Climate X or Climate Jacobin?

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-200
Author(s):  
Russell Duvernoy ◽  
Larry Alan Busk ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Economic System ◽  
Present Article ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Political Economic

In Climate Leviathan, Mann and Wainwright address the political implications of climate change by theorizing four possible planetary futures: Climate Leviathan as capitalist planetary sovereignty, Climate Mao as non-capitalist planetary sovereignty, Climate Behemoth as capitalist non-planetary sovereignty, and Climate X as non-capitalist non-planetary sovereignty. The authors of the present article agree that the depth and scale of destabilizations induced by climate change cannot be navigated justly from within the present social-political-economic system. We disagree, however, on which of the non-capitalist orientations is better suited for generating viable alternatives to the worst dystopian futures. The article thus stages a debate to elucidate the theoretical and political divergence between Climate X and Climate Mao (renamed Climate Jacobin).

scholarly journals Narrating technonatures: discourses of biotechnology in a neoliberal era

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 186
Author(s):  
Myles Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Political ◽  
Effective Strategy ◽  
Economic Implications ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Status ◽  
Political Economic

This article considers the role played by discourses of nature in structuring the cultural politics of anti-GMO activism. It argues that such discourses have been successful rhetorical tools for activists because they mobilize widely resonant nature-culture dualisms that separate the natural and human worlds. However, these discourses hold dubious political implications. In valorizing the natural as a source of essential truth, natural purity discourses fail to challenge how naturalizations have been used to legitimize sexist, racist and colonial systems of injustice and oppression. Rather, they revitalize the discursive purchase of appeals to nature as a justification for the status quo, indirectly reinforcing existing power relations. Moreover, these discourses fail to challenge the critical though contingent reality of GMOs' location within the wider framework of neoliberal social relations. Fortunately, appeals to natural purity have not been the only effective strategy for opposing GMOs. Activist campaigns that directly target the political economic implications of GMOs within the context of neoliberalism have also had successes without resorting to appeals to the purity of nature. The successes of these campaigns suggest that while nature-culture dualisms remain politically effective normative groundings, concerns over equity, farmers' rights, and democracy retain potential as ideological terrains in the struggle for social justice.

Neokoloniale Strukturen in der internationalen Klimapolitik

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lea Rahman
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Industrialized Countries ◽  
Political Economic

Climate change is not just one of the main problems of this century, it rather is a matter of justice: It was particularly caused by western industrialized countries and now hits all states bit by bit – regardless of the question of guilt. The author studies how states struggle for solutions and binding rules at the annual Climate Change conferences and which of the proposals have prevailed. Using approaches of the postcolonial theory, she examines which power relations that are tracing back to colonialism still exist at the political, economic and epistemic level.

Climate Change and Order: Mapping the Scope of International Relations in Studying Climate Politics

2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 361-374
Author(s):  
Isha Sharma
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Climate Politics ◽  
Environmental Threats ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Robert Cox

As globalization gained currency in international politics, multilateral negotiations increasingly expanded their scope to include environmental issues. Still, the political dimension of environmental change remains underrepresented in international relations (IR) theorization. This article aims to focus on the theoretical fortification in the mainstream IR when it comes to transboundary environmental threats. Since the threats of climate change and environmental degradation cannot be contained within the sovereign territories of states, the state-centric conception of the political order in the conventional approaches to IR fails to respond to the threats that are planetary in nature. The article seeks to answer two questions: (a) What are the inadequacies in the realist and liberal concepts of political order vis-à-vis climate change? (b) How to destabilize the conventional assumptions of political order with the aim of making it more receptive to the concerns associated with climate change? To do the latter, the article delves into the work of Robert Cox in order to delineate his intersubjective approach, which combines the material basis of political order with social relations of production. By doing so, this approach also sheds light on the transnational variants of hegemonic power, making it a useful explanatory framework for political implications of climate change.

Another Climate Change Story: Looking Upstream

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-7
Author(s):  
Merrill Singer ◽  
Hans A. Baer
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Economic System ◽  
Applied Anthropology ◽  
Narrative Approach ◽  
Social Response ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Economic Perspective ◽  
Sustainable Future ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Contemporary Climate

Abstract The applied anthropology of climate change seeks to bring the anthropological lens to the study of and social response to life on a warming planet. Recently, Practicing Anthropology published a special issue on Storying Climate Change! Here, we provide a critique of this set of papers from a political economic perspective based on the assertion that a threat of the magnitude of contemporary climate change warrants a more fully mobilized anthropological response than the local narrative approach called for in the special issue. Specifically, we argue that local stories of climate change experience are knotted together by the reigning global political economic system of capitalism and that this is a story we need to tell to build a sustainable future.

scholarly journals The Possibility of a Pluralist Commonwealth Evolutionary Reconstruction Toward a Caring and Just Political Economy

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gar Alperovitz
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic System ◽  
Institutional Characteristics ◽  
The Political ◽  
Land Trusts ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Transformative Process ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Ecologically Sustainable ◽  
Systemic Design

New developments at various level of the political-economic system suggest possible institutional trajectories supportive of community, and a longer term systemic design more supportive of strong democracy and a caring culture. An integration of institutional elements also offers possibilities more productive of equality and ecologically sustainable outcomes. The “Pluralist Commonwealth” is both pluralist in its institutional characteristics and supportive of such “commonwealth” institutions as co-operatives, neighborhood land trusts and community corporations, municipal utilities and a range of other larger scale ownership forms. An “evolutionary reconstructive” institutional, political, and cultural path is projected as a longer term transformative process different from both traditional reform and traditional ideas of revolution. Such a path inherently seeks to maximize the development of a caring community as it builds.

2. Looming Tragedy

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-52
Author(s):  
John S. Dryzek
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Carrying Capacity ◽  
Environmental Concern ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Planetary Boundaries ◽  
Limits To Growth ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Global Action

Ecologists have applied the concept of “carrying capacity”, the population of a species that an ecosystem can support, to human populations. Ecological limits to growth in population and the economy dominated environmental concern in the 1970s and beyond. More recently they have been supplanted by the idea of planetary boundaries, based on the stresses that the earth system is capable of absorbing, several of which (including biosphere integrity and climate change) have already been transgressed, suggesting the system is in grave peril. This chapter also considers the points of critics of the idea that there can be limits, then analyzes the political implications of limits and boundaries, from the authoritarianism associated with some 1970s thinkers to the need for cooperative global action to the more democratic possibilities that could be associated with degrowth and planetary boundaries.

Political Challenges of the Climate-Changed Society

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (01) ◽  
pp. 13-17
Author(s):  
David Schlosberg
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Energy Systems ◽  
The Political ◽  
Global Environmental Governance ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Impacts Of Climate Change

We are at a turning point when it comes to the political implications of climate change. Given the reality of a future in a climate-changed world, it is time for us—broadly as a species, but particularly as academics—to move beyond the foci of the last few decades on the politics of preventing climate change through global agreements. There is a growing literature on the obvious need to slow the impacts of climate change, develop postcarbon energy systems, and design new forms of global environmental governance. Beyond these immediate needs, however, climate change poses a range of new problems and requires a broader research agenda for a climate-challenged politics.

scholarly journals The Irony of Michael Novak

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Menno R. Kamminga
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Reasonable Doubt ◽  
The Political ◽  
Reinhold Niebuhr ◽  
Fossil Energy ◽  
Democratic Capitalism ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
Dangerous Climate Change ◽  
Political Economic

The late influential American intellectual Michael Novak was a self-declared devotee of Reinhold Niebuhr, arguably the foremost twentieth-century American theologian. Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982) was an attempt to fill the political-economic lacuna in Niebuhr’s thought. The present article offers a Niebuhrian irony–focused response to Novak’s democratic capitalism in view of climate change as probably the greatest threat facing humanity. Novak quite successfully extended Niebuhrian ideas into a theology-based vision of democratic capitalism as the only political-economic system effective in widely lifting people out of poverty. Yet he failed to acknowledge human-induced climate change as beyond reasonable doubt and rooted in the predominantly American invention of a fossil energy–based capitalist political economy. This article’s thesis is that Novak’s democratic capitalism entails Niebuhrian irony: the virtue it displays about resources becomes a vice due to Novak’s irresponsible post–Spirit of Democratic Capitalism attempt to represent democratic capitalism as innocent of any dangerous climate-change implications.

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