The Politics of Climate Change

by Anthony Giddens

  The US is heavily dependent upon Middle Eastern oil producers, as are Europe and Japan, although all are now scrambling to diversify their sources of supply. Russia’s attempt to return as a great power is based upon its fossil fuel resources and the high prices they currently command. China’s very rapid rate of economic growth has led the country to take far more of an international role than it had done previously, as it makes its presence felt in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America in pursuit of oil, gas and minerals.

  The EU countries import a great deal of gas from Russia and a substantial proportion of their oil too. The implications on both sides for climate change policy are considerable. Russia is maximizing its income from oil and gas without the modernization that could have come about had the country permitted the introduction of outside investment and encouraged effective management. Gazprom, Russia’s largest state-owned company, is notoriously inefficient and poorly managed. Domestic and industrial consumers in Russia get their energy at heavily subsidized prices, a policy that is changing only slowly, but which does nothing to promote energy conservation.

  The Russian leadership developed a confrontational approach to the EU, with consequences that also spill over into the area of climate change. It firmly rejected EU approaches to find a meeting point: ‘We intend to retain state control over the gas transport system and over Gazprom. We will not split Gazprom up. And the European Commission should not have any illusions. In the gas sector, they will have to deal with the state.’14 On the other hand, Russia has found it quite easy to do individual deals with EU member–states and thereby undercut European unity. A notable example is the Nord Stream pipeline project, which brings together Gazprom and two of Germany’s biggest energy companies. By February 2011 two sections of the pipeline, running through the Baltic Sea, had been built. The pipeline passes through the territories of Finland, Sweden and Denmark as well as Russia and Germany.

  The very idea of the project runs contrary to the spirit of European solidarity. Since energy security and responding to climate change are so closely linked, an EU that cannot speak with one voice on the first could find its ability to make progress with the second compromised – a serious matter, since, in terms of concerns to combat global warming, it aspires to be the world leader.

  The struggle for resources

  Only the US is ahead of China in terms of oil and gas consumption. In 2010 China accounted for about 40 per cent of the worldwide growth in demand for oil. Its level of demand will rise by about 6 per cent a year over the next decade if its rates of growth are sustained and its energy policies remain the same. In casting around for oil, China is pursuing an expansionist foreign policy – following, it could be said, in the footsteps of Britain and the US. China does not work through oil corporations as Western countries tend to do, but its objectives are much the same. It essentially buys oilfields in different countries for its own use, setting the terms of sale locally. Countries where China has done such deals range from Venezuela to Indonesia, Iraq, Oman, Yemen and Sudan.

  It has also made substantial inroads into the Middle East, to the chagrin of the US. Saudi Arabia has become the largest oil supplier to China, and the Chinese have been allowed to explore for gas within the country. China has forged a close relationship with Iran and is importing increasing amounts of gas and oil from that state. American oil companies are prohibited from doing business with Iran as a result of an Act of Congress, so cannot get a look in. In the meantime, along with Russia, China for some while blocked the imposition of sanctions on Iran, which most other nations in the international community support in their attempt to stop the country from acquiring nuclear weapons and the rocket systems able to deliver them. ‘Both sides behave as if an oil shortage is looming, and that it’s “us or them”.’15 American observers have claimed that, although China has now accepted imposing sanctions on Iran, it does not implement or enforce its trade controls properly. Indeed, some 15 per cent of its oil is imported from Iran, which is China’s second largest provider.

  India has not yet adopted such a high foreign policy profile as China in respect of oil, but it will need much more fuel as its economy advances and as consumer tastes change. In China, there has been a steep rise in car use over the past decade, with no heed at all being paid to environmental considerations. Much the same is set to happen in India. The Tata Nano car was unveiled in that country in January 2008. Costing 100,000 rupees (£1,300), it is by far the cheapest new car in the world; millions of Indians, even those on a relatively modest income, will, for the first time, be able to buy a car. The Tata Nano has a 33bhp petrol engine, which, because of being so small, is reasonably fuel-efficient. Yet the sheer numbers likely to appear on the roads will certainly result in large-scale environmental consequences.

  Outside India, there are also plans to market the car in Latin America, South-East Asia and Africa. The chief scientist of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, himself an Indian, said he is ‘having nightmares about it’. The response from the industrialist Ratan Tata sums up perfectly some of the dilemmas surrounding both energy security and climate change: ‘We need to think of our masses. Should they be denied the right to an individual form of transport?’16

  Commentators on energy security have started to speak of ‘Chindia’ to refer to the combined impact of Chinese and Indian economic growth on world oil and energy markets. For most of the time since the Second World War the rise in demand for oil has been only about half that of overall economic growth. Since 2000, however, that proportion has increased to 65 per cent.17 At the moment, measured on a per capita basis, Chindia consumes one-seventh of the total for the industrial countries. If Chindia joins the high-income group of countries within the next 20 years, as seems likely, growth in worldwide energy demand will dramatically accelerate.

  In the areas of both climate change and energy security, the main divergence between the more sanguine and the apocalyptic writers is time – how much time remains before large changes will have to be made to the ways in which we live. Even if the effects of climate change are progressive rather than abrupt, and will mainly affect subsequent generations rather than ourselves, the lesson should still be to prepare early, and to start now. Exactly the same is true of energy security, even if those who say that oil and gas have several decades to run turn out to be right.

  The situation in the Middle East looks to be changing dramatically. The geopolitical bargain whereby the US kept a strategic hold over parts of the region is breaking down. That bargain was the key to the stability of oil supplies to the US, and to some extent the global economy in general. It underpinned the US’s profligate use of energy. Successive generations of American presidents promised to reduce the US’s dependency on imported oil, but none succeeded.

  Will the dwindling of US influence in the Middle East cause the country to look in a much more serious way at its indiscriminate use of energy? At the time of writing, the answer to that question is imponderable, but the consequences of the transformations affecting the Middle East will certainly stretch well beyond that area itself.

  The United States in particular, and to some degree the other developed countries, have become used to ‘cheap’ energy, delivered in some degree by the influence of the US in the region, and by the strategic alliances it deployed there. A sharp dimunition in such influence may give a jolt to complacency about supplies of oil and gas and produce a wave of investment in alternative technologies – as happened 30 years before. However, it may also prompt more conservative attitudes, such as a continuing love affair with coal.

  In the following chapter I return directly to climate change, beginning by looking at the impact of the green movement on environmental thinking. Issues to do with energy, however, intrude at most points throughout the remainder of the book, since there is no chance of mitigating climate change without radically reducing our fossil fuel dependency.

  3

  THE GREENS AND AFTER

  Now that clim
ate change discussions have moved into the mainstream, it isn’t surprising that they reflect a variety of different perspectives. Those in the green movement tend to argue thus: ‘This is our topic, since we were speaking about pollution of the environment well before anyone else.’ And indeed, the green movement – or certain currents of thinking within it – has been the main source of philosophical reflection relevant to climate change objectives. Green concepts and imagery permeate the writings of even the most sober scientific writers on climate change.

  However, others are pressing their claims. Environmental economists dismiss most green thinking as woolly. For them, a proper approach must be hard-edged and phrased in terms of the costs and benefits of different strategies, with markets having the upper hand. They also tend to look towards carbon markets as likely to contribute most to enabling us to cope with global warming.

  For writers on the left, climate change offers the opportunity to renew the case against markets that has for so long been associated with left-of-centre traditions. After all, Nicholas Stern, the author of a major review on climate change, has remarked that global warming ‘is the greatest market failure the world has seen’.1 Although Stern himself doesn’t draw any such conclusion, the quote is food and drink to those who would like to see the role of markets shrink and that of the state expand. As a political issue, responding to global warming also appeals to some on the left in a different way – it offers the chance to recover the radicalism that disappeared with the dissolution of revolutionary socialism. It might be seen as a means of renewing the critique of capitalism, regarded by them as the source of the troubles we face. The red–green coalitions that have been proposed by different authors, and that have existed in some real-life political contexts, have their origins in this type of reasoning.

  Bandwagon effect in respect of global warming is noticeable on a strategic as well as on a more abstract plane. Thus, those who want to revive the European Union and give it more legitimacy and sense of direction find in climate change a way of doing so. Europhiles see the issue as a way of demonstrating to their own sceptics what a crucial role the EU can play in influencing global issues.

  I hope I have managed to avoid bandwagon effect. Plainly, it is important to be careful about using global warming as a way of surreptitiously legitimating other concerns. There is nevertheless a left/right tinge to current climate change debates: those who want to respond to climate change through widespread social reform mostly tend towards the political left; most of the authors who doubt that climate change is caused by human agency, on the other hand, are on the right. Yet it is vital that climate change policy as far as possible transcends such divisions and survives changes of government within democratic systems. I shall discuss this issue in more detail in chapter 5.

  The greens

  Strictly speaking, of course, there is no green movement – rather, there is a diverse range of positions, perspectives and recipes for action. I do not pretend to cover all of these, but instead will concentrate upon a number of key themes.

  Like socialism, green thinking is a creation of the industrial revolution. Factories and rapidly growing cities transformed and, in many areas, came to dominate the landscape, while the ‘green and pleasant land’ retreated into the background. New-found wealth was brought to many, but in the eyes of critics the price paid was far too high. The ‘hatred of modern civilization’, which William Morris spoke of as ‘the leading passion of my life’, found widespread echo in the arts and in the thinking of the early conservationists. Is it all, he wondered in a remarkable anticipation of today’s social critics, ‘to end in a counting house on top of a cinder heap?’2

  Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature appeared in 1836. Emerson protested volubly (although to no immediate effect) against the logging which was devastating the forests. In modern industry, he argued, nature appears as an object pressed into the service of the production of commodities. We should seek to recover the unmediated relationship to nature that our ancestors enjoyed, and which is the source of aesthetic experience and morality.3 The theme was taken up by Henry Thoreau who, in celebrated fashion, put it into practice by living alone in the woods for two years, depending wholly on his own labour to do so. ‘That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest’, he wrote, adding prophetically: ‘what is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?’4 Walden Pond in Massachusetts, where Thoreau spent his two years in isolation, is considered by many to be the birthplace of the conservation movement.

  The Sierra Club, founded in the US in 1892, and influenced by the ideas of Emerson and Thoreau, is widely recognized to be the world’s first significant environmental organization, devoted in the first instance to protecting wilderness areas. It has a history of activism, dating back to protests against the damming of rivers in the early years of the twentieth century. Today, fighting global warming has become its main activity; it seeks to combat the ‘reckless energy policy’ of the US.

  The modern green movement had its origins in Germany in the 1970s. The term ‘green’ in its political sense was coined in Germany, where the Green Party was also the first to achieve a measure of electoral success. The greens have since developed into a global movement: their first worldwide gathering was held just before the UN conference in Rio in 1992. The Global Green Network has party representatives from some 80 different countries. Amid the diversity of views represented by green parties, there are some common threads that hold them all together. The Network lists a charter of principles ‘defining what it means to be Green in the new millennium’. It involves the four principles first set out by the German greens two decades ago – ‘ecological wisdom’ (ecological harmony or equilibrium), social justice, participatory democracy and nonviolence, with two others added: sustainability and respect for diversity.

  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?’5 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.6 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’.