politica vitales, naturaleza y estado en giddens.pdf

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Life politics, nature and the state: Giddenssociological theory and The Politics of ClimateChange1

Charles Thorpe and Brynna Jacobson

Abstract

Anthony Giddens The Politics of Climate Change represents a significant shift in

the way in which he addresses ecological politics. In this book, he rejects the

relevance of environmentalism and demarcates climate-change policy from life

politics. Giddens addresses climate change in the technocratic mode of simple

rather than reflexive modernization. However, Giddens earlier sociological

theory provides the basis for a more reflexive understanding of climate change.

Climate change instantiates how, in high modernity, the existential contradiction of

the human relationship with nature returns in new form, expressed in life politicsand entangled with the structural contradictions of the capitalist state. The inter-

linking of existential and structural contradiction is manifested in the tension

between life politics and the capitalist nation-state. This tension is key for under-

standing the failures so far of policy responses to climate change.

Keywords: Climate change; Giddens; life politics; environmentalism; risk;

ontological insecurity

A distinctive aspect of Anthony Giddens sociological theory has been hisemphasis on the challenge posed to modern societies by ecological issues

and by environmentalist movements as an expression of what he calls life

politics, raising questions of lifestyle or how we should live (Giddens 1990:

165; Giddens 1991: 9, 2146, 2213; Giddens 1994: 14; OBrien 1999: 278).

His 2009 book, The Politics of Climate Change [hereafter Politics] follows

from this ecological dimension of his sociological thought. However, Politics

represents a shift in the way in which Giddens handles ecological politics. In

this book, he rejects the relevance of environmentalism and adopts a nar-

rowly instrumental approach focused on market-oriented policies, bracketing

the questions of values and lifestyles raised by environmentalism and other

Thorpe and Jacobson (Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego) (Corresponding authors email: cthorpe@

ucsd.edu)

London School of Economics and Political Science 2013 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online.

Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,

MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/1468-4446.12008

The British Journal of Sociology 2013 Volume 64 Issue 1


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life-political movements. This shift, we argue, represents a retreat from the

reflexivity of high modernity that Giddens theorized in his earlier work.

Rather, the approach to climate change in Politics reflects the characteristic

orientation of simple modernization (Giddens 1994: 5, 42, 807): an instru-

mental approach to nature, faith in technological progress and abstract

systems of expertise, and the exclusion of ambivalence and uncertainty. This

instrumental and technocratic approach might seem justified by the urgency

of tackling climate change, but we argue that Giddens policy prescriptions

are too narrow and limited, and that the politics of climate change must meet

the deeper challenges of reflexivity and the existential and value-questions

raised by environmentalism.

The recent shift in Giddens handling of environmental issues also serves to

highlight the fundamental tension between life politics and the key institutionsof modernity the nation-state and systematic capitalist production (Giddens

1990: 174). The problem of whether life politics can be reconciled with these

institutions is central to Giddens work, but is not adequately resolved. This

tension is expressed in his notion of utopian realism (Giddens 1990: 1545;

1994: 24950). The utopian dimensions of his thought came to the fore when

he presented life-political movements as potential heralds of a post-modern

order that would involve post-scarcity economics, democratization, and an

ecological ethos (Giddens 1990: 16373). But this was tied to his notion of

realism, expressed in his view that we remain within modernity an intensi-

fied high modernity (Giddens 1990: 1556; 1991: 4, 2732). Giddens has

treated realism as demanding acceptance of institutions such as the global

market which operate in ways that can run counter to life-political values.

Giddens Third Way was not only about moving beyond modern politics split

between left and right; it was also an attempt to reconcile life politics with

modern institutions of the state and capitalist production and exchange.While

left-wing critics of the Third Way have emphasized its accommodation with

global capitalism (e.g. Callinicos 2001), life politics potentially destabilizessuch accommodation.

The inherent tension in Giddens utopian realism can be understood in

relation to his central metaphor of modernity as a juggernaut (Loyal 2003:

152). The image, in The Consequences of Modernity, implies relentless dyna-

mism and inertia, especially associated with capitalist growth and technologi-

cal development, suggesting that these processes cannot be held back: The

juggernaut crushes those who resist it. Instead, one must ride the juggernaut

(Giddens 1990: 139, 146). However, Giddens also suggested that we shouldseek to assert collective agency over technological momentum, implying

that the juggernaut could be steer[ed] toward alternative futures (1990: 154;

see also Craib 2011 [1992] : 77). Giddens embraced life politics as a corrective

to productivism, or accumulation for its own sake, and to the compulsive

character of modernity, manifested in capitalist accumulation, bureaucratic

100 Charles Thorpe and Brynna Jacobson

London School of Economics and Political Science 2013 British Journal of Sociology 64(1)


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organizations, and technological systems (1994: 1689, 195; 1994b: 90). Unless

such a challenge is mounted, these forms of bureaucratic and technological

inertia have apocalyptic implications, either in nuclear war or an ecological

catastrophe [. . .] as disturbing in its implications (Giddens 1990: 173).

Politics is about how to assert agency in the face of possible disaster and

it emphasizes the need for a rapid shift in technological priorities. However,

in contrast to Giddens earlier thought, here he presents the locus of agency

as being political, technoscientific and business elites rather than social

movements. He gives little attention to democratic participation and rejects

the idea of a grassroots shift toward more ecologically sustainable lifestyles.

Ethical questions of how we should live are shut down in favour of pragmatic

top-down policy solutions. As he addresses climate change, Giddens detaches

questions of risk from the existential dilemmas stressed in his earlier work.Focusing on pragmatic policy fixes, Giddens fails to draw deeply on his earlier

analyses of the contradictions of the capitalist state, ontological insecurity,

reflexivity, and the rise of life politics. But these analyses and concepts provide

key insights for understanding the depth of the challenge that climate change

poses for modern institutions.

Drawing on Giddens earlier thought, we argue that the problem of climate

change exposes fundamental contradictions in the relationship between the

state and capital, which have been exacerbated by globalization processes. It

also uncovers the basic existential contradiction of the human relationship

with nature that Giddens argued has been repressed in modernity. In climate

change, these different forms of contradiction are overlaid on one another,

compounding the complexity and intractability of the problem. Risks of

climate change need to be understood sociologically in relation to the radical

ontological insecurity that arises from the way in which the existential con-

tradiction has returned in a new form. Since climate change is not only a

problem of risk, but also poses an existential dilemma, it cannot be merely

managed at a technical and pragmatic policy level. The reflexive ethical ori-entation of life politics is essential if society is to cope with the challenge of

climate change.

Nature, the existential contradiction, and modernity

The human relationship with nature is central to Giddens historical sociology.

In this relationship, Giddens identified the fundamental contradiction thatexists in all types of society. Human beings emerge from and exist within the

world of Being, the world of nature. And yet, the human individual is also a

conscious, reflective agent and in that sense transcends nature as the negation

of the inorganic (Giddens 1981: 2367). This existential contradiction is medi-

ated by society, since it is in society that the human being acquires a second

Life politics, nature and the state 101

London School of Economics and Political Science 2013British Journal of Sociology 64(1)


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nature of culture, language, and social practice (Giddens 1981: 236; 1979: 161).

The reproduction of social relationships sustains the accommodations

between human beings and nature and the modes of control to which nature

is made subject (Giddens 1979: 161). In this way, the existential contradiction

acquires a social character as it is externalized in institutions and thus

becomes translated into structural contradiction (Giddens 1979: 161).

Giddens traced how state power has drawn on symbolic and religious

resources that express attempts to handle the existential contradiction

(Giddens 1981: 237). In pre-capitalist class-divided societies the states media-

tion of existential contradiction underpins its mobilization of authoritative

resources (Giddens 1981: 96, 100, 1456). When existential contradiction is

institutionalized in the state, it is transformed into structural contradiction so

that the state is the focus of the contradictory character of human societalorganisation (Giddens 1981: 237). With the development of the capitalist

nation-state, however, structural contradictions lose their manifest relation-

ship with existential contradiction. Capitalism severs contradiction from its

foundation in existential contradiction. Or rather, existential contradiction is

suppressed by structural contradiction, in which the state/society relation

becomes detached from the intermingling of human social life and nature

(Giddens 1981: 238).

The fundamental contradiction of the capitalist state is the division between

the political and the economic as separate spheres, arising from the capitalist

labour contract (Giddens 1981: 128). The economic sphere is insulated from

the force wielded by the state, but this separation means that the state relies for

its revenue on private accumulation outside its direct control (Giddens 1981:

17781, 20914, 229). Extraction of surplus is achieved through capitalists

surveillance and management of the labour process (Giddens 1981: 13540).

Class relations within the labour process (1981: 2201) are interlaced with

technical control of the natural world: an exploitative attitude to nature [. . .] is

associated with social exploitation, directly geared into it (Giddens 1979: 163,emphasis in original). According to Giddens, The instrumental relation to

nature that is promoted by the rise of capitalism, fuelled by the accumulation

process, becomes one side of the faultline of the contradictory character of the

capitalist state (1981: 238).

The instrumental relationship with nature that characterizes capitalist pro-

duction also conditions quotidian life. Giddens argued that de-traditionalized

and routinized everyday life is a specific feature of capitalist modernity. Eve-

ryday life is shaped by the intersection of internal pacification by the state, thedull compulsion of market forces, and the reach of capitalist production in

creating manufactured urban environments which are experienced as being

removed from nature (Giddens 1981: 1534). Modern everyday life is thus

smoothed of the disruptions of nature, resulting in routinized predictability

(Giddens 1981: 173; Giddens 1991: 1356, 1649; see also Shove 2003: 13940,




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1612). However, this routinization combines with a heightened sense of fra-

gility of the individual in their daily life (Giddens 1981: 11, 194; 1991: 167). The

rise of capitalism undermines pre-existing sources of ontological security,

meaning the ability to take for granted ones experienced reality and the

continuity of the present with established patterns and institutions (Giddens

1981: 11, 152; 1991: 534). Modernity erodes the traditional narratives and

practices that provided ways of handling the dilemmas that arise from the

existential contradiction (Giddens 1981: 154). There is a deep sense of mean-

inglessness in the wasteland of everyday life (Giddens 1981: 13).

As a source of security, modernity substitutes for tradition the instrumental

control of nature. Security comes to depend on trust in abstract systems of

technology and scientific expertise (Giddens 1990: 923, 1123; Giddens 1994:

80). The influence of these systems within everyday life, combined with thedull compulsion of economic forces, has the effect of suppressing existential

anxieties. Giddens commented on just how far modern civilization has come

to rely on the expansion of control, and on economic progress as a means of

repressing basic existential dilemmas of life (Giddens 1994: 212).

The suppression of existential dilemmas is an aspect of the way in which

capitalist modernity subjects human life to automatic forces, as implied by the

metaphor of the juggernaut. Automatism can be seen in the dull compulsion

of the market and in the unquestioned pursuit of economic growth (Giddens

1981: 11, 124). Giddens argues that under capitalism, economic relations

become peculiarly significant [. . .] as a medium of power (Giddens 1981: 111,

emphasis in original; see also 7, 104, 1068, 112). Within capitalism, the power

of the dominant class derives fundamentally from its control of allocative

resources (Giddens 1981: 210). As social power depends increasingly on

allocative control, economic forces become the crucial levers of societal trans-

formation (Giddens 1981: 104, 244). It is a distinctive feature of capitalism that

economic growth becomes an imperative built into the social system. Giddens

writes that capitalist society is associated with a chronic impetus to techno-logical innovation and economic growth unparalleled in previous history

(Giddens 1981: 1212; see also 214).

However, this chronic impetus also makes modernity prone to crisis.

Giddens writes that Understanding the juggernaut-like nature of modernity

goes a long way towards explaining why, in conditions of high modernity, crisis

becomes normalised (1991: 184). The domination of nature, manifested in

advancing technology, produces new threats, especially in the form of more

devastating weapons. The threat of nuclear war has been a key theme inGiddens work (esp. Giddens 1985). At the end ofA Contemporary Critique of

Historical Materialism, Giddens noted that the whole of humanity now lies in

the shadow of possible destruction. This unique conjunction of the banal and

the apocalyptic, this is the world that capitalism has fashioned (1981: 252). In

subsequent work, Giddens increasingly dealt with risks of ecological disaster




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as an aspect of modernitys apocalyptic potential. In Beyond Left and Right,

he argued that An ever-expanding capitalism runs up not only against envi-

ronmental limits in terms of the earths resources, but against the limits of

modernity (Giddens 1994: 10). Modern everyday life is evacuated of moral

meaning and yet modernity unleashes technological forces that inspire dread.

Such threats are rationalized within the abstract systems of modern science,

such as formal risk assessment in which Apocalypse has become banal

(Giddens 1991: 183). But Giddens suggested that these threats could not be

contained within the parameters of instrumental or technical reason. Moder-

nitys suppression of existential dilemmas reaches its limit.

A key aspect of the reflexivity of high modernity is the re-emergence of

existential problems suppressed by simple modernity. Giddens wrote that

New forms of social movement mark an attempt at a collective reappropria-tion of institutionally repressed areas of life (1991: 207, see also Dickens 1999:

101). He discussed ecological politics in this context. In Beyond Left and Right,

he suggested:

The ecological crisis [. . .] and the various philosophies and movements

which have arisen in response to it, are expressions of a modernity which

[. . .] comes up against its own limits.The practical and ethical considerations

thus disclosed [. . .] express moral and existential dilemmas which modern

institutions, with their driving expansionism and their impetus to control,have effectively repressed or sequestered. (Giddens 1994: 11)

The opening up of the moral and existential question of how we should live

is the defining feature of life politics (Giddens 1994: 90). The aspects of life

hidden by modernity push back as ethical questions which have to be justi-

fied, leading to the emergence of new political agendas (Giddens 1994a: 10).

Ecological movements link concerns of everyday life (e.g. consumerism and

waste) with challenges to systemic features of capitalism and modernity, ques-

tioning especially the value of economic growth and the control of nature(Giddens 1991: 208). In this way ecological issues are a signal, as well as an

expression, of the centrality of life-political problems. They pose with particu-

lar force the questions we must face [. . .] when there are ethical dilemmas that

mechanisms of constant economic growth either cause us to put to one side or

make us repress (Giddens 1994: 92). Giddens thereby presented life-political

movements, including ecology, as carriers of the reflexivity of high modernity

(cf. McKechnie and Welsh 2002).

The emergence of ecological politics demonstrates that modernity is nolonger able to bracket the existential contradiction rooted in human beings

relationship to nature. A key dimension of the reflexivity of high modernity is

that we can no longer treat the problem of nature as progressively solved

through instrumental control. Instead, how we, as conscious agents, relate

to nature becomes again a problem of morality and meaning as well as of




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scientific understanding. In Beyond Left and Right, Giddens wrote, The ques-

tion of how shall we live? is raised by any attempt to decide what to preserve

of nature or of the past (1994: 212).

However, the problem of nature returns in a new form in high modernity.

Giddens has emphasized that, under conditions of modernity, nature is radi-

cally transformed by human activity. In the sense of being a physical environ-

ment independent of human action, nature has all but dissolved; the problems

of environmental degradation which perturb us today come from the trans-

formation of the natural into the social and cultural (Giddens 1994: 47). The

environmental problems of high modernity are problems of the created envi-

ronment and of a plastic nature moulded by human action (Giddens 1990: 60,

127; 1994: 102).

This transformation of nature introduces a new kind of ontologicalinsecurity. While modern science and technology allowed greater control over

natural hazards such as disease, flood, and pests, new kinds of unpredictability

emerge in high modernity. In Modernity and Self-Identity, Giddens pointed to

global warming as an example of this new unpredictability arising not from

brute nature but from the unintended consequences of industrial society. We

today face high-consequence risks [. . .] about which precise risk assessment is

virtually impossible (Giddens 1991: 137; cf. Beck 1995, 2009). We are less

assured of the ability to control nature through science and technology, and

unpredictability now arises from our very transformations of the natural

world. These transformations, in turn, diminish our ability to treat nature

as a source of ontological security. Giddens quoted environmentalist Bill

McKibbens lament that the new transformed nature offers none of the con-

solations of the retreat from the human world, a sense of permanence, or even

of eternity (McKibben quoted in Giddens 1991: 137). The murkiness of the

boundaries between the human and the natural is a key dimension of the

radical ontological insecurity of high modernity.

Giddens has criticized what he perceives as the fundamentalist tendency inenvironmentalism to retreat from this insecurity toward a romantic conception

of natural harmony (1994: 11, 48). He argued that nature cannot any longer be

defended in the natural way. Instead, a contemporary environmentalism must

recognize that nature is no longer separate from human action (Giddens 1994:

2056).The point, as Giddens put it in The Nation-State and Violence, should be

not so much to rescue nature as to explore possibilities of changing human

relationships themselves (1985: 341).

Despite his criticisms of environmentalism, Giddens also argued for thepositive potential of the reflexivity that emerges from the environmentalist

challenge to modernity. When environmentalists highlight problems of risk

and deep ecologists lament lost natural harmonies, they experience these

aspects of modernity as failures, and so questions of the modern relationship

with nature return first of all under a negative sign . But Giddens suggested




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that each, when viewed positively, discloses moral considerations relevant to

the question how shall we live? in a world of lost traditions and socialized

nature. While pollution and environmental degradation represent modernity

under a negative sign, the positive potential of high modernity is for renewed

protection of the non-human world (Giddens 1994: 207). Giddens critique of

what he saw as backward-looking tendencies in environmentalism was there-

fore combined with his determination to pursue the positive ways in which

environmentalism opens up the question of the human relationship with the

non-human world, bringing back questions of meaning and morality, and

calling for the assertion of conscious agency over and against the automatism

of modernitys juggernaut.

Life politics and the Third Way

Giddens social and political theorizing has been influenced by environmen-

talists call for a new value-orientation. Giddens suggested that one reason

why existing Marxist and socialist thought needed to be revised is that this

tradition has incorporated a Promethean approach to nature (1981: 60;

Giddens 1994: 53; cf. Foster 1999: 372). The traditional left has remained

mired in the productivism of simple modernity (Giddens 1994: 1756). A new

approach is required for what Giddens has called the potential emergence of

a post-scarcity order, defined as a condition in which economic growth can no

longer be regarded as necessarily good, but must be evaluated ethically in

terms of its effect on the quality of life (Giddens 1990: 1657; Giddens 1994:

163). Giddens emphasized that scarcity is relative to socially defined needs

and to the demands of specific life-styles. Therefore, moving toward a post-

scarcity condition has less to do with reaching an absolute level of material

abundance and more to do with alterations in modes of social life (Giddens

1990: 166). The re-evaluation of our wants and needs called for by life politicsis an important part of this. Life politics points us [. . .] beyond circumstances

in which economic criteria define the life circumstances of human beings

(Giddens 1990: 165). This shift would involve a new ethical orientation toward

nature. Giddens conjectured that An overall system of planetary care might be

created, which would have as its aim the preservation of the ecological well-

being of the world as a whole (1990: 170).

Giddens theoretical work in the 1990s drew inspiration from the ways in

which life politics called modernitys economic compulsiveness into question.Life politics could be expressed in lifestyle decisions that limit, or actively go

against, maximizing economic returns (Giddens 1994: 102, emphasis in

original). Giddens endorsed the need for change within everyday life. He

wrote that A clear part of increased ecological concern is the recognition that

reversing the degradation of the environment depends upon adopting new




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lifestyle patterns. He suggested that Widespread changes in lifestyle, coupled

with a de-emphasis on continual economic accumulation, will almost certainly

be necessary if the ecological risks we now face are to be minimised (Giddens

1991: 2212). A post-scarcity condition also demands the humanising of

technology so as to introduce moral issues into the now largely instrumen-

tal relation between human beings and the created environment (Giddens

1990: 170). Against standard discourses of modernization that assume a

single path of development targeted toward a high-production and high-

consumption economic model, Giddens advocated alternative development

taking into account non-material values as sources of happiness and self-

respect (1994: 1638). The global cosmopolitanism emerging from reflexive

modernization includes an attitude of respect towards non-human agencies

and beings (Giddens 1994: 253).While Giddens criticized the way in which the value of economic growth has

been taken for granted, he held back from asserting that post-scarcity order

would mean an end to growth. Growth would be no longer of overriding

importance (1994: 101). But a post-scarcity economy is not necessarily a

no-growth economy (Giddens 1994: 178). He suggested that industrial pro-

duction and the market could be deprived of their compulsive character and

shaped by values expressed in life-political movements (Giddens 1990: 165).

Giddens presented his utopian realism as shaping, but not operating

against structural trajectories of the capitalist economy and the global market.

Utopian realist politics seeks to realize life-political values, but in a way that

corresponds to observable trends (Giddens 1994: 101). This problem of

meshing life-political value-considerations with realism concerning what are

taken to be objective economic and social trends remains the fundamental

tension in Giddens Third Way project (Finlayson 2003: 12531). Giddens

Third Way attempts to reconcile life politics both with the global market and

the political structures of the nation-state. This attempt, however, necessarily

collides with the structural contradictions of the capitalist state, contradictionsthat intensify under conditions of economic globalization. These contradic-

tions have crucial implications for whether ecological issues can be adequately

addressed within the framework of the Third Way.

Giddens emphasized the nation-state as the crucible of power in modern

societies (1981: 147, 189). But the capitalist nation-state is also dependent on

processes of the accumulation of private capital that are outside its control.

The contradictory position of the state in relation to capital is also a contra-

diction between private appropriation and socialised production .Although capital is under private ownership, the unified or socialised

character of capitalism produces much higher levels of societal integration

(Giddens 1981: 238). Giddens observed that The capitalist state maintains a

monopoly of political and military power within its own bounds, but the world

system which it initiates is fundamentally influenced by capitalistic processes




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operating on a world scale (1981: 197). Increasing global social integration,

driven by capitalism as a world system, is not matched at the political level,

where power remains strongly tied to the nation-state (Giddens 1981: 202). So

the contradictory relationship between the state and private accumulation

becomes exacerbated as private capital is increasingly mobile on a global scale

(Latham 2001: 31). Giddens writing on globalization can be understood as

implying that the structural contradictions of the capitalist state increasingly

take spatio-temporal form.

In The Third Way, Giddens argued that globalization pulls away from the

nation-state, especially weakening the states capacity for economic interven-

tion (1998: 31; Loyal 2003: 155). At the same time, globalization pushes down

below the level of the nation-state (Giddens 1998: 31). Giddens argued that

globalization acts as a spur for de-traditionalization, individualization, andintensified social reflexivity (1994: 42, see also 801, 1101).Together, globali-

zation and life politics call into question routinized domains of everyday life

and produce pressures for grassroots democratization as a means for express-

ing the heightened reflexivity of local and global life today (Giddens 1994:

120). Globalization does not overturn the position of the nation-state as a

crucible of power, but it does mean that the nation-state now stands in a

contradictory relationship with social integration globally and increasing

pressure for democratization locally.

These contradictions impact the legitimacy of the nation-state since liberal

democracy, based on an electoral party system, operating at the level of the

nation-state, is not well equipped to meet the demands of a reflexive citizenry

(Giddens 1994: 10). In The Third Way, Giddens called for a democratizing of

democracy (1998: 77) in order to develop political forms that could overcome

the contradictory relationship between the nation-state and globalization.

Life politics and individualization require that authority [. . .] be recast on an

active or participatory basis (Giddens 1998: 66). Giddens asserted that these

new conditions required a double democratization: upward in the sense ofextending democracy to the level of supra-national institutions and downward

in the sense of new forms of grassroots participation (1998: 717, 1467,

quoting 72).

As it pulls away and pushes down, globalization opens up a spatio-temporal

dimension in the structural contradictions of the capitalist state. These struc-

tural contradictions come to be combined with existential contradiction as the

states ability to repress existential dilemmas is weakened under conditions of

reflexive modernization. Renewed value-questions of how we should livecannot be handled by modernitys technocracies, bureaucracies and repre-

sentative politics, and require new forms of dialogic democracy. Giddens

argued in The Third Way that Experts cannot be relied upon [. . .] to know

what is good for us and therefore that Characterizing risk [. . .] cannot just be

left to experts (Giddens 1998: 59, 76).




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Globalization creates pressures for grassroots democratization and awakens

life-political concerns. But the demands of life-political movements such as

environmentalism often conflict with the more economistic interests of the

capitalist nation-state, with its dependency on private accumulation within a

global market.This opens up the tension in Giddens utopian realism, begging

the question of how to reconcile life-political values with economic and power-

political interests. In his Fabian pamphlet, extracted in Giddens The Global

Third Way Debate, Fabian Society director Michael Jacobs suggested that the

key problem with environmentalism is that it is Driven by its values rather

than by analysis of the world as it is (2001: 317; Jacobs 1999). Too frequently,

environmentalists make utopian proposals that seem to ignore the trends of

the modern world (Jacobs 2001: 318). A Third Way approach to ecological

problems would aim at environmental modernisation, leveraging theknowledge-economy to solve ecological problems through technological inno-

vation (Jacobs 2001: 32932, quoting 329). Bill Jordan has argued that Jacobs

essay exemplifies the way in which Third Way thinkers and politicians have

tried to reconcile ecological concerns with acceptance of the global market:

the Green agenda was dismissed as backward-looking and unsuited to a

globalised world, which required ecological policies to be integrated into an

advanced technological response to all the challenges of an integrated world

economy (Jordan 2010: 71).

Jacobs essay prefigures the approach that Giddens adopts in his climate

change book. In line with his conception of the nation-state as modernitys

crucible of power, Giddens emphasizes that climate change must be analysed

in relation to the power-political interests of nation-states, and that viable

solutions to climate change will be those that nation-states can recognize as

being in their interests. Solutions, he argues, will depend a great deal upon

governmentand the state (Giddens 2009: 91 emphasis in original). Following

from his insistence that Third way politics should take a positive attitude

towards globalization (Giddens 1998: 64), Giddens also attempts to develop apolitics of climate change compatible with the global market. He does so,

however, by largely abandoning his earlier engagement with life politics and by

denying the relevance of environmentalism as a value-perspective. This indi-

cates a breakdown of the attempt to reconcile life politics with the nation-state

and global capitalism within a Third Way framework. Giddens abandons the

utopian dimensions of his thought in favour of a power-political realist

approach to climate change.

Giddenss paradox and life politics

Giddens rejection of the relevance of life politics for addressing climate

change derives justification from what he calls Giddenss paradox: since the




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dangers posed by global warming arent tangible [. . .] many will sit on their

hands and do nothing [. . .] about them. Yet waiting until they become visible

and acute [. . .] will, by definition, be too late (2009: 2). This is both a problem

of free-riding and of individuals discounting future harms in favour of imme-

diate benefits (Giddens 2009: 23, 1012). Despite awareness of climate

change, people are generally not spurred to take individual action to mitigate

their own contribution to the problem. People drive Sport Utility Vehicles

even in the knowledge that they are contributing to global crisis. Giddens sees

little chance of the exhortations of environmentalists changing this. He writes

that he is quite hostile to attempts to urge people to change their consump-

tion patterns and daily habits in order to reduce their individual carbon

footprint. [S]uch endeavours, he argues, are based upon a quite unrealistic

assumption that everyone is willing and able to live like the small minority ofpositive greens (Giddens 2009: 106).

These statements demarcate the politics of climate change from the ques-

tion of how should we live? and the possibility of transforming everyday

life as expressed by life politics. Instead, Giddens presents individual choice

responding to market signals which governments can influence by providing

positive financial incentives for adopting more environmentally-friendly prod-

ucts (Giddens 2009: 1067). While governments may edit choice, Giddens

accepts the market as the primary mediator of choices in everyday life and, in

line with this, sees no possibility of a break within everyday life from moder-

nitys instrumental relationship with nature. Giddens identifies the call for

people to reduce their consumption with the environmental movements

demand that we help save the planet. He argues that this expresses romantic

values that are irrelevant to addressing global warming:We must also disavow

any remaining forms of mystical reverence for nature, [. . .] tackling global

warming has nothing to do with saving the earth, which will survive whatever

we do (Giddens 2009: 6, 56).

Similarly to Jacobs critique of environmentalism as value-driven (Jacobs2001: 317), Giddens presents environmentalism as antithetical to modernity

and he argues that green ideas are amenable to reactionary politics (2009:

512). He demarcates climate change from green issues, arguing that the fact

that climate change can be known and defined only through science distin-

guishes it from the types of problems that environmentalists more typically

address (Giddens 2009: 55). Yet, many of the environmental movements

claims depend on science (Yearley 1991; Tesh 2000; Egan 2007). Whether the

questions are the effects of agricultural chemicals, radiation from nuclear-power plants, or an oil spills effects on marine life, environmental politics is

always deeply interwoven with science. In this way, environmentalism exem-

plifies the reflexive character of life-political movements. The value-oriented

challenges of life-political movements combine with the way in which abstract

systems of expertise call into question previously taken-for-granted features of




13/24

everyday life (Giddens 1990, 1991, 1994). In Politics, however, Giddens insists

on a rigid demarcation between a scientific view of climate change and the

value-orientation of saving the earth.

As well as indicting environmentalism as mystical and anti-scientific,

Giddens sees similar anti-modernist sensibilities in environmentalist opposi-

tion to capitalist development. He maintains that the green movement is not

helpful to the task of integrating environmental concerns into our established

political institutions especially due to its history of hostile emotions toward

industrial capitalism and markets (2009: 6, 53). Giddens earlier highlighted the

tension between nation-state politics and life-political expressions of a reflex-

ive citizenry (1994: 10), but in Politics he rejects the environmental movement

because it is not well adapted to existing nation-state forms. In these ways,

Giddens defends the institutional forms of modernity against the value-oriented challenges posed by life politics.

Climate risk, technology, and the ensuring state

The demarcation of climate change from value-considerations informs

Giddens treatment of risk. Giddens has previously emphasized that risk is not

merely negative but is also an energizing principle linked to the cultural,

economic, and technological dynamism of modernity (1998: 63). However, as

discussed above, Giddens also treated risk as expressing ontological insecurity

and as opening up value-questions suppressed in modernity. Precisely for

this reason, the characterization of risk could not be left to experts alone. In

contrast, the way in which Giddens applies the concept of risk in Politics

suggests a more narrowly economistic conception of weighing costs and

benefits.

Giddens explains that he side[s] with those who are optimistic about

humanitys ability to deal with the problems of climate change in the sensethat risk and opportunity belong together; from the biggest risks can also flow

the greatest opportunities (2009: 228). A cost-benefit model of risk is evident

in Giddens rejection of the precautionary principle in favour of what he calls

the percentage principle according to which there is always a balance of risks

and opportunities to be considered (2009: 72, see also 57). Giddens acknowl-

edges that Risks associated with climate change [. . .] shade so far over into

uncertainty that they often cannot be calculated with any precision (2009:

174). But if climate risks are highly uncertain, it becomes problematic to argue,as Giddens does, that one can balance risk with opportunity through market

means such as assurance bonds and polluter pays mechanisms that entail the

ability to assign monetary value (2009: 678; cf. Beck 2009: 1389). 2 Uncer-

tainty has, instead, been a motivation for institutionalizing the precautionary

principle which seeks to avoid environmental damage by careful forward




14/24

planning and places the burden of proof on those implementing potentially

harmful activities (ORiordan and Jordan 1995: 193; see also Raffensperger

and Tickner 1999: 89; Wynne 1992).

The precautionary principle is, on Giddens view, closely linked with envi-

ronmentalisms conservationist attitude [. . .] towards nature (Giddens 2009:

57, see also 53). His opposition to conservationism derives from his longstand-

ing view that modernity has brought nature to an end. The value of staying

close to nature or conservation, he argues has no direct relevance to climate

change (Giddens 2009: 55). The desire to protect animal species from extinc-

tion might [. . .] be a worthy one, he writes, but its only connection to climate

change is if extinction threatens the ecosystems that help reduce emissions

(Giddens 2009: 55).3 Conservationist and environmentalist calls to reduce

consumption represent, for Giddens, an attempt to turn back history to asimpler world. Instead, he asserts there can be no overall going back the

very expansion of human power that has created such deep problems is the

only means of resolving them (2009: 228).

Giddens looks for a solution to climate change compatible with his view

that the juggernaut of modernity cannot be stopped and must be ridden. He

finds this approach in ecological modernization theory (EMT), which envis-

ages sustainability arising from a combination of economic development,

technological innovation, and institutional reform (Dryzek 2005: 16779).

This represents a marked departure from his more cautious treatment of

EMT in The Third Way. There, he remarked that EMT did not adequately

acknowledge the conflict between environmental protection and economic

development (Giddens 1998: 58). Yet, in Politics, he endorses EMT as an

approach through which environmental issues could best be dealt with by

being normalized by drawing them into the existing framework of social

economic institutions, rather than contesting those institutions as many

greens chose to do (2009: 70). He also praises EMTs emphasis [. . .] on the

role of science and technology in generating solutions to environmental dif-ficulties (Giddens 2009: 70). This description of EMT parallels Giddens own

arguments for addressing climate change through a surge of technological

innovation (2009: 11).

Giddens expresses enthusiasm for technologies such as nuclear power and

low fuel-consumption hypercars which would allow future economic growth

to be decoupled from contributing to climate change (2009: 133, 1401). In

this way, his argument aligns with the position of Jacobs and EMT that new

technologies enable the dematerialisation of economic activity (Jacobs2001: 322; cf. York and Rosa 2003). A key way in which Giddens sees tech-

nology as assisting with tackling climate change is through increases in

energy efficiency. He asserts that greater energy efficiency ipso facto reduces

emissions (Giddens 2009: 107). The idea that energy efficiency allows the

dematerialization of growth enables Giddens to avoid extending his critique




15/24

of productivism (or what he calls in Politics the fetish of growth) to an

endorsement of environmentalists calls for a no-growth society (Giddens

2009: 9, 54).

As discussed above, Giddens has been concerned to overcome the automa-

tism of capitalisms growth-imperative, arguing that we are moving toward a

post-scarcity society. In Politics he states that we cannot assume that growth

is an unalloyed benefit and argues that GDP is not necessarily an adequate

measure of wellbeing. His view is not that economic growth has to stop, but

that it should not be pursued irrespective of its wider consequences and that

we should adopt other measures such as the Sustainable Society Index (2009:

656, 71).But he views growth as essential for developing countries even if this

process involves a significant growth in greenhouse gas emissions (2009: 72).

Developing countries should therefore have a licence to pollute (2009: 64).The notion of alternative development put forward in Beyond Left and Right

is absent in Politics, which instead asserts a development imperative (2009: 9,

64, 72). Giddens looks to Contraction and convergence whereby devel-

oped countries reduce their emissions first, and radically, with poorer countries

following suit as they become richer [. . .] Developing nations can increase

their emissions for a period in order to permit growth, after which they must

begin to reduce them. The two groups will then progressively converge (2009:

645). Since Giddens rules out calling for significant lifestyle changes, it is

crucial for his case that the reductions in emissions are made possible by new

technologies. So he seems to take as a normative model the existing material

living standards and consumption patterns of developed nations. Although he

follows his earlier critique of productivism in the sense of rejecting a view of

growth as an unproblematic good, an element of productivism remains in the

view that a certain level of production must be achieved before environmental

goals can be prioritized.

For the spur toward technological energy-efficiency and green technology,

Giddens looks to a combination of market signals and state action to incen-tivize consumers and businesses to reduce emissions (2009: 106). He argues

that competition will create increased efficiency whenever [a] good is

exchanged, but the state will have to ensure that externalized costs are

brought into the marketplace (2009: 5). Carbon taxes are one method for

regulating industry emissions that Giddens advocates (2009: 12, 14955). Such

measures would be a component of what Giddens calls a return to planning.

However, he emphasizes the difference between this and older socialist or

social-democratic models. The kind of active state intervention that Giddenscalls for is in line with his earlier conception of the social investment state in

The Third Way (2009: 5, 67, 69, 946; 1998: 99128). It is planning not in place

of the market, but for the market, using incentives and penalties as means of

editing choice, and operating as acatalyst and facilitator of action (2009: 91,

109). The ensuring state facilitates, but also regulates, risk-taking in the




16/24

market (2009: 916; see also Giddens 1998: 100). Giddens suggests that,

through taxes, regulations, and incentives, states can promote a shift from

energy-intensive practices toward efficiency and renewable energy (Giddens

2009: 8, 923).

Giddens conceptualizes the ensuring state as having a primarily cooperative

relationship with private business and he expresses optimism about the pos-

sibility of new forms of mutual action and collaboration between businesses,

NGOs and citizens.While he acknowledges that Powerful interests often stand

in the way of reform and recognizes the power of business in avoiding emis-

sion reduction targets and in lobbying against climate change action, Giddens

remains optimistic about the business communitys willingness to cooperate in

climate-change mitigation efforts (2009: 11, 93, 11920). He expresses disap-

proval of the easy demonizing of the industry lobbies, and of big businessmore generally, that pervades much of the environmental literature and is

critical of the left for using climate change as an opportunity to renew the case

against markets (2009: 49, 120). There are, he argues, significant examples of

businesses voluntarily moving toward more ecologically sustainable practices.

A new generation of business leaders, he writes, is arising which not only

acknowledges the perils of climate change, but is active in the vanguard of

reaction to it (2009: 121).

There is room, however, for scepticism about the depth of such voluntary

shifts in corporate practices, and Giddens himself acknowledges the problem

of greenwash (2009: 121). Companies often claim to be reducing emissions

based on a measure of carbon intensity, while increasing their total energy

consumption and emissions. Environmental journalist Fred Pearce writes, The

problem is that the atmosphere doesnt recognise this increased efficiency. All

it does is respond to the extra carbon dioxide in the air by raising tempera-

tures (Pearce 2009). Giddens points to Wal-Marts commitment to reduce its

emissions (2009: 121). Yet, critics point out that Wal-Marts business model is

highly import-dependent, producing significant emissions from long-distancecontainer-shipping, and that its big box stores increase car travel by customers

(Anderson 2007, Anderson and Waskow 2007: 178; Mitchell 2011). In such

cases, while there may be improvements in efficiency, the business model is

fundamentally carbon-intensive.

Corporate interests have also been influential within the political field,

actively working against progress on climate-change policy. In the USA, oil

and gas interests spent over $154 million on lobbying in 2009, including efforts

against climate-change legislation (Mulkern 2010). In California, climate-change mitigation legislation (Assembly Bill 32) was enacted in 2006, and

Giddens praises it an example of regional climate-change action (2009: 127,

200). However, in 2010, prior to the laws implementation, oil companies and

other corporate entities spent millions of dollars supporting a referendum

initiative to suspend the law by requiring stringent economic conditions for its




17/24

activation (Roosevelt 2010).4 While this referendum ultimately failed at the

polls, it constituted a concerted effort by corporate interests against climate-

change policies.

Giddens politics of climate change centre on international negotiations

between nation-states, cooperation between states and business, and to some

extent the role of NGOs in spurring states and businesses into taking action

(2009: 5). The key to solving the climate change problem, for Giddens, is the

convergence of interests: in the political sphere, the alignment of climate

goals with other political goals, such as energy security, and in the economic

sphere, alignment of climate action with competitive advantage (2009: 89).

While Giddens recognizes that global summits meant to set targets for emis-

sions have largely failed to achieve concrete results (Giddens 2009: 4, 18692,

202; Giddens and Rees 2010), he does not propose truly distinct alternatives tothis model. For example, he criticizes the G-8 countries for not making

progress on emissions-reduction goals, yet he calls for establishing a body

representing the major polluters which would set an example of convergence

by showing how emission reductions could be coupled with economic advan-

tage (2009: 2212). The core of Giddens approach to climate change is the

notion that the state can shape economic incentives, thereby promoting the

convergence of social interests and stimulating technological advances such as

in energy efficiency.

Conclusion: life politics and climate change

Giddens emphasis on technological solutions to climate change is an escape

from the unresolved dilemma of how to reconcile his critique of productivism

with his view that we must ride modernitys juggernaut: the central tension in

his utopian realism. In A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism,

Giddens argued that capitalism exhibits an unprecedented chronic impetus toboth technological innovation and economic expansion (Giddens 1981: 121).

In Politics Giddens looks to innovation, especially improvements in energy

efficiency, to reduce the climatic disruption that accompanies economic

growth. But the Jevons paradox indicates that, by lowering costs, improved

technological efficiency can itself facilitate the expansion of production,

increasing overall resource-use and emissions (Foster 2009: 124; York and

Rosa 2003: 280; Polimeni et al. 2009; Clark and York 2005: 411; Gould, Pellow,

and Schnaiberg 2008: 44). Given capitalisms chronic impetus to growth, thebenefits of efficiency are likely to be swallowed up by the ongoing expansion

of production. If technological efficiency is no panacea, then there is no solu-

tion internal to capitalist modernitys dynamism. The response that is required

is not just the application of modernitys science and innovation to modernitys

risks, but a more fully ethical reflexivity, calling into question our modern ways




18/24

of living and thinking (see also McKechnie and Welsh 2002).This is the kind of

broad ethical reflexivity that Giddens has argued is characteristic of life

politics.

However, Politics operates with a highly restrictive value-frame that mar-

ginalizes life politics in favour of instrumental and technocratic approaches.

Giddens adopts an economistic approach to conceptualizing climate risk as a

set of costs and benefits and to understanding political action in terms of

instrumentally rational action motivated by economic incentives. He suggests

that if these incentives can be structured properly, currently divergent interests

will tend to converge. Giddens explicitly rejects the salience of an approach

that calls on individuals to change their worldview and mode of everyday

living. He presents environmentalists call for an ethical reorientation in atti-

tudes as irrelevant to the problem of climate change. This is in contrast to theview expressed in a recent joint report by the Climate Outreach and Informa-

tion Network, the Campaign to Protect Rural England, Friends of the Earth,

Oxfam, and the World Wildlife Fund. This report, titled Common Cause: The

Case for Working with our Cultural Values, stresses the importance of deep

value-frames in motivating political action (Crompton 2010). The report

argues that treating climate change as primarily an economic problem, as in

the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, may undermine the

compelling moral arguments for action (Crompton 2010: 51, emphasis in

original).

Ingolfur Blhdorn similarly criticizes policy agendas relying on technologi-

cal fixes and incremental reform. He writes:

As these techno-managerial approaches reinforce rather than challenge the

underlying values and logic governing advanced modern societies [. . .] they

may actually themselves accelerate the depletion of the cultural resources

on which sustainability vitally depends. (Blhdorn 2009: 4)

Politics instantiates such cultural depletion, since a major thrust of this book

is toward discrediting the environmentalist valuation of nature for its own

sake. Instead, the values that Giddens puts forward in Politics are those that

mesh with the instrumentalist orientation of capitalist culture. He argues that

with risk comes opportunity and that tackling climate change can be a

positive-sum game since it will create economic opportunities. Giddens

response to climate change mirrors what Jordan has argued is the broader

tendency of the Third Way to base policy on a utilitarian rational-actormodel of society as composed of individuals organized through market

incentives and contractual regulation (Jordan 2010: esp. 3, 4362). Politics

reinforces an instrumental frame of rational self-interest congruent both

with market individualism and with the pursuit of national self-interest by

states.




19/24

Politics participates in what Giddens previously referred to as modernitys

suppression of existential dilemmas. The value question of how should we

live? is suppressed in the book, as Giddens rejects the relevance of change in

everyday modes of living and instead prioritizes elite action (by policymakers

and enlightened corporate leaders), asserts an imperative of economic devel-

opment, and calls for More of the same in the sense of the pursuit of scientific

and technological development (2009: 6, 93). Politics therefore responds to

climate change in the technical-instrumental mode of simple modernization,

abandoning the insights of high-modern reflexivity. This reflexivity has to do

not only with the way abstract systems of expertise impinge on everyday life,

but also the flooding back of repressed existential concerns, and their expres-

sion in life politics.

Environmentalisms reconsideration of the human relationship with thebroader living world manifests modernitys inability to keep existential dilem-

mas and associated value-questions at bay. The contradiction basic to human

existence of being both in nature and transcending it is no longer effectively

suppressed in the pursuit of economic growth and scientific-technical advance

and mediated through the structures of the state. A key dimension of high-

modern reflexivity is that it has become apparent that the instrumental

control of nature through science and technology produces new hazards and

uncertainties. This occurs in a context of the wasteland of everyday life with

few patterned ways of mediating existential problems (Giddens 1981: 13). For

this reason, the re-emergence of these suppressed dilemmas calls modern

everyday life into question, presenting life-style as a value problem.

Giddens insists that there is no going back either to tradition or nature.

Nature has ended in the sense that it can no longer be taken for granted. But

this does not provide grounds for suggesting that nature has ceased altogether

to be a meaningful category (Dickens 1999: 1024). Giddens recognition that

capitalist accumulation [. . .] is not self-sustaining in terms of resources and

reference to environmental limits in terms of the earths resources suggestthat it is still possible to speak of natural resources as an external condition for

human economic activity (1990: 165; 1994: 10). And his discussion of problems

of deciding what to preserve implies that it does still make sense to think of

natural ecosystems as an evolved inheritance to be conserved rather than a

product of human activity (Giddens 1994: 212). Problems of pollution are not

just problems of our created environment but of how what we create interacts

with features of the physical and biological world that human beings have not

created and do not control. For example, in the case of global warming, humanstransform nature by burning fossil fuels, but do not create or control the heat

absorption characteristics of carbon dioxide or the interactions between the

Earths atmosphere and oceans. Climate change therefore represents a

complex interaction between nature and technologized second nature. The

effects of climate change on weather patterns (producing floods, droughts, and




20/24

storms) exemplify how nature returns in a way in which what is natural and

what is unnatural is problematic. This lack of distinctness of the boundary

between the human and non-human nature is a key dimension of the onto-

logical insecurity of high modernity.

While some forms of environmentalism, notably deep ecology, do try to

derive values from pure nature, this is just one part of the more complex way

in which ecological politics foregrounds and contests problems of how to value

nature, and how to decide what to preserve. Giddens wrote that nineteenth-

century romanticism gave rise to Antecedent forms of todays green move-

ments (1990: 161). But environmentalism has developed beyond these origins.

Contemporary environmentalism operates not only with romantic value-

repertoires, but also with scientific knowledge-claims which it mobilizes even

while contesting technocratic authority (Yearley 1991; Fischer 2000; Egan2007; Tesh 2000). Environmentalist movements challenge the demarcation of

risk debates within the boundaries of technical knowledge, and insist on the

moral and aesthetic value-dimensions of these issues (McKechnie and Welsh

2002; Wynne 2002). In doing so, these movements carry an awareness that

environmental issues are not just about better management of pollution, but

are also existential troubles that require ethical reflection concerning the place

of human beings in relation to the physical and biological world of nature (see

also Jordan 2010: 823).

Modern ecological problems such as climate change re-open the existential

contradiction under conditions in which this is no longer adequately mediated

by social institutions but becomes a pressing source of ontological insecurity,

calling forth new modes of reflexivity. While the existential contradiction

appears in new form, it continues to be related in complex ways with structural

contradictions of the state. Action on climate change is mired in the structural

contradictions of the capitalist state. One can see in climate change the con-

tradiction between socialized production and private appropriation, especially

in the sense in which productions externalities are socialized in the form ofpollution while profit is privately appropriated.The dependence of the state on

private accumulation is a significant obstacle to international agreement as

states are unwilling to agree to climate regulation that could adversely affect

the competitiveness of their national economies (see also Jordan 2010: 1423).

Giddens sociological theory provides a conceptual framework for under-

standing the social dimensions of climate change as a problem in which the

suppressed existential dilemma of the human relationship with nature returns

and is made manifest, but is also deeply entangled with contradictions of thecapitalist state. Existential dilemmas that return in high modernity are

expressed in life politics. However, this opens up a new contradiction between

this form of politics and the forms of participation institutionalized in the

nation-state. Giddens proposals for democratizing democracy were in recog-

nition of the need for new institutionalized forms of participation enabling the




21/24

expression of life politics. However, life-political questioning of values at the

level of everyday life largely goes without institutional articulation, falling

between the structures of the state and the market. Giddens approach to the

politics of climate change is symptomatic of this gap, as he abandons the

life-political component of the Third Way in favour of a technocratic and

managerial approach in which the key actors are businesses, politicians and

officials.

In Politics, citizens are relegated to a role in support of policymaking.

Giddens writes that, while generating widespread political support from citi-

zens is necessary, for better or worse, the state retains many of the powers that

have to be invoked if a serious impact on global warming is to be made

(Giddens 2009: 91). The problem with this state-centered conception of politics

is that it fails to express and articulate the active stance towards the conditionsof their existence that Giddens has argued is characteristic of a society of high

reflexivity (Giddens 1994: 87).

The significance of environmentalism, as a life-political movement, is pre-

cisely the way it calls into question conditions of existence taken for granted

in modernity. The challenge environmentalism poses is to re-evaluate our

everyday practices and social and economic organization in light both of a

scientific understanding of environmental harms and of an ethical reformula-

tion of the place of humanity in the natural world. The lack of integration of

environmentalism into orthodox politics stems from the contradiction

between the dominant structures of the capitalist state and the forms of

reflexivity carried by life-political movements. This contradiction between life

politics and the capitalist state is key for understanding the failures so far of

policy responses to climate change.

(Date accepted: November 2012)

Notes

1. The authors would like to thank Jenni-

fer Nations for her input at an early stage of

this work, and Ingmar Lippert for comments

on an earlier draft. We are also very grateful

to this journals anonymous referees for

their enormously helpful feedback.

2. The notion of balancing risk and

opportunity is, in general, problematic whenapplied to environmental problems. When

one makes a monetary investment in a

venture, potential losses are finite (limited to

the amount invested), while the oppor-

tunities may be virtually infinite. With the

environment, this calculation is reversed:

potential losses are infinite and they may be

irreversible as in the case of extinction.

There may also be a long time-delay before

environmental harms become fully evident

and chains of causality are often extremely

complex.

3. The connection between conservationand efforts to mitigate climate change is, in

fact, highly significant, since emissions from

deforestation make up 17 to 20 per cent of

annual global greenhouse gas emissions

(Secretariat of the Convention on Biological




22/24

Diversity and Deutsche Gesellschaft fr

Internationale Zusammenarbeit 2011: 11).

The United Nations Global Biodiversity Out-

look Reportargues,The linked challenges of

biodiversity loss and climate change must beaddressed by policy-makers with equal prior-

ity and in close co-ordination, if the most

severe impacts of each are to be avoided

(Secretariat of the Convention on Biological

Diversity 2010: 11).

4. The measure, Proposition 23, would

have suspended implementation of the

emission controls until unemployment

drops to 5.5 percent or less for [a] full

year http://www.voterguide.sos.ca.gov/

propositions/23/ (Accessed May 5, 2011).

See also Campaign Finance: Yes on 23,California Jobs Initiative, a Coalition of

Taxpayers, Employers, Food Producers,

Energy, Transportation and Forestry Com-

panies, Cal-Access, http://cal-access.ss.ca.

gov/Campaign/Committees/Detail.aspx?id=

1323890&session=2009&view=general

(Accessed June 14, 2012).

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