Anthem EnviroExperts

Reviewed by Dr. Yasmin Zaerpoor, Boston College

Why is collective action on climate change so difficult to achieve, despite the overwhelming scientific consensus that the climate is changing?

The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change: A Guide to the Debate, 3rd Edition, by A. E. Dessler and E. A. Parson, Cambridge University Press, 2020, 278 pp.

Our global response to climate change remains insufficient despite regular, and increasingly urgent, warnings from the scientific community about the global impacts, especially if warming exceeds 1.5°C. Although there is some uncertainty about the extent to which our natural world will change as a result of the climate changing, there is wide scientific consensus that the climate is changing. The existing challenge is therefore not related to knowledge, but to knowing how to translate that knowledge into political action.

In this third edition of The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change, A. E. Dessler and E. A. Parson masterfully consider the interaction science and politics as it relates to climate action. They outline three factors that make climate change more difficult to address than previous environmental challenges. First, climate change is a slow process that requires long-term planning, which is not immune to changes in local and national politics. Second, they highlight the tradeoff between environment and economics, noting that the necessary reduction in greenhouse gas emissions will require transitioning away from fossil fuels and may have, at least short-term, impacts on economies around the world. Third, uncertainty about the impacts of climate change makes it easy to misunderstand and miscommunicate the seriousness of the problem.

Chapter One starts by introducing the science of climate change and, more specifically, describing climate, the Earth’s energy balance, the greenhouse gas effect, the role of feedbacks and climate forcings, and the impact of humans on the climate. It also provides a brief overview of climate change policy, starting from the late 1980s and 1990s through the 2015 Paris Agreement (and the United States’ temporary withdrawal under Donald Trump).

Chapter Two summarizes the scientific and political debates on climate change, their differences and how they interact. Interestingly, Dessler and Parson approach this by differentiating between positive and normative statements made in the climate debate, describing the scientific process as a collective endeavor with peer review rather than an abstract, rational process, and by highlighting the potential conflict that emerges when science is used/misused to support contradictory political positions. This is a very thoughtful approach to the climate debate as it extends beyond the science and introduces readers to the complexity of integrating science into policy.

Chapter Three, which focuses on the impacts of humans on the climate, is organized around four questions: (i) Is the climate changing? (ii) Are human activities responsible? (iii) What further climate changes are likely? and (iv) What will the impacts be? Dessler and Parson also consider natural processes (e.g., tectonic processes, variations in Earth’s orbit, solar variability and internal variability of the climate system) that affect climate, but explain that these do not explain the extent to which the climate is changing. They end the chapter by considering, and rebutting, two contrary claims for anthropogenic climate change. More specifically, they explain and dismiss the misinformed and pervasive counterarguments that global warming is not happening and that the climate has always changed and therefore should not be a concern.

In Chapter Four, Dessler and Parson turn to climate change action–focusing on mitigation, adaptation and climate engineering. In each of these discussions, the politics surrounding the feasibility of future action is considered alongside the science. For example, they point to nuclear power as a significant potential zero-emission source of energy, while also recognizing the existing political opposition to nuclear energy and the risk that expanding fission could lead to increased opportunities for “sabotage, terrorism, or diversion for weapons.” They also consider subnational, national and global policies that could promote mitigation, weighing the benefits and limitations of different types of policies (e.g., market-based policies such as cap and trade systems versus regulatory policies) before describing two possible approaches to climate engineering, or the act of manipulating the climate system to reduce the impacts of greenhouse gases. They conclude the chapter with a recognition that effective climate action will require all three interventions–mitigation to reduce the effects of climate change, adaptation to reduce the impacts and continued study of climate engineering in case the first two interventions are insufficient.

The final chapter summarizes climate policy in 2019 and outlines a path forward. Interestingly, the authors warn against waiting for global consensus on climate change and suggest that piecemeal national and subnational mitigation may be the best we can hope for in today’s political climate.

This book is an excellent teaching resource–whether it is for an undergraduate or graduate course or for nonspecialists who want to understand how science and politics interact in relation to climate action. It is structured intuitively as though the authors have anticipated the questions and follow-on questions that students of climate change will ask, and answer them comprehensively and succinctly. Overall, it is an easy, engaging, and comprehensive primer for anyone trying to understand the challenges and opportunities for action on climate change.

Reviewed by Gregory Johnson, PhD student, Auburn University School of Forestry and Wildlife, and Dr. Kelly Dunning, Assistant Professor Auburn University School of Forestry and Wildlife

What insights can the politics of public land management yield regarding one of the most important acts of political violence this decade?

This Land Is My Land: Rebellion in the West, by James R. Skillen, Oxford University Press, 2020, 296 pp.

James Skillen’s account of how an ideologically conservative movement contests federal land management in the West means more in the wake of the events of January 6, 2021. What insights can the politics of public lands lend us to understanding one of the most important acts of political violence this decade?

Public lands in the United States have been an issue of great contention for well over 100 years. Eleven Western states live with 50 percent of their available land managed by the federal government in the form of National Parks, Wilderness Areas, National Conservation Lands and National Monuments, to name a few. The book begins with describing the large number of Western Americans that rely on the land for their livelihood, lifestyle and culture. These same people, regarded in popular culture as “cowboys,” have to follow the federal policies that have changed repeatedly in the name of conservation and economic needs. Since the beginning of federal public lands, challenges to who should manage the land have manifested themselves in the Sagebrush Rebellion, the War of the West and the so-called Patriot Rebellion.

The book goes into great detail about each of these phenomena to demonstrate to the reader how an ideologically conservative movement in the United States was formed, shaped and driven to conflict with the federal government. Readers of policy process literature will appreciate Deborah Stone’s ideas translated from Policy Paradox, drawing on symbols and narratives to make his point. One of the main characters, Cliven Bundy, known for his armed standoff with the Bureau of Land Management and other federal agents in Nevada over cattle grazing on federal property, is a powerful symbol for Western determination.

Adherents of this movement see Washington (and its distant, “out of touch” lawmakers) violating the Constitution, suggesting that such “tyranny” would eventually lead to socialism. Bundy even goes on to compare himself to Rosa Parks, M. K. Gandhi, Henry Thoreau and even to George Washington standing up to British oppression. This political grandstanding and the use of symbols has gained an astonishingly broad support from mainstream conservatives, to the Tea Party, to members of Congress, and even to armed militias. The author deftly predicts the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6 by noting that the history of Western America “provides enough information for a tentative prediction” that “as soon as a Democrat moves into the White House and enjoys Democratic support in the Congress” that “the next rebellion is likely to erupt.” Quelling future political violence in a contentious era requires us to understand the lessons contained in Skillen’s book.

Reviewed by Shekhar Chandra, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

Do science advisory committees facilitate the functioning of Multilateral Environmental Agreements? Are their roles purely technocratic and apolitical?

Science Advice and Global Environmental Governance: Expert Institutions and the Implementation of International Environmental Treaties, by Pia M. Kohler, Anthem Press, 2019, 226 pp.

Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) are key instruments of international global environmental governance.  To facilitate the functioning of the MEAs, there is a provision of science advisory committees. In recent decades, such instruments have grown significantly and the role of these committees has become institutional. The committees, in their role as a repository of knowledge, compile relevant evidence from peer-reviewed studies. The role of these committees, while recognized as crucial, is often considered purely technocratic and entirely apolitical.

Pia M. Kohler’s book makes a radical departure from the mechanical understanding of the committees to frame them as an active source of knowledge coproduction connecting science and policy with significant power of deciding on what constitutes evidence and how to translate the evidence into governance. Due to the reframing of the role of science advisory committees, Kohler scrutinizes who these experts are and how they organize their work to answer the global implementation challenges. While the theme of the book may fit into the larger question of how science diplomacy influences policy, dealt in great detail in the works of MIT’s Larry Susskind and Harvard’s Sheila Jasanoff, what separates Kohler’s contribution is her effort in untangling the institutional mechanism that links science and policy at the global scale.

Kohler’s methodology is qualitative that includes participant observations, elite interviews and archival analysis. She analyzes the proceedings from specific angles of the three science committees established under the Montreal Protocol, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification. For example, in the case of the Montreal Protocol, she examines how the question of the relative strength of experts from developing and developed countries became controversial when some exemptions were granted to the developed nations under the protocol. While the book focuses entirely on environmental issues, its central message is broad in its applications. It provides original insights into the question of increasing rule-based structuralism that is becoming common to international governance institutions. The book is a timely contribution and provides clear recommendations to design science committees for more effective global environmental governance.

Reviewed by Jungwoo Chun, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

How do we overlay various sustainable development frameworks and roadmaps on local governments? Who are the critical actors? What does sustainable development look like at a smaller community scale?

Conflict and Sustainability in a Changing Environment: Through the Eyes of Communities, by Gwendolyn Smith and Elena P. Bastidas, Anthem Press, 2017, 208 pp.

Sustainable development is pretty well-defined by international organizations, multinational corporations, and governments. But it is still unclear what sustainable development looks like at a smaller community scale. How do we overlay various sustainable development frameworks and roadmaps on local governments? Who are the critical actors? The authors try to answer these questions in this book.

The book is organized in sections on theory and practice. The first part presents alternative conflict resolution frameworks as a way of incorporating community views into sustainable development initiatives. The authors demonstrate that values are a crucial starting point—they dictate choices and actions that communities must sort through when they are faced with environmental problems that call for social change. Social polygraphy is introduced as a joint-problem-solving method through which the researcher and the community collaboratively create maps of the past, present, and future as a way to understand past conflicts and envision a pathway forward.

The second part illustrates how the proposed framework can be used to analyze the views of the Trio indigenous community in the Amazonian forests of Suriname. Chapters 5–7 discuss how the values of the Trio community shape their views about climate change and the actions they decide to take. These chapters help the reader see how climate change must be understood through the lens of the community.

The book concludes with answers to some of the questions posed at the outset, offering a comparison between how sustainable development is viewed by the community and development organizations. The last chapter explores sustainable solutions for the Trio community, for example, combining mitigation with adaptation efforts already practiced by the community. The authors further explain the “unfitting” nature of the REDD+ framework which operates from a limited mitigation point of view.

Conflicts are likely to emerge when behavioral change is necessary to achieve wider social change. The model offered by the authors can be applied to different contexts around the world, helping local and indigenous communities define their own sustainable development pathways in reaction to guidelines provided by global development organizations.

Reviewed by Nicholas Bradley Allen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Why do national policymakers fail to reach stable carbon pricing agreements in spite of the well-known social costs of carbon and how cross-national differences in domestic climate policymaking are controlled by business and labor?

Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics, by Matto Mildenberger, The MIT Press, 2020, 368 pp.

If we step away from observed experience, national carbon pricing policies seem like they should be easy to pass. The social costs of carbon are well known. Instruments are various and flexible enough that even those harmed by regulation can be placated. Mass movements and extreme weather heighten salience. Delay is exponentially costly. Why, then, do national policymakers fail to reach stable carbon pricing agreements? 

Matto Mildenberger’s new book Carbon Captured scours a 30-year cross-national record to reveal this instability. Writing in the tradition of Theda Skocpol and other comparative political scientists, his interview-based case studies of Norway, the United States, and Australia pursue a historical-institutionalist theory of national climate politics. 

Mildenberger cuts through a thicket of instruments and institutional arrangements to find a simple, chimerical advantage held by carbon polluters: their “double representation.” First, carbon-polluting industries have membership in both left and right political coalitions, ensuring any proposal will fracture internal support. Second, when reform coalitions succeed in passing carbon pricing, carbon-polluting industries may assert themselves in rulemaking or mobilize citizen resistance to higher energy costs. Administrations that marginalize carbon polluters in policy formulation, as Obama’s production-focused Clean Power Plan did, discover their opponents’ blocking power later. Countries with more stable pricing regimes, like Norway and Japan, overcome polluters’ double representation by exempting intensive industries and passing costs to consumers. Accommodation, however economically inefficient and loathsome to climate advocates, prevents sabotage. 

The “double representation” thesis enriches other studies of carbon-pricing opponents’ tactical maneuvering (e.g., Oreskes and Conway 2011). Mildenberger skillfully explains why carbon, unlike other pollutants, is so successfully defended in the policymaking process. Political scientist Robert Keohane (2015) observed that climate policy stalemates have the appearance of “driving one’s car into the wall rather than trying to drive around the wall.” For those interested in the bypass, Carbon Captured offers a few different routes.