Climate Policy is Dead, Long Live Climate Politics!

Abstract

In this commentary, the author argues that the alleged failure of the Copenhagen climate summit in December 2009, and in particular the role played by the developing countries, should be embraced as a political accomplishment opening up a moment of political opportunity. Admittedly Copenhagen was a political failure, albeit of a populist consensual policy practice that invokes the semi-scientific threat of an apocalyptic doomsday scenario to make everybody toe the line of the neo-liberal market economy. Now that we are at the point where this consensual policy approach has imploded under its own weight, the time is right to revive the climate and, by extension, the environment as a matter of genuine political concern that is open to struggle and contestation, in this way constituting an essential component of social change.

Notes

Notes

1 This not to say that I qualify science and technology as inherently bad; it rather points towards the detrimental environmental and social impacts of the specific way science and technology are embedded in our neo-liberal order. In the following, I will therefore argue to put not science and technology as such in question, but rather the societal order in which they are embedded.

2 At this point, it suffices to say that I use the adjective ‘political’ to indicate all aspects of human existence that are related to the question of the good life, which I thus regard as the ultimate political question. With the noun ‘politics’, I refer to the process through which the political is dealt with. In the ensuing discussion, and relying on Mouffe (2005), I will try to convey an antagonistic image of the political as something that is constituted by contestation and dissensus and that is ultimately based in the idea that every objectification divides and separates.

3 One of Belgian's most prominent climate publicists, Peter Tom Jones, recently stated in one of Belgium's leading newspapers that ‘climate skepticism is a crime against humanity’ (De Standaard, 8 December 2009). Belgian climate scientist and IPCC Vice-President Jean-Pascal van Ypersele has repeatedly argued in the Belgian press that ‘we should think seriously about bringing them [climate skeptics] to court’ (e.g. De Morgen, 4 November 2006).

4 The actual dynamics of the Copenhagen negotiations are of course too complex to attribute its impasse solely to the unbending posture adopted by the developing countries. Also, the diversity in the group of countries that make up the official delegation speaking for developing countries (i.e. G77 + China) makes it impossible to univocally attribute them the ‘environmental justice’ concerns mentioned.