Only the state can transform society/behavior in time to avoid worst impacts of climate change

(Richard, Politics@Leeds, Climate science, the politics of climate change and futures of IR, International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117820946365)

Climate action requires political action simply because, without political action, the scale of the challenge as well as the time within which this action must be achieved cannot be met. If the shutting down of the global economy during the first 4 months of COVID-19 led to an 8 percent annual decrease in carbon emissions, and this decrease is required yearly for the next 10 years, nothing short of coordinated national and international action can be effective. As the logic behind the CoP15 Paris Agreement understood, in a world structured by a system of states, the state remains, in relation with other states, the effective focus for these national and international acts of coordination. One can maintain, of course, that concerted reflection on goals and their practice cannot be rehearsed within the same state system that, in co-evolution with capitalism, has produced the climate problem in the first place.24 Yet, my argument here is simple: (1) climate action must be of a political kind if this action is to be coherent and effective, and the horizon of this understanding of the political (comprehensive and effective action) is in a vital sense defined by the state; (2) this political action redounds above all to the agency and responsibility of the state both in relation to its own citizenry and in relation to other states and their citizenry. In response to the challenge of time and scale, I argue we should turn to, not turn away from, the state as an agent of change. Only if one renounces the potential of political action today through historically constituted practices of political efficacy does one shun this kind of conclusion. In which case, I would argue, one has renounced politics for our age, as well as the major emotion on which politics is based, hope.25 Since Max Weber, the state is sociologically defined by the legitimate monopoly of violence that it holds over all other forms of force within a nationally determined territory.26 There are many ways in which this monopoly is contested today. The description of a state as ‘vulnerable’ is nothing but the indication that a particular state does not hold the monopoly of violence within its territory. Prior to questions of political authority and legitimacy, all states are today vulnerable in this sense given the nature of global challenges that follow intended and unintended processes of interdependence (global financial instability, global terrorism, migration flows, pandemics, climate change, etc.). That said, the responses both to the financial crisis of 2008 and (much more so) to the present COVID-19 crisis testify to the fact that the monopoly of violence particular to the effectiveness of state governance remains in place. Among an increasing complexity of social actors, the state still holds the levers of power that are decisive in effecting social transformation. Consequently, to one side of the empirical fact that countries constitute the beef of the UNFCCC climate regime, I am arguing that the state remains the primary vehicle of a politics of climate change. As the emerging literature on the Green New Deal implies, the state can do the following. At a national level, it can organize and steer fiscal, monetary and sector-policies like those of energy, transport, agriculture, the communications industry and housing in such a way that both businesses and consumers are motivated to shift behaviour towards a carbon-neutral society. This model of the state is one of a regulated market economy that uses the coordination of state direction with market dynamism to effect broad social change. Governments respond to markets as they plan ahead with regard to climate change (the rapid fall in the price of solar and wind energy, for example), and much of the new green infrastructure is/will be locally distributed and assembled (no ‘giant public works’ given that contemporary technology is smart).27 That said, governments are the sole governance body with appropriate fiscal and monetary tools (1) to set up the rebuilding of national economies with new strategic priorities; (2) to steer and to guarantee concerted action across sectors; and (3) to guarantee, in turn, that this action is underpinned by the principles of ‘a just transition’.28 If the timeline to a 50 percent reduction of carbon emissions is 2030, then the state must so organize and steer that solutions to climate change are integrated. Attention to ‘the climate emergency’ alone will not lead to the necessary change. This last point is important and suggests why the idea of the Green New Deal, whether one is on the Left or Right, harbours the appropriate response. The integration of climate policy with radical policies for poverty alleviation and re-employment in sustainable industries and commerce provides the only way in which the shift from an extractive to a regenerative economy and society is possible in the first place. Without this convergence of solutions, practical solutions to climate change will not only tackle the scale and timeline of the problem; they will re-create a deeply divided polity of the employed and unemployed that could lead to ever-worse scenarios of a politics based on division and fear, not community and hope. It is the state alone – in conjunction with the forces of the market and civil society – that can provide the vision, the terms of execution of this vision (organized integration) and, critically, the policy-leverage that can bring about economic and social convergence.