The Russian invasion of 2022 was based on an organized process of influence on the Ukrainian population, aimed at obtaining their support or neutralizing their possible resistance, in concert with the state apparatus. We find, in the backdrop of this process, the memorial conflict between these two countries and their neighbours, concerning World War II and the Soviet Union. This war of influence, or political warfare, which falls within new forms of contemporary hybrid warfare, profoundly has to do with images, (...) especially moving images. The cinematic images, the debauchery of their propaganda during the Second World War and throughout the existence of the USSR, still weighs on the bodies and minds; the new media has in many ways inherented them and their way of reenacting or extending propaganda on an individual or group scale. We will then question the place of images, and in particular those in motion, in the war between Russia and Ukraine since 2014 to describe the way in which they have served or still serve the military-memorial device deployed by the Russian invader. (shrink)

The Russian invasion of 2022 was based on an organized process of influence on the Ukrainian population, aimed at obtaining their support or neutralizing their possible resistance, in concert with the state apparatus. We find, in the backdrop of this process, the memorial conflict between these two countries and their neighbours, concerning World War II and the Soviet Union. This war of influence, or political warfare, which falls within new forms of contemporary hybrid warfare, profoundly has to do with images, (...) especially moving images. The cinematic images, the debauchery of their propaganda during the Second World War and throughout the existence of the USSR, still weighs on the bodies and minds; the new media has in many ways inherented them and their way of reenacting or extending propaganda on an individual or group scale. We will then question the place of images, and in particular those in motion, in the war between Russia and Ukraine since 2014 to describe the way in which they have served or still serve the military-memorial device deployed by the Russian invader. (shrink)

The Russian invasion of 2022 was based on an organized process of influence on the Ukrainian population, aimed at obtaining their support or neutralizing their possible resistance, in concert with the state apparatus. We find, in the backdrop of this process, the memorial conflict between these two countries and their neighbours, concerning World War II and the Soviet Union. This war of influence, or political warfare, which falls within new forms of contemporary hybrid warfare, profoundly has to do with images, (...) especially moving images. The cinematic images, the debauchery of their propaganda during the Second World War and throughout the existence of the USSR, still weighs on the bodies and minds; the new media has in many ways inherented them and their way of reenacting or extending propaganda on an individual or group scale. We will then question the place of images, and in particular those in motion, in the war between Russia and Ukraine since 2014 to describe the way in which they have served or still serve the military-memorial device deployed by the Russian invader. (shrink)

While most studies of low-carbon transitions focus on green niche-innovations, this paper shifts attention to the resistance by incumbent regime actors to fundamental change. Drawing on insights from political economy, the paper introduces politics and power into the multi-level perspective. Instrumental, discursive, material and institutional forms of power and resistance are distinguished and illustrated with examples from the UK electricity system. The paper concludes that the resistance and resilience of coal, gas and nuclear production regimes currently negates the (...) benefits from increasing renewables deployment. It further suggests that policymakers and many transition-scholars have too high hopes that ‘green’ innovation will be sufficient to bring about low-carbon transitions. Future agendas in research and policy should therefore pay much more attention to the destabilization and decline of existing fossil fuel regimes. (shrink)

The left must confront the politics of removing carbon from the atmosphere – a topic rapidly making its way to the top of the climate agenda. We here examine the technology of direct air capture, tracing its intellectual origins and laying bare the political economy of its current manifestations. We find a space crowded with ideology-laden metaphors, ample fossil-capital entanglements and bold visions for a new, ethereal frontier of capital accumulation. These diversions must be cut short if a (...) technology with the capacity to help repair at least some climate damage is to be of any use. Only socialising the means of removal will allow this to happen. (shrink)

Ideal carbon tax policy is internationally coordinated, fully internalizes externalities, redistributes revenues to those harmed, and is politically acceptable, generating predictable market signals. Since nonideal circumstances rarely allow all these conditions to be met, moral issues arise. This paper surveys some of the work in moral philosophy responding to several of these issues. First, it discusses the moral drivers for estimates of the social cost of carbon. Second, it explains how national self-interest can block climate action and suggests (...) international policies—carbon border tax adjustments and carbon clubs—that can help address these concerns. Third, it introduces some of the social science literature about the political acceptability of carbon taxes before addressing a couple common public concerns about carbon taxes. Finally, it introduces four carbon revenue usage options, arguing that redistributive and climate compensation measures are most morally justified. [Open access]. (shrink)

Vietnam’s forests are at risk - carbon offset schemes could be the best chance of saving them, say Dr. Quan-Hoang Vuong and Minh-Hoang Nguyen. The value of forests is deeply ingrained in Vietnamese culture. Rừng vàng, biển bạc” [“forests of gold and seas of silver”] is both a metaphor for Vietnam, and a description of its natural wealth. The phrase is everywhere, from political speeches to daily conversation, as is Nhất phá sơn lâm, nhì đâm hà bá [“the worst (...) crime is to destroy the mountains and forests, the second worst is to kill the river”]. Deforestation is a Vietnamese taboo. (shrink)

Low-carbon innovation is usually depicted as an exemplar of pursuit of the common good, in both mainstream policy discussion and the emerging orthodoxy of transition studies. Yet it may emerge as a key means of intensifying inequality. We analyse low-carbon innovation as a social and political process through the prism of differential risk-classes, focusing on the pivotal global case of emergence of the Chinese middle-class in seaboard megacities, especially regarding the profound challenges of urban e-mobility transition. This approach (...) shows emergence of this still-forming sociopolitical grouping as tightly and complementarily coupled with the assembling of innovations that meaningfully tackle global risks, such as climate change, while also intensifying existing inequalities. Misrecognition of the duality of low-carbon innovations as both moral technologies and as relatively expensive consumer products has the potentiality to be a key mechanism of this process, thereby serving to reproduce, constitute and legitimize inequalities in novel and unexpected ways. (shrink)

Many companies offer their customers voluntary carbon ‘offset’ certificates to compensate for greenhouse gas emissions. Voluntary offset certificates are cheap because the demand for them is low, allowing consumers to compensate for their emissions without significant sacrifices. Regarding the distribution of emission reduction responsibilities I argue that excess emissions are permissible if they are offset properly. However, if individuals buy offsets only because they are cheap, they fail to be robustly motivated to choose a permissible course of action.This suspected (...) lack of robust motivation raises both pragmatic questions about the functioning of offsetting schemes and moral questions about the worth of such unstable motives. The analysis provided here also has wider implications for the normative analysis of partial compliance and ‘many hands’ problems, especially for those cases where compliance levels and costs interact. (shrink)

Climate change presents a fundamental challenge to the current global energy regime. Under the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international community is developing the architecture of a policy response. Three serious flaws are examined: (a) the potential sacrifice of small island states, (b) the use of market-based policy measures to commodify the atmospheric commons, and (c) the substitution of carbon sequestration for meaningful reductions in energy use. The authors’ analysis of the politics of climate change, based on (...) these issues, suggests a new understanding of ecology is emerging—what they term postmodern ecology—in which a global environmental crisis is risked to secure the future of the world energy regime. An alternative, based on principles of sustainability and equity, is proposed that would require abandoning the global energy status quo. (shrink)

‘Methodological cosmopolitanism’ connotes a profound transformation of the sciences as forms of public reflexive social analysis on learning to live well together through building homes in the world: what may be called the ‘Beckian vision’, in memory of Ulrich Beck. This short note considers how Beck’s concept of emancipatory catastrophism may not be the most productive development of his own programme. This is precisely brought out by a methodologically cosmopolitan analysis of a key East Asian response to the global risk (...) of climate change: innovation of low-carbon cities in China. Instead, these presumptively archetypically cosmopolitan initiatives offer something of a political education regarding the irreducibly strategic power/knowledge dynamics at work – including in ongoing contestation about the very term ‘cosmopolitan’. (shrink)

The potential upscaling of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies to meet states’ net-zero targets may enable individuals to remove emissions by purchasing carbon removal certificates. In this paper, I argue for two concepts of individual responsibility to capture the moral responsibility of individuals to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through CDR technologies. The first is that of liability, a direct responsibility to remove carbon in order to minimize one’s carbon footprint. The second is a (...) shared political responsibility to remove carbon that individuals have by virtue of being part of weak collectives responsible for mitigating climate change or by virtue of participating in structures that contribute to climate change. I argue that the concept of shared political responsibility can be used to determine how CDR technologies should or should not be implemented. Finally, I discuss how these two responsibilities are related. (shrink)

Even in the absence of complete scientific consensus on the magnitude, timing, and regional distribution of the effects of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions, it is worthwhile to examine potential policy responses to the prospect of climate change. An internalization of the greenhouse externality based on property rights in carbon emissions offers the potential to promote rather than retard worldwide economic development. As the world economy moves in a market?oriented direction, the arbitrary wealth transfers associated with a (...) carbon?rights distribution plan would dissipate within the time span required for planetary climate management. Thus, the present world situation may provide a new opportunity to reconcile the imperatives of global environmental protection and the promotion of sustained economic growth. (shrink)

In this article I maintain that a progressive and leftist carbon tax should be revenue-neutral through a dual policy package: first, it should use some revenues to offset price increases for the poor and middle classes; second, it should use the remaining part of revenues to lower taxes on labour income (both employed and self-employed income) for those below a middle-income threshold. I will briefly examine three reasons why such a revenue-neutral and dual-package carbon tax (RN-DP-CT) could (and (...) should) become central in the political agenda of the European Left – even though much of what I will suggest can reasonably hold also with respect to other countries. First, the tax wage on labour in the euro area is one of the highest in the world. Second, the revenue-neutral and dual policy package carbon tax will tax more capital that yields income without a proportional increase in labour demand, rather than capital that creates new job opportunities. Third, we live in societies that are highly unequal, hence I see no moral reason why a carbon tax reform should not aim, among other things, to take wealth away from the richest. (shrink)

Much of the climate ethics discussion centers on considerations of compensatory justice and historical accountability. However, little attention is given to supporting and defending the Beneficiary Pays Principle as a guide for policymaking. This principle states that those who have benefitted from an instance of harm have an obligation to compensate those who have been harmed. Thus, this principle implies that those benefitted by industrialization and carbon emission owe compensation to those who have been harmed by climate change. Beneficiary (...) Pays is commonly juxtaposed with Polluter Pays Principle and the Ability to Pay Principle in the relevant literature. Beneficiary Pays withstands objections that raise suspicion for the latter two. (shrink)

This book reflects on Indonesia's recent experience with REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation), all set within a broader discussion of neoliberal environmentalism, hyper-capitalism and Indonesian carbon politics. Drawing on the author's political ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Jakarta, Central Sulawesi and Oslo, where the author examined Norway's interests and role in implementing REDD, this book discusses the long evolution of the idea that foreign state and private financing can be used to protect tropical forests and the (...) carbon stored within them, resulting in both local economic development and global climate benefits. It shows how neoliberal environmental approaches to climate change, of which REDD is a leading example, increases the severity of political contestations that must be overcome to reach global climate mitigation goals, and how recent incarnations of REDD have tended to forget earlier scholarly advice to couple anti-deforestation approaches with policies that reduce industrial carbon emissions. In Indonesia, tectonic political and economic forces are shown to have negatively impacted REDD implementation. Using a political ecology approach, the book links the literature on REDD with that covering Indonesia's recent democratic regression, highlighting how the country's environmental performance is inextricably linked to the timbre of its political governance. Given the severity of the political contestations that must be overcome to reach its stated goals, REDD cannot replace global policies that drastically reduce industrial carbon emissions. This book will be of great interests to students and scholars of political ecology, deforestation, climate change, environmental politics, natural resource management and environmental conservation. (shrink)

Carbon pricing is one of the most politically important approaches for the mitigation of climate change in the world today. Most political actors who are not committed to climate change denial favor carbon pricing, either as emissions trading or carbon taxation. In this article, I argue that carbon pricing should be considered unfair in most of its forms. I present a line of criticism called the Unfair Burdens Argument. It states that the most politically relevant ways (...) to price carbon needlessly burden the less affluent more than the more affluent. This is unfair because, among other things, the more affluent have on average done more to create the problem of climate change in the first place. Principles for the fair distribution of burdens under climate change mitigation like the Polluter Pays Principle, which were thought to support carbon pricing, turn out to speak against it, when interpreted properly. Although the Unfair Burdens Argument on its own cannot show that carbon pricing is impermissible, it offers important clues for what a morally permissible form of climate change mitigation would look like. (shrink)

Enhanced weathering, in comparison to other geoengineering measures, creates the possibility of a reduced cost, reduced impact way of decreasing atmospheric carbon, with positive knock-on effects such as decreased oceanic acidity. We argue that ethical concerns have a place alongside empirical, political and social factors as we consider how to best respond to the critical challenge that anthropogenic climate change poses. We review these concerns, considering the ethical issues that arise (or would arise) in the large-scale deployment of enhanced (...) weathering. We discuss post-implementation scen- arios, failures of collective action, the distribution of risk and externalities and redress for damage. We also discuss issues surrounding ‘dirty hands’ (taking conventionally immoral action to avoid having to take action that is even worse), whether enhanced weathering research might present a moral hazard, the importance of international governance and the notion that the implementation of large-scale enhanced weathering would reveal problematic hubris. Ethics and scientific research interrelate in complex ways: some ethical considerations caution against research and implementation, while others encourage them. Indeed, the ethical perspective encourages us to think more carefully about how, and what types of, geoengineering should be researched and implemented. (shrink)

Climate change economists have called it “the most important number you’ve never heard of” and the “holy grail of climate economic analysis.” It is the social cost of carbon (SCC), and its purpose is to reflect—in one dollar figure—the harm caused by emitting a single ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The SCC is an essential concept for environmental cost-benefit analysis, and for the idea of an “optimal tax” on carbon emissions. It is also the subject (...) of fierce debate in the academic literature and in American politics. This book offers the most systematic analysis yet of the social cost of carbon, its theoretical basis, and its proper role in climate economics and climate policy design. It explains that the SCC is not one concept but four, each of which is addressed to a distinct task in climate economics. Moreover, these four concepts can be sorted into two families that correspond to the two main branches of welfare economics, social choice theory and general equilibrium theory. The book explains these radically different theoretical frameworks and how a mathematically identical pair of SCC concepts can emerge from each. It then argues that the analytical power of each SCC concept is limited by its inability to capture the full array of ethical considerations that bear on responsible climate policy. Despite these limitations, the book explains how at least some SCC concepts can and should be put to work in real-world climate change policy analysis. (shrink)

Corporate carbon footprint data has become ubiquitous. This data is also highly promissory. But as this paper argues, such data fails both consumers and citizens. The governance of climate change seemingly requires a strong foundation of data on emission sources. Economists approach climate change as a market failure, where the optimisation of the atmosphere is to be evidence based and data driven. Citizens or consumers, state or private agents of control, all require deep access to information to judge emission (...) realities. Whether we are interested in state-led or in neoliberal ‘solutions’ for either democratic participatory decision-making or for preventing market failure, companies’ emissions need to be known. This paper draws on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a Fortune 50 company’s environmental accounting unit to show how carbon reporting interferes with information symmetry requirements, which further troubles possibilities for contesting data. A material-semiotic analysis of the data practices and infrastructures employed in the context of corporate emissions disclosure details the situated political economies of data labour along the data processing chain. The explicit consideration of how information asymmetries are socially and computationally shaped, how contexts are shifted and how data is systematically straightened out informs a reflexive engagement with Big Data. The paper argues that attempts to automatise environmental accounting’s veracity management by means of computing metadata or to ensure that data quality meets requirements through third-party control are not satisfactory. The crossover of Big Data with corporate environmental governance does not promise to trouble the political economy that hitherto sustained unsustainability. (shrink)

Urban agriculture in Cuba is often promoted as an example of how agroecological farming can overcome the need for oil-derived inputs in food production. This article examines the geographical implications of Cuba’s low-carbon urban farming based on fieldwork in five organopónicos in Pinar del Río. The article charts how energy flows, biophysical relations, and socially mediated ecological processes are spatially organised to enable large-scale urban agricultural production. To explain this production system, the literature on Cuban agroecology postulates a model (...) of two distinct modes: agroecology versus industrial agriculture. Yet this distinction inadequately explains Cuba’s urban agriculture: production in the organopónicos rather sits across categories, at once involving agroecological, organic-industrial, and petro-industrial features. To resolve this contradiction, a more nuanced framework is developed that conceptualises production systems by means of their geographical configuration. This provides analytical clarity—and a political strategy for a low-carbon, degrowth agenda. (shrink)

Enterprises are the market players for carbon reductions and carbon trading, and they are also the significant driving force in a low-carbon economy and society. Using the data of A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2016, this study uses a difference-in-differences model to examine the effects of the low-carbon city construction on corporate carbon reduction performance. Consistent with our hypotheses, we find that the low-carbon city construction promotes corporate carbon reduction performance. Further analysis (...) indicates that the policy effect is stronger for state-owned enterprises than non-state-owned enterprises. Moreover, environmental quality can affect the promotion of local government officials, which is more prominent in pilot low-carbon cities, and political promotion incentives significantly improve corporate carbon reduction performance. Furthermore, the highest emission reduction effects come in the fourth year after adopting a carbon reduction policy and are concentrated among the firms in the eastern region. Overall, our findings offer a new point view for a deeper understanding of the improvement of corporate carbon reduction performance, and provide microscopic evidence for the objective evaluation of the environmental effects of China's low-carbon city pilot policies. (shrink)

Much discourse on low-carbon transition envisages progressive social change towards environmentally sustainable and more equitable societies. Yet much of this literature pays inadequate attention to the key question of (productive, relational) power. How do energy infrastructures and socio-technical systems interact with, construct, enable and constrain political regimes, and vice versa? Conceiving low-carbon energy transitions through a power lens, the paper explores a case study of huge, but overlooked, significance: the paradox of the ‘phenomenal’ resurgence of coal in an (...) era of low-carbon innovation. Through exposition of the strong connections between coal-based socio-technical systems and a political regime of classical liberalism, illustrated in two eras, we trace an emerging constellation of energy and political regimes connecting ‘clean coal’ with a ‘liberalism 2.0’ centred on a rising China. This affords a critique of the low-carbon society emergent from these developments – a society more reminiscent of coal's previous Dickensian heyday than the progressive visions of much ‘low-carbon transition’ literature. (shrink)

Moral duties concerning climate change mitigation are – for good reasons – conventionally construed as duties of institutional agents, usually states. Yet, in both scholarly debate and political discourse, it has occasionally been argued that the moral duties lie not only with states and institutional agents, but also with individual citizens. This argument has been made with regard to mitigation efforts, especially those reducing greenhouse gases. This paper focuses on the question of whether individuals in industrialized countries have duties to (...) reduce their individual carbon footprint. To this end it will examine three kinds of arguments that have been brought forward against individuals having such duties: the view that individual emissions cause no harm; the view that individual mitigation efforts would have no morally significant effect; and the view that lifestyle changes would be overly-demanding. The paper shows how all three arguments fail to convince. While collective endeavours may be most efficient and effective in bringing about significant changes, there are still good reasons to contribute individually to reducing emission. After all, for most people the choice is between reducing one’s individual emissions and not doing anything. The author hopes this paper shows that one should not opt for the latter. (shrink)

The past years have witnessed a growing awareness of the role of institutions of knowledge production in reproducing the global climate crisis, from research funded by fossil fuel companies to the role of mainstream economics in fuelling the idea of growth. This essay argues that rethinking knowledge production for post-carbon futures requires engaging with the co-determination of modes of knowing and modes of governing. The ways in which knowledge production is embedded in networks of global capitalism shapes how we (...) (can) think about the future. The essay argues for an attentivity to the material and infrastructural sides of knowledge production, which will enable us to re-think transition to post-carbon futures in ways that recognize the deep structural, spatial and social inequalities underpinning knowledge production. (shrink)

In October 2010, the German conservative ruling coalition and Free Democratic Party ) passed a law permitting the extension of contracts for Germany’s seventeen nuclear power plants. This policy amended a law passed in 2001 by a Social Democratic Party and Green Party majority to phase out nuclear energy by the early 2020s. The explosions in the nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility, however, resulted in a decision to speed up the phaseout of nuclear energy. The nuclear (...) meltdowns in Japan sent hundreds of thousands of protesters onto the streets. Angry voters made their disillusionment with the nuclear politics of the conservative government coalition clear in local elections. The federal government responded by setting up an Ethics Commission for a Safe Energy Supply, which recommended an end to nuclear energy and a shift to a renewable energy-based economy. Within months of the Fukushima disaster, the government had permanently shut down eight of the country’s oldest nuclear power plants and issued a schedule for the phased shutdown of the remaining nine plants by 2022. In addition, the government reaffirmed its climate change plans, which call for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by around forty percent of 1990 levels by 2020 and eighty percent by 2050. Thus, out of a crisis, the German government is forging an opportunity to become a global leader in the promotion of new renewable energies, energy efficiency, and greenhouse gas emission reductions. In Japan, the nuclear crisis has also weakened support for nuclear energy, but with a strong industrial coalition calling for its continued use, both for energy stability and in response to climate change, a complete nuclear phaseout is less certain, at least in the short term. (shrink)

European Journal of Political Theory, Ahead of Print. How should responsibility be theorized in the context of the global climate crisis? This question is often framed through the language of distributive justice. Because of the inequitable distribution of historical emissions, climate vulnerability, and adaptation capacity, such considerations are necessary, but do not exhaust the question of responsibility. This article argues that climate change is a structural injustice demanding a theory of political responsibility. Agents bear responsibility not in virtue of their (...) individual causal contribution or capacity, but because they participate in and benefit from the carbon-intensive structures, practices, and institutions that constitute the global political and economic system. Agents take responsibility by engaging in collective political action to transform these structures that generate both climate hazards and unjust relationships of power. By incorporating distributive principles within a capacious conception of political responsibility, this framework advances the theory and practice of climate justice in two ways. First, adopting a relational rather than individualistic criterion of responsibility better makes sense of how and why individuals bear responsibility for a global and intergenerational injustice like climate change. Second, framing climate justice in terms of political responsibility for unjust structural processes better orients and motivates the political action necessary for structural transformation. (shrink)

Le défi climatique appelle une mutation sans précédents de nos sociétés. Au Nord comme au Sud, il faudra bouleverser les modes de vie, changer les habitudes en matière de logement, de transport et d'alimentation. Ces changements, qui n'auront de sens qu'à l'échelle planétaire, remettent en cause notre mode de développement. Comment parvenir à réduire notre consommation d'énergie et nos émissions de gaz à effet de serre tout en répondant aux besoins essentiels de chacun? Comment au Nord inventer une économie sans (...) carbone tout en préservant les grands équilibres sociaux et économiques? Comment au Sud sortir de la pauvreté sans compromettre par un surcroît d'émissions de CO2 le bien-être des générations futures? Il est impossible de surmonter de telles difficultés sans innovations en termes de politiques publiques. Ce livre dresse un état des lieux international des nouveaux instruments et politiques possibles, touchant tant la fiscalité, les normes, les investissements, que la justice sociale, qui pourraient rythmer nos vies au cours du xxiè siècle. (shrink)

From around the world, cities and regions, civil society networks and businesses, nongovernmental organizations and institutions for research and learning, and many others, are taking action on climate change. The role of these nonstate and substate actors is increasingly being recognized in the new facilitative climate regime. Political theory to date has been surprisingly silent about the scale and prospects of these actions for low-carbon, climate-resilient, and sustainable transformations. Idil Boran argues provocatively for the need for a widened scope (...) of vision, one that has a broader public life of climate action at its centre. While acknowledging the role of the state and the multilateral process, Boran maintains that social transformation is as deeply and more continuously influenced by the engagement of a wide range of actors below and above the state, whose actions are often locally anchored and inescapably interwoven across borders. Bringing concepts of the public sphere from political theory into contact with leading scholarship on transnational climate governance, Political Theory and Global Climate Action launches an exploration sensitive to changing patterns of practice, focused on diversity of actors, driven to explore historically contingent conditions of possibility, and responsive to questions of equity and justice in the context of transformations. The result is a repositioning of political thought on climate change, engaging political philosophers, scholars of politics and governance, and drivers of climate action worldwide at nonstate and substate levels interested in the social and political meaning of their engagement. (shrink)

Some ethical imperatives pertaining to climate change are mostly uncontroversial. Humanity has caused the problem and must do something to mitigate it and this job must to a large extent be carried by the current generations, as time is short. There is also wide agreement, at least among climate justice scholars, that the reason for why this is so is a combination of causal responsibility and ability to pay, and that the affluent therefore must lead the transition away of fossil (...) fuels. However, when it comes to implementing a just transition to a low-car- bon and sustainable future, most policies are ethically and politically contentious. (shrink)

In this paper, we are interested in the effects of institutional context on public attitudes towards climate policies, where institutions are defined as the conventions, norms and formally sanctioned rules of any given society. Building on a 2014 survey experiment, we conducted thirty qualitative interviews with car-owners in Oslo, Norway, to investigate the ways in which institutional context and political-value orientation affect public attitudes towards emissions policies. One context (presented as a text treatment) highlighted individual rationality, emphasising the ways in (...) which local pollution impacts the individual citizen; the other highlighted social rationality, emphasising the wider significance of carbon emissions and global responsibility for climate change. We analysed the effects of these contexts on attitudes, finding that institutional context influenced individuals' perspectives as well as their attitudes towards climate policies. Groups with different value orientations differed in terms of their evaluations but not their interpretations of these contexts. (shrink)

The scientific evidence is reviewed for claims that a global transition to “green” fuels and technologies by global treaty obligations is needed. The likely equity implications of these efforts are discussed, and it is argued that this evidence remains shaky. Measures based on this contested knowledge cannot be defended on grounds of either environmental effectiveness or equity. Rather, they rely on commercial expectations and promises of secondary benefits usually requiring state intervention. Poorer groups and nations are unlikely to benefit from (...) proposals to redirect energy policies to “combat global warming.” The advocated decarbonization of global energy supplies is more likely to increase political instability than prevent climatic change. To support this argument, three areas of knowledge are consulted: controversies about the causation and likely impacts of global warming, advocated technical and fiscal solutions, and the interests of technical, commercial, and political elites. (shrink)

This article engages the French pragmatism of Laurent Thévenot, Luc Boltanski and Bruno Latour in debates on how to forge a moral-political sociology of ecological valuation, justification and critique. Picking up the debate initiated by Thévenot on the possible emergence of a novel ‘green’ order of worth, the article juxtaposes the sociology of critical capacity of Boltanski and Thévenot with the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour. In doing so, the article suggests that each of these three pragmatic sociologists succeeds, in (...) characteristically different ways, in theoretically articulating an important but partial socio-political grammar of ecological worth. This claim is substantiated by invoking three case studies into environmental critique and compromise, on transnational carbon markets, urban sustainability projects, and Japanese whaling, respectively. Against this backdrop, the article concludes that – when read together as grammarians of the ecological bond – pragmatic sociology provides important insights into the bounded multiplicity of nature’s worth in political modernity. (shrink)

Tourism is one of the socio-economic trends that significantly contributes to the shift of the planetary system into the Anthropocene regime. At the same time, it is also a socio-cultural practice characteristic of the imperial mode of living, or consumerism. Thus, it is a form of commodification of nature, also a way of deepening social inequalities between a privileged minority of the global population and an exploited majority providing services to those whose socio-economic status allows them to travel for fun (...) and commoditised “experience”. This is not an inevitable activity, an activity in which environmental costs (carbon footprint, water footprint, energy consumption, and waste production) are necessary to ensure the basic resources of life. Tourism is therefore a form of luxury consumption. For any tourism model to be, not only, environmentally sustainable but also socially just, or at least acceptable, it would have to be accessible to all people. Ecotourism should also have to meet the criterion of a solidarity mode of living referred to as sufficiency. This is hardly conceivable in the climatic, demographic, and political regime of the Anthropocene. The latter is likely to be characterized by, among other things, mass migration of climate or environmental refugees on the one hand and climate apartheid of the states of the global North on the other. Ecotourism, accessible to an even smaller proportion of the world`s population than the current mass tourism, will thus be more likely to accentuate the social and environmental inequalities of which it is already a significant manifestation. Therefore, the question is whether the concept of ecotourism is not just another manifestation of greenwashing, i.e. an attempt to legitimize economic, social, and cultural activities that devastate the social and environmental environment. (shrink)

This article examines the centrality of Brazil within the future of climate policy and politics. The state of the carbon sink of the Amazon rainforest has long been an iconic marker of the condition of the Earth. Brazil has been innovative in developing many non-carbon forms of energy generation and use and it has played a major role in international debates on global warming since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. We examine various ways in which climate (...) change has come to be centrally important in Brazilian public opinion. Survey evidence shows that Brazilians are the most concerned about issues of climate change – with less climate change scepticism as compared with more ‘advanced’ societies. Through using techniques of corpus linguistics we examine how Brazilian media has engendered and stabilized such a high and striking level of climate change concern. We show that the media helped to fix a ‘climate change framing’ of recent often strange weather. The article analyses the newly constructed Brazilian Corpus on Climate Change, presenting data on a scale and reach that is unique in this area of research. (shrink)

A close analysis of contemporary and historical extraction of Caspian oil and its transportation, via pipeline and tanker, to central Europe, frames an investigation into interrelationships between the organization and conditioning of European societies and their fuel mobility systems. For the fuel used for contemporary mobility systems relies on the mobility systems of fuel. The article examines the governmental and capital structures that have driven oil consumption growth since the 1870s, enabled the powering of geopolitics and determined the spatiality of (...) carbonized sociotechnical systems. It unpacks the current forces that resist any shift away from this petroculture, any ‘powering down’ of society. (shrink)

This article takes stock of the project of ecological democracy, a project that has been central to debates in Environmental Values since the late 1990s. Whilst we can identify quite distinct articulations of eco-democratic thinking emerging out of the fields of green political theory, postcolonial/feminist political ecology and science studies/radical geography, it is argued that these discussions have reached something of an impasse of late following the rise of climate scepticism, authoritarian populisms and technocratic eco-modernisms. Resurgent eco-authoritarian impulses and the (...) hankering for a 'green leviathan', a climate Lenin or a 'dictatorship of the sustainment' to resolve our climate crisis make it more important than ever to affirm the need for just, rapid and democratic post-carbon transitions. The article goes on to outline how emerging discussions in radical design studies focused on redirective practice in conjunction with a revived eco-socialist focus on labour-focused political ecologies might open up different possibilities for a materialist re-grounding of ecodemocratic discussions. It is suggested that a political ecology of design embedded in public institutions, the workplace and civil society could possibleyreground a more substantive vision of ecological democracy but also allow us to think about the forms of creative labour that could drive the just transition. (shrink)

An urgent account of the state of our oceans today--and what we must do to protect them The ocean sustains life on our planet, from absorbing carbon to regulating temperatures, and, as we exhaust the resources to be found on land, it is becoming central to the global market. But today we are facing two urgent challenges at sea: massive environmental destruction and spiraling inequality in the ocean economy. Chris Armstrong reveals how existing governing institutions are failing to respond (...) to the most pressing problems of our time, arguing that we must do better. Armstrong examines these crises--from the fate of people whose lands will be submerged by sea level rise to the exploitation of people working in fishing to the rights of marine animals--and makes the case for a powerful World Ocean Authority capable of tackling them. A Blue New Deal presents a radical manifesto for putting equality, democracy, and sustainability at the heart of ocean politics. (shrink)

This dissertation extends John Rawls’s mature theory of justice out to address the environmental challenges that citizens of liberal democracies now face. Specifically, using Rawls’s framework of political liberalism, I piece together a theory of procedural justice to be applied to a constitutional democracy. I show how citizens of pluralistic democracies should apply this theory to environmental matters in a four stage contracting procedure. I argue that, if implemented, this extension to Rawls’s theory would secure background environmental justice. I explain (...) why the theory can be viewed as a partially specified political conception of environmental pragmatism, and how it relates to public environmental policy and discourse. While the framework is anthropocentric, it is one that reasonable non-anthropocentrists can endorse. Using this theory, I argue that liberal democracies must take measures to secure basic environmental rights for all presently existing and future citizens. Measures must also be in place to secure a minimum of social goods (including environmental goods) that guarantees that all citizens (present and future) can exercise their basic rights and liberties. Moreover, disparities in environmental goods should only be tolerated if they arise in accord with Rawls’s principle of fair equality of opportunity. I discuss carbon taxes, as well as carbon allocation trading schemes. I also argue that free democracies should employ precautionary reasoning when attempting to meet the demands of background environmental justice. (shrink)

In the midst of the current ecological crisis, there is often lofty talk of the need for humanity to ‘overcome its divisions’ and work together to tackle the big challenges of our time. But as this new book by Razmig Keucheyan shows, the real picture is very different. Just take the case of the siting of toxic waste landfills in the United States: if you want to know where waste is most likely to be dumped, ask yourself where Blacks, Hispanics, (...) Native Americans and other racial minorities live and where the poorest neighbourhoods are. This kind of ‘environmental racism’ is by no means restricted to the United States: it is very much a global phenomenon. Keucheyan show how the capitalist response to the crisis has been marked by a massive expansion in ‘environmental finance’. From ‘carbon markets’ to ‘pollution permits’, ‘climate derivatives’ and ‘catastrophe bonds’, we are seeing a proliferation of nature-related financial products. Instead of tackling the root of the problem, the neoliberal strategy seeks to profit from environmental risks. Moreover, with the rise in natural disasters, resource scarcity, food crises, the destabilization of the poles and oceans and the prospect of tens of millions of ‘climate refugees’, Western powers are increasingly adopting a military response to ecological problems. The Cold War is over: welcome to the ‘green wars’. From New Orleans to the Siachen glacier via the Arctic floes, Keucheyan explores the landmark sites of this new ‘climate geostrategy’. Through a sharp critique of the way capitalism responds to environmental disaster, this innovative book provides a fresh perspective on some of the most critical issues confronting our societies today. (shrink)

Both intertemporal and intratemporal equity are central to the examination of policy towards climate change. However, many discussions of intertemporal issues have been marred by serious analytical errors, particularly in applying standard approaches to discounting; the errors arise, in part, from paying insufficient attention to the magnitude of potential damages, and in part from overlooking problems with market information. Some of the philosophical concepts and principles of Paper 1 are applied to the analytics and ethics of pure-time discounting and infinite-horizon (...) models, providing helpful insights into orderings of welfare streams and obligations towards future generations. Such principles give little support for the idea of discrimination by date of birth. Intratemporal issues are central to problematic and slow-moving international discussions and are the second focus of this paper. A way forward is to cast the policy issues and analyses in a way that keeps equity issues central and embeds them in the challenge of fostering the dynamic transition to the low-carbon economy in both developed and developing countries. This avoids the trap of seeing issues primarily in terms of burden-sharing and zero-sum games – that leads to inaction and the most inequitable outcome of all. (shrink)

As a collective action problem, climate change is best tackled by coordination. Most moral philosophers therefore agree on our individual responsibility as political citizens to help establish such coordination. There is disagreement, however, on our individual responsibilities as consumers to reduce emissions before such coordination is established. In this article I argue that from a Kantian deontological perspective we have a perfect duty to refrain from activities that we would not perform if appropriate coordination were established. Moral autonomy means that (...) we do not need to wait for an external lawmaker to tell us what we ought to do. In practice, this means basing our decisions on a shadow price for carbon: if we would not go out for a drive on a sunny Sunday afternoon in a gas-guzzling sport utility vehicle if gas prices were twice as high, we should not do it now. Moreover, we have imperfect duties to reduce emissions by more than our perfect duties require. (shrink)