![]() First, and most likely, is what, referencing Thomas Hobbes, they call the “Climate Leviathan”: an ostensibly sustainable remake of capitalism, complete with global carbon markets, a “green” Keynesianism, and an international order steered by the World Bank and the United Nations. Sketching four archetypal futures, they give each a name designed to unnerve us out of our inaction. “Climate change,” they write, “poses political problems for which the current order has no answer.” Their purpose is to predict what might come next. Echoing the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who envisioned a state he called the “Leviathan” capable of withstanding the horrors of the English Civil War, Mann and Wainwright sketch futures that have yet to emerge. It is exactly what its subtitle promises: “a political theory of our planetary future,” at once speculative and wide-ranging. Unlike many books on climate politics, Climate Leviathan is neither apocalyptic nor prescriptive. The question is whether our political systems will change in time.Įnter Mann and Wainwright. The question is not whether business-as-usual politics will get us through the climate crisis (it won’t). If there is anything that the last 40 years has taught us, it is that our systems of governance - nation-states on the verge of supranationalism but with splintering fringe populism gaining ground - are ill-equipped for climate change. As for representatives from small island states at risk of losing their homelands to sea level rise, they made impassioned pleas that fell on deaf ears. In what may well be a strange new alliance of petro-states, the United States, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Russia moved to block critical language in the final “rulebook” for implementation of the Paris agreement. At a protest outside the conference, Polish marchers wore face masks and respirators.īut while the venue was novel, the politics was business-as-usual. Delegates coughed and covered their faces against the smell of coal dust and smog. ![]() Katowice, the capital of the Polish region of Silesia, is renowned for its carbon-dioxide-spewing coal production, which provides 80 percent of the country’s electricity. But when it comes to global climate politics, it impedes rather than facilitates - most famously by withdrawing from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and now, thanks to President Trump, withdrawing from the 2015 Paris Agreement as well.Īgainst this backdrop, delegates from around the world convened last December in Katowice, Poland, for the 24th United Nations Conference of the Parties on climate change, or COP24. With only five percent of the world’s population, the United States has produced 28 percent of the world’s cumulative greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, apart from the Green New Deal and the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, mainstream American politicians have largely ignored climate change, opting instead to battle over taxes, foreign wars, and immigration. In October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned in a special report that even 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming - a level we are likely to reach in the 2040s, barring unprecedented action in the next 12 years - will be catastrophic. Some commentators argue that climate change is intensifying the migrant crisis, which has pushed millions of refugees across borders, catalyzing xenophobia and a resurgent wave of nationalism in Europe and the United States. This summer, heat waves scorched Europe and wildfires devastated the American West. Coral reefs are acidifying, and small island states are drowning. ![]() The planet has warmed by approximately one degree Celsius since pre-industrial times, and temperatures and CO 2 levels continue to climb. ![]() As Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright note in their new book Climate Leviathan (2018), “There is, on one hand, the almost imperceptible background noise of rising seas and upward ticking of food prices, punctuated, on the other hand, by the occasional pounding of stochastic events.” Apocalyptic narratives, in other words, come thick and fast, and with them a sense of hopelessness, or - worse yet - apathy. THE DANGERS and impending impacts of climate change are now so well documented that they risk becoming journalistic and scientific tropes. ![]()
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