Introduction

Starting from the popular slogan, ‘System Change Not Climate Change’, this book has explored its practical meanings. The slogan has targeted high-carbon systems which cause climate change, other environmental harms, resource plunder and social injustices, along with policies which perpetuate them. As the focus here, the system includes the elite's climate fixes for system continuity, their basis in market-driven instruments, and their popular appeal or acceptance for minimizing any societal disruption.

At the same time, public protest and controversy over such fixes has been a political opportunity to advance proposals for replacing harmful production systems with environmentally sustainable, low-carbon, socially equitable ones. But an effective social agency to implement such proposals has been generally elusive. Hence they have remained as technical-administrative blueprints, or appeals to hypothetical planners, or mere supplements to dominant high-carbon systems, especially as fossil fuels gain new investment and total energy usage rises.

An effective social agency would need to come from political forces far broader than those demanding climate action (see Figure 7.1). To explore the broader potential, this book has analysed public controversies where climate fixes entail many other issues. Chapter 1 posed some generic questions:

• • How do policy frameworks promote market-type incentives and competition, supposedly in order to generate technological fixes for environmental problems (especially climate change)?

• • How do those fixes encourage a passive public to accept or await them, meanwhile continuing harmful production systems?

• • How do opponents contest those fixes, stimulate public controversy and so open up different societal futures?

• • How do such opponents attempt to build a social agency for alternative solutions?

• • In those ways, how do claims for solutions promote divergent societal futures, serving either system change or continuity?

A further overarching question is: How can cross-case comparisons inform strategies for an effective social agency towards system change? Juxtaposing the case studies, here are some generic answers.

Technofix controversy as a political opportunity

For at least half a century, policy elites have regularly promoted technological fixes for various environmental problems and more recently for climate change. Meanwhile they have disparaged or marginalized other available solutions which would be socially and environmentally beneficial. According to some critics, technofixes substitute technological change for the societal change necessary to solve environmental problems.