Stabilization is mythical, religious, and an ultimately incorrect relation to the climate.

A parallel logic can be found in the work of economists. In this paper we are not specifically concerned with economic models per se, or with the differences in adaptation, impacts and mitigation analyses. We suggest that these economic analyses have broadly drawn from and supported climate stabilization discourses, usually as a heuristic that might guide decision-making. Within the framework outlined above, economists have attempted to identify an optimal and efficient approach that could give rise to a climate policy that was focused as much on a cost-effective stabilization target as reducing emissions to cause least harm. The economist William Nordhaus in 1977, for example, started to develop this now very familiar mode of reasoning in 1977. Using a highly simplified, heuristic model of the climate, and assuming a doubling of CO2 concentration as a reasonable upper limit to impose for the climatic response, Nordhaus (1977) examined the costs of controlling emissions that would meet this target. Indeed it is interesting that inasmuch as scientific work has frequently been guided by doubling concentration scenarios, so has economic work (Azar, 1998). Nordhaus explicitly made clear that the calculations were fraught with all kinds of uncertainties, but concluded that one could use a ‘best guess’ scenario since damages would be a roughly linear function of CO2 concentrations (Nordhaus, 1982).8 Bach, likewise, called for ‘‘[a] broad systems approach . . . to help define some ‘threshold’ value of CO2-induced climate change beyond which there would likely be a major disruption of the economic, social and political fabric of certain societies . . . An assessment of such a critical CO2-level ahead of time could help to define those climatic changes, which would be acceptable and those that should be averted if possible’’ (Bach, 1980, p. 4). Thus for an emerging set of economic formulations of the problem of climate change, the heuristic that would guide policy action would be one that took a fixed concentration target as a proxy for a climate target, that could then be used to analyze the costs and benefits of mitigating action to meet that target. A cost–benefit analysis of climate change would thus be possible. It is notable that this re-frames the debates from one of the costs and benefits of cutting emissions, to one that includes the costs and benefits of the resultant climate or as Oreskes et al. (2008) put it, the ‘‘carbon problem’’ becomes the ‘‘climate question.’’ Climates are to be efficiently managed. This is reflected, as they illustrate, in the Changing Climate report (National Academy, 1983) and also in the growing quantity of economic work in the early 1980s, especially as it related to energy and climate change. Boehmer-Christiansen (1994b) argues that climate policy has to be understood within changing energy politics. The late 1970s had seen rising energy prices fuelled by concerns about fossil fuel longevity of supply amidst a host of political interventions. A key question for energy politics in the 1980s was the declining price of fossil fuels, which questioned the role of the state in controlling energy supply/demand. Climate change offered a new means to tackle the fossil fuel industries and carbon constraints could highlight the need for nuclear solutions (Boehmer-Christiansen, 1994b). From the late 1970s and early 1980s energy researchers were increasingly considering the technologies and economics of managing CO2 emissions that might significantly influence the climate. There were debates over whether climate change would become the main limiting factor for energy growth rather than peak oil scenarios (D’Arge and Kogiku, 1974; Nordhaus, 1974; Perry, 1982; Oreskes et al., 2008). Much depended upon assumptions of future resource availability and energy efficiency. The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) concluded in work in 1983 that ‘‘transition to fast breeder nuclear reactors, centralized solar and coal synfuels must be made . . .’’ (as discussed by Wynne, 1984, p. 285) to establish a secure energy supply in the future. Climate change could offer an agenda for change (a lever) in the energy industry thus translating climate stabilization targets through political negotiations about energy growth and fossil fuel use (Boehmer-Christiansen, 1994a,b). A different example comes from a study by the German Federal Environmental Agency that examined energy efficiency, but concluded that growth could be disentangled from carbon emissions (Lovins and Lovins, 1982). Their confidence in technological developments led them to suggest that energy efficiency gains resulting in CO2 reductions would reduce the time pressure on climate scientists to find the climatic answer. Assumptions about energy demand and efficiency thus filtered into the cost analyses that would suggest which climate targets might be feasible in terms of energy costs and which stabilization targets were realistic in terms of energy growth. Climate stabilization discourse provided an interface (particularly for policy advice) between climate debates and energy debates, but the interface was increasingly vulnerable to the multiplicity of assumptions (climatic, economic and energy demand) being worked into them (see also Pielke et al., 2000). Cost–benefit analysis does not provide a simple answer to climate change, because it inherently requires value judgments about discounting, costs and uncertainties. This is particularly the case when estimating damages and adaptation costs (Demeritt and Rothman, 1999), which is why some early climate economics separated out the cost–benefits of prevention and adaptation policies (Thompson and Rayner, 1998, p. 292). Cost–benefit analysis inherits the uncertainties from the climate components, but has additional uncertainties resulting from the assumptions in the costs of mitigation pathways and impacts. But as Cohen et al. (1998) point out, the aggregation of global mean climate changes serves a technocratic agenda focused on emissions controls, an agenda whose social science the economists have most readily filled. Further, Cohen et al. (1998), using the example of the US, suggest that it is difficult to pose questions about ethics, development, aid, trade and responsibility to future generations, when the analysis is framed by balancing the economic benefits of releasing carbon versus the potential GDP costs and risks of environmental change. Or, Azar (1998, p. 312) suggests that alternative interpretations of the need to avoid dangerous climate change must be made rather than trying to solve the puzzle of the ‘‘optimal level of climate change.’’ The economic justification for climate action has therefore further embedded the approach to climate stabilization within climate policy. While this was acknowledged as a heuristic this had few repercussions, but useful heuristics can rapidly be translated into direct policy guidance. Climate stabilization was taken up in policy statements and analyses from the late 1980s as a prescriptive goal for climate policy and an aim for the campaigning of environmental non- governmental organizations (ENGOs). Partly this was borrowed from similar policy logics that had been applied to controlling ozone and nitrous oxides (Franz, 1997; Grundmann, 2006; Oppenheimer and Petsonk, 2005). There is also similarity with arms issues whereby one controls both the total stock of arms as well as the location of those arms (Prins and Rayner, 2007). Here we select just a few examples to illustrate the rise of climate stabilization as a policy goal (more recent examples were given in the introduction). A Dutch Ministry of Environment funded project concluded in 1988 with the need for climate stabilization, preferably at just 1 8C above pre-industrial temperatures, but certainly a maximum target of 400ppm CO2 concentration (Krause, 1988). Drawing from Irving Mintzer’s work a Common- wealth Group of Experts the following year also agreed that while there were uncertainties it was important to make substantial emission cuts to a level that would achieve ‘approximate stability’. They suggested that doubling CO2 concentrations should be postponed beyond 2075 thus restricting temperature increases in the order of 0.6–1.7C by 2060 on top of warming already committed to (Holdgate et al., 1989). An OECD report in 1992 also concluded with the need to identify appropriate targets for policy concluding that there were three possible science-based targets: stabilization of atmospheric concentrations of CO2 at current levels; not allowing global mean temperature to rise more than 2C; or not allowing a rate of change faster than 0.1C per decade (Barrett, 1992). Indeed the report pointed out the problems of inferring emissions targets in the latter two cases given the uncertainties in extrapolating from temperature targets to emissions. Yet the latter two became the focus of discussions for the European Union (EU) and since 1996, the EU has put forward a maximum temperature target of 28C, which was originally approximated to a 550 ppm CO2e concentration target (cited in European Environment Agency, 1996). Tol (2007) amongst others has disputed this figure as being weakly supported by cost–benefit analysis, but regardless of the figures it is clear that climate stabilization is politically appealing in part because of the promise of reward for (potentially costly) actions taken now. The growing numbers of ENGOs since the 1970s, spurred on by ‘Earth Day’ in the US (Gottlieb, 1993), have assimilated these ideas into their discussions of climate change too. Partly this can be associated with a ‘quasi-religious’ ideal of stability (Kwiatkowska, 2001) that holds discursive power for engaging public and government attention to ‘save the planet’. A guiding ethos of climate stabilization is the imagined future, safe, secure, stable climate, which can be engineered by our actions now; but the flipside of this myth is that if action is not taken the future will be insecure, unsafe, and unstable.9 These equilibrium and stability myths thus share static responses and polarizing dynamics that are counterposed to an approach based upon resilience and the incorporation of surprise (Timmerman, 1986; see also Jasanoff and Wynne, 1998). They reflect a project of bringing order to our existence and resonate with other environmental debates in the 1970s including that of population, not least in their demands for global management (Buttel et al., 1990; see also Sayre, 2008).10 Several examples of this polarized strategy can be highlighted. The ‘Stop Climate Chaos Coalition’ explicitly draws on an either/or approach to future climatic states in its declaration of a 2 8C threshold (climate chaos or calm—Stop Climate Chaos Coalition, 2009), while organizations such as Greenpeace have repeatedly made claims about the necessity of stabilizing global mean temperature, a figure frequently taken to be 2 8C (e.g. Kelly, 1990; see also Doyle, 2007). This is manifested directly in contemporary ENGOs such as 350.org, which is an international campaign to mitigate climate change through reducing and keeping atmo- spheric CO2 concentrations below 350 ppm. Climate stabilization has thus become an enduring myth, providing an easily graspable understanding of climate change, even though there are many questions about the framing of the problem, the accuracy of the figures and the implications for management. It has provided a ready interface between scientists, economists, policymakers and environmentalists, and it is this collective weaving that makes it so hard as a concept to disentangle from. Forsyth states that ‘‘assessments of frames should not just be limited to those that are labeled as important at present, but also seek to consider alternative framings that may not currently be considered important in political debates’’ (2003, p. 78). Considered in this way, climate stabilization – as a framing concept – has focused attention for political and policy engagement in particular ways; among them are a broad focus on mitigation rather than adaptation, and on static quantification of an equilibrium response rather than more dynamic goals of decarbonizing energy systems. Our work here traces how this discourse has developed, and how it has been fixed (or stabilized) for policy aims; yet we argue that such a discourse is problematic in that it has been consistently resisted and contested by ‘unstable’ bio-physical processes. As climate stabilization has become a guiding concept for political action on climate change, it has encased policy in areas of intractable scientific uncertainty that create all kinds of problematic assumptions and prescriptions, which influence both climate science and environmental economics. Climate stabilization presents a good example of how Levy et al. (2001) describe issue development and policy in accumulating stages from early simple, but rigid unscientific goals that are effective in anticipating policy, but which inevitably outlive their usefulness and are difficult to replace with more sophisticated goals because of the enduring socialization in the former. Scientists desiring action on climate change might have been concerned about any possible destabilization of the dominant framing, particularly as the reactionary discourses of vested interests opposed to decarbonization became stronger. With scientists and policymakers focused on the more immediate task of establishing the reality and (rough) magnitude of the problem, the stabilization-focused science-policy debate became an attractive approach and has guided many scientists, economists and policymakers into these modes of thinking. Tony Blair, in the quote at the start of the paper, suggests that stabilization provides a concept that has appealed to the instincts of scientists and economists. In terms of its historical genesis, however, stabilization is perhaps better conceived as a concept that emerged through an uneasy connecting of physical science, economics and policy thereby offering a framing of the question in a specific way that was amenable to these analyses. Climate stabilization became an intuitively reasonable heuristic during the 1980s because of a wide variety of intersecting intellectual heritages, a lack of alternatives, and model inadequacies. It has been valuable in that it has focused attention on diminishing negative human contributions to the changing climate; however, in so doing, it has encouraged policy to focus on considerations of long-term equilibrium targets, that may have posed comfortable predicaments for political and policy cycles, but have stymied short term action as policymakers wait for the answers that will solve all the questions about scientific, political, and economic uncertainty. Collectively, the recent 2008 UN COP14 provided numerous illustrations where climate negotiations have thus been lulled into contradictory unnerving comfort. For instance, former US Vice President Al Gore garnered rapturous applause when he ‘upped the ante’ of long-term promises by declaring ‘‘the truth is that the goals we are reaching toward are incredibly difficult, and even a goal of 450 parts per million, which seems so difficult today, is inadequate. We will soon need to toughen that goal to 350 parts per million’’ (Gore, 2008). Yet, at this meeting in Poznan, Poland, short-term agreements and actions remained a scarcity. A number of conclusions can therefore be drawn from this paper. First, we suggest that stabilization discourse has proved valuable for supporting particular scientific approaches to ‘solving’ climate change. Second, we argue that the focus on finding a scientific answer to the question of climate policy might be misplaced and that we also need a broader engagement with the ethics and politics of the science–economics hybrid of climate stabilization. Third, we posit that climate stabilization discourses may have led to unrealistic public expectations that leave open the possibility of future public and political critique. First, some research communities may actually benefit from the focus on stabilization since it gives their research agendas an apparent policy relevance that would otherwise be hard to defend. For instance, paleoclimate modeling – while valuable as a part of fundamental research programs and process understanding in geophysics, biodiversity and ecosystems research – perhaps benefits from a prominence accorded it by its claims to help constrain climate sensitivity (Hegerl et al., 2006; Schneider von Deimling et al., 2006; Crucifix, 2006) that would be hard to sustain if the global policy community were to reframe the question in terms of the relationship between 20th century attributable warming (Stott and Kettleborough, 2002) and expected 21st warming (Frame et al., 2006). Thus, from this perspective one might not expect some researchers to embrace the sort of reframing conversation we have in mind here. Scientific centres institutionalize these conceptualizations by organizing research groups to study the specific problem of the equilibrium response, such as, for example, the Climate Sensitivity group within the Hadley Centre. The establishments of groups primarily focused on climate sensitivity is a sensible response to explicit policy direction, but focus on climate sensitivity is, in turn, a response to the fact that stabilization and its attendant notions have become ‘obligatory passage points’ (Latour, 1987) in previous scientific enquiries and policy documents. The recurring and somewhat unreflectively accepted theme of climate stabilization in proposed policy frameworks is the thing that should be questioned. The levers open to today’s policymakers are primarily related to current and future sources of emissions, and very little of the infrastructure that provides those anthropogenic sources (or sinks) will be around on equilibrium response timescales. Natural sources and sinks in a new equilibrium are subject to considerable uncertainty. Thus, the policy focus needs to move from focusing on a more static quantification of the details of the equilibrium response – stabilization – to more dynamic formulations that seek to decarbonize energy systems on multi-decadal timescales. While establishing and subsequently meeting long-term climate targets may be one of a set of sufficient conditions for mitigating the worst outcomes of anthropogenic climate change, over the next several decades a much more important task is to achieve substantial decarbonization goals. Moreover, the present lack of enforcement mechanisms to curb carbon-based energy habits makes the achievement of long-term emissions reduction proposals even less likely. Second, the focus on long-term stabilization targets places scientific certainty and uncertainty at the centre of considerations of decarbonization and distinct from political perspectives. By framing action in such a way, further scientific inputs regarding links between GHG concentrations, emissions and temperature change can unearth more questions to be answered, rather than settling already existing ones (Jasanoff and Wynne, 1998). Therefore, greater scientific inputs actually can contribute to more complicated policy decision-making by offering up a greater supply of knowledge from which to develop and argue varying interpretations of that science (Sarewitz, 2004). The allure of the scientifically focused ‘climate stabilization’ discourses distracts attention from open political debate about the timescale, respective burdens and objectives of climate policy. Instead of posing these challenges and/or objections to particular actions as scientific ones, they can more effectively be treated as political ones (too), as well as ethical ones. Rayner notes, however, that ‘‘for good or ill, we live in an era when science is culturally privileged as the ultimate source of authority in relation to decision-making’’ (2006, p. 6); often, the focus on securing scientific certainty can effectively obstruct effective policy action (see also Oreskes, 2004). Also, as mentioned before, it contributes to dominant considerations of mitigation policies, often to the detriment of considerations for policy action on adaptation. Thus, assessments of anthropogenic climate stabilization have prema- turely foreclosed around fixed international policies on mitigation (e.g. Kyoto Protocol) and associated proposals/practices (e.g. targets and timetables, temperature rise ceiling of 2 8C and 450–550 ppm CO2 atmospheric concentration caps). Third, while the stabilization-based discourse may have been valuable in building broad policy actor and public engagement in climate mitigation, it has also fostered sub-optimal aims and unrealistic expectations. For instance, the ‘Stop Climate Chaos Coalition’ based in the UK has now involved over 11 million citizens, spanning a wide range of environmental and labour organizations as well as development charities and faith-based groups. However, their mission statement includes a call to support activities that ‘‘keep global warming below the two degrees (Celsius) danger threshold to protect people and the planet’’ (Stop Climate Chaos Coalition, 2009). While those claims-makers – barring medical science breakthroughs – will not be alive to defend their claims, there is irony in claiming intergenerational equity as the ethical requirement to stabilize the climate, when the attention remains focused on stability instead of preparing our grandchildren for new relations with their future climates (through already existing commitments to a certain amount of climate change). By critiquing stabilization we are not critiquing long-term thinking per se; we posit that this should be an open engagement rather than one tied predominantly to scientific targets and notions of stability. More- over the name Stop Climate Chaos has a strange Canute-ishness about it, as though we either could or should stand together on a beach and command, in the name of good climate governance, that change and variability cease. If climate can be stabilized in this sense, then clearly the level of DAI or stabilization target becomes an intensely political and ethical question, as the future global climates will effectively be determined by actors living in the early years of this century who design and implement such a policy (in this regard an international agreement is vital). It thus privileges and instantiates their conceptions of safe, dangerous and tolerable, silencing both current and future discontents.11 It also suggests some rational basis by which certain impacts are allowable, raising the opportunity for populations to demand either protection or compensation for a stable climate that has destabilized their livelihoods. Therefore any mitigation options pursued that aim to suck carbon out of the atmosphere cannot merely be seen as technologies to benignly stabilize the climate, but rather must be seen as active and heavily politicized interventions. Critical ethical and political dilemmas are therefore obscured within the technocratic calculability of climate stabilization policies. In this paper we have argued that the elegant attraction of ‘climate stabilization’ discourses has culminated in a focus on long- term mitigation targets and a cost-effective climate policy that does not address broader political and ethical questions about the timescale, actors and costs involved. It seems appropriate, scientifically, historically and socially, to question this discursive hegemony and open up debates on more productive and effective framings of climate policy. This paper therefore argues that while the climate stabilization discourse (and associated ways of thinking/proposing/acting) has been valuable in drawing greater attention to human influences on the global climate, it is time to explicitly move to more productive ways of considering minimizing detrimental impacts from human contributions to climate change.