More On The Impact Of Economic Crisis On Climate Change
What impact will the global economic downturn have on arguments about climate change? The way to an answer lies through ourselves as much as the weather.
By Mike Hulme
Climate change is often described as the greatest environmental crisis faced by the world. So what is the significance of the unfolding global financial crisis for the "climate crisis"? Might it lead to a retreat from concern, a resurgent interventionism or a reflection on society's deeper dilemmas?
"Climate change" involves far more than a measured description of evolving trends in regional or global weather statistics or an uncomplicated account of the changing biogeochemical functions of the Earth system. How we talk about climate change - our discourse - is increasingly shaping our perception and interpretation of the changing physical realities that science is battling to reveal to us. At that same time, discourse is always embedded in evolving cultural, political and ethical movements and moods. Not only is our climate unstable, but how we talk about our climate is also unstable.
Understanding climate change - and the meaning we attach to the idea - is therefore always historically contingent. A sequence of four influential themes that have emerged over the last four decades illustrates the point. The idea of anthropogenic global climate change first became a possibility following the emergence of the 1960s environmental movement; the phenomenon became fully globalised during the triumph of economic globalism during the 1980s and 1990s; climate change then became part of new security discourses which emerged after 9/11; while following the Stern report on the economics of climate change in 2006, climate change has been viewed by some as merely a consequence of market failure.
The onset of the financial crisis and a gathering worldwide recession, signalled by the banking collapses and emergency bailouts of September-October 2008 - make it plausible to anticipate that this period too will generate its own characteristic frame of reference. So how will this latest manifestation of economic globalism change the way we think, talk and act about climate change? What may this new global turn eventually do to climate - both materially (by modifying the flows of carbon-dioxide through the planet) and culturally (by modifying the rhetoric and language of climate change)?
The three pointers
Climate change is a powerful symbol of the current zeitgeist. It is a hybrid phenomenon that reveals and is revealed by a number of important political, economic, intellectual and psychological dualisms: global-local, north-south, material-cultural, fear-hope, control-vulnerability. As we vacillate between these poles of thought and action, so too does our talk of climate change and with it our understanding of the phenomenon and what it means to us. Climate change becomes a continually mutating hybrid entity in which scientific narratives are unavoidably entangled with wider social discourses (see "Climate change: from issue to magnifier", 19 October 2008).
There are many directions in which this hybrid entity of climate change may evolve in the months and years ahead, in parallel with persisting economic problems and accompanying social dislocation. Just as the physical climate- system responds both to slow-changing natural rhythms and also to more rapid human-induced perturbations, so will those human artefacts we use to make sense of climate change - language, metaphors, policies, beliefs - respond both rapidly and slowly to the new financial and economic mood. I suggest these social responses may fall into one of three meta-categories:
* a retreat from concern about climate change
* a resurgent support for state policies on climate change
* a deeper reflection about the human drivers of climate change.
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