Climate Rationality

Johnston unpacks and critiques the legal, economic, and scientific basis for precautionary climate policies pursued in the United States. In doing so, he reveals an alternative approach to climate change policy that would enable the US to efficiently adapt to a changing climate and radically reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

"Climate change is an issue that transcends and exceeds formal political and geographical boundaries. Social scientists are increasingly studying how effective policies on climate change can be enacted at the global level, 'beyond the state'. Such perspectives take into account governance mechanisms with public, hybrid and private sources of authority. Studies are raising questions about the ways in which state authority is constituted and practiced in the climate arena, and the implications for how we understand the potential and limits for addressing the climate problem. This book focuses on the rationalities and practices by which a carbon-constrained world is represented, categorized and ordered. The book will enable investigations into a range of sites (e.g., the body, home, shopping centre, firm, city, forests, streets, international bureaucracies, financial flows, migrants and refugees) where subjectivities around climate change and carbon are formed and contested. Despite a growing interest in this area of work, the field remains fragmented and diffuse. This edited collection brings together the leading scholarship in the field to cast new light on the question of how, why, and with what implications climate governance is taking place. It is the first volume to collect this body of scholarship, and provides a key reference point in the growing debate about climate change across the social sciences"--

"Climate change is an issue that transcends and exceeds formal political and geographical boundaries. Social scientists are increasingly studying how effective policies on climate change can be enacted at the global level, 'beyond the state'. Such perspectives take into account governance mechanisms with public, hybrid and private sources of authority. Studies are raising questions about the ways in which state authority is constituted and practiced in the climate arena, and the implications for how we understand the potential and limits for addressing the climate problem. This book focuses on the rationalities and practices by which a carbon-constrained world is represented, categorized and ordered. The book will enable investigations into a range of sites (e.g., the body, home, shopping centre, firm, city, forests, streets, international bureaucracies, financial flows, migrants and refugees) where subjectivities around climate change and carbon are formed and contested. Despite a growing interest in this area of work, the field remains fragmented and diffuse. This edited collection brings together the leading scholarship in the field to cast new light on the question of how, why, and with what implications climate governance is taking place. It is the first volume to collect this body of scholarship, and provides a key reference point in the growing debate about climate change across the social sciences"--

That America's natural environment has been degraded and despoiled over the past 25 years is beyond dispute. Nor has there been any shortage of reasons why-short-sighted politicians, a society built on over-consumption, and the dramatic weakening of environmental regulations. In Retaking Rationality, Richard L. Revesz and Michael A. Livermore argue convincingly that one of the least understood-and most important-causes of our failure to protect the environment has been a misguided rejection of reason. The authors show that environmentalists, labor unions, and other progressive groups have declined to participate in the key governmental proceedings concerning the cost-benefit analysis of federal regulations. As a result of this vacuum, industry groups have captured cost-benefit analysis and used it to further their anti-regulatory ends. Beginning in 1981, the federal Office of Management and Budget and the federal courts have used cost-benefit analysis extensively to determine which environmental, health, and safety regulations are approved and which are sent back to the drawing board. The resulting imbalance in political participation has profoundly affected the nation's regulatory and legal landscape. But Revesz and Livermore contend that economic analysis of regulations is necessary and that it needn't conflict with-and can in fact support-a more compassionate approach to environmental policy. Indeed, they show that we cannot give up on rationality if we truly want to protect our natural environment. Retaking Rationality makes clear that by embracing and reforming cost-benefit analysis, and by joining reason and compassion, progressive groups can help enact strong environmental and public health regulation.

Simon Wolf describes how the growing awareness for the economic consequences of climate change and the economic opportunities of climate protection has led to changes in the rationality of governing climate change, from reducing emissions to building low-carbon economies. One crucial strategy for governments in orchestrating the transformation to cleaner economies is to enable low-carbon investment. The author therefore takes a critical look at how climate governance is reframed as an economic and investment challenge in recent years, and reveals some of the blind spots of focusing on the economic and investment opportunities related to climate protection.

Politics and regulation -- A threatening synthesis -- Staying in bounds -- A retreat from reason -- The illusion of costs without benefits -- Erasing public health science -- Resurrecting discredited models -- Ignoring indirect benefits -- Trivializing climate change -- Manipulating transfers -- Future directions -- Improving the guardrails.

Climate change is without question the single most important issue the world faces over the next hundred years. The most recent scientific data have led to the conclusion that the globally averaged net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming and that continued greenhouse gas emissions at or above current rates would cause this process to continue to the severe detriment of our environment. This unequivocal link between climate change and human activity requires an urgent, world-wide shift towards a low carbon economy and coordinated policies and measures to manage this transition. The starting point and core idea of this book is the long-held observation that the threat of climate change calls for a change of climate in economics. Inherent characteristics of the climate problem including complexity, irreversibility and deep uncertainty challenge core economic assumptions and mainstream economic theory appears inappropriately equipped to deal with this crucial issue. Kevin Maréchal shows how themes and approaches from evolutionary and ecological economics can be united to provide a theoretical framework that is better suited to tackle the problem.

Climate change is the greatest challenge of the age, and yet fierce disagreement still exists over the best way to tackle the problem or, indeed, whether it should be tackled at all. In this original book, Amanda Machin draws on radical democratic theory to show that such disagreement does not have to hinder collective action; rather, democratic differences are necessary if we are to have any hope of acting against climate change. This is an important read for researchers, students, policy makers and anyone concerned about the current (lack of) politics in climate change.