The Politics of Climate Change (9 page)

BOOK: The Politics of Climate Change
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Influenced by earlier social protests in the 1960s and early 1970s (for example, against the Vietnam War), the greens emerged as a movement that in some part set itself against parliamentary politics, and feared too great an involvement with the state. This is why it tends to emphasize grassroots democracy and localism. Greens oppose established institutions of power, whether in the shape of big government or big business. They also contest ‘productivism' in economics – a stress upon economic growth as a prime economic value. Growth that lowers the quality of life, or, in particular, which damages the biosphere, is ‘uneconomic' growth. Orthodox economics is ‘grey' – human life and nature both figure as ‘factors of production' alongside other commodities. Most greens have tended to mistrust capitalism and markets, and view the large corporations with considerable hostility.

Greens often describe themselves not as anti-science, but as anti-‘scientism' – against untrammelled faith in science and, especially, technology. A key aspect of green thinking in relation to technology is the precautionary principle – one of the main concepts, in fact, that the greens have contributed to the wider political discourse. It connects readily with the early thinking of Morris, Emerson and Thoreau. The precautionary principle is not easy to state – indeed, I shall argue below that it is actually incoherent. However, it has quite often been taken to mean that technologies should be rejected unless it can be proven that they will not cause harm either to human beings or to the biosphere. The precautionary principle lies behind the objections that almost all greens have had to nuclear power. The greens had a strong influence on the decision of Germany and Sweden to phase out nuclear power stations, for example.

A somewhat bewildering variety of philosophical standpoints has been associated with the greens. The Australian
philosopher Robert Goodin has sought to impose some order upon this diversity. He argues that green political thinking depends upon two basic strands – a green theory of value and a green theory of agency. The first tells us what greens value and why; the second, how they do (or should) go about pursuing them.

In economics, value is assessed in terms either of prices or of welfare, the second of these defined narrowly as material benefit. In the green theory of value, by contrast, what makes something valuable is that it has been created by natural processes rather than by human beings. We can understand this position by answering a question posed by another philosopher, Martin Krieger: ‘What's wrong with plastic trees?'
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In the late 1960s, the city authorities in Los Angeles, finding that real trees planted by the freeways died because of air pollution, planted plastic ones instead. They were surprised when these were pulled down by irate citizens. Goodin suggests that even if artificial trees could be made in such a way as to be indistinguishable from the real thing, we would still (rightly) tend to reject them – much as we would a forgery of a picture. We value nature, because it is larger than ourselves and because it sets our own lives in a much more encompassing context.

Unlike the ‘deep ecologists', who try to derive values from nature itself, Goodin accepts that objects in nature can only have value through us – when we speak of values there is inescapably a human element involved, since there must be someone to hold these values. Such values are at the same time relational: they presuppose and depend on a world larger than ourselves. A landscape doesn't have to be wholly untouched by a human hand for us to value it in this manner. Thus the English fields and hedgerows are human modifications of nature – they house (or used to) a way of life in which people broadly live in harmony with nature. This situation is different from circumstances where we seek to impose our own order on nature in a tyrannical fashion. Goodin gives the example of Los Angeles, in fact, where, he argues, nature has been obliterated.
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Sustainability, a basic green concern, can be inferred from such an emphasis; so can concern with the interests of future generations. Many greens have argued
against further economic growth on the grounds that it is too damaging – they would like to see a ‘no-growth society'.

Values do not realize themselves. They have to be connected to a ‘how' that explains the means whereby they can be realized. Greens, as mentioned, have a distrust of power and the state – the desire for participatory democracy is found in the manifestos of virtually all green parties. Goodin searches for a logical connection between green values and the typical green political framework – advocacy of participatory democracy, distrust of large-scale power, and nonviolence – and finds none. This is an important conclusion, for reasons I shall mention later. He also argues – I think correctly – that a green theory of value should have priority, in cases of clash, over the green theory of agency. As he points out, such an emphasis runs counter to the intuitions of most greens, who believe that direct personal action should have priority over orthodox politics, and see this belief at the core of what it means to be green.

Although Goodin does not discuss the issue in an extensive way, one should point out that the relationship between the greens and the question of global warming is problematic. Global warming is not simply an extension of more traditional forms of industrial pollution; it is qualitatively different. Scientists, and scientists alone, have directed our attention to it, since it is not visible in the way London smogs were, or smoke-stack pollution is. We are also wholly dependent on the research and monitoring work of scientists to track the progress of warming and map its consequences.

Some concepts which play a major role in current environmental thinking, such as the aforementioned precautionary principle, come from the green movement broadly defined. Other notions sound as though they have green origins, but in fact do not, such as ‘ecological footprint', a phrase first introduced by William Rees in the early 1990s.
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One might think it refers to a footprint in the sand, but it actually has high-tech origins – it came from the comment of a computer technician, who spoke admiringly of the small space his new computer took up on his desk.

A lot more order needs to be brought into this jumble of ideas and concepts. I see no problem in accepting that there
are green values which are relevant for significant aspects of political life. However, such values are not necessarily the same as those connected to controlling climate change, and may indeed run counter to them. For example, a key green value is that of ‘staying close to nature' – or, more briefly put, conservation. It is a value that has a certain aesthetic quality to it. It is very possibly important to the good life, but it has no direct relevance to climate change. Clashes can easily occur between conservationist values and policies relevant to global warming – for example, conservationists might resist the building of a nuclear power station, or a wind farm, in a given area of the countryside.

The desire to protect animal species from extinction might also be a worthy one, but its only connection to climate change is if extinction threatens the ecosystems that help reduce emissions. For these reasons, although being ‘green' has become synonymous with acting against global warming, I don't use the term. Of course, green values or policies could be and are relevant to wider political concerns. In other words, actions that are politically attractive because they serve widely held green values could also serve the goal of limiting climate change. It is quite right to say that economic growth shouldn't be valued in and of itself, especially as a society becomes more affluent.

The green movement will lose (or has already lost) its identity as environmental politics become part of the mainstream. Although green groups and parties holding these ideas will of course remain, the absorption of the greens into the mainstream means discarding those aspects of green theories of agency that have nothing intrinsically to do with green values. These include the theses that participatory democracy is the only kind of democracy that counts; that the best kind of society we can aim for is a radically decentralized one (decentralization may quite often be a valuable political goal, and even relevant to green objectives, but only alongside other forms of political organization); and the commitment to nonviolence (plainly an important goal in most contexts, but arguably not a universal one, and in any case one that has no intrinsic connection with climate change objectives as such).

We must also disavow any remaining forms of mystical reverence for nature, including the more limited versions which shift the centre of values away from human beings to the earth itself
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– tackling global warming has nothing to do with saving the earth, which will survive whatever we do. Living in harmony with the earth, respecting the earth, respecting nature – these ideas fall into the same category.

The green movement leaves behind it some central dilemmas. In what sense, if any, does coping with climate change and energy security mean that economic growth, in its usual sense, is inevitably compromised? Can and should political life in the industrial countries, and perhaps elsewhere too, be reshaped so that well-being replaces affluence as a core aspiration of development? We also have to ask how useful the concepts are that have come, at least in some part, from the green movement. They include especially the precautionary principle, sustainability and the principle that ‘the polluter pays'.

Managing risk: the precautionary principle

The precautionary principle (PP) has been used well beyond the green movement to handle risk in the context of climate change and other environmental areas. The notion has been incorporated into numerous official documents concerned with global warming. It was built into the 1992 Rio Declaration and has been applied widely since, including in the programmes of the European Commission. Its core meaning can be summarized as the aphorism ‘better safe than sorry', although it is invariably clothed in more technical garb. Like other aspects of everyday wisdom, ‘better safe than sorry' is a theorem that dissolves into ambiguity when subjected to scrutiny. Moreover, there is no reason why ‘better safe than sorry' should be prioritized over its opposite: ‘he who hesitates is lost'. All popular maxims, in fact, have their opposite, which explains their lack of explanatory or predictive capacity. We tend to apply them retrospectively depending on what the outcomes of a course of action prove to be.

The PP concentrates only on one side of risk: the possibility of harm. The reason why it has become so prominent is bound up with its origins in the green movement and the attitude of that movement towards nature. Conservationism easily slides over into the view that we should beware of interfering with natural processes as a matter of principle. Risk, however, has two sides. The opposite of precaution is boldness and innovation – taking the plunge. Taking risks adds edge to our lives, but, much more importantly, is intrinsic to a whole diversity of fruitful and constructive tasks.
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Risk-taking is essential to new thinking in all spheres, to scientific progress and to wealth-creation. We have no hope of responding to climate change unless we are prepared to take bold decisions. It is the biggest example ever of he who hesitates is lost.

The American legal scholar Cass Sunstein has produced a devastating critique of the precautionary principle. He notes how divergent are the situations it has been taken to cover. The definition of the PP most often offered is ‘that regulators should take steps to protect against potential harms, even if causal chains are unclear and even if we do not know that those harms will come to fruition'.
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Yet thus formulated, the PP can be invoked in quite contradictory ways. It could be used to endorse interventionist action to prevent a given state of affairs from arising, as in the case of taking action against global warming – or, as Sunstein points out, the invasion of Iraq. More often, however, the PP is invoked to justify exactly the opposite – inaction, on the grounds of being better safe than sorry. Such is the case, for example, when groups oppose the introduction of GM crops, in the belief that it is better to maintain the status quo than to make risky interventions into nature.

Since it can be used to justify completely opposed courses of action, it isn't surprising that there is little consistency in definitions offered of the PP. Sunstein traces some 20 different such definitions, in fact, remarking that ‘they are not compatible with one another'.
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They range from ‘weak' to ‘strong'. A weak definition is one such as the following: that ‘a lack of decisive harm should not be grounds for refusing to regulate, in relation to a specific hazard'. Strong definitions are those such as ‘action should be taken to correct a problem as soon
as there is evidence that harm may occur'. Sunstein shows that both types of definition are worthless as guides to action. Weak versions of the PP do no more than state a truism. Governments could not possibly demand certainty in risk situations before taking regulatory action.

However, stronger versions, if they were applied strictly, would paralyse all action. Take the example of GM crops. The risks to human health and local ecologies are not known with any precision. A strong version of the PP requires that they be banned completely, on the basis that this way we avoid any risks they are likely to pose. However, prohibiting their use creates significant risks too, including the possibility, for example, of rising levels of starvation and malnutrition. The strong definition of the PP would entail that we avoid these risks too. Hence the strong definition is logically incoherent; it goes against both the cultivation and the non-cultivation of GM crops. The PP in its strong form, Sunstein shows, tends to lead to extreme conclusions, as a means of concealing its incoherence. It tends to focus only on worst-case possibilities, producing either a paralysing focus on the status quo, or endorsements of extreme reactions.

BOOK: The Politics of Climate Change
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