Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
issues, climate change throws the debate about means and ends wide open.
It speaks to what many regard as the ultimate human question, namely
'how should we live?' While we necessarily rely on various epistemic work-
ers and their modes of representation to help us understand the options
and corresponding value commitments, we have to assume responsibility
for instructing politicians, businesses, NGOs, etc. on how to proceed on
our behalf. As stakeholders we have rights and responsibilities. To pretend
otherwise is to regard epistemic dependence as simply a curse rather than a
resource we can use actively to fashion our thoughts, actions and, ultimately,
our person-hood. However imperfect our democracies are, the collective
power of citizens to deliberate and decide on societal futures is real enough
(if often weakly actualised). It's one way we utilise our epistemic dependence
so as to make it work in our favour - or not as the case may be (see
Box 8.3
).
BOX 8.3
RESPOND TO CLIMATE CHANGE
In the West, and probably beyond, there's currently no political con-
sensus about how to respond to the prospect of significant global
climate change. Rhetorically, many government leaders worldwide
express serious concern about the prospect, as do many citizens and
NGOs. In practice, however, piecemeal reforms, like the introduction
of carbon trading schemes, suggest a default to the socio-technical
and economic status quo. This is to be expected because the prospect
of serious climate change invites 'abortion politics' in Pielke's (2007)
sense of the term. The worst-case biophysical scenario for the twenty-
first century (that presented by Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, 2011)
incites profound reflection about the widest conceivable range of pos-
sible responses predicated on the widest conceivable range of values.
While a plethora of thoughtful responses have been suggested, and a
whole variety of underpinning values proposed and justified, most of
these arguably remain ghettoised. They've either been invisible to most
people or not taken seriously by them. There's a whiff of 'post-politics'
here (see
Box 3.4
), especially in the tendency of some climate change
sceptics to pretend that the 'real issues' are about the quality of cli-
mate science rather than a societal failure to properly consider how to
respond to what the science is telling us.
Why has there been an unwillingness to engage in meaningful 'Abor-
tion politics'
viz.
climate change in government arenas and the public
sphere? We can only speculate with the help of research. Recent studies
(e.g. Hobson and Neimeyer, 2012; Leiserowitz
et al.
, 2012) suggest that
public scepticism about global warming in the 'post-gate' period has
