Read The Politics of Climate Change Online
Authors: Anthony Giddens
The Politics of Climate Change (15 page)
Energy efficiency is important to combating climate change if part of a wide-ranging policy package. If not, it can in fact directly increase emissions, since the savings made may be simply spent on other carbon-producing activities. Japan is an example of a society that has a high level of energy efficiency, but growing greenhouse gas emissions. Finally, most countries want greater energy security, except those amply provided with natural resources. Energy security can be a driving motivation for reducing emissions, but only if carefully directed to that end. Thus a country that responds to worries about energy security by turning back to coal would exacerbate global warming rather than help reduce it. Coal is the most lethal fossil fuel in terms of emissions.
6  The inertia built into current ways of doing things is very large, both in energy systems and in the ways of life which they underpin. Not a single country in the world is as yet on track to reduce its emissions to a level compatible with limiting global warming to a 2ºC increase.
7Â Â Although I have not discussed the issue in this chapter in a direct way, we should bear in mind that the past 20 years
have been a period during which manufacturing continued to decline in Western countries. They have become dependent upon manufactured goods produced in China and the other developing countries. The levels of emissions produced by the developed countries would be considerably higher than they currently are without this âtransfer of emissions' eastwards.
5
A RETURN TO PLANNING?
Key arguments of this book are that the industrial nations must take the lead in addressing climate change and that the chances of success will depend a great deal upon
government
and
the state
. Whatever can be done through the state will in turn depend upon generating widespread political support from citizens, within the context of democratic rights and freedoms. I don't want to deny that reaching international agreements is essential, or that many other agencies, including NGOs and businesses, will play a fundamental role. However, for better or worse, the state retains many of the powers that have to be invoked if a serious impact on global warming is to be made.
What should the role of the state, as ensuring state, be? Its main function must be to act as a catalyst, as a facilitator, but certainly, as far as climate change and energy security are concerned, it has also to strive for guarantees. These are areas where solutions simply have to be found, and where there are timetables involved. If your living room is a mess, you can wait until you have time to clear it up. We can't do the same with emissions, as they pile up in the atmosphere and oil starts to run out.
These are some of the tasks in which the state has to be prime actor:
The state must help us to think ahead
. It is the responsibility of political leaders to introduce policies for the long
term. For this shift in orientation to come about, there has to be return to planning, in some guise or another. In case it isn't self-evident, thinking long term is not the same as setting targets for some distant date in the future and then sitting back and relaxing. âRigorous' targets set two or three or more decades down the line might make government ministers feel good, but really there has to be an all-out concentration upon
means
. In the Soviet Union, five-, ten-and twenty-year targets were announced with a great deal of huffing and puffing. The results normally fell well short of expectations and new plans would then be instituted. Empty promises for the future won't do in the case of climate change, since the emissions in the atmosphere continue to mount. Planning, of course, isn't the sole prerogative of the state. Governments should encourage a shift towards long-term thinking among companies, third-sector groups and individual citizens.
2Â Â
Climate change and energy risks must be managed in the context of other risks faced by contemporary societies
. Risk and opportunity are the two poles around which a great deal of social and economic policy now revolves. We face a future in which the past history of industrialism, as it were, is rapidly catching up with us, and major adjustments have to be made. However, the risks associated with climate change intersect with a variety of others, locally, nationally and internationally.
3Â Â
The state must promote political and economic convergence, as the main driving forces of climate change and energy policy
. Both can and should be targets for the short and the longer term, and should form the foundation of forward planning. In the long term, a whole diversity of areas has to be considered, including preparing for the large-scale social and economic restructuring that a low-carbon economy inevitably will involve.
4Â Â The state must make interventions into markets to institu
tionalize âthe polluter pays' principle
, thereby ensuring that markets work in favour of climate change policy, rather than against it. In almost all developed countries at the moment environmental costs remain largely externalized. I am dubious about how effective carbon markets as such
will be, but there is a great deal that can be done to introduce full cost pricing, and therefore to allow market forces to become centred upon promoting environmental benefits. Government should act to reduce ânegative externalities' â situations in which environmental costs are not brought into the marketplace â in order that markets can work to environmental ends.
5Â Â
The state must act to counter business interests which seek to block climate change initiatives
. Large-scale change is needed here, and at first blush this seems a tall order indeed. For business, especially big business, has a dominant role in contemporary societies. It is able to influence governments, even sometimes hold them to ransom and also influence consumers through advertising and other means. When governments threaten regulation, businesses can simply announce that they will up sticks and move elsewhere â the so-called problem of âleakage'. Yet couldn't all this be turned around and the power of business become deployed to climate change objectives? I believe it is possible, even in the short term, as long as governments act together with enlightened corporate leaders. Here again we see the key importance of economic convergence. Joint action can emerge from a confluence of interests; it doesn't have to come from a sudden burst of altruism on the part of business firms.
6Â Â
The state must keep climate change at the top of the political agenda
. For most people, most of the time, global warming is not a worry that intrudes deeply into the routines of daily life. It can drift off the agenda as other concerns come to the fore, or as elections approach. There should be an agreement among competing political parties that climate change and energy policy will be sustained in spite of other differences and conflicts that exist. In addition, climate change should feature in the curriculum of all schools.
7Â Â An appropriate economic and fiscal framework must be devel
oped for moving towards a low-carbon economy
. Subsidies are needed if new technologies are to thrive, since, in the beginning, they will be unable to compete with fossil fuels. I shall argue below that a holistic approach is needed to carbon taxation â it will not do just to think in terms of a handful of
specific tax measures. The overall tax system needs continuous auditing in terms of its generic impact upon economic behaviour and lifestyles.
8Â Â
The state must prepare to adapt to the consequences of climate change
, which will now be felt in any case. Thinking ahead in this area is crucial â as in the case of mitigation, we can't just wait around to see what develops. We must try to anticipate exactly how and where the effects of global warming will be felt and act pre-emptively to counter or minimize them.
9Â Â
Local, regional, national and international aspects of climate change policy must be integrated
. Without robust national programmes, international agreements will not work. Conversely, however, international collaboration of one sort or another is a necessary condition for coping with climate change.
Is this all asking too much, given the fact that governments often find themselves hemmed in by the pressure of events of the day? The political theorist John Dryzek argues that the combination of capitalist markets, vested interests and state bureaucracy means that government will be âthoroughly inept when it comes to ecology'. He adds that âany redeeming features are to be found only in the possibilities they open up for their own transformation'.
1
The first comment is too dismissive, but I agree with the thrust of the second. Responding to climate change will prompt and require innovation in government itself and in the relation between the state, markets and civil society.
The above points provide the basis for this and the following two chapters. In the current one, I shall discuss what a return to planning might imply, what surveys show about public attitudes towards climate change and how we might keep the issue at the forefront of the political agenda. I will then move on to consider how consistent policy might be maintained between otherwise antagonistic political parties. In the following chapter I discuss technological innovation and what help government might play in furthering it, plus how taxation can play a role. In
chapter 7
I move on to the ticklish but necessary topic of the politics of adaptation.
Planning was in vogue for some two or three decades in Western countries after the Second World War and was, of course, the very basis of the economy in Soviet-type societies. Between 1928 and 1991, as many as 13 successive national plans were instituted in the USSR. Planning was not only in fashion, but was
de rigueur
in Western countries too for a lengthy period after the Second World War, before falling into disrepute. In 1949 the economist Evan Durbin wrote: âWe are all planners now. . . . The collapse of the popular faith in
laissez-faire
has proceeded with spectacular rapidity . . . all over the world since the War.'
2
In the post-war period, âplanning' normally meant strong central direction by the state in the interests of overall economic prosperity and social justice. In the mixed economies of the West, it signalled the nationalization of industry, especially those industries seen as strategically important, such as the energy industries, communications and iron and steel. It also referred to the creation of âplanned communities', such as ânew towns' and garden cities.
The reasons why the world retreated from planning, especially in its more centralized versions, were various. In Soviet-style society it was associated with an authoritarian, oppressive state. Even in the West many came to resent the heavy-handed outlook of government planners â faceless bureaucrats who could intervene in communities without much thought for local concerns or sensitivities. Moreover, centralized planning of the economy, supposed to overcome the irrationalities of capitalism, proved quite unable to cope with the complexities of a developed economic system. Bets were placed by governments on industries which promptly then went on to fail. Critics such as Friedrich von Hayek were proved correct when they argued that only markets can cope with the enormous numbers of on-the-ground decisions about prices and products that have to be made every moment of the day in modern economies.
3
When the counter-revolution set in, from the 1980s onwards, involving widespread privatization, coupled with
minimal macroeconomic steering, the very word âplanning' came under a shadow and has, until recently, remained there. Yet whenever we think about the future in a systematic way, in the sense of attempting to shape or guide it, planning of some sort is inevitable. The post-war period was one of reconstruction, in which large-scale investments had to be made in order to recover from a situation of immense material damage.
Many forms of planning were in fact carried on âbelow the radar' by states, even after the time at which the idea fell into disrepute. Governments have had to monitor demographic shifts, for instance, in order to plan ahead for future needs in education, health and pensions. They have had to do the same with roads and railways in terms of future projections of use. Contingency plans have to exist in case of possible disasters. Even as âplanned communities' fell out of fashion, so urban planning of one sort or another continued.
There has now to be a return to greater state interventionism, a conclusion that is reinforced by the failure of deregulation. That failure can be summed up as too much âshort-termism' and a corrosion of public institutions, coupled to a lack of controls for system risk. In terms of the economy, ways will have to be found to introduce regulation without crippling that sense of adventure and entrepreneurialism upon which a successful response to climate change will also depend. In a nutshell, overall macroeconomic steering, the main economic role of government for the past three or four decades, is no longer enough. There needs to be a greater emphasis on industrial policy. This point is obvious in the case of the fostering of low-carbon technologies, but surely must apply more broadly â although the issues involved stretch well beyond my specific concerns here. Supply-side mechanisms will continue to be vital areas for state investment, as in the case of education or the provision of infrastructure.