheralded events occur— wildfires in Russia and Canada, floods in Pakistan and England, coral bleaching in Australia and Belize, species declining everywhere—they are rinsed and lost by the quotidian wash of whatever comes next. The biggest events have a sound of their own, the high-pitched scream of emergency. But because the background noise ultimately is this emergency in latent form, the true tone of climate change is not yet properly heard.
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Consider the Arctic, which concentrates all the contradictions of our conjuncture into one geographical region. Warming has reduced the polar ice cap so rapidly that we can expect ice-free ship passage by 2030.
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The coming crisis is not “unmanageable”; it is already here, already being managed by liberal capitalism (if rather badly). Indeed, the very “manageability” of the crisis is part of the problem we face. To address it, we do not need to learn to die, but to think, live, and rebel.
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Arendt presciently recognized that this condition—which she characterized as the “denationalization” of the “stateless people”—would become “a powerful weapon of totalitarian politics,” a weapon forged in the “power vacuum” left by the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the dissolution of the Czarist regime.51 Arendt’s analysis repeats Hobbes differently (“now everybody was against everybody else”), while also foreshadowing the political reaction we should expect to a world with hundreds of millions of climate refugees who are not recognized as such—but only as denationalized or stateless peoples, and perhaps as victims of "natural disasters."
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The possibility of rapid, global carbon mitigation as a climate change abatement strategy has passed. The world’s elites, at least, appear to have abandoned it—if they ever took it seriously. In 2010, Mike Davis imagined a “not improbable scenario” in which mitigation “would be tacitly abandoned ... in favour of accelerated investment in selective adaptation for Earth’s first-class passengers.” His prediction may prove prescient. (
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(⬆️) The goal would be the creation of green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an otherwise stricken planet. Of course, there would still be treaties, carbon credits, famine relief, humanitarian acrobatics, and perhaps the full-scale conversion of some European cities and small countries to alternative energy. But worldwide adaptation to climate change, which presupposes trillions of dollars of investment in the urban and rural infrastructures of poor and medium income countries, as well as the assisted migration of tens of millions of people from Africa and Asia, would necessarily command a revolution of almost mythic magnitude in the redistribution of income and power.
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This pair of dichotomies produces four potential global political responses to climate change, each of which is distinguished by the hegemony of a particular bloc, a mode of appropriation and distribution through which that hegemony is exercised: a capitalist Climate Leviathan; an anticapitalist, state-centered Climate Mao; a reactionary capitalist Behemoth; and an anticapitalist, anti- sovereign Climate X (figure in book).
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.. This is not to say that all future politics will be determined by climate alone, but rather that the challenge of climate change is so fundamental to the global order that the complex and manifold reactions to climate change will restructure the world along one of these four paths. To say the least, the continuing hegemony of existing capitalist liberal democracy cannot be safely assumed.
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To begin, capitalism is treated not as a question, but as the solution to climate change. Indeed, filtered through the COP lens, climate change appears to capital as an opportunity: trade in emissions permits (“cap-and-trade”), “green” business, nuclear power, corporate leadership, carbon capture and storage, green finance, and ultimately, geoengineering: these are Leviathan’s lifeblood.
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Why call this “Leviathan”? Climate Leviathan is a direct descendant from Hobbes’s original to Schmitt’s sovereign: when it comes to climate, Leviathan will decide and is constituted precisely in the act of decision. It expresses a desire for, and the recognition of, the necessity of a planetary sovereign to seize command, declare an emergency, and bring order to the Earth, all in the name of saving life. If Agamben is correct that “the declaration of the state of exception has gradually been replaced by an unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government,” then the consolidation of Climate Leviathan represents the rescaling of the “normal technique[s]” to encompass planetary security, or the making-secure of planetary life. With this achievement, the state of nature and the nature of the state would form a self- authorizing union.
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Any realizable planetary Climate Leviathan must be constructed with the approval of a range of actors formerly excluded from global governance—China and India most notably, but the list could go on. Ensuring China’s support for any binding climate regulation complicates the role of capital in Leviathan. (This is ChapterTwo, more on this, read to ChapterFive).
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Given the drive for incessantly expanded accumulation without which capital ceases to be, the constant conversion of the planet into means of production, and the material throughput and energy-intensity through which it is operated, capitalism is (as the ecologican Marxists tell us) effectively running up against its planetary limits. If there is a “spatial fix” for this contradiction, it is as yet unavailable.
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... Any attempt to reduce planetary carbon emissions will require sacrifices and transnational alliances. Deep inequalities within and between nations are fatal to such efforts: intranationally because inequalities make it difficult to build trans-class coalitions around shared sacrifice and entrench the capacity of the wealthy to prevent the conversion of carbon-intensive economies into more sustainable alternatives, and internationally because the world’s stupefying inequalities of wealth and power prevent the transnational coordination that will be necessary for Leviathan to rule effectively.
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Minqi Li’s is arguably the best developed of this line of thought, and like Arrighi he locates the fulcrum of global climate history in China, arguing that Climate Mao offers the only way forward:
[U]nless China takes serious and meaningful actions to fulfill its obligation of emissions reduction, there is little hope that global climate stabilization can be achieved. However, it is very unlikely that the [present] Chinese government will voluntarily take the necessary actions to reduce emissions. The sharp fall of economic growth that would be required is something that the Chinese government will not accept and cannot afford politically. Does this mean that humanity is doomed? That depends on the political struggle within China and in the world as a whole.
Taking inspiration from Mao, Li says a new revolution in the Chinese revolution —a re-energization of the Maoist political tradition—could transform China and save humanity from doom. He does not claim this is likely; one need only consider China’s massive highway expansions, accelerated automobile consumption, and subsidized urban sprawl. But he is right that if an anticapitalist, planetary sovereign is to emerge that could change the world’s climate trajectory, it is most likely to emerge in China.
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Even today, when an increasingly non-Maoist Chinese state invokes its full regulatory authority, it can achieve political feats unimaginable in liberal democracy.
Perhaps the most notable instance of state-coordinated climate authority is the manner in which Beijing’s air quality was re-engineered during the 2008 Olympics—flowers potted all over the city, traffic barred, trees planted in the desert, and factories and power plants closed—all to successfully blue the skies for the Games.
Another effect of this power is the way in which the Chinese state effectively killed General Motors’s gas-guzzling Hummer in early 2010, when it blocked the division’s sale to Sichuan Tenzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery due to the vehicle’s emissions levels.
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Though Chairman Mao’s face looms over Tiananmen Square and decorates every yuan note, China is emphatically not on the path toward Climate Mao. The Communist Party of China appears committed, at least today, to building a capitalist Climate Leviathan. The centrality of China to the Paris Agreement only proves the point.
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The logic of Climate Mao is that only revolutionary state power rooted in militant, popular mobilization would be sufficient to transform the world's productive forces and thus resolve our planetary "contradiction between society and nature."
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We are not suggesting that Climate Mao will emerge through an ecological awakening on the part of Indian or Chinese peasants.
Asian peasants (and recently urbanized former peasants) will respond not to carbon emissions per se but to state failures to act in response to material crises (shortages of water, food, shelter, and so on) and elite expropriations certain to come in the face of climate- induced instabilities.
However, presently China’s state is building the path toward Climate Leviathan. How we get from here to Climate Mao would depend principally on the Chinese proletariat and peasantry. As is commonly noted, China’s emissions are growing daily, and the economic growth with which those emissions are associated is the basis of much of the legitimacy enjoyed by the Chinese state and ruling elites.
Certainly the collective embrace of the West’s vision of capitalist Leviathan on the part of Asia’s peasant and proletariat classes seems unlikely. Rather, the opposite is more plausible:
the rapid rise of more authoritarian state socialisms, regimes that use their power to decisively reduce global carbon emissions and maintain control during climate-induced "emergencies."
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What, if anything, makes Climate Mao a plausible basis for global transformation? Figure 2.3 (get the latest data at Carbonmap - PeopleAtRisk) makes two points uncomfortably clear.
First, most rich countries (the United States, Canada, Western Europe and some oil- producing states) are home to very few people who are directly at risk of the negative effects of climate change.
Second, there is an extraordinary geographical unevenness to the world’s at-risk population. They live mainly in South and East Asia, between Pakistan and North Korea, a belt of potentially revolutionary change.
Asia is not only home to the majority of humanity, but also the center of capital’s economic geography: the world’s hub of commodity production and consumption (and carbon emissions).
We might expect, therefore, climate-induced social turbulence to combine in a region with an enormous, growing capacity to reshape the consumption and distribution of all the world’s resources.
Consequently, it is a more interesting thought experiment to ask how radical social movements in Asia could challenge Leviathan than to imagine a would-be Climate Mao emerging in, say, Lagos or La Paz.