2 - Nature's ends
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 April 2017
Summary
CLIMATE CHANGE AS NATURAL CATASTROPHE
The previous chapter established the central contention that climate change is a symptom of neoliberal governance. This chapter advances the further claim that the tendency to present climate change as an impending natural catastrophe is likely to blunt efforts to undermine neoliberal governance. Catastrophic portrayal of climate change has become so common that questioning its legitimacy requires a deliberate effort of mind. It is important to be explicit about the fact that my critique of climate change catastrophism has nothing in common with climate change scepticism, an attitude adopted by many on the right. I see no reason to call into question the basic findings of the IPCC and the credibility of the future climate scenarios it predicts. Rather, my immediate concern is with those on the political left who feel that rendering climate change a matter of imminent ecological collapse is the best way to galvanise efforts to mitigate or reverse it. An example of this approach is offered by Naomi Klein (2014) in her recent book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. In the introduction Klein sets out her basic position:
Climate change has never received the crisis treatment from our leaders, despite the fact that it carries the risk of destroying lives on a vastly greater scale than collapsed banks or collapsed buildings. The cuts to our greenhouse emissions that scientists tell us are necessary in order to greatly reduce the risk of catastrophe are treated as nothing more than gentle suggestions, actions that can be put off pretty much indefinitely. Clearly, what gets declared a crisis is an expression of power and priorities as much as hard facts. But we need not be spectators in all this: politicians aren't the only ones with the power to declare a crisis. Mass movements of regular people can declare one too. (Klein 2014: 6)
Calling for a conversion of climate change into what she calls ‘a people's shock’ refers us back to Klein's (2007) earlier book, The Shock Doctrine, which exposed the way neoliberal capitalism has established itself over the last four decades by taking advantage of periodic economic and social crises.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Natural CatastropheClimate Change and Neoliberal Governance, pp. 52 - 88Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016