Sociological Issues Related to Climate Change
Ron Kramer
Department of Sociology
Sociological Issues Related to Climate Change
1. Examining the Social Consequences of Climate Change
a) Interpersonal (Direct) Violence
b) Structural (Indirect) Violence
2. Explaining the Social Causes of Global Warming
a) Structural
b) Cultural
3. Analyzing the Social Organization of Climate Change Denial
a) Corporate Interest Groups (Literal and Interpretive Denial)
b) Cultural Cognition/System Justification
c) Emotions and Everyday Life (Implicatory Denial)
4. Investigating Social/Collective Responses to Climate Change
a) Mitigation
b) Adaptation
c) International Agreements/UNFCCC
d) Transformational Social Movement
5. Criminological Issues Related to Climate Change
a) The Language of Criminality/Concept of Violence
b) Global Warming as State‐Corporate Crime
Conceptualizing the Social Consequences of Climate Change as Violence
Two General Forms of Social Violence
1) Violence as Action/Direct Physical Harm
A) Interpersonal (person to person)
B) Institutional (organizational acts by states, corporations or groups) 2) Violence as Structure/Indirect Physical Harm
Structural violence describes the variety of physical harms that result from unequal social structures. With structural violence asymmetric social relations cause the loss of life. We can recognize structural violence only at the collective level when we observe survival rates that are too low relative to available resources. Structural violence, therefore, is a set of social conditions from which flows absolute poverty, disease, hunger and malnutrition, poor sanitation and health care services, premature death, high infant mortality, illiteracy, unemployment, pollution, and general misery and squalor. Social Consequences of Climate Change As Violence
Explaining the Social Causes of Global Warming
Structural/Institutional Forces
Political Economy‐political and economic systems
Accumulative, Expansionary, Extractive Economic Institutions
Modern Industrial Capitalism/“Free” Market Systems
State Socialism/Centralized Command and Control Economy
Modern Industrial Capitalism
Globalization/Domination by Transnational Corporations
Quest for Profits/Capital Accumulation
Deregulation: absence or removal of political rules
Exponential Growth‐unsustainable due to resource limits
Production: predatory, exploitive, destructive, polluting
Externalities: external costs borne by unrelated third parties
Extraction of Fossil Fuels and Emission of Greenhouse Gases
False Saviors: technology and efficiencies
The Rise of the Corporate State and the Crisis of Democracy
The State as a Site of Struggle
Politics and Corporate Money/Citizens United/Inverted Totalitarianism Monumental failure of the political system to act on climate change Cultural Values, Beliefs and Narratives
Growth Fetishism
Environmental Domination
State Supported Cultures of Consumption and Production
Materialism/Greed/Self‐Interest/Waste
Ontology of Possessive Individualism
Hierarchical Worldview
Anthropocentrism: little ethical use for non‐humans
American/Western Exceptionalism
The Social Organization of Climate Change Denial
According to Cohen, denial “refers to the maintenance of social worlds in which an undesirable situation (event, condition, phenomenon) is unrecognized, ignored or made to seemnormal.”
He identifies three categories of denial: 1) A literal denial is: “the assertion that something did not happen or is not true.”
2) With an interpretive denial, the basic facts are not denied, however, “…they are given a different meaning from what seems apparent to others.”
3) Finally, the notion of implicatory denial “covers the multitude of vocabularies‐justifications, rationalizations, evasions‐that we use to deal with our awareness of so many images of unmitigated suffering.” Here, “knowledge itself is not an issue. The genuine challenge is doing the ‘right’
thing with this knowledge.”
There are also 3 Forms of Socially Organized Denial that use these categories in various ways.
1. Corporate and Ideological Interest Groups: Literal and Interpretive
Denial of Global Warming and Climate Change
The global warming denial counter‐movement, organized by corporate and ideological interest groups, has been able to create doubts about climate science and block actions that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and create clean energy alternatives. Global warming denial efforts are largely carried out by conservative think tanks funded
for the most part by money from the fossil fuel industry. They attempt to obfuscate, misrepresent, manipulate or suppress the results of scientific research. They engage in both literal and interpretive denial.
There are five types of climate change denial argument:
1. Conspiracy theories‐Plot to abolish capitalism or “Climategate”
emails prove conspiracy
2. Fake Experts‐Petitions show there is no consensus or spokespersons with no background in climate science
3. Impossible expectations‐Climate models not completely certain
4. Misrepresentations and logical fallacies‐The climate has changed in the past, current change is natural variation
5. Cherry‐picking‐Isolated papers and data are selected while the larger body of evidence is ignored
Two other critical factors in the conservative climate change denial counter‐
movement:
1. Obstruction and manipulation within the political system, specifically by the George W. Bush administration and Republicans in the Congress.
2. The bias of the mass media. •Promotion of climate change denial by right‐wing media such as Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.
•Balance as Bias: The “balancing norm” of the mainstream media allows the views of denialists to be placed on par with the views of climate scientists.
2. Identity Protective Cognition/System Justification Attitudes
Research shows that conservative white males (“cool dudes”) are more likely to espouse climate change denial.
Two theories explain this phenomenon:
1. Identity Protection Cognition:
Risk perception is shaped by cultural worldviews (hierarchical, individualistic in this case) shared by members of salient in‐groups.
Information threatening to one’s cultural worldview and the beliefs associated with belonging to particular group will be rejected to protect one’s identity and the status and esteem that individuals receive from group membership.
2. System Justification:
Conservatives have stronger system justification tendencies‐supporting maintenance of the status quo and resisting attempts to change it.
System justification is associated with the denial of problems, such as climate change, that threaten system functioning.
3. Emotions and Everyday Life (Implicatory Denial)
Even people who are aware of climate change and have some information about it take no actions, make no behavioral changes, remain apathetic.
This implicatory denial is explored by Kari Marie Norgaard, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life (2011).
Central role of emotions.
Climate change is a troubling topic, an uncomfortable issue. Emotions and cognition are linked. We control emotions by controlling thoughts.
Socially organized denial is the social process by which individuals collectively distance themselves from troubling information.
Climate change raises troubling emotions:
Fears for the future; threatens a sense of continuity
Feelings of helplessness and powerlessness
Feelings of guilt; fear of being a bad person
Emotion Management/Collective Strategies for Avoidance
“People want to protect themselves a bit.”
Cultural Tool Kit: norms, cultural scripts, social narratives
Conversation Norms‐don’t talk about climate change
Emotion Norms‐maintain control, be tough, be cool, be smart
Norms of Attention‐normal things to think about, be aware of
Legitimating and Normalizing Narratives
Produced by corporations and the state, echoed by citizens
Serve to deflect disturbing information
Normalize a particular version of reality
Interpretive denial‐positive spin on disturbing information
Perspectival selectivity‐others are worse
Claims to virtue‐greenwashing
The American Case:
Superwicked problem‐complex, no clear solution, time up
Extensive political alienation‐existing structure inadequate
Cult of American individualism‐can’t be fixed by individuals
American Exceptionalism‐“the American way of life”
Anti‐intellectualism in American political culture
Corporate funded campaign of denial
Social/Collective Responses
The watchwords of the climate discussion are mitigation and adaptation‐that is, we must mitigate the causes of climate change while adapting to its effects. Mitigation means drastically cutting our production of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, like methane and chlorofluorocarbons, that prevent the sun’s heat from radiating back out to space. Mitigation means moving toward clean energy sources.
Adaptation, on the other hand, means preparing to live with the effects of climatic changes, some of which are already underway and some of which are inevitable‐in the pipeline. Adaptation is both a technical and a political challenge.
Technical adaptation means transforming our relationship to nature as nature transforms.
Political adaptation, on the other hand, means transforming humanity’s relationship to itself, transforming social relations among people. Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos (2011)
Successful political adaptation to climate change will mean developing new ways of containing, avoiding, and deescalating the violence that climate change fuels. That will require economic redistribution and development. It will require a new diplomacy of peace building.
“However, another type of political adaptation is already under way, one that might be called the politics of the armed lifeboat: responding to climate change by arming, excluding, forgetting, repressing, policing, and killing” (Parenti, p.11).
“One can imagine a green authoritarianism emerging in rich countries, while the climate crisis pushes the Third World into chaos. Already, as climate change fuels violence in the form of crime, repression, civil unrest, war, and even state collapse in the Global South, the North is responding with a new authoritarianism” (Parenti, p. 11).
“The Pentagon and its European allies are actively planning a militarized adaptation, which emphasizes the long‐term, open ended containment of failed or failing states‐
counterinsurgency
forever” (Parenti, p. 11).
“This sort of ‘climate fascism,’ a politics based on exclusion, segregation, and repression, is horrific and bound to fail. There must be another path. The struggling states of the Global South cannot collapse without eventually taking wealthy economies down with them. If climate change is allowed to destroy whole economies and nations, no amount of walls, guns, barbed wire, armed aerial drones, or permanently deployed mercenaries will be able to save one half the planet from the other” (Parenti, p. 11).
“I argue that the best way to address the effects of climate change is to tackle the political and economic crises that have rendered us so vulnerable to climate‐induced chaos in the first place. But ultimately, mitigation remains the most important strategy. The physical impacts of climate change‐rising sea levels, desertification, freak storms, and flooding‐are certainly frightening, but so are the emergency social and political aspects of adaptation, which too often take destructive and repressive forms. We must change that (Parenti, p. 12).
International Agreements: IPCC and UNFCCC
1988 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
‐World Meteorological Organization (WMO)
‐UN Environment Programme (UNEP)
‐Assess the scientific knowledge on global warming
1990 IPCC First Assessment Report
‐Broad international consensus that climate change was human induced
‐Led the way to an international convention
1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
‐Produced at UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED)
‐Held in Rio de Janeiro (called the Earth Summit)
‐Objective: Stabilize greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations in atmosphere at a level to prevent dangerous anthropogenic climate change
1994 UNFCCC Entered into Force
‐Treaty sets no mandatory limits on GHG emissions
‐No enforcement mechanisms/Legally non‐binding
‐Treaty provides for updates (Protocols) that would set limits
‐Conference of Parties (COP)‐Supreme body of convention
1995 IPCC Second Assessment Report
1997 Kyoto Protocol Adopted at COP 3
‐Provide mandatory targets on GHG emissions
‐Provide flexibility in how to meet targets
‐Recognize that commitments would vary by country
2000/2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report
2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report
2009 COP 15/MOP 5 Copenhagen, Denmark
2010 COP 16/MOP 6 Cancun, Mexico
2011 COP 17/MOP 7 Durban, South Africa
Criminological Issues
The Language of Criminality:
In 2009, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a physicist and the chief climate advisor to the government of Germany referred to eight years of inaction on global warming by the George W. Bush administration in the United States by saying, “This was a crime.”
John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace U.K. stated after the failure of the conference: “The city of Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport. There are no targets for carbon cuts and no agreement on a legally binding treaty”
Climate scientist Donald Brown has stated, “We may not have a word for this type of crime yet, but the international community should find a way of classifying extraordinarily irresponsible scientific claims that could lead to mass suffering as some type of crime against humanity.”
Analyzing Crimes of Violence
Interpersonal Institutional/Organizational
Structural
Global Warming as State‐Corporate Crime
I have a chapter forthcoming in Rob White (ed.), Climate Change, Crime and Criminology. New York: Springer (2012).
This chapter expands on the notion of global warming and climate change as state‐
corporate crime by examining how transnational corporations, particularly in the fossil fuel industry, and the nation states of the global North, particularly the United States, act in concert in ways that, intentionally or not, cause widespread environmental and social harm. Corporate and state actors in interaction with each other create these harms in four ways: 1) by denying that global warming is caused by human activity, 2) by blocking efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, 3) by excluding progressive, ecologically just adaptations to climate change from the political arena, and 4) by responding to the social conflicts that arise from climate change by transforming themselves into “fortress societies while the rest of the world slips into collapse.”