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April 05, 2005
A Taxonomy of Climate Politics
Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change
Dan Whipple's UPI column today has some kind words for Prometheus and a response to a post here a few weeks back that took issue with his use of the politically-loaded phrase "climate skeptic." The UPI column today goes over well trodden ground reviewing the surface-troposphere temperature record debate and the "hockey-stick" controversy. Rather than developing a political taxonomy of the climate debate focused on science, I thought that it might be worth focusing on the actual political and policy agendas at play. Please consider the list below as food for thought, experimental, subject to change and not definitive. We'd welcome your comments, additions and subtractions.
Climate realists The UPI column correctly places me in this camp. But Steve Rayner characterized this community best, "But, between Kyoto's supporters and those who scoff at the dangers of leaving greenhouse gas emissions unchecked, there has been a tiny minority of commentators and analysts convinced of the urgency of the problem while remaining profoundly sceptical of the proposed solution.....
Scientizers. This large and diverse group actively works to frame the climate issue as a scientific debate under the expectation that if you win the scientific debate then your political agenda will necessarily follow. This group is comprised mostly of scientists of one sort or another...
Energy Policy Free Riders... Senator Tim Wirth (D-CO) characterized this perspective in the late 1980s when he said, "We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy" (cited here, in PDF). For this group the current debate over climate change is really all about changing energy policies.
Free Market Free Riders....A recent column at Tech Central Station presented a strong version of this perspective, "[The Kyoto Protocol] is emblematic of the 'unorthodox' thinking in social sciences. It gave the world Marxism, Stalinism, planned economies and fascism in the past, and supports anti-trade movements, anarcho-socialism, dogmatic pacifism and multicultural relativism today."
International Relations Free Riders....In this group are those who see multilateralism as a solution to international conflicts (climate among them) and others who see it as part of them problem. The IR Free Riders includes the U.S. neoconservatives and their opponents. It also represents a cleavage of optinion between the Bush Administration's approach-to-date on climate and that generally favored by governments in Europe.
There is undoubtedly a larger set of "free riders" who have sought to hitch their own favored agendas (e.g., species preservation, Bush Administration bashing, etc. etc.) to the climate issue, but these seem to be the most significant.
Those who Suffer Climate Impacts. There is an extremely large group of people (and species, ecosystems, etc.) that actually experience the effects of climate in their everyday lives. Too often they are used as symbols (or as potential material witnesses in lawsuits) by one of the groups listed above without real concern for their plight. The hundred of millions of people who suffer the impacts of climate have a real political stake in climate policies and with a few notable exceptions (e.g., see the 2002 Dehli Declaration) have little voice in how climate policy is evolving. (See also this recent paper.)
