Climate change and political theory

After her major work on climate justice from a Rawlsian perspective a decade or so ago, and a dozen articles tackling political issues surrounding climate change, from human displacement to solar radiation management, Catriona McKinnon’s new full-length book is the most useful panoramic of the state of the art in the political theory of the climate crisis.

McKinnon’s resounding message is that there is still (little) time and hope is not (entirely) lost. As with most of her colleagues, McKinnon assigns the main responsibility for action – aggressive emissions reductions, extensive support for adaptation programs, and the scale-up of renewable energies to transition to a zero-carbon economy – in developed countries and a core group of corporations. Poor countries are practically left off the hook. Not only have they not caused the problem, nor benefited as much from it, but they must also continue to grow – in a carbon-based economy as it is – to satisfy their people’s basic needs. McKinnon argues that the inaction of responsible countries amounts to nothing less than killing future people (p. 96). If that is the case, the world’s poorest people find themselves in a self-defense scenario (p. 112). While degrowth obligations may eventually be required for rich and highly industrialized countries, they cannot be imposed onto the worst-off.

Besides the enlightening final chapter on the dangers of geoengineering, an area in which McKinnon is a leading figure, I found three distinctions throughout the book particularly explanatory for an overview for the non-specialist reader. First, the distinction between cost–benefit analysis and the precautionary approach as competing frameworks for the best climate policy. Although introductory texts are often neutral regarding the presented options, McKinnon criticizes utilitarian approaches for climate policymaking – such as that proposed by Cass Sunstein – as ‘sites of moral corruption’ (p. 73). She instead advocates for a precautionary approach as an ‘ethically adequate alternative’ for guiding climate action, not necessarily to specify one particular policy choice but to at least rule out some choices in scenarios of uncertainty (p. 77). Second, regarding who should bear the costs of climate action, McKinnon distinguishes between the polluter-pays, the beneficiary-pays, and the ability-to-pay approaches. While she does not side with any isolated theory, the author concludes that they will ‘largely converge to identify the same sets of agents: rich, more developed, early industrializing countries’ (p. 105). Third, McKinnon portrays environmental citizenship and ecological citizenship as rival political philosophies to deal with the climate political challenge. While the former points to the preservation of liberal rights and the state’s commitment to ethical neutrality in the face of a plurality of conceptions of the good, the latter may require the abandonment of some of these rights, as well as political neutrality, once we have identified worldviews that are detrimental to the environment, such as ‘consumerism, technophile, and colonial conceptions of the good’ (p. 129). McKinnon does not make explicit her preference, probably because the radical option, as much as it may capture her sympathies on a substantive level (she blames the ‘orgy of unrestrained consumption’ (p. 7) for the current environmental crisis), considerably reduces the list of ideological allies. It may also put some pressure on her early liberal political principles.

Here, to my mind, we find the elephant in the room: to what extent the actions necessary to successfully overcome the most catastrophic climate scenarios require the sort of coercive measures that challenge what we understand by liberal democracy? McKinnon rapidly dismisses ‘the deep skepticism about democratic solutions to ecological crises’ (p. 122), adding that most political theorists now acknowledge ‘that reformed … democratic politics has the power to make good on our climate failures: that by preserving the democratic legitimacy of political institutions we can turn around the climate crisis’ (p. 123). But support for this claim is missing: is it because democratic institutions guarantee the free flow of information, contestation, and accountability? Or is it because they allow and encourage the involvement of civil society, such as NGOs? Or perhaps it is because citizens are better at grasping climate science? What to do with the evidence that shows that democracies with high levels of corruption are incapable to reach climate targets and reduce CO₂ emissions? Although talk about green leviathans and eco-authoritarianism is highly controversial, it is not clear if we discard them as a matter of normative principle or are otherwise persuaded that liberal democracies deliver better empirical outcomes. The latter, though, runs contrary to the intuition that few people are voluntarily willing to forgo their lifestyles, to the extent that these lifestyles usually stand for identity and status. Indeed, McKinnon reiterates that human beings have a stubborn presentist bias, and such bias hinders decisive climate action. Arguably, the electoral dimension of liberal democracy is crucially presentist. Campaign exhortations urging sacrifice for the welfare of future generations are hardly profitable. Populists worldwide have exploited this feature. They win votes by downplaying the climate emergency, thus calming the anxiety of those who see their accomplishments threatened. More should be said to defend democracy’s ability to handle climate change.

Finally, McKinnon seems to adhere to the claim that the fossil fuel industry and big economic interests are behind climate denial. However, other forces might also be at work, which are epistemic rather than moral. As recent literature in cultural cognition shows, most people shape their factual views on politically controversial issues based on their preexistent values and beliefs. Libertarians and citizens of a populist mindset may be driven to distrust any proposition coming from political, cultural, or scientific elites. Closing the debate on climate denial by attributing its fueling to evil forces may lose sight of other epistemological complexities that obstruct a political consensus able to mirror the scientific one.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo [#11200056].