CLIMATE CHANGE AND NEOLIBERALISM

Among progressive environmentalists there is a growing chorus of catastrophism. Ominously, this penchant for labelling climate change a natural catastrophe is becoming equally plausible among the chief agents of neoliberal governance. This is not a confluence opponents of neoliberalism should welcome. Instead, it tends to block out the alternative political vistas potentially opened up by efforts to undo the root causes of climate change. Rendering climate change a natural catastrophe serves to remove it from the social sphere properly speaking and present it as a merely empirical state of affairs, a fact of nature. But climate change is symptomatic of a social-political condition, not an independently existing condition of the natural world.

While it is hard not to get caught up in the urgency to act in the face of climate change, there are many good reasons to resist the condition of panic that is being induced. Chief among these is the readiness with which this urgency of action feeds into the security rhetoric of the neoliberal state. Clearly, the prospect of catastrophic climate change is not bringing about a crisis of the current configuration of the nation state. On the contrary, the scientific and technical complexity of climate change is serving as a pretext to undermine further the democratic accountability of state action. As will be discussed in this first chapter, there are real indications that policy across powerful neoliberal states is converging towards a position that might be labelled a ‘war on climate change’. Attention paid to politically organised climate change denial has tended to keep this reality out of the media spotlight.

If the war on terror was in part a struggle for access to oil, a much larger front will need to be opened up to fight for all the goods needed to maintain western consumer lifestyles given the context of accelerating climate change. This will crucially involve access to agricultural goods, including irrigation, chemical inputs, and food commodity distribution networks.