Changing Prices in a Changing Climate: Electoral Competition and Fossil Fuel Taxation

When do governments increase the price of fossil fuels? Charting the theoretical territory between climate change politics and long-term policymaking, this paper highlights the role of electoral competition in shaping how politicians respond to the intertemporal tradeoff fossil fuel taxation represents. The more secure the government is in office, the more insulated it is from the vagaries of political competition, and the more likely it is to impose costs on constituents today to generate a future stable climate. By influencing governments’ time preferences, competition structures the myopia of elected officials. I test the arguments using an original dataset of gasoline taxation across high-income democracies between 1988-2013. I find evidence that higher levels of competition are associated with lower gasoline tax rates, and that the relationship is moderated by the level of costs imposed on voters, but not government partisanship.

Just “performance nonsense”?: How recipients process news photos of activists’ symbolic actions about climate change politics

In this article, I investigate how recipients make sense of images that show symbolic actions by environmental activists during two recent United Nations Climate Change Conferences. Environmental advocacy groups are successful in creating visibility for their symbolic actions via news visuals, but little empirical evidence exists about how ordinary media recipients engage with this type of imagery. Can they understand the intended meaning of complex visual rhetoric used by environmental activists? I use think-aloud protocols to uncover the cognitive strategies which are used in processing these stylised visual claims. Results show that news photos rarely manage to communicate the intended meaning of symbolic actions. By systematically analysing various stages of visual frame processing, this study offers insights into specific configurations of the image-viewer relationship that cause high levels of ambiguity and prevent staged visual claims from being understood as intended. Yet I also find empirical evidence for a visual framing approach that works well and describe this recipe for effective communication via symbolic action photography.

The Gender-Climate-Injustice Nexus

This chapter offers an account of central issues and themes in feminist critiques of the institutionalized system of gender-climate-injustice operating across the social, cultural, economic, political, and environmental spheres. In its consideration of the gendered impacts of climate change, it discusses the forces of violence, injustice, and inequity, which are at the core of the gender-climate-injustice nexus. It reflects on the meaning and possibility of a feminist climate change politics that works within the gender-climate-injustice nexus. Combining Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, Chandra Mohanty, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, I argue for the importance of using feminist theory and a gendered perspective when assessing the variegated and uneven impacts climate change is, and will continue producing.

Editorial: Is There a New Climate Politics?

Addressing climate change globally requires significant transformations of production and consumption systems. The language around climate action has shifted tangibly over the last five years to reflect this. Indeed, thousands of local governments, national governments, universities and scientists have declared a climate emergency. Some commentators argue that the emergency framing conveys a new and more appropriate level of urgency needed to respond to climate challenges; to create a social tipping point in the fight against climate change. Others are concerned to move on from such emergency rhetoric to urgent action. Beyond emergency declarations, new spaces of, and places for, engagement with climate change are emerging. The public square, the exhibition hall, the law courts, and the investors’ forum are just some of the arenas where climate change politics are now being negotiated. Emergent governing mechanisms are being utilised, from citizens’ assemblies to ecocide lawsuits. New social movements from Extinction Rebellion to Fridays For Future demonstrate heightened concern and willingness to undertake civil disobedience and protest against climate inaction. Yet questions remain which are addressed in this thematic issue: Are these discourses and spaces of engagement manifestations of a radical new climate politics? And if these are new climate politics, do they mark a shift of gear in current discourses with the potential to effect transformative climate action and support a just transition to a decarbonised world?

Climate Change Politics in Canada and the EU—from Carbon Democracy to a Green Deal?

The idea of a green deal transforming industrialized societies’ climate policies in a sustainable manner has become highly popular in various countries. The study takes up this notion focusing on climate policy initiatives in Canada and the EU, raising three interrelated issues: (i) on a descriptive level, the study asks where we stand and what has so far been achieved regarding climate policy; (ii) analytically, the study provides a theoretical explanation of why progress has been slow in the EU and hardly visible in Canada, making use of the concept of carbon democracy; (iii) on a prescriptive level, the study explores what will be needed to make a green deal successful, arguing that one has to accept that a green deal is a deeply political project that will create winners and losers and that not all losers can be compensated under the label of a “just transition”. The argument advanced is that the EU and Canada represent a form of carbon democracy in which the extensive use of carbon laid the foundation for establishing democratic institutions and strongly shaped them. The paper shows that the extensive influence of carbon-related activities not only empowers specific non-state agents but is rather deeply enmeshed in the societal and political genome of both regions’ polities. The claim that follows is that climate politics in Canada and the EU will have to be deeply transformative and therefore disruptive in order to be successful.

Origins and Theory of Climate Change Politics

Climate change politics refers to attempts to define climate change as a physical phenomenon as well as to delineate and predict current and future effects on the environment and broader implications for human affairs as a foundation for political action. Defining the causes, scale, time frame, and consequences of climate change is critical to determining the political response. Given the high stakes involved in both the consequences of climate change and the distributive implications of policies to address it, climate change politics has been and remains highly contentious both within and across countries. Climate politics presents difficulties for study given its interdisciplinary nature and the scientific complexities involved in climate change. Climate change politics emerged in the mid- to late 1980s, as climate science became more accessible to policymakers and the public. However, scholarship on international climate politics was relatively slow to develop. Prior to 2008, major publications on international relations (except for policy journals) only lightly touched upon climate politics. Climate change was frequently referenced in articles on a range of topics, but it was not the primary focus of analysis. Since 2008 there has been a dramatic increase in literature focusing on climate change. The possibility of massive economic, political, and ecological dislocation from the consequences of climate change as well as from policies to address the problem have resulted in an extensive literature. Scholars have addressed aspects of climate politics from every paradigm within international relations, as well as drawing on research from numerous related disciplines. The international relations theories that shaped the scholarship on climate politics provide the foundation for understanding the ongoing normative debates surrounding domestic and international policies to address climate change.

Normative Debates and Policy Responses in Climate Change Politics

Climate change politics refers to attempts to define climate change as a physical phenomenon as well as to delineate current and predict future effects on the environment and broader implications for human affairs as a foundation for political action. Defining the causes, scale, time frame, and consequences of climate change is critical to determining the political response. Given the high stakes involved in both the consequences of climate change and the distributive implications of policies to address climate change, climate change politics has been and remains highly contentious both within countries and across countries. Climate politics presents difficulties for study given its interdisciplinary nature and the scientific complexities involved in climate change. The international relations literature surrounding climate politics has also evolved and grown substantially since the mid-2000s. Efforts to address the consequences of climate change have evoked controversial ethical and distributive justice questions that have produced an important normative literature. These debates increasingly inform the ongoing negotiations surrounding responsibility for the problem of climate change and the policies required to address climate change. There is also a larger debate regarding the complex linkages between climate change and broader ecological as well as economic and political consequences of both the effects of climate change and policies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or remove them from the atmosphere. As we enter the 2020s, a new debate has emerged related to the implications of the posited transition to the Anthropocene Epoch and the future of climate politics. Normative and policy debates surrounding climate change politics remain contentious without a clear path to meaningful political action.