Climate Change and Politics - a collection of articles from Cambridge

Ross Mittiga (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and University of Graz)

There are some facts about climate change that are so often repeated that we become almost anesthetized to them[i]. One of these is about the straightforward global warming the world has already experienced: as the NOAA reminds us, the “top-10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2010 and the last nine years (2014-2022) are the nine-warmest years on record.” It now seems all but certain that 2023 will sit atop the ranks next year, with October temperatures exceeding pre-industrial averages by a startling 1.43°C—just shy of what many believe to be the absolute upper-limit of non-catastrophic warming, 1.5°C.

Another track on repeat: 6 years to have any shot at not crossing that 1.5°C threshold. Increasingly as familiar as it is perilous, this annual countdown now hardly attracts more sustained attention than the turning of the hands on a clock, even as the hour approaches midnight for our remarkably fecund and stable Holocene, which has played host to virtually the entirety of human civilization.

Even climate change’s dire material consequences in the present moment can seem abstract, remote—at least for those of us residing in the more privileged parts of the world, where water is not yet drying up, crops not yet failing, extreme heat not yet claiming too many lives. But devastation is already well underway. As a recent Lancet report observes: “Globally, 5,083,173 deaths…were associated with non-optimal temperatures per year” between 2000 and 2019. Another article published in PNAS found that the fine particulate matter (PM2.5) that comes largely from burning fossil-fuels caused about 8.9 million deaths in 2015 alone. This is a quiet tragedy that will only grow louder in the second act; consider that, according to the WHO, between “2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250 000 additional deaths per year, from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress alone.”

There are many more dismal points one could press here—about diseases proliferating, cities burning, unprecedented rate of extinctions, whole nations slipping into the sea. But the essential point is just this: climate change now confronts us as an emergency, both in the sense that (i) it is causing harm on a scale that is already (and will only become more) morally devastating and politically destabilizing, and (ii) only our most resolute and immediate action can deliver us from broader catastrophe and wholesale collapse.

Fortunately, scholars in many fields are (finally) beginning to recognize this and confront it in their work. According to the Washington Post, whereas in “2015, only 32 papers in the Web of Science research database included the term ‘climate emergency’,” in “2022, 862 papers contained the phrase.” In the natural sciences, much of this change has been driven by somber reports signed by thousands of scientists.

Similar changes are underway in fields closer to our own. In economics, for instance, there are now long-standing (and often intensely polemical) debates over carbon pricing and the best methods for modeling climate damages, shaped by towering figures like the late Martin Weitzman, Sir Nicholas Stern, and William Nordhaus. There is innovative work, too, being developed by a younger generation of scholars, like Kate Raworth’s “doughnut economics” or the emerging literature on managed degrowth. One can also find much important research in legal studies being published in high-profile collections and leading journals, treating (e.g.) the design and use of the precautionary principle in international law, the force and extent of global climate treaties, and the roles of courts in constraining and facilitating climate activism. Similarly, for almost twenty years, major university presses and flagship journals in philosophical ethics have been publishing work on climate change, resulting in now voluminous literatures examining, among other things, our duties to future generations, the limits and implications of agents’ responsibilities for historical emissions, and the adequacy of various distributive-justice principles for allocating the costs of climate action or use of the remaining carbon budget. The influence of this work can be seen in the many climate reports that cite it, including the benchmark IPCC reports, which routinely count philosophers among their lead authors and devote whole chapters to questions of climate justice.

But what of political science?

Well, if one were to have read only the predominant, generalist journals in our field over the last few decades, one might be forgiven for thinking that climate change is not an important problem, at least for political science.[ii]

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. It is now a common—and certainly correct—adage that climate change no longer confronts us as a technical problem but as a political one. The idea here is that feasible, cost-effective solutions to climate change already exist, all that’s missing is the political will to adopt them.

And while there are signs that this is changing—governments everywhere are declaring climate emergencies, often at the behest of their increasingly committed and visible climate activists—the world’s major polluters appear in no rush to slow down. Quite the opposite: many states are aggressively expanding fossil-fuel extraction and use, potentially committing the world to decades of deadly warming.

The extreme mismatch between the existential urgency of the climate crisis and the resounding inaction of those with the power to address it may well represent the political problem of our era. For if we fail at this, we run the credible risk of wholesale civilizational collapse, as a range of sober studies has warned. Indeed, in a very real material sense, a stable climate constitutes a necessary background condition of every political struggle we might wish to undertake, every institution we would seek to construct or reform, every norm or value we would like to preserve or promote; it is the hidden foundation of peaceful social cooperation, democratic order, justice, stability, and law.

Clearly, then, those of us in political science have so strong reasons to give climate change a central place in our research and teaching. And we must! For perhaps more than any other discipline, we are particularly well-equipped to diagnose the disastrously dilatory politics of the last thirty years: i.e. to account for the resounding political failure of climate inaction and to articulate strategies for overcoming it. We can also help, more than most, to make sense of the political realities that have emerged in response to this failure, and to identify those that are likely to arise in response to the different policy pathways states may take, and the increasingly harrowing climate consequences publics may suffer, in the years ahead.

Of course, a good number of political scientists and theorists have long been doing just this, and many others are now getting underway. This special collection is meant to showcase some of their important work—in particular, contributions which have made their way into APSA’s flagship journals, along with a few others managed by Cambridge University Press. The aim, however, is not just to celebrate the pathbreaking research of these scholars but to offer a starting-point for those who wish to begin working on this most pressing of issues. Not a perfect or comprehensive one, to be sure, but a foothold that can nonetheless serve to make initial research less overwhelming. This is especially critical with respect to climate change, as the highly technical and often interdisciplinary nature of the relevant literature can pose a high barrier-to-entry. 

The articles I have included below are immensely diverse in terms of approach, starting-points, precise subject matter, and findings. Yet, permitting some reductiveness, we can distinguish a few general themes or tendencies among them.

First, there is climate work that can be broadly situated in the realm of political behavior, dealing, as it does, with political messaging, opinion formation, the epistemic impact of political identities, and the responsiveness of voting behaviors to climate policies and consequences. Exemplary here is a recent article by Nikhar Gaikwad, Frederica Genovese, and Dustin Tingley (2022), which shows how cross-cutting preferences among citizens in the US and India—two of the world’s largest emitters—are influenced by their different levels of vulnerability to climate change and to the costs of climate policy; understanding this is essential for limiting popular backlash, especially among groups who potentially stand to lose the most from decarbonization, like those living in coal country.

Second, there are articles treating cooperation and conflict around climate change. These pieces examine, among other things, how international institutions and regimes (or the lack thereof) facilitate or stymie negotiations, the impact of “norms cascades” in driving action, strategies for overcoming the primary obstacles to climate-policy implementation, and methods for studying climate-related conflict and security issues. An example of work in this area is Robert Falkner’s (2016) article on “minilateral” approaches to international climate action in the form of “climate clubs”—a relatively recent idea that has proved influential among climate economists, and which has clear relevance for political scientists interested in identifying strategies for overcoming the gridlock of widely inclusive global climate negotiations.

The third and most populous group includes political-theoretic research on climate change.[iii] Some of this work is largely conceptual in nature, as with Clare Heyward’s (2013) outstanding article categorizing (and identifying some of the dangers with) the vast array of technologies and interventions collectively referred to as “geo-engineering.” Other works offer ideological critiques, as with Mathias Thaler’s (2023) interrogation of eco-miserabilism, which many regard as an impediment to meaningful climate action. Still other pieces offer careful normative analysis of the fairness of specific climate policies or impacts, as with Jamie Draper’s (2021) discussion of how states might formulate labor migration policies as part of a just approach to climate adaptation. There are also articles aimed at elucidating how the climate crisis bears on key political values, including (e.g.) citizenship (MacGregor 2020), legitimacy (Mittiga 2022), or responsibility (Goodhart 2022).

The final group includes meta-research germane to the spirit of this special collection: i.e. articles that flag the lack of political-science engagement with the problem of climate change and that speak to some of the ways in which political scientists and theorists could (and should) contribute to addressing it—including by working across sub-disciplinary lines (as Steve Vanderheiden [2013] enjoins). While I wish to let these valuable interventions speak for themselves, a comment made by Robert Keohane in 2014 bears repeating here: “In view of the magnitude of climate change, it is distressing to observe the slow response from political science as a discipline.” That much the same could be said nearly ten years later is perhaps more distressing still.

Yet there are grounds for hoping that the climate crisis is finally coming to be taken more seriously in the mainstream outlets of our field. This special collection may be taken as evidence of that, as could the fact that, of the articles that the APSR has published on climate, all date from 2020 and the majority of those from 2022. While of course early still, this suggests real change is underway, and not a moment too soon.

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[i] Work on this collection was supported by Chile’s Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (via a Fondecyt de Iniciación grant; project no. 11201060). I also wish to thank Rosario Paz Acevedo Gómez for her research assistance, and George Klosko for his comments on an earlier draft of the introduction.

[ii] The APSR, for instance, has only published 7 articles focused centrally on climate change, ever. This, however, exceeds the 3 published by the discipline’s other flagship journal, the AJPS. (To understand how I am came up with these numbers, see here.) Of course, it is important to note that climate change work has featured more heavily outside of generalist journals; a clear example of this is Environmental Politics, which has undergone a striking rise in the rankings over the last twenty years, undoubtedly owing much to the increased salience of its subject matter.

[iii] The disproportionate size of this category will not, I hope, be taken as evidence of editorial bias, but rather as a reflection of the outsized attention political theorists have devoted to the issue relative to the rest of the discipline. There are perhaps many reasons for this, including the slow-moving accumulation of data needed for good empirical work, but I believe one of the most significant factors is the longer-standing salience of climate change in philosophical ethics, which of course is a sister field to political theory.

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