But is the Aff really EXACTLY what Heidegger Ks?! Where does your wind link say offshore?!
We need less of this and more impact turns.
Needz more impact turnz.
Environment K Answers
Warming v K
Market > Philosophy—2ac
Operating within the market system is necessary to solve warming – arm chair
philosophizing dooms us to extinction
Bryant 12—professor of philosophy at Collin College (Levi, We’ll Never Do Better Than a Politician:
Climate Change and Purity, 5/11/12, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/05/11/well-never-dobetter-than-a-politician-climate-change-and-purity/)
Somewhere or other Latour makes the remark that we’ll never do better than a politician. Here it’s important to remember that
for Latour– as for myself –every
entity is a “politician”.Latour isn’t referring solely to those persons that we call
“politicians”, but to all entities that exist. And if Latour claims that we’ll never do better than a politician, then this is because
every entity must navigate a field of relations to other entities that play a role in what is and is
not possible in that field. In the language of my ontology, this would be articulated as the thesis that the local
manifestations of which an entity is capable are, in part, a function of the relations the entity entertains to other entities in a
regime of attraction. The
world about entities perpetually introduces resistances and frictionsthat play
a key role in what comes to be actualized.¶It is this aphorism that occurred to me today after a disturbing
discussion with a rather militant Marxist on Facebook. I had posted a very disturbing editorial on climate change by the world
renowned climate scientist James Hansen. Not only did this person completely misread the editorial, denouncing Hansen for
claiming that Canada is entirely responsible for climate change (clearly he had no familiarity with Hansen or his important work),
but he derided Hansen for proposing market-based solutions to climate change on the grounds that “the market is the whole
source of the problem!” It’s difficult to know how to respond in this situations.¶ read on! ¶It
is quite true that it is the
system of global capitalism or the market that has created our climate problems(though, as Jared
Diamond shows in Collapse, other systems of production have also produced devastating climate
problems).In its insistence on profit and expansion in each economic quarter, markets as currently
structured provide no brakes for environmental destructive actions. The system is itself
pathological.¶However, pointing this out and deriding market based solutions doesn’t get us very far. In
fact, such a response to proposed market-based solutions is downright dangerous and
irresponsible . The fact of the matter is that 1) wecurrentlylive in a market based world, 2) there is
not, in the foreseeable futurean alternative system on the horizon, and 3), above all, we need to do
something now.We can’t afford to reject interventions simply because they don’t meet our
ideal conceptions of how things should be.We have to work with the world that is here, not
the one that we would like to be here. And here it’s crucial to note that pointing this out does not
entail that we shouldn’t work for producing that other world.It just means that we have to
grapple with the world that is actually there before us.¶ It pains me to write this post because I remember,
with great bitterness, the diatribes hardcore Obama supporters leveled against legitimate leftist criticisms on the grounds that
these critics were completely unrealistic idealists who, in their demand for “purity”, were asking for “ponies and unicorns”. This
rejoinder always seemed to ignore that words have power and that Obama, through
his profound power of
rhetoric, had, at least the power to shift public debates and frames, opening a path to making
new forms of policy and new priorities possible.The tragedy was that he didn’t use that
power, though he has gotten better.¶ I do not wish to denounce others and dismiss their claims on these sorts of grounds. As a
Marxist anarchists, I do believe that we should fight for the creation of an alternative hominid ecology or
social world. I think that the call to commit and fight, to put alternatives on the table, has been one of the most powerful
contributions of thinkers like Zizek and Badiou. If we don’t commit and fight for alternatives those alternatives will never appear in
the world. Nonetheless,
we still have to grapple with the world we find ourselves in. And it is
here, in my encounters with some Militant Marxists, that I sometimes find it difficult to avoid
the conclusion that they are unintentionally aiding and abetting the very things they claim to be
fighting. In their refusal to become impure, to work with situations or assemblages as we
find them, to sully their hands, they end up reproducing the very system they wish to topple
and change.Narcissistically they get to sit there, smug in their superiority and purity, while
everything continues as it did before because they’ve refused to become politicians or
engage in the difficult concrete work of assembling human and nonhuman actors to render another
world possible. As a consequence, theyoccupy the position of Hegel’s beautiful soul thatdenounces the horrors
of the world, celebrate the beauty of their soul, while depending on those horrors of the
world to sustain their own position. ¶To engage in politics is to engage in networks or ecologies of relations
between humans and nonhumans. To engage in ecologies is to descend into networks of causal relations and feedback loops that
you cannot completely master and that will modify your own commitments and actions. But there’s no other way, there’s no way
around this, and we do need to act now.
Perm
Combining policy with a diverse set of knowledge systems is key to solve – discourse
in decision making forums key
-
Also makes an apocalyptic rhetoric good arg
Field et al 3/31/14 – Stanford Professor of Climate Science, in conjunction with other scientists in a
report for the IPCC (Christopher, “Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability
SUMMARY FOR POLICYMAKERS” http://ipccwg2.gov/AR5/images/uploads/IPCC_WG2AR5_SPM_Approved.pdf, HW)
Adaptation planning and implementation at all levels of governance are contingent on ¶ societal
values, objectives, and risk perceptions (high confidence). Recognition of diverse interests, circumstances,
social-cultural contexts, and expectations can benefit decision making processes. Indigenous, local,
and traditional knowledge systems and practices, including indigenous peoples’ holistic view of
community and environment are a major resource for adapting to climate change, but these have not
been used consistently in existing adaptation efforts. Integrating such forms of knowledge with
existing practices increases the effectiveness of adaptation. Decision support is most effective when it is sensitive to
context and the diversity of ¶ decision types, decision processes, and constituencies (robust evidence, high agreement). ¶ Organizations
bridging science and decision-making, including climate services, play an ¶ important role in the
communication, transfer, and development of climate-related knowledge, ¶ including translation,
engagement, and knowledge exchange (medium evidence, high ¶ agreement).71
69
Combining policy and individual action is necessary to create the best forms of these
actions
Field et al 3/31/14 – Stanford Professor of Climate Science, in conjunction with other scientists in a
report for the IPCC (Christopher, “Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability
SUMMARY FOR POLICYMAKERS” http://ipccwg2.gov/AR5/images/uploads/IPCC_WG2AR5_SPM_Approved.pdf, HW)
Adaptation planning and implementation can be enhanced through complementary actions ¶ across
levels, from individuals to governments (high confidence).National governments can ¶ coordinate
adaptation efforts of local and subnational governments, for example by protecting ¶ vulnerable groups, by supporting
economic diversification, and by providing information, policy ¶ and legal frameworks, and financial support
(robust evidence, high agreement).Local ¶ government and the private sector are increasingly recognized as
critical to progress in ¶ adaptation, given their roles in scaling up adaptation of communities, households, and
civil ¶ society and in managing risk information and financing (medium evidence, high agreement).¶ 68A first step towards adaptation to future
climate change is reducing vulnerability and ¶ exposure to present climate variability (high confidence). Strategies include actions with cobenefits for other objectives. Available
strategies and action can increase resilience across a range of possible
future climates while helping to improve human health, livelihoods, social and economic well-being,
and environmental quality. See Table SPM.1. Integration of adaptation ¶ into planning and decision-making
can promote synergies with development and disaster risk ¶ reduction.
Pragmatism
Pragmatic warming policy is effective and key to prevent extinction
Simpson 10 (Francis, College of Engineering, Vanderbilt University, “Environmental Pragmatism and its
Application to Climate Change The Moral Obligations of Developed and Developing Nations to Avert
Climate Change as viewed through Technological Pragmatism”, Spring 2010 | Volume 6 | Number 1)
Pragmatism and Footprinting¶ Environmental
pragmatism is a relatively new field of environmental ethics that seeks
to move beyond the strictly theoretical exercises normal in philosophy and allows the environmental
movement to formulate substantial new policies (Light, 1). Environmental Pragmatism was initially posited by
Bryan Norton and evolved to not take a stance over the dispute between non-anthropocentric and anthropocentric ethics.
Distancing himself from this dispute, he preferred to distinguish between strong and weak anthropocentricism (Light, 290-291,
298). The main philosophers involved in advancing the debate in environmental pragmatism include Eric Katz, Andrew Light, and
Bryan Norton. This
particular discipline advocates moral pluralism, implying that the
environmental problems being faced have multiple correct solutions.Light argues that the
urgency of ecological crises requires that action is necessary through negotiation and compromise. While
theorists serve to further the field of environmental ethics and to debate the metaethical basis
of various environmental philosophies, some answers to questions are best left to private
discussion rather than taking time to argue about them publically (introduction of pragmatism).
Pragmatism believes that if two theories are equally able to provide solutions to a given problem, then debate on which is more is
argued that: “the
commitment to solving environmental problems is the only precondition for any
workable and democratic political theory” (Light, 11). While the science behind a footprint is well understood,
what can the synthesis of environmental pragmatism and footprinting tell us about the moral obligation to avert climate change?
How does grounding the practice of sustainability footprinting in environmental pragmatism generate moral prescriptions for
averting climate change?¶ Environmental Pragmatism necessitates the need for tools in engineering to be developed and applied
to avert the climate change problem, since pragmatism inherently calls
for bridging the gap between theory
and policy/ practices. With the theory of pragmatism in mind, further research and development of tools such as life-cycle
analysis and footprinting are potential policy tools that are necessary under a pragmatist viewpoint so that informed decisions can
be made by policy makers. Since the role of life-cycle analysis and footprinting attempt to improve the efficiency and decrease the
overall environmental impact of a given process, good, or service, environmental pragmatism would call for the further
development and usage of these tools so that we can continue to develop sustainably and fulfill our moral obligation to future
generations. By
utilizing footprinting and life-cycle analysis, it becomes possible to make
environmentally conscious decisions not only based upon a gut instinct but additionally based on
sound science. Finally, in regards to averting climate change, footprinting and life-cycle analysis offer another dimension to
traditional cost-benefit analysis and can allow for our moral obligation to future generations to weigh into final decisions which
will eventually result in policies and/ or a production of a good or service. Since traditional cost benefit analysis does not account
for the environment explicitly, pragmatism would call for the application of these tools to ensure that the environment is
adequately protected for future generations.¶ Climate
change modeling inherently contains many
unknowns in terms of future outcomes and applied simplifications, but these factors should not be enough to
hold us back from an environmental pragmatism stand point. Rather than hiding behind a
veil of uncertainty with the science, the uncertainty of the possible catastrophic outcomes
demands action on the part of every human individual. Environmental pragmatism could also adopt a view point like the
precautionary principle where a given action has great uncertainty, but also great consequence (Haller). Since we are
attempting to protect human lives and prevent unnecessary suffering, environmental
pragmatism would dictate that we should take action now and stop debating the theoretical
aspects of this problem. A moral obligation exists to protect human life, and it becomes our
obligation to avert climate change. Despite the relatively high economic costs of averting climate change, it is worth
noting that the creation of green jobs and new sectors will help to stimulate the economy rather than completely hindering it.
People inherently fear change, and it is my opinion that averting climate change requires a
drastic change in our consumption patterns, an important reason why people are resisting averting climate change. From an
environmental pragmatism viewpoint, it is humanities responsibility to avert climate change before it is
too late since we have a moral obligation to protect the future of humanity and the biosphere.
Public Policy
Reframing warming is necessary to involve the citizens required to create and pass
policy to solve it – debate is a unique opportunity to accomplish this
Nisbet, ‘10 (Matthew, Professor of Communication, American University and AB in Government from
Dartmouth College. August, Communicating Climate Change: Why Frames Matter for Public
Engagement, Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 51:2, 12-23)
U.S. presidents, especially newly elected ones, are often given discretion to pursue their preferred legislative priorities. Yet research¶shows that
presidential popularity is not enough¶ to pass policy initiatives. The efforts of recent administrations to
pass health care, welfare, or immigration reforms have depended on generating widespread public
support and mobilization while effectively countering the communication efforts of opponents of these
reforms.1 When these conditions are not met, as in health care and immigration reforms, presidents have suffered major policy
defeats.¶There is no reason to suspect that climate change policy will be any different, especially given the
long history of partisan gridlock in U.S. politics. In the context of two wars and an economic cri- sis, absent a shift in the polls
and a surge in input from a diversity of constituents, it is unlikely over the next four years that a strong majority in Congress will accept the
political risks needed to pass mean- ingful policy actions such as a cap-and- trade bill, carbon tax, or new international tion efforts have focused
on increasing the¶ climate treaty.¶More
importantly, democratic principles are at stake. Policies to address
climate change will bear directly on the future of Americans, impacting their pocketbooks, lifestyles, and
local com- munities. These decisions are therefore too significant to leave to just elected officials and
experts; citizens need to be actively involved. Reframing the relevance of climate change in ways that connect
to a broader coalition of Americans—and repeatedly communicating these new meanings through a variety of trusted
media sources¶ and opinion leaders—can generate the level of public engagement required for policy action.
Successfully reframing climate change means remaining true to the underlying science of the issue, while
applying research from communication and other fields to tailor messages to the existing attitudes,
values, and perceptions of different audiences, making the complex policy debate understandable, relevant, and personally
important.2 This approach to public outreach, however, will require a more careful understanding of U.S. citizens’ views of climate
change as well as a reexamination of the assumptions that have traditionally informed climate change
communication efforts.
Public persuasion on the effects of and solutions to environmental ills is key to
mobilize action – the judge should vote affirmative to ethically orient themselves
toward climate solutions
De-Shalit, 2000. Professor of Political Theory at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Associate Fellow at the Oxford Centre for
Environment, Ethics, and Society, Mansfield College, Oxford University. “The Environment: Between Theory and Practice,” Avner p. 4-6,
Questia.
However, it would be wrong, if not dangerous, to blame the 'other'. From the prophets in biblical times to the French revolutionaries and the
early Fabians, history
is full of examples of theorists and philosophers who abandoned all hope of
persuading others through deliberation, and became impatient and hence more radical in their ideas. This
explains why the shift from humanistic to misanthropic attitudes has been rapid. Perhaps the 'easiest' way to solve a problem
is to lose faith in a form of gradual change that can still remain respectful of humans. Such an attitude, I
believe, only brings about a new series of problems encompassing dictatorship, totalitarianism, and lack of
personal freedom. In this book I seek to maintain the philosophical impetus, not to point the finger at the politicians or the activists.
Rather, I wish to examine ourselves—the philosophers who engage in discussing the environment—to discover how we might construct a
theory that is much more accessible to the activists and the general public (without relinquishing any of our goals), and which can be harnessed
to the aims of political philosophy. Here, the counter-argument would go something like this: 'OK, so the argumentation supplied by
environmental philosophers is so removed from that used by activists and governments. So what? The only outcome of this is that more
arguments, or, if you like, a pluralistic set of arguments, will emerge. Some arguments are relevant to academia alone; others can be used in
politics. Thus, for example, in the university we could maintain an ecocentric environmental philosophy, 7 whereas in politics anthropocentric 8
arguments would dominate.' In response to this, it could be argued that plurality of argument is indeed welcome. Moreover, as we saw earlier,
the divergence between, say, ecocentric environmental philosophy and anthropocentric environmental
philosophy is not so vast in terms of the policies they recommend. In fact, as John Barry argues, 'reformed
naturalistic humanism' is capable of supporting a stewardship ethics just as well (J. Barry 1999 : ch. 3). But my
point is that saving the environment is not just a matter of theory: it is an urgent political mission. In a
democratic system, however, one cannot expect policies to be decided without giving any thought to how these
policies should be explained to the public, and thereby gain legitimacy. In other words, the rationale of a policy is an
increasingly important, if not inseparable, part of the policy; in particular, the openness and transparency of the democratic regime makes the
rationale a crucial aspect of the policy. A
policy whose rationale is not open to the public, or one that is believed to
be arrived at through a process not open to the public, is considered a-democratic (cf. Ezrahi 1990).
Consequently, a policy's legitimacy is owed not only to its effectiveness, but also to the degree of moral
persuasion and conviction it generates within the public arena. So, when constructing environmental
policies in democratic regimes, there is a need for a theory that can be used not only by academics, but also by
politicians and activists. Hence the first question in this book is, Why has the major part of environmental philosophy failed to
penetrate environmental policy and serve as its rationale? The first part of this book, then, discusses this question and offers two explanations
in response. These explanations are based on the premiss that environmental ethics and political theory should be differentiated and well
defined so that later on they may join hands, rather than that they should be united in a single theory. It is assumed that they answer two
questions. Environmental ethics is about the moral grounds for an environment-friendly attitude. Political theory with regard to the
environment relates to the institutions needed to implement and support environmental policies. Thus, the failure to distinguish properly
between environmental ethics and political theory underlies the failure of the major part of environmental philosophy to penetrate
environmental policy and provide its rationale. In Chapter 1 it is claimed that in a way environmental
philosophers have moved
too rapidly away from anthropocentrism—mainstream ethical discourses—towards biocentrism and
ecocentrism. 9 My argument is that the public on the whole is not ready for this, and therefore many activists
and potential supporters of the environmental movement become alienated from the philosophical
discourse on the environment. In addition, I suggest that the reason for the gap between on the one hand environmental
philosophers and on the other activists and politicians is that environmental philosophers have applied the wrong approach to political
philosophy. I claim that all moral reasoning involves a process of reflective equilibrium between intuitions and theory. I distinguish between
'private', 'contextual', and 'public' modes of reflective equilibrium, arguing that environmental philosophers use either the first or second mode
of reasoning, whereas political philosophy requires the third: the public mode of reflective equilibrium. The latter differs from the other two
models in that it weighs both the intuitions and the theories put forward by activists and the general public (and not just those of professional
philosophers). The argument for this being so is that reasoning about the environment needs to include political and democratic philosophy.
And yet, most of environmental philosophers' efforts so far have focused on such questions of meta-ethics as 'intrinsic value theories' and
'biocentrism'. Environmental philosophers have been pushed in this direction out of a genuine desire to seek out the 'good' and the truth, in an
effort to ascertain the moral grounds for an environment-friendly attitude. I suggest that environmental philosophers should not
limit themselves to discussing the moral grounds for attitudes, or to trying to reveal the good and the truth, although these are important and
fascinating questions. At least some of them should
instead go beyond this and address the matter of the necessary
institutions for implementing policies, and finally, and of no less importance, find a way to persuade
others to act on behalf of the environment. In other words, while there is a place for meta-ethics, it should not be
the only approach to philosophizing about the environment; it should not replace political philosophy.
State Action
The state is inevitable and an indispensable part of the solution to warming
Eckersley 4 Robyn, Reader/Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University
of Melbourne, “The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty”, MIT Press, 2004, Google
Books, pp. 3-8
I seek to draw attention to the positive role that
states have played, and might increasingly play, in global and domestic politics
Bull
outlined the state's positive role in world affairs, and his arguments continue to
provide a powerful challenge to those who somehow seek to "get beyond the state," as if such a move
would provide a more lasting solution to the threat of armed conflict or nuclear war, social and
economic injustice, or environmental degradation
given that the state is here to stay whether we
like it or not, then the call to get "beyond the state is a counsel of despair, at all events if it means that
we have to begin by abolishing or subverting the state, rather than that there is a need to build upon it ¶
rejecting the "statist frame" of world politics ought not prohibit an inquiry into the emancipatory
potential of the state as a crucial "node" in any future network of global ecological governance
one can expect states to persist as major sites of social and political power for at least the
foreseeable future and that any green transformations of the present political order will, short of
revolution, necessarily be state-dependent. Thus, like it or not, those concerned about ecological
destruction must contend with existing institutions and
seek to "rebuild the ship while still at
sea."
¶
it
would be unhelpful to become singularly fixated on the redesign of the state at the expense of other
institutions of governance
it is necessary to keep in view the broader
spectrum of formal and informal institutions of governance (e.g., local, national, regional, and
international) that are implicated in global environmental change
the political power concentrated in the state
"is a momentous, pervasive, critical phenomenon. Together with other forms of social power, it
constitutes an indispensable medium for constructing and shaping larger social realities, for
establishing, shaping and maintaining all broader and more durable collectivities States play
significant roles in structuring life chances, in distributing wealth, privilege, information, and risks, in
upholding civil and political rights, and in securing private property rights and providing the
legal/regulatory framework for capitalism. Every one of these dimensions of state activity has, for good
or ill, a significant bearing on the global environmental crisis. Given that the green political project is
one that demands far-reaching changes to both economies and societies, it is difficult to imagine how
such changes might occur on the kind of scale that is needed without the active support of states
the state
holds
a unique position in the
constitutive hierarchy from individuals through villages, regions and nations all the way to global
organizations. The state is inclusive of lower political and administrative levels, and exclusive in speaking
for its whole territory and population in relation to the outside world
it seems inconceivable to
advance ecological emancipation without also engaging with
state power ¶
While acknowledging the basis for this antipathy toward the nation- state, and the limitations of state-centric analyses of global ecological degradation,
. Writing more than twenty years ago, Hedley
(a proto-
constructivist and leading writer in the English school)
.10 As Bull argued,
.""
In any event,
. This is especially so,
given that
, where possible,
And if states are so implicated in ecological destruction, then an inquiry into the potential for their transformation even their modest reform into something that is at least more conducive to ecological sustainability would seem to be compelling.
Of course,
. States are not the only institutions that limit, condition, shape, and direct political power, and
. Nonetheless, while the state constitutes only one modality of political power, it is an especially significant
one because of its historical claims to exclusive rule over territory and peoples—as expressed in the principle of state sovereignty. As Gianfranco Poggi explains,
."12
, in varying degrees,
. While it is often
observed that states are too big to deal with local ecological problems and too small to deal with global ones,
nonetheless
, as LennartLundqvist puts it, "
."13 In short,
and seeking to transform
to me
. Of course, not all states are democratic states, and the
green movement has long been wary of the coercive powers that all states reputedly enjoy. Coercion (and not democracy) is also central to Max Weber's classic sociological understanding of the state as "a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of
physical force within a given territory."14 Weber believed that the state could not be defined sociologically in terms of its ends* only formally as an organization in terms of the particular means that are peculiar to it.15 Moreover his concept of legitimacy was merely concerned with
whether rules were accepted by subjects as valid (for whatever reason); he did not offer a normative theory as to the circumstances when particular rules ought to be accepted or whether beliefs about the validity of rules were justified. Legitimacy was a contingent fact, and in view of his
understanding of politics as a struggle for power in the context of an increasingly disenchanted world, likely to become an increasingly unstable achievement.16 ¶In contrast to Weber, my approach to the state is explicitly normative and explicitly concerned with the purpose of states,
and the democratic basis of their legitimacy. It focuses on the limitations of liberal normative theories of the state (and associated ideals of a just constitutional arrangement), and it proposes instead an alternative green theory that seeks to redress the deficiencies in liberal theory. Nor is
my account as bleak as Weber's. The fact that states possess a monopoly of control over the means of coercion is a most serious matter, but it does not necessarily imply that they must have frequent recourse to that power. In any event, whether the use of the state's coercive powers is
to be deplored or welcomed turns on the purposes for which that power is exercised, the manner in which it is exercised, and whether it is managed in public, transparent, and accountable ways—a judgment that must be made against a background of changing problems, practices, and
under- standings.
The coercive arm of the state can be used to "bust" political demonstrations and invade privacy. It
can also be used to prevent human rights abuses, curb the excesses of corporate power, and protect
the environment.¶ although the political autonomy of states is widely believed to be in decline, there
are still few social institution that can match the same degree of capacity and potential legitimacy that
states have to redirect societies and economies along more ecologically sustainable lines to address
ecological problems such as warming pollution, the buildup of toxic and nuclear wastes and the rapid
erosion of
biodiversity States
have the capacity to curb the socially and ecologically
harmful consequences of capitalism.
There are therefore many good reasons why green political theorists need to think not only critically but
also constructively about the state and the state system
offer
two cheers
as a potentially more significant ally in the green cause
In short,
global
the earth's
.
and
—particularly when they act collectively—
They are also more amenable to democratization than cor- porations, notwithstanding the ascendancy of the neoliberal state in the increasingly competitive global economy.
. While the state is certainly not "healthy" at the present historical juncture, in this book I nonetheless join Poggi by
"a timid
for the old beast," at least
.17
ing
Warming = Struc Vio/Racism
The global south will suffer the most devastating consequences of climate change.
Goodman 9 (James, University of Technology (Sydney) ‘9 “From Global Justice to Climate Justice?
Justice Ecologism in an Era of Global Warming” New Political Science 31 (4) p. 501)
The impact of climate change has been likened to that of a third world war —at least as devastating as its
predecessors. In this war it
is the Global South that is in the immediate firing line: the impacts of climate change
for low-income peoples are now predicted to be disproportionate and catastrophic. In April 2007 a report issued
by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on impacts and vulnerability stated that it is in the South, where
urbanization and industrialization are already putting pressure on resources and where adaptation
capacity is relatively weak, that climate change will have itsmost immediate negative impact.10 The
report predicted major water shortages due to climate change, with a potential halving in agricultural
production in some regions of Africa by 2020, and a one-third reduction in yields in Central and South
Asia by 2050, as well as inundation of the densely populatedmega-deltas of South and South-EastAsia due to rising sea levels. Those
amongst Northern and Southern elites who continue to benefit from continued accumulation do so at an immediate and measurable cost to
Southern peoples. But there is a sting in the tail: as nature wreaks its revenge, a climate breakdown from which even the richest cannot insulate
themselves is now only a generation away. The UN Human Development Report for 2007, “Fighting Climate Change,” underlines the point:
Climate change is the defining human development challenge of the 21st century. Failure
to respond to that challenge will stall
and then reverse international efforts to reduce poverty . The poorest countries and most vulnerable
citizens will suffer the earliest and most damaging setbacks, even though they have contributed least to
the problem. Looking to the future, no country—however wealthy or powerful— will be immune to the impact of global warming.11
Warming disproportionately impacts marginalized peoples
Field et al 3/31/14 – Stanford Professor of Climate Science, in conjunction with other scientists in a
report for the IPCC (Christopher, “Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability
SUMMARY FOR POLICYMAKERS” http://ipccwg2.gov/AR5/images/uploads/IPCC_WG2AR5_SPM_Approved.pdf, HW)
Differences in vulnerability and exposure arise from non-climatic factors and from ¶ multidimensional
inequalities often produced by uneven development processes (very high ¶ confidence). These differences shape
differential risks from climate change. See Figure ¶ SPM.1. People who are socially, economically, culturally, politically,
institutionally, or ¶ otherwise marginalized are especially vulnerable to climate change and also to
some adaptation ¶ and mitigation responses (medium evidence, high agreement). This heightened
vulnerability is ¶ rarely due to a single cause. Rather, it is the product of intersecting social processes that result in ¶ inequalities in
socioeconomic status and income, as well as in exposure. Such social
processes ¶ include, for example, discrimination on
the basis of gender, class, ethnicity, age, and ¶ (dis)ability.13 ¶ ¶ Impacts from recent climate-related
extremes, such as heat waves, droughts, floods, ¶ cyclones, and wildfires, reveal significant
vulnerability and exposure of some ecosystems ¶ and many human systems to current climate
variability (very high confidence). Impacts of ¶ such climate-related extremes include alteration of
ecosystems, disruption of food production ¶ and water supply, damage to infrastructure and
settlements, morbidity and mortality, and ¶ consequences for mental health and human well-being. For
countries at all levels of ¶ development, these impacts are consistent with a significant lack of preparedness for current ¶ climate variability in
some sectors.14 ¶ Climate-related
hazards exacerbate other stressors, often with negative outcomes for ¶
livelihoods, especially for people living in poverty (high confidence). Climate-related hazards ¶ affect poor
people’s lives directly through impacts on livelihoods, reductions in crop yields, or ¶ destruction of
homes and indirectly through, for example, increased food prices and food ¶ insecurity. Observed positive
effects for poor and marginalized people, which are limited and ¶ often indirect, include examples such as diversification of social networks and
of agricultural ¶ practices.¶ 15
Global warming is a form of racism—U.S. emissions affect the Southern hemisphere
significantly more than itself
Paroma Basu, University of Wisconsin, 11-16-‘5
(“Third World bears brunt of global warming impacts” http://www.news.wisc.edu/11878.html) 7-12-13
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In a recent chilling assessment, the World Health Organization (WHO)
reported that human-induced changes in the
Earth's climate now lead to at least 5 million cases of illness and more than 150,000 deaths every year.
Temperature fluctuations may sway human health in a surprising number of ways, scientists have learned, from influencing
the spread of infectious diseases to boosting the likelihood of illness-inducing heat waves and floods. Now, in a synthesis report featured on the
cover of the journal Nature, a team of health and climate scientists at UW-Madison and WHO has shown that the
growing health
impacts of climate change affect different regions in markedly different ways. Ironically, the places that
have contributed the least to warming the Earth are the most vulnerable to the death and disease
higher temperatures can bring. "Those least able to cope and least responsible for the greenhouse
gases that cause global warming are most affected," says lead author Jonathan Patz, a professor at UW-Madison's Gaylord
Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. "Herein lies an enormous global ethical challenge." According to the Nature
report, regions at highest risk for enduring the health effects of climate change include coastlines along the
Pacific and Indian oceans and sub-Saharan Africa. Large sprawling cities, with their urban "heat island" effect, are also prone
to temperature-related health problems. Africa has some of the lowest per-capita emissions of greenhouse gases.
Yet, regions of the continent are gravely at risk for warming-related disease. "Many of the most important
diseases in poor countries, from malaria to diarrhea and malnutrition, are highly sensitive to climate," says co-author Diarmid CampbellLendrum of WHO. "The health sector is already struggling to control these diseases and climate change threatens to undermine these efforts."
"Recent extreme climatic events have underscored the risks to human health and survival ," adds Tony
McMichael, director of the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University. "This synthesizing
paper points the way to strategic research that better assesses the risks to health from global climate change."¶ The UW-Madison and WHO
assessment appears only weeks before global leaders convene in Montreal during the first meeting of the Conference of Parties to the Kyoto
Protocol, which came into effect in February 2005. Patz will also deliver the keynote address at a parallel WHO/Health Canada event.¶ The
United States - the world's top emitter of greenhouse gases - has yet to ratify the Kyoto treaty. Patz
and his colleagues say their work demonstrates the moral obligation of countries with high per-capita
emissions, such as the U.S. and European nations, to adopt a leadership role in reducing the health
threats of global warming. It also highlights the need for large, fast-growing economies, such as China and India, to develop
sustainable energy policies.¶ "The political resolve of policy-makers will play a big role in harnessing the man-made forces of climate change,"
says Patz, who also holds a joint appointment with the UW-Madison department of Population Health Sciences.¶ Scientists believe that
greenhouse gases will increase the global average temperature by approximately 6 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. Extreme
floods, droughts and heat waves, such as Europe's 2003 heat wave, are likely to strike with increasing frequency. Other factors such as irrigation
and deforestation can also affect local temperatures and humidity.
Warming v Racism
Identity bad
Global warming movements are coming now thanks to a decline in identity politics --their strategy crushes those movements --- causes extinction
Monbiot 8
George Monbiot, English Writer and Environmental and Political Activist, 9-4-2008, “Identity Politics in
Climate Change Hell,” http://www.celsias.com/article/identity-politics-climate-change-hell/
If you want a glimpse of how the movement against climate change could crumble faster than a summer
snowflake, read Ewa Jasiewicz’s article , published on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site. It is a fine example of the identity politics
that plagued direct action movements during the 1990s, and from which the new generation of activists
has so far been mercifully free. Ewa rightly celebrates the leaderless, autonomous model of organising
that has made this movement so effective. The two climate camps I have attended – this year and last –
were among the most inspiring events I’ve ever witnessed. I am awed by the people who organised them, who
managed to create, under extraordinary pressure, safe, functioning, delightful spaces in which we could
debate the issues and plan the actions which thrust Heathrow and Kingsnorth into the public eye. Climate camp is a tribute to the anarchist
politics that Jasiewicz supports. But in seeking to extrapolate from this experience to a wider social plan, she
makes two grave errors. The first is to confuse ends and means. She claims to want to stop global
warming, but she makes that task 100 times harder by rejecting allstate and corporate solutions. It
seems to me that what she really wants to do is to create an anarchist utopia, and use climate change as
an excuse to engineer it. Stopping runaway climate change must take precedence over every other aim.
Everyone in this movement knows that there is very little time: the window of opportunity in which we
can prevent two degrees of warming is closing fast. We have to use all the resources we can lay hands on, and these must include both
governments and corporations. Or perhaps she intends to build the installations required to turn the energy economy around - wind farms, wave machines, solar
thermal plants in the Sahara, new grid connections and public transport systems - herself? Her
article is a terryifying example of the
ability some people have to put politics first and facts second when confronting the greatest challenge
humanity now faces. The facts are as follows.Runaway climatechange is bearing down on us fast. We
require a massive political and economic response to prevent it. Governments and corporations,
whether we like it or not, currently control both money and power. Unless we manage to mobilise them,
we stand a snowball’s chance in climate hell of stopping the collapse of the biosphere. Jasiewicz would ignore all
these inconvenient truths because they conflict with her politics. “Changing our sources of energy without changing our sources
of economic and political power”, she asserts, “will not make a difference. Neither coal nor nuclear are
the “solution”, we need a revolution.” So before we are allowed to begin cutting greenhouse gas
emissions, we must first overthrow all political structures and replace them with autonomous communities of happy campers. All
this must take place within a couple of months, as there is so little time in which we could prevent two degrees of warming. This is magical thinking of the most
desperate kind. If I were an executive of E.On or Exxon, I would be delighted by this
political posturing, as it provides a marvellous
distraction from our real aims. To support her argument, Jasiewicz misrepresents what I said at climate camp. She claims that I “confessed not
knowing where to turn next to solve the issues of how to generate the changes necessary to shift our sources of energy, production and consumption”. I confessed
nothing of the kind. In my book Heat I spell out what is required to bring about a 90% cut in emissions by 2030. Instead I confessed that I don’t know how to solve
the problem of capitalism without resorting to totalitarianism. The issue is that capitalism involves lending money at interest. If you lend at 5%, then one of two
things must happen. Either the money supply must increase by 5% or the velocity of circulation must increase by 5%. In either case, if this growth is not met by a
concomitant increase in the supply of goods and services, it becomes inflationary and the system collapses. But a perpetual increase in the supply of goods and
services will eventually destroy the biosphere. So how do we stall this process? Even when usurers were put to death and condemned to perpetual damnation, the
practice couldn’t be stamped out. Only the communist states managed it, through the extreme use of the state control Ewa professes to hate. I don’t yet have an
answer to this conundrum. Does she? Yes,
let us fight both corporate power and the undemocratic tendencies of the
state. Yes, let us try to crack the problem of capitalism and then fight for a different system. But let us
not confuse this task with the immediate need to stop two degrees of warming, or allow it to interfere
with the carbon cuts that have to begin now. Ewa’s second grave error is to imagine that society could
be turned into a giant climate camp. Anarchism is a great means of organising a self-elected community of like-minded people. It is a disastrous
means of organising a planet. Most anarchists envisage their system as the means by which the oppressed can free themselves from persecution. But if
everyone is to be free from the coercive power of the state, this must apply to the oppressors as well as
the oppressed. The richest and most powerful communities on earth - be they geographical
communities or communities of interest - will be as unrestrained by external forces as the poorest and
weakest. As a friend of mine put it, “when the anarchist utopia arrives, the first thing that will happen is that every Daily Mail reader in the country will pick up
a gun and go and kill the nearest hippy.” This is why, though both sides furiously deny it, the outcome of both market fundamentalism and anarchism, if applied
universally, is identical. The anarchists associate with the oppressed, the market fundamentalists with the oppressors. But by eliminating the state, both remove
such restraints as prevent the strong from crushing the weak. Ours is not a choice between government and no government. It is a choice between government and
the mafia. Over
the past year I have been working with groups of climate protesters who have changed my
view of what could be achieved. Most of them are under 30, and they bring to this issue a clearheadedness and pragmatism that I have never encountered in direct action movements before. They are
prepared to take extraordinary risks to try to defend the biosphere from the corporations, governments
and social trends which threaten to make it uninhabitable. They do so for one reason only: that they
love the world and fear for its future. It would be a tragedy if, through the efforts of people like Ewa,
they were to be diverted from this urgent task into the identity politics that have wrecked so many
movements.
Taking action against warming represents an opportunity to rebuild progressive
politics for a more just society, but only if we set aside traditional differences founded
around identity in favor of a broad-based coalition
Smith 10
Brendan, co-founder of Labor Network for Sustainability, 11-23, “Fighting Doom: The New Politics of
Climate Change,” Common Dreams, http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/11/23-1
The climate crisis is not, at its core, an
environmental issue. In fact it is not an "issue" at all; it is an existential threat to every human and
community on the planet. It threatens every job, every economy in the world. It threatens the health of our children. It threatens our food and water supply. Climate change will continue to alter the
world our species has known for the past three thousand years. As an oyster farmer and longtime political activist, the effects of climate change on my life will be neither
distant nor impersonal. Rising greenhouse gases and ocean temperatures may well force me to abandon my 60-acre farm within the next forty years. From France to Washington state, oystermen are
I admit I have arrived late to the party. Only recently have I begun to realize what others have known for decades:
already seeing massive die-offs of seed oysters and the thinning shells science has long predicted. I can see the storm clouds and they are foretelling doom. But my political alter ego is oddly less pessimistic. Rather than triggering
this
coming crisis may be the first opportunity we have had in generations to radically re-shape the political
landscape and build a more just and sustainable society. The Power of Doom The modern progressive
movement in the U.S. has traditionally grounded its organizing in the politics of identity and altruism.
Organize an affected group -- minorities, gays, janitors or women -- and then ask the public at large to
support the cause -- prison reform, gay marriage, labor rights, or abortion -- based on some cocktail of good will, liberal guilt, and moral persuasion. This strategy has been effective at times. But we
have failed to bring these mini-movements together into a force powerful enough to enact broad-based
social reform. It takes a lot of people to change society and our current strategy has left us small in
numbers and weak in power.The highlights of my political life -- as opposed to oystering -- have been
marked by winning narrow, often temporary, battles, but perennially losing the larger war. I see the results in every
gloom, the climate crisis has surprisingly stirred up more hope than I have felt in twenty years as a progressive activist. After decades of progressive retreat it is a strange feeling. But I am haunted by the suspicion that
direction I look: growing poverty and unemployment, two wars, the rise of the right, declining unionization, the failure of the Senate's climate legislation and of Copenhagen, the wholesale domination of corporate interests. The
What is so promising about the climate
crisis is that because it is not an "issue" experienced by one disenfranchised segment of the population,
it opens the opportunity for a new organizing calculus for progressives. Except for nuclear annihilation,
list goes on and on. We have lost; it's time to admit our strategy has been too tepid and begin charting anew. This time can be different.
humanity has never faced so universal a threat where all our futures are bound inextricably together.
This universality provides the mortar of common interest required for movement building. We could
literally knock on every door on the planet and find someone -- whether they know it or not -- who has a vital self-interest
in averting the climate crisis by joining a movement for sustainability. With all of humanity facing doom, we can finally gather under one banner and count our future members not in the thousands
but in the millions, even billions. But as former White House "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones told the New Yorker in 2009, "The challenge is making this an everybody movement, so your main icons are Joe Six-Pack, Joe the Plumber,
and our political strategy
needs to be directed toward making the climate movement an "everybody movement." Let me use a personal example. As an
becoming Joe the Solar Guy, or that kid on the street corner putting down his handgun, picking up a caulk gun." The climate crisis is carrying us into uncharted waters
oysterman on Long Island Sound my way of life is threatened by rising greenhouse gases and ocean temperatures. If the climate crisis is not averted my oysters will die and my farm will be shuttered. Saving my livelihood requires
that I politically engage at some level. Normally I would gather together my fellow oyster farmers to lobby state and federal officials and hold a protest or two. Maybe I would find a few coalitions to join. But we would remain small
in number, wield little power, and our complaints about job loss would fall on largely unsympathetic ears in the face of so many suffering in so many ways. And what would we even petition our government to do about the
To save our lives and livelihood we need to
burrow down to the root of the problem: halting greenhouse gas emissions. And halting emissions
requires joining a movement with the requisite power to dismantle the fossil fuel economy while building a green economy. To
tackle such a large target requires my support for every nook and cranny effort to halt greenhouse gases and transition to a green economy. I need to gather up my fellow oyster
farmers and link arms with students blocking new coal-fired power plants while fighting for just
transition for coal workers; I need to join forces with other green workers around the country to
demand government funding for green energy jobs, not more bank and corporate bailouts; I need to
support labor movement efforts in China and elsewhere to climb out of poverty by going "green not
dirty." I have a stake in these disparate battles not out of political altruism, but because my livelihood and community depend on stopping greenhouse gases and climate change. In other words, the hidden jewel of the
problem? Buyouts and unemployment benefits? Re-training classes? Our oysters will still die and we will still lose our farms.
climate crisis is that I need others and others need me. We are bound together by the same story of crisis and struggle. Some in the sustainability movement have been taking advantage of the "power of doom" by weaving
together novel narratives and alliances around climate change. Groups in Kentucky are complementing their anti-mountain top removal efforts by organizing members of rural electrical co-ops into "New Power" campaigns to force
a transition from fossil fuels to renewable power -- and create jobs in the process. Police unions in Canada, recognizing their members will be first responders as climate disasters hit, have reached out to unions in New Orleans to
ensure the tragedies that followed Katrina are not repeated. Artists, chefs, farmers, bike mechanics, designers, and others are coalescing into a "green artisan movement" focused on building vibrant sustainable communities.
Immigrant organizers, worried about the very real possibility of ever-worsening racial tensions triggered
by millions of environmental refugees flooding in from neighboring countries, are educating their
membership about why the climate crisis matters.My hope is that over the coming years we will be able to catalog increasing numbers of these tributaries of the climate
crisis. Our power will not stem from a long list of issue concerns or sponsors at events -- we have tried that as recently as the October 2nd Washington D.C. "One Nation Working Together" march with little impact. Nor, with the
rise of do-it-yourself organizing, will our power spring from top-down political parties of decades past. Instead oystermen like me, driven by the need to save our lives and livelihood, will storm the barricades with others facing the
We will merge our mini-movements under a banner of common crisis, common vision and
common struggle. We will be in this fight together and emerge as force not to be trifled with. This Time We Have an
Alternative I am also guardedly optimistic because this time we have an alternative. My generation came of age after the fall of communism, and as a result, we have been raised in the midst
effects of the climate crisis.
of one-sided debate. We recognize that neoliberalism has ravaged society, but besides nostalgic calls for socialism, what has been the alternative? As globalization swept the globe, we demanded livable wages and better housing
for the poorest in our communities; we fought sweatshops in China; we lobbied for new campaign finance and corporate governance laws. But these are mere patchwork reforms that fail to add up to a full-blown alternative to our
current anti-government, free-market system. Never being able to fully picture the progressive alternative left me not fully trusting that progressive answers were viable solutions. But when I hear the proposed solutions to the
climate crisis, the fog lifts. I can track the logic and envision the machinery of our alternative. And it sounds surprisingly like a common sense rebuttal to the current free-market mayhem: We face a global emergency of catastrophic
we need to re-direct our institutions and economic resources
toward solving the crisis by replacing our carbon-based economy with a green sustainable economy. And by
proportions. Market fundamentalism will worsen rather than solve the crisis. Instead
definition, for an economy to be sustainable it must addresses the longstanding suffering ordinary people face in their lives, ranging from unemployment and poverty to housing and healthcare. For years I have tossed from
campaign to campaign, but the framework of our new progressive answer to
the climate crisis now provides a roadmap for my political strategy. It
helps chart my opponents -- coal companies and their political minions, for example -- as well as my diverse range of allies. It lays out my policy agenda, ranging from creating millions of new green jobs to building affordable green
housing in low-income communities. I finally feel confident enough in my bearings to set sail. The Era of Crisis Politics While building a new green economy makes sense on paper, it is hard to imagine our entrenched political
system yielding even modest progressive reform, let alone the wholesale re-formatting of the carbon economy. But I suspect this will change in the coming years, with our future governed by cascading political crises, rather than
political stasis. We are likely entering an era of crisis politics whereby each escalating environmental disaster -- ranging from water shortages and hurricanes to wildfires and disease outbreaks -- will expose the impotence of our
existing political institutions and economic system. In the next 40 years alone, scientists predict a state of permanent drought throughout the Southwest US and climate-linked disease deaths to double. As Danny Thompson,
secretary-treasurer of the Nevada AFL-CIO, told the Las Vegas Review Journal, the ever-worsening water crisis could be "the end of the world" that could "turn us upside down, and I don't know how you recover from that." As if
that is not enough, these crises will be played out in the context of a global economy spiraling out of control. Each hurricane, drought or recession will send opinion polls and politicians lurching from right to left and vice versa.
Think of how quickly, however momentarily, the political debate pivoted in the wake of Katrina, the BP disaster, and the financial crisis. As White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel famously said "Never let a serious crisis go to
waste...It's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before." While addressing the climate crisis requires radical solutions that cannot be broached in today's political climate, each disaster opens an opportunity to advance
alternative agendas -- both for the left and right. While politicians debate modest technical fixes, ordinary people left desperate by floods, fires, droughts and other disasters will increasingly -- and angrily -- demand more
in an era of crisis politics what appears unrealistic and
radical before a storm may well appear as common sense reform in its wake. My generation has been
raised in the politics of eternal dusk. Except for a passing ray of hope during the Obama campaign, our
years have been marked by the failure of every political force in society -- whether it be political elites or
social movement leaders -- to address the problems we face as a nation and world. They have left us
spinning towards disaster. We can forge a better future. Climate-generated disasters will bring our
doomed future into focus. The failure of political elites to adequately respond to these cascading crises
will transform our political landscape and seed the ground for social movements. And if we prepare for
fundamental reforms. While our current policy choices appear limited by polls and election results,
the chaos and long battle ahead, our alternative vision will become a necessity rather than an
impossibility. As a friend recently said to me, "God help us, I hope you're right."
Narratives Fail
Focusing on the global, existential threat of climate change solves global violence—the
alternative cannot access this because narratives rely on a uniquely individual
perspective
Vail et al ‘12
TOM PYSZCZYNSKI is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. His research is concerned with the
role of existential concerns in human behavior, recently with particular focus on intergroup conflict, war, terrorism, and morality. MATT MOTYL
is a Doctoral Candidate in Social Psychology at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on understanding and ameliorating intergroup
conflicts when sacred values are at stake. He is also Co-Director of CivilPolitics.org, a nonprofit academic website that brings together research
and scholars from many disciplines to try to foster improved communication between groups in conflict. JAMIE ARNDT received his PhD from
the University of Arizona in 1999 and is the Frederick A. Middlebush Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri. His
research explores motivational and existential dynamics of the human condition, and how these interface with various forms of social and
health behavior. KENNETH E. VAIL, III is a PhD student at the University of Missouri who received his M.A. in 2010, and his BA from the
University of Colorado at Colorado Springs in 2008. His research has focused on such questions as how peoples’ management of existential
concerns influences geopolitical affairs, religion, and motivations for authenticity and self-determination. GILAD HIRSCHBERGER is associate
professor of psychology at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, Israel. His main research interests are interpersonal and intergroup
conflict, prosocial motivation, and terror management theory. PELIN KESEBIR is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Colorado,
Colorado Springs. Her research explores different aspects of existential motivation. CORRESPONDENCE CONCERNING THIS ARTICLE should be
addressed to Tom Pyszczynski, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. E-mail: tpyszczy@uccs.edu, “Drawing Attention to Global Climate
Change Decreases
Support for War,” AM
Today’s world remains locked in violent conflicts while facing a multitude of other problems, such as
economic recession and global climate change. How might these different types of challenges influence one another? On the one
hand, climatic disruption could exacerbate the many other problems humankind is facing and lead to
increased competition for resources and intensified international conflict (Anderson & DeLisi, 2011). On the
other, widespread acknowledgment of the shared global consequences of environmental degradation before
disaster strikes might tap into psychological processes that could help mitigate conflict. Cognizance of the
shared global consequences of climate change could create a sense of shared threat that implies that
diverse groups of humans, even those currently in conflict with each other , must work together to avoid an
impending catastrophe. In this article, we combine ideas from terror management theory (TMT; Greenberg,
Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986; Kesebir & Pyszczynski, 2012; Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 2003) with findings from classic social
psychological research showing that a shared threat can promote cooperation among competing groups (e.g.,
Sherif, 1966) to explore one set of conditions under which drawing attention to the threat of global climate change might encourage
international cooperation and discourage international conflict. TMT TMT
research has documented the conflictenhancing
effect of existential threat in international disputes by showing that reminders of death often increase
support for war and terrorism (e.g., Hirschberger & Ein-Dor, 2006; Pyszczynski, Abdollahi, Solomon, & Greenberg, 2006). However,
recent research has shown that increased intergroup conflict is not an inevitable consequence of existential threat and that activating cultural
values that promote compassion and a sense of shared humanity can reduce and even reverse the effect of existential threat on support for
war (for a review, see Motyl, Vail, & Pyszczynski, 2009). These findings are compatible with earlier TMT studies showing that priming values
such as tolerance or pacifism can prevent mortality salience (MS) from leading to prejudice and aggression toward the outgroup, and lead to
more tolerant and pacifistic attitudes (e.g., Greenberg, Simon, Pyszczynski, Solomon, & Chatel, 1992; Jonas et al., 2008). The research
reported here tested
the hypothesis that drawing attention to the potential shared catastrophic effects of
global climate change could reduce or even reverse the effect of existential threat on support for
violence. TMT posits that human awareness of the inevitability of death creates the potential for existential terror, which is both highly
aversive and capable of undermining adaptive behavior unless effectively managed. According to the theory, people stave off this potential for
anxiety by: (a) maintaining faith in cultural worldviews that imbue life with meaning, value, and permanence, (b) garnering self-esteem, by
living up to their culture’s standards of value, and (c) maintaining close interpersonal attachments. This protection is threatened by those who
hold worldviews different from one’s own and those who derogate one’s group; this undermines the faith in these anxiety-buffering
conceptions that is required for effective functioning. From
the perspective of TMT, intergroup conflict is thus
motivated, in part, by threats to one’s worldview and self-esteem posed by the beliefs, values, and
behavior of outgroup members. People support discrimination, hostility, and violence against those who threaten their anxietybuffering conceptions of world and self (Pyszczynski, Solomon, & Greenberg, 2003). Accordingly, reminders of death increase
hostility toward groups with worldviews different from one’s own, especially when these groups are perceived to
violate cherished moral values (Kesebir & Pyszczynski, 2011). Research has shown that reminders of mortality can encourage aggression toward
political outgroup members (McGregor et al., 1998), sectarian strife (Greenberg et al., 1990), and prejudice toward other nations (Castano,
Yzerbyt, Paladino, & Sacchi, 2002; for a review, see Castano & Dechesne, 2005). MS also has been shown to increase support for war and the
use of military might among Americans and Israelis, and support for martyrdom missions to kill Americans among Iranians (Hirschberger & EinDor, 2006; Pyszczynski et al., 2006). However, TMT
does not imply that people always respond to existential threat
by lashing out at those who threaten their worldviews. Rather, the theory suggests that people use whatever aspect of
their worldview that is most likely to provide security in the particular situation they find themselves. Research supports this
malleability of terror management defenses. For example, reminding religious fundamentalists of the compassionate teachings
of their religions (Rothschild, Abdollahi, & Pyszczynski, 2009), activating thoughts of warm and caring interactions with attachment figures
(Weise et al., 2008), presenting violence as subhuman and animalistic (Motyl, Hart, & Pyszczynski, 2010), highlighting personal susceptibility to
harm, or nonviolent adversary intents (Hirschberger, Pyszczynski, & Ein-Dor, 2009) redirects responses to MS away from support for political
violence. Thus, although MS often increases hostility toward outgroups as a way of fending off the threat they pose to one’s own worldview, it
also encourages people to strive for selfesteem by living up to salient standards of their worldviews. Thus, when beliefs and values antithetical
to violence are salient, MS would be expected to decrease support for violent resolutions to conflicts. The Impact of Superordinate Goals,
Identities, and Threats Sherif’s classic Robbers Cave experiments illustrated that arbitrary group divisions can cultivate intergroup antagonism,
but simultaneously showed that conflict can be ameliorated when superordinate goals require the cooperation of formerly competing groups
(Sherif, Harvey, White, Hood, & Sherif, 1961). Allport (1954) suggested that viewing “humanity” as the ultimate ingroup category could
encourage peaceful coexistence. More recently, the Common Ingroup Identity Model (CIIM; Gaertner, Dovidio, Anastasio, Bachman, & Rust,
1993) suggested that reframing subordinate groups as a single superordinate inclusive group can reduce hostility. Consistent with the CIIM,
research has shown that when subordinate groups are led to contemplate shared aspects of their social identities, they cease to display
intergroup bias (Gaertner & Dovidio, 2000; also see Gaertner, Mann, Murell, & Dovidio, 1989; Houlette et al., 2004; Nier et al., 2001). Most of
the research conducted in these traditions, however, examines relations between artificial groups created in the laboratory or faced with
somewhat artificial superordinate goals, and none have assessed these processes within the context of long-standing real world intractable
conflicts. For example, some of this research examined relations between ad hoc minimal groups by having participants sit in different colored
chairs or in different spatial configurations in the laboratory (e.g., Gaertner et al., 1989). Shared superordinate goals and group identities in this
research are often similarly artificial in nature. For example, Gaertner et al. (1999) induced superordinate goals for participants in different
subgroups by offering each individual a small $10 award for cooperating with the other groups to devise the best resolution to an artificial
budget deficit. Mottola, Bachman, Gaertner, and Dovidio (1997) induced superordinate group identification by having undergraduate students
role-play as employees of corporations that are merging together (as opposed to one absorbing the other). To our knowledge, the
research reported here is among the first to assess the effect of focusing attention on a very serious shared
global threat— climate change—on support for war and peace-making among parties to volatile ongoing real
world conflicts, specifically the conflicts between the US and Iran and between the Palestinians and Israelis. Although some previous
studies considered the relationship between global climate change and war, for example using historical data to show that long-term climate
change has driven past wars (Zhang, Brecke, Lee, He, & Zhang, 2007), our study takes an experimental approach, and investigates processes
through which awareness of global climate change might encourage peace rather than war. Sherif (1966) posited that, much like a
superordinate goal or group identity, the presence of a shared threat can encourage intergroup cooperation and reduce conflict. An early study
found, for example, that participants awaiting a painful electric shock were more likely to help someone they thought was sharing the same
threat, but not someone who was not (Darley & Morris, 1975). Others demonstrated that per- ceived interdependence born from a shared
threat plays a key role in the formation of ingroup/ outgroup boundaries (Flippen, Hornstein, Siegal, & Weitzman, 1996). Presumably, shared
fate and shared threat lead to a recategorization of group boundaries and give rise to a sense of “weness,” which in turn increases intergroup cooperation and reduces intergroup conflict. Unfortunately, relatively
few studies have documented the conflict-assuaging properties of shared threat and, to our knowledge, no research has yet examined the
interplay between shared threats and variables such as MS, that have been shown to exacerbate support for violence among groups with long
histories of intractable conflict. The
present studies were designed to integrate previous work on shared group
identity and shared threat with TMT ideas about the existential roots of intergroup conflict. We sought
to determine if focus on a shared global threat—specifically, the threat of global climate change—can
reduce or reverse the common finding that existential threat exacerbates intergroup conflicts. Given the
increasingly globalized nature of the modern world, and the need for diverse groups with sometimes opposing interests to work together to
remedy these problems, it is important to know if heightening awareness of the shared nature of these threats might help reduce the costly
conflicts that embroil much of the world today. Global Climate Change as Superordinate Threat
The vast majority of the
scientific community agrees that the earth’s climate is changing, that these changes have the potential
to produce catastrophic consequences, and that humans have been contributing to this phenomenon (e.
g., Canadian Meteorological & Oceanographic Society, 2002; Joint Science Academies, 2005). Although the severity of the predicted effects of
climate change are disputed by some (Ball, 2007), many
scientists have warned of the potential for cataclysmic global
disasters, including extinction of animal species, flooding of densely populated coastal areas, forced evacuations and
migrations in regions no longer able to support agriculture, disruptions of weather patterns, drought,
famine, and increased competition for resources (Hileman, 1999; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], 1996;
Schneider, 1997). Building on research from psychology, sociology, political science, economics, history, and
geography, Anderson and DeLisi (2011) present evidence that global climate change might intensify
existing intergroup conflicts and create new ones. Both experimental and correlational studies establish that
uncomfortably warm temperatures increase physical aggression and violence (e.g., Anderson & Anderson, 1998;
Anderson, Anderson, Dorr, DeNeve, & Flanagan, 2000). In
addition to the direct effects of global climate change on
irritability and aggression, there would likely also be indirect effects on populations whose livelihoods
and survival are threatened by the changes brought about by global climate change. As realistic group conflict
theory (Sherif et al., 1961) suggests, the inevitable decrease in resources precipitated by global climate change
could lead to more intergroup violence as groups try to secure the resources they need. In fact, some argue that climate
change already has exacerbated existing tensions and conflicts in the Darfur region of Sudan and in
Bangladesh (Anderson & DeLisi, 2011). Although the potential for global catastrophe, including increased intergroup conflict,
is great if the projected effects of global climate change occur, research and theory (Allport, 1954; Gaertner et
al., 1993) suggest another possibility, at least before these consequences become too severe. Awareness of the
shared nature of this impending threat could encourage cooperation among those affected and might even
facilitate resolution of long-standing conflicts. This article presents three studies examining the interactive effect of existential
threat and contemplating the consequences of global climate change. Based on TMT and classic theories and research on the impact of shared
goals and threats, we hypothesized that reminders
of death would lead people focusing on the shared global
consequences of climate change to increase their support for peace and reconciliation and decrease their
support for war.
GW x Social Justice
Advocacy for specific policy reform is key to environmental justice movements--refusal of policy relevance ensures marginalization
Douglas S. Noonan 5, Assistant Professor, School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology,
2005, “DEFINING ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: POLICY DESIGN LESSONS FROM THE PRACTICE OF EJ
RESEARCH,” http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~dn56/EJ.APPAM.pdf
The negotiated nature of environmental policymaking holdssome stark lessons for policymakers and analysts alike. Even if
there were no uncertainty – and all of the useful scientific evidence was available – the heterogeneous interests of affected parties
would persist. When policies ultimately seek to reconcile these competing interests, essentially answering questions of social choice
(for which optimal solutions may not be available either in theory or due to practical limits to policy), only rarely or never would a policy process be such that
selfish advocacy by interest groups yields both individually and socially optimaloutcomes. In the environmental policy
arena, the disconnect between the pursuit of individual interests and the pursuit of collective goals is
paramount. In this sense, the acrimony surrounding many environmental policy debates is both undersandable and inevitable. ¶ Although this preface might apply equally well to
discussions of “climate change policy” or “species/wilderness preservation policy,” the application to environmental justice (EJ) provides an
opportune arena in which to observe the interplay between environmental policymaking and the (allegedly)
relevant research. Environmental justice is a major theme in environmental and social policy. Its researchers
are legion. Their output is voluminous.A debate about the empirical evidence and about appropriate
policies continues among academics. In more public forums, interest groups routinely cite environmental
justice in advocating for policy reforms. As is typical in policy debates, advocates select evidence to cite
in support of their position. The influence of scholarly EJ research on policymakers , however, is less than
straightforward . If the mounting evidence provides only partial answers or, as is common, answers to
questions only marginally relevant to policymakers , theneven hundreds of books 1 on the subject
maydo little to swaypublic policy . Or, conversely, the evidence’s influence may far outstrip its limited relevance. Regardless, like many other environmental policy
topics, the role of scholarly research in policy design is inevitably contentious and complex. ¶ The purpose of this paper is to offer some insight about
policy design from the scholarly literature on EJ. After scaling this mountain of literature, what are the important lessons to
be learned formaking EJ policy? From this vantage, this papercritiques the field of EJ research . It also offers some suggestions
for a more policy-relevant research agenda. The conclusion returns to the broad assessment of EJ policy and suggests some future directions for designing policy and framing the discourse.
GW = Structural Violence
Allowing warming to continue perpetuates racist inequalities
Hoerner 8—Former director of Research at the Center for a Sustainable Economy, Director of Tax Policy at the Center for Global Change at the
University of Maryland College Park, and editor of Natural Resources Tax Review. He has done research on environmental economics and policy on
behalf of the governments of Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States. Andrew received his B.A. in Economics
from Cornell University and a J.D. from Case Western Reserve School of Law—AND—Nia Robins—former inaugural Climate Justice Corps Fellow in 2003,
director of Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative (J. Andrew, “A Climate of Change African Americans, Global Warming, and a Just Climate
Policy for the U.S.” July 2008, http://www.ejcc.org/climateofchange.pdf)
Everywhere we turn, the issues and impacts of climate change confront us. One of the most serious
environmental threats facing the world today, climate change has moved from the minds of scientists
and offices of environmentalists to the mainstream. Though the media is dominated by images of polar
bears, melting glaciers, flooded lands, and arid desserts, there is a human face to this story as well.
Climate change is not only an issue of the environment; it is also an issue of justice and human rights,
one that dangerously intersects race and class. All over the world people of color, Indigenous Peoples
and low-income communities bear disproportionate burdens from climate change itself, from illdesigned policies to prevent it, and from side effects of the energy systems that cause it. A Climate of
Change explores the impacts of climate change on African Americans, from health to economics to
community, and considers what policies would most harm or benefit African Americans—and the nation
as a whole. African Americans are thirteen percent of the U.S. population and on average emit nearly
twenty percent less greenhouse gases than non-Hispanic whites per capita. Though far less responsible
for climate change, African Americans are significantly more vulnerable to its effects than non- Hispanic
whites.Health, housing, economic well-being, culture, and social stability are harmed from such
manifestations of climate change as storms, floods, and climate variability. African Americans are also
more vulnerable to higher energy bills, unemployment, recessions caused by global energy price shocks,
and a greater economic burden from military operations designed to protect the flow of oil to the U.S.
Climate Justice: The Time Is Now Ultimately, accomplishing climate justice will require that new alliances
are forged and traditional movements are transformed. An effective policy to address the challenges of
global warming cannot be crafted until race and equity are part of the discussion from the outset and an
integral part of the solution. This report finds that: Global warming amplifies nearly all existing
inequalities. Under global warming, injustices that are already unsustainable become catastrophic. Thus
it is essential to recognize that all justice is climate justice and that the struggle for racial and economic
justice is an unavoidable part of the fight to halt global warming. Sound global warming policy is
alsoeconomic andracial justice policy.Successfully adopting a sound global warming policy will do as
much to strengthen the economies of low-income communities and communities of color as any other
currently plausible stride toward economic justice. Climate policies that best serve African Americans
also best serve a just and strong United States. This paper shows that policies well-designed to benefit
African Americans also provide the most benefit to all people in the U.S. Climate policies that best serve
African Americans and other disproportionately affected communities also best serve global economic
and environmental justice. Domestic reductions in global warming pollution and support for such
reductions in developing nations financed by polluter-pays principles provide the greatest benefit to
African Americans, the peoples of Africa, and people across the Global South. A distinctive African
American voice is critical for climate justice. Currently, legislation is being drafted, proposed, and
considered without any significant input from the communities most affected. Special interests are
represented by powerful lobbies, while traditional environmentalists often fail to engage people of
color, Indigenous Peoples, and low-income communities until after the political playing field has been
defined and limited to conventional environmental goals. A strong focus on equity is essential to the
success of the environmental cause, but equity issues cannot be adequately addressed by isolating the
voices of communities that are disproportionately impacted. Engagement in climate change policy must
be moved from the White House and the halls of Congress to social circles, classrooms, kitchens, and
congregations. The time is now for those disproportionately affected to assume leadership in the
climate change debate, to speak truth to power, and to assert rights to social, environmental and
economic justice. Taken together, these actions affirm a vital truth that will bring communities together:
Climate Justice is Common Justice. African Americans and Vulnerability In this report, it is shown that
African Americans are disproportionately affected by climate change. African Americans Are at Greater
Risk from Climate Change and Global Warming Co-Pollutants ¶• The six states with the highest African
American population areall in the Atlantic hurricane zone, and are expected to experience more intense
storms resembling Katrina and Rita in the future. ¶ • Global warming is expected to increase the
frequency and intensity of heat waves or extreme heat events. African Americans suffer heat death at
one hundred fifty to twohundred percent of the rate for non-Hispanic whites. ¶• Seventy-one percent of
African Americans live in counties in violation of federal air pollution standards, as compared to fiftyeight percent of the white population. Seventy-eight percent of African Americans live within thirty
miles of a coal-fired power plant, as compared to fifty-six percent of non-Hispanic whites. ¶ • Asthma has
strong associations with air pollution, and African Americans have a thirty-six percent higher rate of
incidents of asthma than whites. Asthma is three times as likely to lead to emergency room visits or
deaths for African Americans. ¶ • This study finds that a twenty-five percent reduction in greenhouse
gases—similar to what passed in California and is proposed in major federal legislation—would reduce
infant mortality by at least two percent, asthma by at least sixteen percent, and mortality from
particulates by at least 6,000 to 12,000 deaths per year. Other estimates have run as high as 33,000
fewer deaths per year. A disproportionate number of the lives saved by these proposed reductions
would be African American. African Americans Are Economically More Vulnerable to Disasters and
Illnesses ¶ • In 2006, twenty percent of African Americans had no health insurance, including fourteen
percent of African American children—nearly twice the rate of non-Hispanic whites. ¶ • In the absence of
insurance, disasters and illness (which will increase with global warming) could be cushioned by income
and accumulated wealth. However, the average income of African American households is fifty-seven
percent that of non-Hispanic whites, and median wealth is only one-tenth that of non-Hispanic whites. ¶
• Racist stereotypes have been shown to reduce aid donations and impede service delivery to African
Americans in the wake of hurricanes, floods, fires and other climate-related disasters as compared to
non-Hispanic whites in similar circumstances. African Americans Are at Greater Risk from Energy Price
Shocks ¶• African Americans spend thirty percent more of their income on energy than non-Hispanic
whites. • Energy price increases have contributed to seventy to eighty percent of recent recessions. The
increase in unemployment of African Americans during energy caused recessions is twice that of nonHispanic whites, costing the community an average of one percent of income every year. • Reducing
economic dependence on energy will alleviate the frequency and severity of recessions and the
economic disparities they generate. African Americans Pay a Heavy Price and a Disproportionate Share
of the Cost of Wars for Oil • Oil company profits in excess of the normal rate of profit for U.S. industries
cost the average household $611 in 2006 alone and are still rising. • The total cost of the war in Iraq
borne by African Americans will be $29,000 per household if the resulting deficit is financed by tax
increases, and $32,000 if the debt is repaid by spending cuts. This is more than three times the median
assets of African American households. A Clean Energy Future Creates Far More Jobs for African
Americans • Fossil fuel extraction industries employ a far lower proportion of African Americans on
average compared to other industries. Conversely, renewable electricity generation employs three to
five times as many people as comparable electricity generation from fossil fuels, a higher proportion of
whom are African American. ¶• Switching just one percentof total electricity generating capacity per
year from conventional to renewable sources wouldresult in an additional 61,000 to 84,000 jobs for
African Americans by 2030. ¶ • A well-designed comprehensiveclimate plan achieving emission
reductions comparable to the Kyoto Protocol would create over 430,000 jobs for African Americans by
2030, reducing the African American unemployment rate by 1.8 percentage points and raising the
average African American income by 3 to 4 percent.
Climate change is coming now and bears a hugely disproportionate impact on those
already at the greatest socioeconomic disadvantage, causing widespread physical
displacement and death
Byravan and Rajan ’10 SujathaByravan and SudhirChellaRajan, “The Ethical Implications of Sea-Level
Rise Due to Climate Change,” Ethics & International Affairs 24, No. 3, 9/20/2010, only accessible on
some exclusive database
As scientific evidence for the adverse effects of human-induced climate change grows stronger, it is
becoming increasingly clear that these questions are of urgent practical interest and require concerted
international political action. In the course of this century and the next, the earth’s climate will almost surely get
warmer as a direct result of the emissions accumulated in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil
fuels since the Industrial Revolution. This warming will very likely result in heat waves, heavy precipitation
in some areas, extreme droughts in others, increased hurricane intensity, and sea-level rise of about one meter—although
recent findings suggest this rise could quite plausibly be greater than that by century’s end.1 Forecasts of how many people will be
displaced by 2050 by climate change vary widely, from about 25 million to 1 billion. The difficulty in accurate forecasting lies not only
in the uncertainty regarding future climate change impacts and adaptation measures but also in estimating the outcome of the several complex factors driving
migration.2 No
other form of environmentally induced human migration will likely be as permanent as that caused by
climate-induced SLR; and there are special reasons why its victims deserve unique moral consideration. SLR will affect coastal populations in
a variety of ways, including inundation, flood and storm damage, erosion, saltwater intrusion, and
wetland loss. Together, these will greatly reduce available land for cultivation, water resources, and
fodder, causing severe hardship in terms of livelihood and habitat loss. Worst of all, SLR and the associated changes in the
coastal zone will add burdens to many who are already poor and vulnerable. The physical changes associated with SLR may themselves take place
in abrupt, nonlinear ways as thresholds are crossed. In turn, the least resilient communities— that is, those
dependent on subsistence fishing—will be the first to experience ‘‘tipping points’’ in their life systems, so that the only option available
to them would be to abandon their homes and search for better prospects elsewhere. As the average sea level continues to rise, coastal
inundation, saltwater intrusion, and storm surges will become more intense and people will find it
increasingly difficult to stay in their homes and will look for ways to migrate inland. As ever larger numbers pass
thresholds in their ability to cope, more societal tipping points will be crossed, resulting in the sudden mass
movements of entire villages, towns, and cities in coastal regions.3 On small islands and in countries with heavily
populated delta regions, the very existence of the nation-state may become jeopardized, so that the extremely vulnerable
will no longer have state protection they can rely on. The extent of vulnerability to sea-level rise in any given country will depend on more than just its terrain and
climatic conditions: the fraction of the population living in low-lying regions, the area and proportion of the country inundated, its wealth and economic conditions,
and its prevailing political institutions and infrastructure will all be of relevance. Thus, in a large country, such as the United States or China, coastal communities
would be able to move inland, given adequate preparation and government response. In the case of small islands in the South Pacific, however, such an option does
not exist, since it is expected that most or even the entire land area will sink or become uninhabitable. In such cases as Bangladesh,
Egypt,
Guyana, and Vietnam, wherenearly half or more of the populations live in low-lying deltaic regions that
support a major fraction of their economies, SLR will threaten the very functioning of the state. Moreover,
it is increasingly clear that for tens to hundreds of millions of people living in low-lying areas and on small islands, no physical defense is realistically possible or can
be fully protective. A recent report by the Dutch Delta Committee proposes annual investments of about 1.5 billion Euros for the rest of the century just to protect
the Netherlands’ 200-mile coastline, and indicates that 20–50 percent of coastal land worldwide cannot be protected, especially under conditions where SLR takes
place rapidly—as a result, say, of a collapse of major ice sheets in Greenland or Antarctica.4 Even
if greenhouse gases are removed from
the atmosphere through some future technology, we are already committed to a certain degree of warming and
sea-level rise because of the thermal inertia of the oceans. In addition, most residents of small island
nations and other low-lying coastal regions around the world will not be able to avail themselves of
the sorts of conventional adaptation remedies that are conceivable for the victims of drought,
reduced crop yields, desertification, and so on. Apart from exceptional cases where adequate engineering solutions can be developed to
prevent inundation, coastal erosion, saltwater intrusion, and other challenges associated with rising seas, people living in these vulnerable
regions will be forced to flee, generally with no possibility of return to their original homes. Indeed, migration and permanent
resettlement will be the only possible ‘‘adaptation’’ strategy available to millions. Existing international law provides no solution for
these individuals, for whom, we will argue, the only just remedy is in the form of special rights of free global movement and resettlement in regions and
countries on higher ground in advance of disaster. What Needs to Be Done The issue of climate change and migration has received considerable scholarly attention,
primarily in terms of its political and legal implications, but there has been little focus on the ethical aspects.5 In an earlier paper we suggested that the
responsibility of absorbing ‘‘climate exiles’’ should be shared among host countries in a manner that is proportional to a host’s cumulative emissions of greenhouse
gases.6 Here, we try to develop the ethical basis for the international community, first, to recognize that displaced persons, and in particular those whose nation
states will have become physically nonexistent or will face an unendurable burden, should have a special right to free movement to other countries; and, second, to
formulate institutional means for providing them political, social, and economic rights. We define the victims’ unbearable burden in the following terms: they will
face a breakdown or total forfeiture of prevailing physical, economic, and social support systems; and they will have no effective state to endow them with rights
and alleviate their pain. It is not our intention to provide a particular formula for how individual countries should be made responsible for the victims’ habitation
and citizenship, but to suggest instead that once the basic principle of shared responsibility based on each country’s contribution to climate change is accepted,
there could be several ways to determine precisely how the costs of policy implementation should be distributed, how rights could be exercised by the climate
exiles and migrants, and what other institutional and political mechanisms should be established to avert a massive refugee crisis. The fairest solution, we therefore
propose, is for the international community to grant, in the first instance, the individual right to migrate to safe countries for those who will be displaced forcibly by
SLR. We then recommend that an international treaty begin to address this issue so that climate migrants and future exiles will be able to find homes well in
advance of the actual emergency.7 Indeed, unlike in the case of natural disasters, such as the Asian tsunami of December 2004, the world is already sufficiently
forewarned about the need to prepare for the effects of SLR and has ample time and opportunity to make reasoned judgments about how best to respond.8 We
contend that the alternative—to
ignore potential victims until after they become ‘‘environmental refugees’’—is
morally indefensible as well as impractical. For one thing, the victims in the case of SLR cannot even be classified as ‘‘refugees’’ since there are no legal
instruments that give them this option. Notably, the Refugee Convention, designed to protect those forced to flee their homes as a result of war or persecution, in
force since 1954, recognizes as a refugee someone who is ‘‘unable [or] unwilling to avail himself of the protection’’ of his country of nationality and is outside that
country ‘‘owing to well-grounded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion’’—a
definition that does not extend to those adversely affected by environmental disasters, including climatic change. In this paper and elsewhere we therefore reserve
the terms ‘‘climate migrants’’ and ‘‘climate exiles’’ to refer to the victims of SLR attributed to climate change. The former includes all those who are displaced
because of the effects of climate change, while the latter refers to a special category of climate migrants who will have lost their ability to remain well-functioning
members of political societies in their countries, often through no fault of their own. Further, while most climate migrants will be internally displaced people, or
have the opportunity of returning to their countries or regions of origin if adequate adaptation measures were taken, climate exiles will be forced to become
permanently stateless in the absence of other remedies. Duties to Climate Exiles Our fundamental argument is that humanity
carries a special
obligation to present and future generations of people whose homes, means of livelihood, and membership in states
will be lost specifically as a result of sea-level rise caused by climate change. We draw upon the principle of intergenerational equity,
wherein each generation is collectively responsible for protecting and using natural resources in a sustainable manner so that future generations are not unduly
harmed by their present misuse. The recognition of this duty implies, as JoergTremmel suggests, that ‘‘ in
spite of the difficulties such as opportunity
costs, restricted human ability and foresight, modern collective agents (present governments and leading industrial companies) have to take
their responsibility for future generations seriously.’’9 This responsibility is carried over to representative agents in the future who share the legacy
of causing harm with their forebears but who now have the ability to recognize the suffering that ensues as a result of historical (if not continuing) actions and
Epistemology
---K Ans: Expertism
Expertism Good
Evaluating infinite perspectives allows for the best solution – pragmatic action solves
Higgins 13 University of Texas-Austin Philosophy Professor
(Kathleen, “Post-Truth Pluralism: The Unlikely Political Wisdom of Friedrich Nietzche”, Breakthrough,
http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/past-issues/issue-3/post-truth-pluralism)
Progressives are right that we live increasingly in a post-truth era, but rather than rejecting it and pining nostalgically
for a return to a more truthful time, we should learn to better navigate it. Where the New York Times and Walter Cronkite were
once viewed as arbiters of public truths, today the Times competes with the Wall Street Journal, and CBS News with FOX News and MSNBC, in
describing reality. The Internet multiplies the perspectives and truths available for public consumption. The
diversity of viewpoints
opened up by new media is
not going away and is likely to intensify. This diversity of interpretations of reality is part of a
and modernization have brought a proliferation of worldviews and declining
authority of traditional institutions to meanings. Citizens have more freedom to create new
interpretations of facts.
longstanding trend. Democracy
This proliferation of viewpoints makes the challenge of democratically addressing contemporary
problems more complex. One consequence of all this is that our problems become more wicked and
more subject to conflicting meanings and agendas. We can’t agree on the nature of problems or their
solutions because of fundamentally unbridgeable values and worldviews.In attempting to reduce
political disagreement to black and white categories of fact and fiction, progressives themselves uniquely illequipped to address our current difficulties, or to advance liberal values in the culture.
A new progressive politics should have a different understanding of the truth than the one suggested by the critics of
conservative dishonesty. We should understand that human beings make meaning and apprehend truth from
radically different standpoints and worldviews, and that our great wealth and freedom will likely lead to more, not fewer,
disagreements about the world. Nietzsche was no democrat, but the pluralism he offers can be encouragement
to today’s political class, as well as the rest of us, to become more self-aware of, and honest about, how our
standpoint, values, and power affect our determinations of what is true and what is false.
In the post-truth era, we should be able to articulate not one but many different perspectives.Progressives seeking
to govern and
change society cannot be free of bias, interests, and passions, but they should strive to be aware of them so
that they can adopt different eyes to see the world from the standpoint of their fiercest opponents.
Taking multiple perspectives into account might alert us to more sites of possible intervention and
prime us for creative formulations of alternative possibilities for concerted responses to our problems.
Our era, in short, need not be an obstacle to taking common action. We might see today’s divided expert class
and fractions public not as temporary problems to be solved by more reason, science, and truth, but rather as permanent
features of our developed democracy. We might even see this proliferation of belief systems and worldviews
as an opportunity for human development. We can agree to disagree and still engage in pragmatic
action in the World.
Experts’ knowledge is critical to form true solutions
Goldman, 2001
[Alvin, University of Arizona, “Experts: Which ones should you trust?” Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, 63.1, 85-110, Online, http://fas-
philosophy.rutgers.edu/goldman/SeminarFall2007/October%2031st/Goldman%20%20Experts%20Which%20Ones%20Should%20You%20Trust.pdf] /Wyo-MB
Before addressing this question, we should say more about the nature of expertise and the sorts of experts we are concerned with here. Some
kinds of experts a r e unusually accomplished at certain skills, including violinists, billiards players, textile designers, and s o forth. These are not
the kinds of experts with which epistemology is most naturally concerned. For epistemological purposes we shall mainly focus on cognitive
or intellectual experts: people who have (or claim to have) a superior quantity or level of knowledge in s ome
domain and an ability to generate new knowledge in answer to questions within the domain. Admittedly,
there are elements of skill or know-how in intellectual matters too, so the boundary between skill expertise and cognitive expertise is not a
sharp one. Nonetheless, I shall try to work on only one side of this rough divide, the intellectual side. How shall we define expertise in the
cognitive sense? What distinguishes an expert from a layperson, in a given cognitive domain? I'll begin by specifying an
objective sense of expertise, what it is to be an expert, not what it is to have a reputation for expertise. Once the objective sense is specified,
the reputational sense readily follows: a reputational expert is someone widely believed to be an expert (in the objective sense), whether or not
he really is one. Turning to objective expertise, then, I first propose that cognitive expertise be defined in "veritistic" (truth-linked) terms. As a
first pass, experts
in a given domain (the E-domain) have more beliefs (or high degrees of belief) in true propositions
and/or fewer beliefs in false propositions within that domain than most people do (or better: than the vast
majority of people do). According to this proposal, expertise is largely a comparative matter. However, I do not think it is wholly
comparative. If the vast majority of people are full of false beliefs in a domain and Jones exceeds them slightly by not succumbing t o a few
falsehoods that a r e widely shared, that still d o e s not ma k e him an "expert" (from a God's-eye point of view). To
qualify as a
cognitive expert, a person must possess a substantial body of truths in the target domain. Being an expert is
not simply a matter of veritistic superiority to most of the community. Some non-comparative threshold of veritistic attainment must be
reached, though there is great vagueness in setting this threshold. Expertise is not all a matter of possessing accurate information. It
includes a capacity or disposition to deploy or exploit this fund of information to form beliefs in true
answers to new questions that may be posed in the domain. This arises from some set of skills or techniques that
constitute part of what it is to be an expert. An expert has the (cognitive) know-how, when presented with a new
question in the domain, to go to the right sectors of his information-bank and perform appropriate
operations on this information; or to deploy some external apparatus or data-banks to disclose relevant
material. So expertise features a propensity element as well as an element of actual attainment. A third possible feature of
expertise may require a little modification in what we said earlier. To discuss this feature, let us distinguish the primary and secondary
questions in a domain. Primary questions are the principal questions of interest to the researchers or students of the subject-matter. Secondary
questions concern the existing evidence or arguments that bear on the primary questions, and the assessments of the evidence made by
prominent researchers. In general, an
expert in a field is someone who has (comparatively) extensive knowledge (in the
weak sense of knowledge, i.e., true belief) of the state of the evidence, and knowledge of the opinions and
reactions to that evidence by prominent workers in the field. In the central sense of "expert" (a strong sense), an
expert is someone with an unusually extensive body of knowledge on both primary and secondary
questions in the domain. However, there may also be a weak sense of "expert", in which it includes someone who merely has
extensive knowledge on the secondary questions in the domain. Consider two people with strongly divergent views on the primary questions in
the domain, so that one of them is largely right and the other is largely wrong. By the original, strong criterion, the one who is largely wrong
would not qualify as an expert. People might disagree with this as the final word on the matter. They might hold that anyone with a thorough
knowledge of the existing evidence and the differing views held by the workers in the field deserves to be called an expert. I concede this by
acknowledging the weak sense of "expert". Applying what has been said above, we can say that an
expert (in the strong sense) in domain D
is someone who possesses an extensive fund of knowledge (true belief) and a set of skills or methods for
apt and successful deployment of this knowledge to new questions in the domain. Anyone purporting to be a
(cognitive) expert in a given domain will claim to have such a fund and set of methods, and will claim to have true answers to the question ( ~ )
under dispute because he has applied his fund and his methods to the question(s). The
task for the layperson who is consulting
putative experts, and who hopes thereby to learn a true answer to the target question, is to decide who has superior
expertise, or who has better deployed his expertise to the question at hand. T h e novicet2-experts problem is
whether a layperson can justifiably choose one putative expert as more credible or trustworthy than the other with respect to the question at
hand, and what might be the epistemic basis for such a choice ?
Expertise is key – geo-engineering is necessary to prevent inevitable extinction
Ward 2009 – Professor of biology and Earth and space sciences at the University of Washington and an astrobiologist with NASA (Peter,
The Medea Hypothesis, 52-54)
Calcium is an important ingredient in this process, and it is found in two main sources on a planet's surface: igneous rocks and, most
importantly, the sedimentary rocks called limestone. Calcium reacts with carbon dioxide to form limestone. Calcium thus draws CO2 out of
the atmosphere. When CO2 begins to increase in the atmosphere, more limestone formation will occur. This can only happen, however, if
there is a steady source of new calcium available. The calcium content is steadily made available by plate tectonics, for the formation of
new mountains brings new sources of calcium back into the system in its magmas and by exhuming ancient limestone, eroding it, and thus
releasing its calcium to react with more CO2. At convergent plate margins, where the huge slabs of the Earth's surface dive back down into
the planet, some of the sediments resting on the descending part are carried down into the Earth. High temperature and pressure convert
some of these rocks into metamorphic rocks. One of the reactions is the carbonate metamorphic reaction, where limestone combining
with silica converts to a calcium silicate—and carbon dioxide. The CO2 can then be liberated back into the atmosphere in volcanic
eruptions. The
planetary thermostat requires a balance betweenthe amount of CO2being pumped into the
atmosphere through volcanic action andthe amount being taken out through the formation of limestone. The entire system is driven
by heat emanating from the Earth's interior, which causes plate tectonics. But as we have seen there is more to this cycle than simply
heating from the interior. Weathering on the surfaceof the Earth is crucialas well, and the rate of weathering is highly
sensitive to temperature, for reaction rates involved in weathering tend to increase as temperature increases. This will cause silicate rocks
to break down faster and thus create more calcium, the building block of limestone. With more calcium available, more limestone can
form. But the rate of limestone formation affects the CO2 content of the atmosphere, and when more lime- stone forms there is less and
less CO2 in the atmosphere, causing the climate to cool. Here is a key aspect of the overall Earth system that helps refute either Gaia or
Medea. If the Medea hypothesis is correct,we should be able to observe or measure a reduction of habitability potential (as measured by
the carrying capacity, or total amount of life that can live on our planet at any give time) through time, or as measured by an observable
shortening of the Earth's ability to be habitable for life in the future. For our own Earth, habitability will ultimately endfor
two reasons. The first of these is not Medean; it is a one-way effect. The ever-increasing energy output of our Sun, a phenomenon of all
stars on what is called the main sequence, will ultimately cause the loss of the Earth's oceans (sometime in the next 2 to 3 billion years,
according to new calculations). When the oceans are lost to space, planetary temperatures will rise to uninhabitable levels. But long before
that, life will have died out on the Earth's surface through a mechanism
that is Medean: because of life, the Earth will
lose one resource without which the main trophic level of life itself—photosynthetic organisms, from microbes to
higher plants—can no longer survive. This dwindling resource, ironically, (in this time when human society worries about too much
of it), is atmospheric carbon dioxide. The Medean reduction of carbon dioxide will then cause a further reduction of planetary habitability
because the CO2 drop will trigger a drop in atmospheric oxygen to a level too low to support animal life. This is an example of a "Medean"
property: it is because of life that the amount of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere has been steadily dropping over the last 200 million years.
It is life that makes most calcium carbonate deposits, such as coral skeletons, and thus life that ultimately caused the drop in CO2, since it
takes CO2 out of the atmosphere to build this kind of skeleton. Life will continue to do this until a lethal lower limit is attained. This finding
is important: in chapter 8 I will show a graph that supports this statement. As pointed out by David Schwartzman, while limestone can be
formed with or without life, life is far more efficient at producing calcium carbonate structures—a process that draws CO2 out of the
atmosphere—than nonlife. There
is only one way outof the lethal box imposed by Darwinian life: the rise ofintelligence
capable of devising planetary-scale engineering. Technical, ortool-producing,intelligence is the unique solution to the planetary dilemma caused by Medeanproperties of life.New astrobiological work indicates that Venus,
Mars, Europa, and Titan are potentially habitable worlds at the present time, at least for microbes, just as the Earth was early in its history.
Did they undergo a reduction in habitability because of prior Medean forces? And certainly the cosmos is filled with Earth-like planets,
based on both new modeling of still-forming solar systems and observations by the Butler and Marcy planet-finding missions. While the
"planet finders" cannot yet directly observe any planet that is Earth-sized (a planet of this size is still too small for us to see with our current
technologies), the orbits exhibited by some of the Jupiter- and Saturn-sized planets that can be observed suggest that smaller, Earth-like
planets might exist there. Would Medean forces occur in alien life, as well as Earth life? If such life were Darwinian, the answer would be
"certainly."
Policy making good
Debate over even the most technical issues improves decision-making and advocacy
Hager 92, professor of political science – Bryn Mawr College,
(Carol J., “Democratizing Technology: Citizen & State in West German Energy Politics, 1974-1990” Polity, Vol. 25, No. 1, p. 45-70)
What is the role of the citizen in the modern technological state? As political decisions increasingly involve
complex technological choices, does a citizen's ability to participate in decision making diminish?These
questions, long a part of theoretical discourse, gained new salience with the rise of grassroots environmental protest
in advanced industrial states. In West Germany, where a strong environmental movement arose in the 1970s, protest has centered
as much on questions of democracy as it has on public policy. Grassroots groups challenged not only the construction of large
technological projects, especially power plants, but also the legitimacy of the bureaucratic institutions which
produced those projects.Policy studies generally ignore the legitimation aspects of public policy making.2 A discussion of both
dimensions, however, is crucial for understanding the significance of grassroots protest for West German political development in the
technological age and for assessing the likely direction of citizen politics in united Germany.In the field of energy politics, West
German
citizen initiative groups tried to politicize and ultimately to democratize policy making.3 The technicality of
the issue was not a barrier to their participation. On the contrary, grassroots groups proved to be able
participants in technical energy debate, often proposing innovative solutions to technological
problems.Ultimately, however, they wanted not to become an elite of "counterexperts," but to create a
political discourse between policy makers and citizens through which the goals of energy policy could
be recast and its legitimacy restored. Only a deliberative, expressly democratic form of policy making, they argued, could enjoy the support
of the populace. To this end, protest groups developed new, grassroots democratic forms of decision making
within their own organizations, which they then tried to transfer to the political system at large. The legacy of grassroots energy
protest in West Germany is twofold.First, it produced major substantive changes in public policy.Informed
citizen pressure was largely responsible for the introduction of new plant and pollution control technologies.
Second, grassroots protest undermined the legitimacy of bureaucratic experts. Yet, an acceptable forum for a
broadened political discussion of energy issues has not been found; the energy debate has taken place largely outside the established political
institutions. Thus, the legitimation issue remains unresolved. It is likely to reemerge as Germany deals with the problems of the former German
Democratic Republic. Nevertheless, an
evolving ideology of citizen participationa vision of "technological
democracy"-is an important outcome of grassroots action.
Consumption Inevitable
Consumption mindset is inevitable---using existing institutions creates sustainable
development---the alt’s totalizing rejection fails
Doran and Barry 6 – worked at all levels in the environment and sustainable development policy arena - at the United Nations, at
the Northern Ireland Assembly and DáilÉireann, and in the Irish NGO sector. PhD--AND--Reader in Politics, Queen's University School of Politics,
International Studies, and Philosophy. PhD Glasgow (Peter and John, Refining Green Political Economy: From Ecological Modernisation to
Economic Security and Sufficiency, Analyse& Kritik 28/2006, p. 250–275, http://www.analyse-und-kritik.net/2006-2/AK_Barry_Doran_2006.pdf)
The aim of this article is to offer a draft of a realistic, but critical, version of green political economy to underpin the economic
dimensions of radical views of sustainable development. It is written explicitly with a view to encouraging others to respond to it
in the necessary collaborative effort to think through this aspect of sustainable development. Our position is informed by two
important observations. As a sign of our times, the crises that we are addressing under the banner of sustainable development
(however inadequately) render the distinction between what is ‘realistic’ and ‘radical’ problematic. It seems to us that the only
realistic course is to revisit the most basic assumptions embedded within the dominant model of development and economics.
Realistically the only longterm option available is radical. Secondly, we
cannot build or seek to create a sustainable
economy ab nihilo, but must begin—in an agonistic fashion—from where we are, with the structures,
institutions, modes of production, laws, regulations and so on that we have. We make this point in
Ireland with a story about the motorist who stops at the side of the road to ask directions, only to be told: “Now Ma’m, I wouldn’t
start from here if I were you.”
This does not mean simply accepting these as immutable or set in stone— after all, some of the current
institutions, principles and structures underpinning the dominant economic model are the very causes of unsustainable
development— but
we do need to recognise that we must work with (and ‘through’—in the terms of the
as well as
changing and reformingand in some cases abandoningthemas either unnecessary or positively harmful to the creation
original German Green Party’s slogan of “marching through the institutions”) these existing structures
and maintenance of a sustainable economy and society. Moreover, we have a particular responsibility under the current dominant
economic trends to name the neo-liberal project as the hegemonic influence on economic thinking and practice. In the words of
Bourdieu/Wacquant (2001), neoliberalism is the new ‘planetary vulgate’, which provides the global context for much of the
contemporary political and academic debate on sustainable development. For example, there is a clear hierarchy of trade (WTO)
over the environment (Multilateral Environmental Agreements) in the international rules-based systems. At the boundaries or
limits of the sustainable development debate in both the UK and the European Union it is also evident that the objectives of
competitiveness and trade policy are sacrosanct. As Tim Luke (1999) has observed, the relative success or failure of national
economies in head-to-head global competition is taken by ‘geo-economics’ as the definitive register of any one nation-state’s
waxing or waning international power, as well as its rising or falling industrial competitiveness, technological vitality and economic
prowess. In this context, many believe ecological considerations can, at best, be given only meaningless symbolic responses, in the
continuing quest to mobilise the Earth’s material resources.
Our realism is rooted in the demos. The
realism with which this paper is concerned to promote recognises that
the path to an alternative economy and society must begin with a recognition of the reality
that most people (in the West) will not democratically vote (or be given the opportunity to vote)
for acompletely different type of society and economy overnight. This is true even as the merits of
a ‘green economy’ are increasingly recognised and accepted by most people as the logical basis for safeguards
and guarantees for their basic needs and aspirations (within limits). The realistic character of the thinking behind this article
accepts that consumption
and materialistic lifestyles are here to stay. (The most we can probably
aspire to is a widening and deepening of popular movements towards ethical consumption, responsible
investment , and fair trade.) And indeed there is little to be gained by proposing alternative economic
systems which start from a complete rejection of consumption and materialism. The appeal to realism is in
part an attempt to correct the common misperception (and self-perception) of green politics and economics requiring an
excessive degree of self-denial and a puritanical asceticism (see Goodin 1992, 18; Allison 1991, 170– 78). While rejecting the claim
that green political theory calls for the complete disavowal of materialistic lifestyles, it
is true that green politics does
require the collective re-assessment of such lifestyles, and does require new economic signals and pedagogical
attempts to encourage a delinking—in the minds of the general populus—of the ‘good life’ and
the ‘goods life’.This does not mean that we need necessarily require the complete and across the
board rejection of materialistic lifestyles. It must be the case that there is room and tolerance in a green economy for
people to choose to live diverse lifestyles—some more sustainable than others—so long as these do not ‘harm’ others, threaten
long-term ecological sustainability or create unjust levels of socio-economic inequalities. Thus, realism in this context is in part
another name for the acceptance of a broadly ‘liberal’ or ‘post-liberal’ (but certainly not anti-liberal) green perspective.2
1. Setting Out
At the same time, while critical of the ‘abstract’ and ‘unrealistic’ utopianism that peppers green and radical thinking in this area,
we do not intend to reject utopianism. Indeed, with Oscar Wilde we agree that a map of the world that does not have utopia on it,
isn’t worth looking at. The spirit in which this
article is written is more in keeping with framing green and
sustainability concerns within a ‘concrete utopian’ perspective or what the Marxist geographer David
Harvey (1996, 433–435) calls a “utopianism of process”, to be distinguished from “closed”, blueprint-like and
abstract utopian visions. Accordingly, the model of green political economy outlined here is in
keeping with Steven Lukes’ suggestion that a concrete utopianism depends on the ‘knowledge of
a self-transforming present, not an ideal future’ (Lukes 1984, 158).
It accepts the current dominance of one particular model of green political economy—namely
‘ecological modernisation’ (hereafter referred to EM)—as the preferred ‘political economy’
underpinning contemporary state and market forms of sustainable development,and further
accepts the necessity for green politics to positively engage in the debates and policies around
EM from a strategic (as well as a normative) point of view. However, it is also conscious of the limits and
problems with ecological modernisation, particularly in terms of its technocratic, supply-side and reformist ‘business as
usual’ approach, and seeks to explore the potential to radicalise EM or use it as a ‘jumping off’
point for more radical views of greening the economy. Ecological modernisation is a work in
progress; and that’s the point.
The article begins by outlining EM in theory and practice, specifically in relation to the British state’s ‘sustainable development’
policy agenda under New Labour.3 While EM as currently practised by the British state is ‘weak’ and largely turns on the centrality
of ‘innovation’ and ‘eco-efficiency’, the paper then goes on to investigate in more detail the role of the market within current
conceptualisations of EM and other models of green political economy. In particular, a potentially powerful
distinction
(both conceptually and in policy debates) between ‘the market’ and ‘capitalism’ has yet to be sufficiently
explored and exploited as a starting point for the development of radical, viable and attractive
conceptions of green political economy as alternatives to both EM and the orthodox economic paradigm. We
contend that there is a role for the market in innovation and as part of the ‘governance’ for
sustainable development in which eco-efficiency and EM of the economy is linked to non-ecological
demands of green politics and sustainable development such as social and global justice,
egalitarianism, democratic regulation of the market and the conceptual (and policy) expansion of the
‘economy’ to include social, informal and noncash economic activityand a progressive role for
the state (especially at the local/municipal level). Here we suggest that the ‘environmental’ argument or basis of
green political economy in terms of the need for the economy to become more resource efficient, minimise
pollution and waste and so on, has largely been won. What that means is that no one is disputing the need
for greater resource productivity, energy and eco-efficiency. Both state and corporate/business actors have accepted
the environmental ‘bottom line’ (often rhetorically, but nonetheless important) as a conditioning factor in the pursuit of the
economic ‘bottom line’.
However, what
has been less remarked upon is the social ‘bottom line’ and the centrality of this nonpolicy objectives to green political economy. In particular, the
argument for lessening socio-economic inequality, and redistributive policies to do this, have not
environmental set of principles and
been as prominent within green political economy and models of sustainable development as they perhaps should be. One of the
reasons for focusing on the ‘social bottom line’ is to suggest that the distinctiveness and critical relevance of a distinctly ‘green’
(as opposed to ‘environmental’ or ‘ecological’) political
economy will increasingly depend on developing a
political agenda around these non-environmental/non- resource policy areas as states, businesses and other
political parties converge around the EM agenda of reconciling the environmental and
economic bottom lines, through an almost exclusive focus on the environmental bottom line. It is on developing a
radical political and economic agenda around the social and economic bottom lines that green
political economy needs to focus.
***This card can be spun as a alt fails/perm card as well
Eliminating human intervention in the environment is impossible – plan key to
develop a pragmatic solution
Barnhizer 6-- Professor of Law, Cleveland State University. (David, Waking from Sustainability's "Impossible Dream": The Decisionmaking
Realities of Business and Government, 18 Geo. Int'l Envtl. L. Rev. 595, Lexis)
Medieval alchemists sought unsuccessfully to discover the process that would enable them to turn base metal into gold--assigning
the name "Philosopher's Stone" to what they sought. The quest was doomed to failure. Just as a "sow's ear" cannot become a "silk
purse," a base metal cannot become gold. Sustainability is impossible for the same reasons. It asks
us tobe
something we are not, both individually and as a political and economic community. It is
impossible to convert humans into the wise, selfless, and nearly omniscient creatures required to
build and operate a system that incorporates sustainability. Even if it were ultimately possible (and it is not), it
would take many generations to achieve and we are running out of time.
There is an enormous gap among what we claim we want to do, what we actually want to do, and our
ability to achieve our professed goals. I admit to an absolute distrust of cheap and easy
proclamations of lofty ideals and commitments to voluntary or unenforceable codes of practice. The only
thing that counts is the actor's actual behavior. For most people, that behavior is shaped by selfinterest determined by the opportunity to benefit or to avoid harm. In the economic arena this means that if a
substantial return can be had without a high risk of significant negative consequences, the
decision will be made to seek the benefit. It is the reinvention of Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons. n1
This essay explores the nature of human decisionmaking and motivation within critical systems. These systems include business
and governmental decisionmaking with a focus on environmental and social areas of emerging crisis where the consequence of
acting unwisely or failing to act wisely produces large-scale harms for both human and natural systems. The analysis begins by
suggesting that nothing
humans create is "sustainable." Change is inevitableand [*597] irresistible
whether styled as systemic entropy, Joseph Schumpeter's idea of a regenerative "creative destruction," or
Nikolai Kondratieff's "waves" of economic and social transformation. n2
Business entities and governmental decision makers play critical roles in both causing
environmental and social harms and avoiding those consequences. Some have thought that the path to
avoiding harm and achieving positive benefits is to develop codes of practice that by their language promise that decisionmakers
will behave in ways consistent with the principles that have come to be referred to as "sustainability." That belief is
a
delusion--an "impossible dream." Daniel Boorstin once asked: "Have we been doomed to make our dreams into
illusions?" n3 He adds: "An illusion . . . is an image we have mistaken for reality. . . . [W]e cannot see it is not fact." n4 Albert
Camus warns of the inevitability of failing toachieve unrealistic goalsand the need to become more
aware of the limited extent of our power to effect fundamental change. He urges that we
concentrate on devising realistic strategies and behaviors that allow us to be effective in our actions. n5
As companies are expected to implement global codes of conduct such as the U.N. Global Compact and the Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, n6 and governments [*598] and
multilateral institutions supposedly become more
concerned about limiting the environmental and social
impacts of business decisionmaking, it may be useful to consider actual behavior related to corporate
and governmental responses to codes of practice, treaties, and even national laws. Unfortunately, business,
government, and multilateral institutions have poor track records vis-a-vis conformity to such codes
of practice and treaties.
Despite good intentions, emptydreams and platitudes may be counterproductive. This essay argues that
the ideal of sustainability as introduced in the 1987 report of the Brundtland Commission and institutionalized in the form of
Agenda 21 at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit is false and counterproductive. The ideal of sustainability
assumes that we
are almost god-like,capable of perceiving, integrating, monitoring, organizing, and controlling our
world. These assumptions create an "impossible" character to the "dream" of sustainability in business and governmental
decisionmaking.
Sustainability of the Agenda 21 kind is a utopian vision that is the enemy of the possible and the
good. The problem is that while on paper we canalwayssketchelegantsolutions that appear to have the ability to
achieve a desired utopia, such solutions work "if only" everyone will come together and behave in the
way laid out in the "blueprint." n7 Humans should have learned from such grand misperceptions as the
French Enlightenment's failure to accurately comprehend the quality and limits of human nature or
Marxism's flawed view of altruistic human motivation that the "if only" is an impossibly utopian
reordering of human nature we will never achieve. n8
[*599] A critical defect in the idea of sustainable development is that it continues the flawed assumptions about human nature
and motivation that provided the foundational premises of Marxist collectivism and centralized planning authorities. n9 Such
perspectives inject rigidity and bureaucracy into a system that requires monitoring, flexibility, adaptation, and accountability. But,
in criticizing the failed Marxist-Leninist form of organization, my argument should not be seen as a defense of supposed free
market capitalism. Like Marxism, a true free market capitalism does not really exist.
The factors of greed and self interest, limited
human capacity, inordinate systemic complexity, and the
power of large-scale driving forces beyond our abilityto controllead to the unsustainability of
human systems. Human self-interest is an insurmountable barrier that can be affected to a degree
only by effective laws, the promise of significant financial or career returns, or fear of
consequences. The only way to change the behavior of business and governmental decisionmakers is through
the use of the "carrot" and the "stick ." n10 Yet even this approach can only be achieved incrementally with limited positive
effects.
---K Ans: Science
Science epistemology good
Scientific knowledge is best because it subjects itself to constant refinement based on
empirical evidence
Hutcheon 93 — former prof of sociology of education at U Regina and U British Columbia.Former research advisor to the Health
Promotion Branch of the Canadian Department of Health and Welfare and as a director of the Vanier Institute of the Family.Phd in sociology,
began at Yale and finished at U Queensland. (Pat, A Critique of "Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA",
http://www.humanists.net/pdhutcheon/humanist%20articles/lewontn.htm)
The introductory lecture in this series articulated the increasingly popular
"postmodernist" claim that all science is
ideology. Lewontin then proceeded to justify this by stating the obvious: that scientists are human like the rest of us and subject to the same
biases and socio-cultural imperatives. Although he did not actually say it, his comments seemed to imply that the enterprise of
scientific research and knowledge building could therefore be no different and no more reliable as a guide to action than
any other set of opinions. The trouble is that, in order to reach such an conclusion, one would have to ignore
all those aspects of the scientific endeavor that do in fact distinguish it from other types and sources of
belief formation.¶ Indeed, if the integrity of the scientific endeavor depended only on the wisdom and
objectivity of the individuals engaged in it we would be in trouble. North American agriculture would today be in the
state of that in Russia today. In fact it would be much worse, for the Soviets threw out Lysenko's ideology-masquerading-as-science decades
ago. Precisely because an alternative scientific model was available (thanks to the disparaged Darwinian theory) the former Eastern bloc
countries have been partially successful in overcoming the destructive chain of consequences which blind faith in ideology had set in motion.
This is what Lewontin'sold Russian dissident professor meant when he said that the truth must be spoken, even at great personal cost. How sad
that Lewontin has apparently failed to understand the fact that while scientific knowledge -- with the power it gives us -- can and does allow
humanity to change the world, ideological beliefs have consequences too. By rendering their proponents politically powerful but rationally and
instrumentally impotent, they throw up insurmountable barriers to reasoned and value-guided social change.¶ What are the crucial differences
between ideology and science that Lewonton has ignored? Both Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn have spelled these out with great care -- the
former throughout a long lifetime of scholarship devoted to that precise objective. Stephen Jay Gould has also done a sound job in this area.
How strange that someone with the status of Lewontin, in a series of lectures supposedly covering the same subject, would not at least have
dealt with their arguments!¶Science
has to do with the search for regularities in what humans experience of
their physical and social environments, beginning with the most simple units discernible, and gradually moving towards the more
complex. It has to do with expressing these regularities in the clearest and most precise language possible, so
that cause-and-effect relations among the parts of the system under study can be publicly and rigorously tested. And
it has to do with devising explanations of those empirical regularities which have survived all attempts to
falsify them. These explanations, once phrased in the form of testable hypotheses, become predictors of future
events. In other words, they lead to furtherconjectures of additional relationships which, in their turn, must survive
repeated public attempts to prove them wanting -- if the set of related explanations (or theory) is to continue to operate as
a fruitful guide for subsequent research.¶ This means that science, unlike mythology and ideology, has a self-correcting
mechanism at its very heart. A conjecture, to be classed as scientific, must be amenable to empirical
test. It must, above all, be open to refutation by experience . There is a rigorous set of rules according to which
hypotheses are formulated and research findings are arrived at, reported and replicated. It is this process-- not the lack of
prejudice of the particular scientist, or his negotiating ability, or even his political power within the relevant university department
-- that ensures the reliability of scientific knowledge. The conditions established by the community of science
is oneof preciselydefined and regulated "intersubjectivity". Under these conditions the theory that wins out, and
subsequently prevails, does so not because of its agreement with conventional wisdom or because of the
political power of its proponents, as is often the case with ideology. The survival of a scientific theory
such as Darwin's is due, instead, to its power to explain and predict observable regularities in human
experience, while withstanding worldwide attempts to refute it -- and proving itself open to elaboration
and expansion in the process . In this sense only is scientific knowledge objective and universal. All this
has little relationship to the claim of an absolute universality of objective "truth"apart from human
strivingsthat Lewontin has attributed to scientists.¶ Becauseideologies, on the other hand, do claim to represent
truth, they are incapable of generating a means by which they can be corrected as circumstances
change. Legitimate science makes no such claims. Scientific tests are not tests of verisimilitude. Science
does not aim for "true" theoriespurporting to reflect an accurate picture of the "essence" of reality. It
leaves such claims of infallibility to ideology.The tests of science, therefore, are in terms of workability and
falsifiability, and its propositions are accordingly tentative in nature.A successful scientific theory is one
which, while guiding the research in a particular problem area, is continuously elaborated, revised and refined, until it is eventually
superseded by that very hypothesis-making and testing process that it helped to define and sharpen. An ideology, on the other hand,
would be considered to have failed under those conditions, for the "truth" must be for all time. More than anything,
it is this difference that confuses those ideological thinkers who are compelled to attack Darwin's theory of
evolution precisely because of its success as a scientific theory. For them, and the world of desired and imagined
certainty in which they live, that very success in contributing to a continuously evolving body of
increasingly reliable-- albeit inevitably tentative -- knowledge can only mean failure, in that the theory
itself has altered in the process.
Science proves warming causes extinction- destroys oceans, ozone, and biodiversity
Dyer, 12 -- London-based independent journalist, PhD from King's College London, citing UC Berkeley scientists
(Gwynne, "Tick, tock to mass extinction date," The Press, 6-19-12, l/n, accessed 8-15-12, mss)
Meanwhile, a team of respected scientists warn that life on Earth
may be on the way to an irreversible "tipping
point". Sure. Heard that one before, too. Last month one of the world's two leading scientific journals, Nature, published a paper,
"Approaching a state shift in Earth's biosphere," pointing out that more than 40 per cent of the Earth's land is already used for human needs.
With the human population set to grow by a further two billion by 2050, that figure could soon exceed 50 per cent. "It really will be a new
world, biologically, at that point," said the paper's lead author, Professor Anthony Barnofsky of the University of California, Berkeley. But
Barnofsky doesn't go into the details of what kind of new world it might be. Scientists hardly ever do in public, for fear of being seen as panicmongers. Besides, it's a relatively new hypothesis, but it's a pretty convincing one, and it should be more widely understood. Here's how bad it
could get. The scientific consensus is that we
arestill on track for 3 degrees C of warming by 2100, but that's just warming caused
by human greenhouse- gas emissions. The problem is that +3 degrees is well past the point where the major feedbacks kick
in: natural phenomena triggered by our warming, like melting permafrost and the loss of Arctic seaicecover, that will add tothe heatingand that we cannot turn off. The trigger is actually around 2C (3.5 degrees F) higher average global
temperature. After that we lose control of the process: ending our own carbon- dioxide emissions would no longer be enough to stop
the warming. We may end up trapped on an escalator heading up to +6C (+10.5F), with no way of getting off. And +6C
gives youthe mass extinction. There have been five mass extinctions in the past 500 million years, when 50 per cent or more of the
species then existing on the Earth vanished, but until recently the only people taking any interest in this were paleontologists, not climate
scientists. They did wonder what had caused the extinctions, but the best answer they could come up was "climate change". It wasn't a very
good answer. Why would a warmer or colder planet kill off all those species? The warming was caused by massive volcanic eruptions dumping
huge quantities of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for tens of thousands of years. But it was very gradual and the animals and plants had
plenty of time to migrate to climatic zones that still suited them. (That's exactly what happened more recently in the Ice Age, as the glaciers
repeatedly covered whole continents and then retreated again.) There had to be a more convincing kill mechanism than that. The
paleontologists found one when they discovered that a giant asteroid struck the planet 65 million years ago, just at the time when the
dinosaurs died out in the most recent of the great extinctions. So they went looking for evidence of huge asteroid strikes at the time of the
other extinction events. They found none. What they discovered was that there
was indeed major warming at the time of all
the other extinctions - and that the warming had radically changed the oceans. The currents that carry oxygen- rich cold
water down to the depths shifted so that they were bringing down oxygen- poor warm water instead, and gradually the depths of the oceans
became anoxic: the deep waters no longer had any oxygen. When that happens, the sulfur
bacteriathat normally live in the silt (because
rise all the way to the surface over the
whole ocean, killing alltheoxygen-breathing life. The oceanalso starts emitting enormous amounts of
oxygen is poison to them) come out of hiding and begin to multiply. Eventually they
lethal hydrogen sulfide gas that destroy the ozone layer and directly poison land- dwelling species. This
has happened many times in the Earth's history.
Scientific, reductionist thought is vital to preserving biodiversity and averting witch
hunts
Lewis 94 – Professor of Environmental Studies
Martin Lewis professor in the School of the Environment and the Center for International Studies at Duke University. Green Delusions, 1992
p135-136
The eco-radical attack on the reductionism and specialization inherent in science is environmentally threatening in its own right. If
we
were to abandon scientific methodology we would have to relinquish our hopes that environmentally
benign technologies might be developed. Advances in solar power will not come about through holistic
inquiries into the meaning of nature. The scientific methodalso must be applied in environmental
monitoring. Had it not been for highly specialized measuring techniques, we would not have known
about the CFC threat until it was too late. Moreover, the requisite devices would never have been made
were it not for the organization of the scientific community into distinct specialties, each framing its
inquiries in a reductionistic manner. To avoid environmental catastrophe we need as much specific
knowledge of environmental processes as possible, although it is also true that we must improve our abilities to combine
insights derived from separate specialities. Much greater emphasis must be placed on basic environmental science, in both its reductive
and synthetic forms, a project that would be greatly hindered if we insist that only vague and spiritually oriented forms of holistic analysis
are appropriate. Eco-radicals can be expected to counter that environmental monitoring is only necessary in the first place because of
industrial poisoning; dismantle industry, and environmental science will cease to be useful. Although seemingly cogent, this argument fails
on historical grounds. As discussed previously, toxins
can be produced by nature as well as by humanity. For centuries
Europeans attributed the delusions they suffered after eating ergot-infected bread to evil spirits. Thousands
of women were burned at the stake because of the fearful reactions of a patriarchal, religiously fundamentalist society to the
psychological effects of an unknown, natural, environmental toxin. Once scientists, using specialized techniques, isolated
the agent, ergotism and its associated social pathologies began to disappear(Matossian 1989). In many different
fields specialized scientific techniques are now proving invaluable for the efforts to control pollution
and preserve natural diversity For example, the development of biosensors—mechanisms that “combine biological membranes
or cells with microelectronic sensors” (Elkington and Shopley 1988:14)—promises vastly improved means of pollution detection. Similarly
the development of Geographic Information Systems (GIs), based on the construction of spatialized computer data bases, has allowed
geographers and planners to predict the ecological consequences of specific human activities and thus minimize deleterious impacts on
critical ecosystems. Nature Conservancy field agents, for example, have found cis a useful tool in devising conservation strategies for Ohio’s
Big Darby Creek, one of the Midwest’s few remaining clear-flowing streams (Allan i 991). Geographers have also repeatedly proved the
utility of satellite image interpretation for developing and implementing conservation plans at the national level (Elkington and Shopley
1988). We may expect eco-extremists to have little patience with such philosophically impure forms of environmental work. Yet rejecting
such techniques outright would only intensify environmental destruction.
Scientific knowledge liberates people from arbitrary power and aims to improve every
individual’s life
Bronner 4
Stephen Eric Bronner, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, 2004, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical
Engagement, p. 21-23
Something will always be missing: freedom will never become fully manifest in reality. The relation between them is asymptotic. Therefore,
most philosophes understood progress as a regulative ideal, or as a postulate,13 rather than as an absolute or the expression of some
divine plane or the foundation for a system.’4 Even in scientific terms, progress
retained a critical dimension insofar as it
implied the need to question established certainties. In this vein, it is misleading simply to equate scientific
reason with the domination of man and nature.15 All the great figures of the scientific revolution —Bacon,
Boyle, Newton—were
concerned with liberating humanity from what seemed the power of seemingly intractable
forces. Swamps were everywhere; roads were few; forests remained to be cleared; illness was rampant; food was scarce; most people
would never leave their village. What it implied not to understand the existence of bacteria or the nature of electricity, just to use very
simple examples, is today simply inconceivable. Enlightenment figures like Benjamin Franklin, “the complete philosophe,”’6 became
famous for a reason: they not only freed people from some of their fears but through inventions like the stove and the lightning rod they
also raised new possibilities for making people’s lives more livable. Critical
theorists and postmodernists miss the point
when they view Enlightenment intellectuals in general and scientists in particular as simple apostles of reification.
They actually constituted its most consistent enemy. The philosophes may not have grasped the commodity
form, but they empowered people by challenging superstitions and dogmas that left them mute and
helpless against the whims of nature and the injunctions of tradition. Enlightenment thinkers were justified in
understanding knowledge as inherently improving humanity. Infused with a sense of furthering the
public good, liberating the individual from the clutches of the invisible and inexplicable, the
Enlightenment idea of progress required what the young Marx later termed “the ruthless critique of
everything existing.” This regulative notion of progress was never inimical to subjectivity. Quite the
contrary: progress became meaningful only with reference to real living individuals.
Scientific Method accurate – fact checking and self-correction
Cohen ‘7
(et al – Louis Cohen is Emeritus Professor of Education at Loughborough University. Research methods in education – pg. 6-7)
Afurther means by which we set out to discover truth is research. This has been defined by Kerlinger (1970) as the
systematic, controlled, empirical and critical investigation of hypothetical proposition* about the presumed relations among natural
phenomena. Research
has three characteristics in particular which distinguish it from the first means of
problem-solving identified earlier, namely, experience. First, whereas experience deals with events
occurring in a haphazard manner, research is systematic and controlled, having its operations on the inductivedeductive model outlined above. Second, research is empirical. The scientist turns to experience for validation. As Kerlinycr (1970) puts it,
subjective, personal belief has to have a reality check against objective, empirical facts and tests. And
third, research is self-correcting. Not only does the scientific method have built-in mechanisms to
protect scientists from error as far as is humanly possible, but also their procedures and results are open to
public scrutiny by fellow professionals. Incorrect results in time will he found and either revised or discarded (Mouly
Research is a combination of both experience and reasoning and must be regarded as the most
successful approach to the discovery of truth, particularly as far as the natural sciences are concerned (Burg 1963).'
Alternative to Science Fails
Science promotes openness that is key to preventing fear-mongering
Gleick 9 (Dr. Peter, president of the Pacific Institute, an internationally recognized water expert and a MacArthur Fellow, “New
McCarthyism: Fear of science and the war on rationality,” http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gleick/detail??blogid=104&entry_id=47022)
As more and more of the world looks to knowledge, education, and science as the routes out of
poverty and conflict, parts of America seems to be slipping back toward the Dark Ages, when fear of
knowledge and science led to an impoverishment of civilization that had lasting effects for centuries.
I've recently returned from two weeks in northern Europe and a series of scientific water meetings and discussions with people from over
130 countries. They read the news from the United States with incredulity. America
is still seen as the place to come for
aspiring students and scientists around the world. Our public universities, despite assaults on budgets, independence, and
knowledge, still struggle to maintain their excellence. But my friends and colleagues from overseas are increasingly shocked, as are many
of us in the U.S., by the expanding efforts of home-grown extremists to undermine rational
discourse, eliminate the use of fact and science in policymaking, and shut down public debate over
the vital issues of our times through hate, vitriol, and ad hominem attacks. Looking through the eyes
of my overseas colleagues, what do we see? We see a debate over providing health care to every
American that is based -- not on facts or civilized discourse -- but on screaming mobs shutting down
public discussions and the use of straw man arguments to promote fear among the public and
policymakers. Yet every major country of Europe provides basic health care for its population. We see President Obama appoint one
of the nation's best scientists in the areas of energy, environment, and national security -- Dr. John Holdren -- to be his Science Advisor, and
then have right-wing mouthpieces like Glenn Beck spread ad hominem lies about him because of their fear that facts and actual science
may once again inform Presidential action. This should be a recognizable tactic to us -- lying about a person to diminish their effectiveness.
In fact, these extremists
want to undermine the forward-looking policies that would prevent the very
draconian measures they say they deplore. We see unambiguous evidence that climate change is
already affecting human health and the global economy -- evidence often collected by world-leading
American scientists and scientific institutions -- while public opinion polls show that the American people
continue to be misled about the risks facing us by conservative pundits who ignore, misunderstand, or intentionally misuse
that science to mislead the public into fear of change. Yet we already see huge economic and environmental opportunities in adapting to
Fear is an effective tool -- as hate groups and extremists know. It is no accident
that repressive regimes of all kinds -- fascists, the Nazis, Stalin, religious states, madrasses -- use tools
of hatred, anti-intellectualism, and fear to control knowledge, universities, and intellectuals. Fear
grows best when sown in fields of ignorance, while science, rationality, and education are the
greatest weapons modern societies have against irrational fear. No wonder Beck and his ilk have intellectuals in
the reality of climate change.
their sights; so do the leaders of Iran, and Burma, and the Taliban, and North Korea, for similar reasons. What does this have to do with
water -- the ostensible focus of my blog? Nothing and everything. I try to focus on numbers here and what they mean for international and
local water issues. Yet water policy, or any policy, must also be based on rationality, facts, and civil discourse. Similarly,
solving any bad water contamination problem requires one of two approaches: don't let the contamination into our water supply in the
first place, or apply the right filters to clean it up when it does. The same rule applies to those who would pollute our public discourse with
hate and noise: don't let their vitriol into our media supply or filter it out before it can poison our democracy.
Criticism of Science Wrong
Criticisms of science prop up climate change deniers - means we can’t solve warming
Berube, 2011, Michael, Paterno Family Professor in Literature and Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania
State University, where he teaches cultural studies and American literature, “The Science Wars Redux,”
http://www.democracyjournal.org/pdf/19/BERUBE.pdf, KHaze
But what of Sokal’s chief post-hoax claim that the academic left’s critiques of science were potentially damaging to the left? That one, alas, has
held up very well, for it turns out thatthe
critique of scientific “objectivity” and the insistence on the inevitable
“partiality” of knowledge can serve the purposes of climate change deniersand young-Earth creationists quite
nicely. That’s not because there was something fundamentally rotten at the core of philosophical antifoundationalism (whose leading American
exponent, Richard Rorty, remained a progressive Democrat all his life), but it might very well have had something to do with the cloistered
nature of the academic left. It was as if we had tacitly assumed, all along, that we were speaking only to one another, so that whenever we
championed Jean-François Lyotard’s defense of the “hetereogeneity of language games” and spat on Jürgen Habermas’s ideal of a conversation
oriented toward “consensus,” we assumed a strong consensus among us that anyone on the side of heterogeneity was on the side of the
angels. But nowthe
climate-change deniers and the young-Earth creationists are coming after the natural
scientists, just as I predicted—and they’re using some of the very arguments developed by an academic leftthat thought
it was speaking only to people of like mind. Some standard left arguments, combined with the leftpopulist distrust of “experts” and “professionals” and assorted high-and-mighty mucketymucks who think they’re the boss of us, were fashioned by the right into a powerful device for delegitimating scientific research. For example, when Andrew Ross asked in Strange Weather,
“How can metaphysical life theories and explanations taken seriously by millions be ignored or excluded by a small group of powerful people called ‘scientists’?,” everyone was supposed to
The countercultural account of
“metaphysical life theories” that gives people a sense of dignity in the face of scientific authority sounds good—
understand that he was referring to alternative medicine, and that his critique of “scientists” was meant to bring power to the people.
until one substitutes “astrology” or “homeopathy” or “creationism” (all of which are certainly taken seriously by millions) in its place. The right’s attacks on climate science, mobilizing a public
distrust of scientific expertise, eventually led science-studies theorist Bruno Latour to write in Critical Inquiry: [E]ntire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are
dangerous extremists are using
the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our
lives.Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies? Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what
learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth...while
we meant? Why does it burn my tongue to say that global warming is a fact whether you like it or not? Why can’t I simply say that the
argument is closed for good? Why, indeed? Why not say, definitively, that anthropogenic climate change is real, that vaccines do not cause
autism, that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and that Adam and Eve did not ride dinosaurs to church? At the close of his “Afterword” to
“Transgressing the Boundaries,” Sokal wrote: No wonder most Americans can’t distinguish between science and pseudoscience: their science
teachers have never given them any rational grounds for doing so. (Ask an average undergraduate: Is matter composed of atoms? Yes. Why do
you think so? The reader can fill in the response.) Is it then any surprise that 36 percent of Americans believe in telepathy, and that 47 percent
believe in the creation account of Genesis? It can’t be denied that some science-studies scholars have deliberately tried to blur the distinction
between science and pseudoscience. As I noted in Rhetorical Occasions and on my personal blog, British philosopher of science Steve Fuller
traveled to Dover, Pennsylvania, in 2005 to testify on behalf of the local school board’s fundamentalist conviction that Intelligent Design is a
legitimate science. “The main problem intelligent design theory suffers from at the moment,” Fuller argued, “is a paucity of developers.”
Somehow, Fuller managed to miss the point—that there is no way to develop a research program in ID. What is one to do, examine fossils for
evidence of God’s fingerprints? So these days, when I talk to my scientist friends, I offer them a deal. I say: I’ll admit that you were right about
the potential for science studies to go horribly wrong and give fuel to deeply ignorant and/or reactionary people. And in return, you’ll admit
that I was right about the culture wars, and right that the natural sciences would not be held harmless from the right-wing noise machine. And
if you’ll go further, and acknowledge that some circumspect, well-informed critiques of actually existing science have merit (such as the
criticism that the postwar medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth had some ill effects), I’ll go further too, and acknowledge that many
humanists’ critiques of science and reason are neither circumspect nor well-informed. Then perhaps we can get down to the business of how to
develop safe, sustainable energy and other social practices that will keep the planet habitable. Fifteen years ago, it seemed to me that the Sokal
Hoax was making that kind of deal impossible, deepening the “two cultures” divide and further estranging humanists from scientists. Now, I
think it may have helped set the terms for an eventual rapprochement, leading both humanists and scientists to realize thatthe
shared
enemies of their enterprises are the religious fundamentalists who reject all knowledge that challenges
their faith and the free-market fundamentalists whose policies will surely scorch the earth. On my side, perhaps humanists are beginning to realize that there is a project
even more vital than that of the relentless critique of everything existing, a project to which they can contribute as much as any scientist—the project of making
the world a more humane and livable place. Is it still possible? I don’t know, and I’m not sanguine. Some scientific questions now seem to be a matter of
tribal identity: A vast majority of elected Republicans have expressed doubts about the science behind anthropogenic climate change, and as someone once remarked, it is very difficult to get
a man to understand something when his tribal identity depends on his not understanding it. But there are few tasks so urgent. About that, even Heisenberg himself would be certain.
Focus on epistemology empowers skepticism of science
Gross and Levitt, 1994 (Paul R. University Professor of Life Sciences and director of the Center for Advanced Studies at the
University of Virginia, and Norman, Professor of mathematics at Rutgers, “The natural sciences: Trouble Ahead? Yes,” Academic Questions, Vol.
7, Issue 2, Spring)
Not long ago, the term "epistemology" denoted a recondite area of professional philosophy, absorbing to its academic votaries (as are
herpetology, Urdu poetry, and the history of the English wool-trade to theirs) but not especially tempting to outsiders. Nowadays the
average campus seems to house enough self-described "epistemologists" to fill the football stadium. Epistemology is one of the buzzwords
of choice wherever postmodern literary critics, radical-feminist theorists, eco-radicals, experts in "cultural studies," and certain kinds of
social scientists gather. The word inhabits, monthly, the interiors of dozens of crisply new books and essays, and not a few title pages. All
this would be unobjectionable, if somewhat hard to account for, if it reflected a competent new enthusiasm for some of the deepest
questions of the Western philosophical tradition. As things stand, however, in current usage "epistemology"
is oftena
euphemism for political cheerleading. What the would-be epistemologist seems to be saying, in conformity with the
perspectivist outlook that defines postmodernism, is "My way of knowing is just as good as yours! Even better! So there!"
Thus there is supposed to be a woman's way of knowing, a gay man's way of knowing, and a way of knowing suitable to the black man in
search of his African roots. For all we can tell, there may be a special way of knowing appropriate to one-eyed lesbian dwarfs.[ 10] On the
surface this is risible, but something quite sobering lurks beneath; the real point seems to be that no
one in any
"disempowered" group needs to take the word of "Western" learning on any subject whatsoever. The
epistemologist of the oppressed frankly looks forward to the day when feminists (of a certain ideological stripe), or, as the case may be,
homosexuals, blacks, or Chicanos, will get to re-invent history, sociology, economics--and nuclear physics--in conformity with their own
interests and their own presumed positions in the narrative field. Since all discourse, as Foucault is thought by the credulous to have
proved, is a regime of power, why not fight for discursive practices, in all areas, that reflect the political interests of the group with which
one identifies? So, indeed, are
the oppressed solemnly advised by a phalanx of much-honored academics.[11] Of
of science itself must be brought into this game.If the vaunted objectivity of
Western science can be deconstructed out of existence then, presumably,anything else in the way of
knowledge will be easy pickings. However, most of the arguments that claim to have pulled off this difficult trick are ludicrously
course, the epistemology
wanting. One has the sense, when reading them, that one is reading someone who has read someone who has read someone who has
read Thomas Kuhn. Somewhere back there, Kuhn (or maybe Feyerabend or maybe even Lakatos) is said to have demonstrated the relative
and contingent nature of all scientific knowledge, and this is supposed to settle things.[ 12] The real tragedy is that someone has read
Thomas Kuhn, but without being aware of how much intellectual equipment is necessary to understand--and evaluate--his work of some
thirty years ago. At
minimum, we should say, one must have a grasp of the detailed intellectual steps that distinguished Kepler
a bit of mathematical physics--the
thing itself, not a paraphrase. In most cases, however, postmodern epistemologists have not taken the least
trouble to learn physics in this sense, and they bristle at the idea that it is necessary. After all, the point of the
from Copernicus, Newton from Kepler, Einstein from Newton. In short, one has to know
game is to show that physics, as now constituted, is a discourse of the hegemonic regime--precisely what one is trying to overthrow.
K of our particular science claims is wrong - their sweeping claims are based on
ignorance and rationalization
Gross ‘98
(et al, Paul R. Gross, who is a University Professor of Life Sciences (Emeritus) at the University of Virginia. He has taught at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, New York University, Brown University, and the University of Rochester –Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its
Quarrels with Science. Page 6)
It would seem to follow, then, that the
last eight or ten years should have seen a flock of earnest humanists and social
critics crowding into science and mathematics lecture rooms, the better to arm themselves for the fateful
confrontation. This has not happened. A curious fact about the recent left-critique of science is the degree
to which its instigators have overcome their former timidity or indifference toward the subject not by studying it in
detail but rather by creating a repertoire of rationalizations for avoiding such study. Buoyed by a "stance" on science,
they feel justified in bypassing the grubby necessities of actual scientific knowledge. This is not because any great number of science apostates
has flocked to their banner, although a handful of figures with scientific credentials, as well as the occasional refugee from an unsatisfactory
scientific career, can be found on the movement's fringes. The
assumption that makes specific knowledge of science
dispensable is that certain new-forged intellectual tools—feminist theory, postmodern philosophy, deconstruction, deep
ecology—and, above all, the moral authority with which the academic left emphatically credits itself are in
themselves sufficient
Relativism Bad
Local knowledge is prejudice – justifies destroying the environment, discriminating
against unpopular groups
Sokal, 1997
Alan D., Professor of Physics at New York University, New Politics, 6(2), pp. 126-129 (Winter 1997), “A Plea for Reason, Evidence and Logic”
Now of course, no one will admit to being against reason, evidence and logic -- that's like being against Motherhood and Apple Pie. Rather,
our postmodernist and poststructuralist friends will
claim to be in favor of some new and deeper kind of
reason, such as the celebration of "local knowledges" and "alternative ways of knowing" as an
antidote to the so-called "Eurocentric scientific methodology" (you know, things like systematic
experiment, controls, replication, and so forth). You find this magic phrase "local knowledges" in, for example, the articles
of Andrew Ross and Sandra Harding in the "Science Wars" issue of Social Text. But are "local knowledges" all that great? And when
local knowledges conflict, which local knowledgesshould we believe? In many parts of the Midwest,
the "local knowledges" say that you should spray more herbicides to get bigger crops. It's oldfashioned objective science that can tell us which herbicides are poisonous to farm workers and to people
downstream. Here in New YorkCity, lots of "local knowledges" hold that there's a wave of teenage
motherhood that's destroying our moral fiber. It's those boring data that show that the birth rate to
teenage mothers has been essentially constant since 1975, and is about half of what it was in the
good old 1950's. Another word for "local knowledges" is prejudice.
Relativistic understandings are hijacked by climate skeptics and makes response to
global warming impossible.
Banning 2009 (Marlia Elisabeth Banning, Ph.D., UC Boulder, “When Poststructural Theory and
Contemporary Politics Collide*The Vexed Case of Global Warming,” Communication and Critical/Cultural
Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3, September 2009, pp. 285304)
While academic research practices and the knowledge these produce have not changed substantially60 in the last half of the twentieth
century (with two exceptions, the distribution of newly sanctioned areas of inquiry and the shift of federal funding for scientific research
from the academy to the private sector),61 theoretical perspectives on knowledge have shifted. Theoretical
inquiry across the
humanitiesand social sciences in the late twentieth century has investigated the nature and status of
knowledge62 and its delineation from the possibilities of universal truth. The target of this theoretical inquiry, broadly
cast, included Enlightenment assumptions aboutthe stability, certainty, and objectivity of knowledge and more specifically,
of scientific research. Studies produced during this time countered the common assumption thatscience relies on
neutral methods used to create a unified, universal, or objective truth located external to human subjects.63 One result of this
inquiry is that the grand narratives that legitimized scientific knowledge*that it would provide for the liberation of humanity and that its
neutral methods provide cumulative rational knowledge contributing to a unified whole speculative truth*have received widespread
scrutiny and incredulity within the humanities and social sciences.64 Another result is that knowledge
produced by academic
inquiry*scientific or otherwise*is widely viewed by critical scholars today to be paradigm-bound,
discursively65 constructed, and contested. Knowledge produced by academic inquiry is seen as culture, context, criteria, and
category contingent.66 It is presumed to be partial, in both senses of the word. Today, little debate remains within critical communication
studies about the partiality of scientific or other kinds of knowledge. What
remains open to question, however, are the
consequences of these theoretical assertions about the partiality of knowledge, particularly when these
assertions permeate and fortify contemporary policy debate. This is because when notions of truth are suspect, when all
discourse is seen as political, and when information is reduced to what Scott Lash describes as ‘‘more-or-less out of control
bytes,’’ political and commercial efforts to undermine unwanted scientific research in various scientific
debates, such as stem cell research, evolution, and global warming, have fertile grounds in which to
work.67 What started in the academy as careful analyses to discern the social fingerprints on science (and all inquiry) have
coincided with*or maximally enabled*corporate entities, the Conservative Right,68 and various elite groups
inside and outside of the US government to deploy a form of cultural relativism in which the uncertainty that is
inherent in scientific methods and conclusions is amplified, and any unpopular or unprofitable discourse, scientific or
otherwise, is dismissed as ‘‘mere opinion.’’69 There are numerous theoretical roots attributable to these assumptions, but I trace just one
via the essay, ‘‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,’’ by Friedrich Nietzsche. In the essay Nietzsche asks ‘‘what then is truth?’’ and
answers: ‘‘A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been
poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical,
and binding.’’70 In this work, Nietzsche
negates the possibility of language and rhetoric to designate truth
and the ability of humans to discern it, if it exists. He dismisses the distinction between truth and deception as an illusion
and advances truth as a mere convention, ‘‘a uniformly valid and binding designation . . . invented for things,’’ in relation to which
deception*lying*is significant only because of its ‘‘unpleasant, hated consequences.’’71 These ‘‘unpleasant, hated consequences,’’
however, comprise a category in which the potential consequences of global warming certainly fall: These
consequences are
precisely why it is necessary to retain commonsense and ethical distinctions between truth and lies,
and honesty and deception, and to hold public discourse accountable to a set of deliberative norms and
standards. Yet these distinctions between honesty and deception appear vexed when viewed through the frameworks offered by
contemporary discourses on truth and knowledge. Theoretical inquiry and prevalent critical discourses on knowledge and truth in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries advanced efforts to demystify scientific knowledge and disentangled the concept of knowledge
from belief in a singular, neutral, or transcendent truth. Contemporary critical perspectives on knowledge and truth have illustrated the
degree to which discourses shape the emotional, ideational, imaginary, and material landscapes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries and have questioned notions of a transparent language, method, or reality. At the same time, these discourses promote a view of
knowledge as fragmented and political, truth as either untenable or irrelevant, and information as out of control.
Impact Turns/D—General
Environmental Management Good
Environmental management is inevitable – only way to make it positive is through
concrete action
Levy 99- PhD @ Centre for Critical Theory at Monash
Neil, “Discourses of the Environment,” ed: Eric Darier, p. 215
If the ‘technological fix’ is unlikely to be more successful than strategies of limitation of our use of resources, we
are, nevertheless unable simply to
leave the environment as it is. There is a real and pressing need for space, and more accurate, technical
and scientific information about the non-human world. For we are faced with a situation in which the
processes we have already set in train will continue to impact upon that world, and therefore us for
centuries. It is therefore necessary, not only to stop cutting down the rain forests, but to develop real,
concrete proposals for action, to reverse or at least limit the effects of our previous interventions.
Moreover, there is another reason why our behavior towards the non-human cannot simply be a matter of leaving it as
it is, at least in so far as our goals are not only environmental but also involve social justice. For if we simply preserve what remains to us of
wilderness, of the countryside and of park land, we also preserve patterns of very unequal access to their resources and
their consolations (Soper 1995: 207).in fact, we risk exacerbating these inequalities. It is not us, but the poor of
Brazil, who will bear the brunt of the misery which would result from a strictly enforced policy of leaving the Amazonian rain forest untouched,
in the absence of alternative means of providing for their livelihood. It is the development of policies to provide such
ecologically sustainable alternatives which we require, as well as the development of technical means for replacing our
current greenhouse gas-emitting sources of energy. Such policies and proposals for concrete action must
beformulated by ecologists, environmentalists, people with expertise concerning the functioning of ecosystems and the impact which our
actions have upon them. Such proposals are, therefore, very much the province of Foucault’s specific intellectual, the one who works ‘within specific sectors, at the
precise points where their own conditions of life or work situate them’ (Foucault 1980g: 126). For who could be more fittingly described as ‘the strategists of life and
death’ than these environmentalists? After the end of the Cold War, it is in this sphere, more than any other, that man’s ‘politics places his existence as a living
being in question’ (Foucault 1976: 143). For
it is in facing the consequences of our intervention in the non-human
world that the hate of our species, and of those with whom we share this planet, will be decided?
Environment Reps = Action
Environmental representations that effect all serve to motivate collective action
Brulle 2k (Robert, Environmental Science @ Drexel, Agency, Democracy, and Nature p. 277-279)
An example of a
partial metanarrative of nature is represented by the term biodiversity. This discursive
invention unified disparate discourses and groups that were concerned about destruction of the natural
environment due to deforestation, overfishing, introduction of exotic species,
hunting, habitat destruction, and
extinction of species. It did notabsorb or destroy the other discourses. Rather, it expanded the concerns of
the various groups to see their common purposes. By so doing, it lead to an increase in collective action. A
similar environmental metanarrative would allow for "the construction of a new common sensewhich
changes the identity of the different groups sothat their differing practices are able to complement one
another(Torgerson 1999: 47). There is no one particular environmental discourse that could function as a metanarrative. The development
of the various environmental frames has resulted in a number of particular discourses which are unique cultural responses to specific
conditions of ecological degradation (Eder 1996b: 163). Instead,
an environmental metanarrative will consist of multiple
forms of arguments to motivate action in different social orders. There is no requirement that joint
action be based on one set ofcultural beliefs; the only requirement is that there exist good reasons to act
in a particular manner. "Political unity," Schlosberg (1998: 87-101) notes, "does not require that a political
agreement be reached based on identical reasons. Rather, unity can be achieved through recognition and inclusion of
multiplicity and particularity. 7i The theory of communicative action can inform the creation of a meta- narrative by describing both the types
of arguments the metanarrative would have to make and the social conditions under which it would be cre- ated. First, the metanarrative must
provide aesthetic, moral, and cognitive reasons for collective action. In order to create a rational agreement about what joint action should be
followed, a discourse must establish that it accurately represents the objective world, that the acceptance of a
proposed action is in accordance with other existing cultural norms and beliefs, and that the statement is an authentic representation of the
speaker's inner se lf.4 Hence, the development of collective action depends on a discourse's sus- taining the validity claims of truth, normative
rightness, and authenticity. This means that the multipleand partial discourses on
the natural environment must be
integrated to form a coherent discourse that can provide cognitive scientific, normative, and aesthetic
rationalesfor the preservation of nature (Eder l996a: 215). Thus, contributions are needed from all the environmental discourses. The
existing environmental discourses form the starting point for such an effort. According to Killingsworth and Palmer
(1992: 266), an ecological metanarrative "will ... draw energy and direc- tion from them and in turn will influence their sense of purpose and
their understanding of their relationships to other discourses. The continuous narrative of an environmentalist culture will, above all, be the
medium through which communicative action is realized and perpetuated." Thus, to be successful, an environmental metanarrative must
recognize the valid- ity of the great variety of viewpoints and rationales with regard to protect- ing the natural environment, and this
knowledge must inform collective action (Schlosberg 1998: 21). Thus, we will need to "enlarge the range of voices in our conversation and with
them the means of considering our rela- tionship with the natural world" (Killingsworth and Palmer 1992: 79). An
ecological
metanarrative would draw on the special management, scientific and legal capacities of the Conservation,
Wildlife Management, and Reform Environmentalist discourses to ensure scientific competence and adequately
address scientific questions. To develop new normative criteria, it would need to encompass the moral fervor and commitment of
the ecotheologists and the deep concerns over equity and justice of both the Ecofeminist discourse and the Environmental justice discourse. To
address our images of what constitutes the good life, it would need to incorporate the aesthetic insights provided by the discourses of
Preservation and Deep Ecology. The theory of communicative action also defines the process through which this metanarrative would be
created. Here Habermas's communica- tive ethics specifies that the process of validating a discourse requires an open speech community in
which the unforced force of the better argument prevails. This ethical relationship, a presupposition of mutual communica- tions, requires basic
recognition and acceptance of others and respect for the autonomy and integrity of the others' identity and selfhood (Schlosberg 1998: 68).
Thus, the theory of communicative action specifies that the cre- ation of an ecological metanarrative must occur through open communi- cation
based on solidarity and mutual respect. An
open dialogue among all environmental organizations would createa
and developcoordinated actions to deal with ecological
democratic community, which couldthen debate
degradation. Torgerson (1999: 160) has labeled the arena in which this dialogue would take place the "green" polit- ical sphere. It is not a
specific institution or think tank. Rather, it defines a change in the relationship of the various environmental communities that would enable
them to engage one another in a community of dialogue (ibid.: 161). The "green" public sphere would define a space in which "industrialist
presuppositions do not prevail" (ibid.: 162). This public space would be the arena in which environmental politics would take place and
meaningful disagreements and debates about our society and the actions necessary to create an ecologically sustainable society would be
carried out. Creating an environmental metanarrative through this dialogue would enable the creation of an environmental community capable
of democrat- ically discussing proposed actions and then acting together (ibid.: 107).
Risk Assessment Good
Risk assessment is good in the context of climate – allows effective policy making
Schneider and Lane 6 (Stephen, Prof. Bio.Sci., Senior Fellow of Institute for Int’l. Studies, Co-Director
of Center for Environmental Science and Policy @ Stanford, and Janica, Research Assistant to Dr.
Schneider, “An Overview of ‘Dangerous’ Climate Change”,
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/adcc/BookCh2Jan2006.pdf)
Ultimately, scientists
cannot make expert value judgments about what climate change risks to
face and what to avoid, as that is the role of policy makers, but they can help policymakers
evaluate what ‘dangerous’ climate change entails by laying out the elements of risk, which is
classically defined as probability x consequence. They should also help decision-makers by identifying thresholds
and possible surprise events, as well as estimates of how long it might take to resolve many of the remaining uncertainties that
plague climate assessments. There is a host of information available about the possible consequences of climate change, as
described in our discussion of the SRES scenarios and of the impacts of climate change, but the SRES scenarios do not have
probabilities assigned to them, making risk management difficult. Some would argue that assigning probabilities to scenarios
based on social trends and norms should not be done (e.g. [15]), and that the use of scenarios in and of itself derives from the fact
that probabilities can’t be analytically estimated. In fact, most models do not calculate objective probabilities for future outcomes,
as the future has not yet happened and ‘objective statistics’ are impossible, in principle, before the fact. However, modelers
can assign subjective confidence levels to their results by discussing how well established the
underlying processes in a model are, or by comparing their results to observational data for past events or
elaborating on other consistency tests of their performance (e.g. [14]). It is our belief that qualified assessment of
(clearly admitted) subjective probabilities in every aspect of projections of climatic changes
and impacts would improve climate change impact assessments, as it would complete the risk
equation, thereby giving policy-makers some idea of the likelihood of threat associated with
various scenarios, aiding effective decision-making in the risk-management framework. At the same time,
confidence in these difficult probabilistic estimates should also be given, along with a brief explanation of how that confidence
was arrived at.
The aff isn’t forecasting, it’s risk management – once we’ve determined what could
happen, we need to start developing pragmatic solutions
Cochrane 11 John H. Cochrane is a Professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of
Business and a contributor to Business Class "IN DEFENSE OF THE HEDGEHOGS" July 15 www.catounbound.org/2011/07/15/john-h-cochrane/in-defense-of-the-hedgehogs/
Risk Management Rather than Forecast-and-Plan The
answer is to change the question, to focus on risk
management , as Gardner and Tetlock suggest. There is a set of events that could happen
tomorrow—Chicago could have an earthquake, there could be a run on Greek debt, the Administration could decide
“Heavens, Dodd–Frank and Obamacare were huge mistakes, let’s fix them” (Okay, not the last one.) Attached to each
event, there is some probability that it could happen. Now “forecasting” as Gardner and Tetlock
characterize it, is an attempt to figure out which event really will happen, whether the coin will land on
heads or tails, and then make a plan based on that knowledge. It’s a fool’s game. Once we
recognize that uncertainty will always remain, risk management rather than forecasting is
much wiser. Just the step of naming the events that could happen is useful . Then, ask
yourself, “if this event happens, let’s make sure we have a contingency plan so we’re not
really screwed.” Suppose you’re counting on diesel generators to keep cooling water flowing through a reactor. What if
someone forgets to fill the tank? The good use of “forecasting” is to get a better handle on
probabilities , so we focus our risk management resources on the most important events. But we must still pay
attention to events, and buy insurance against them, based as much on the painfulness of
the event as on its probability. (Note to economics techies: what matters is the risk-neutral probability, probability
weighted by marginal utility.) So it’s not really the forecast that’s wrong, it’s what people do with it. If
we all understood the essential unpredictability of the world, especially of rare and very costly events, if we
got rid of the habit of mind that asks for a forecast and then makes “plans” as if that were the only state of the world that could
occur; if
we instead focused on laying out all the bad things that could happen and made sure
we had insurance or contingency plans, both personal and public policies might be a lot
better.
Simulations Good
Simulation and institutional deliberation are valuable and motivate effective
responses to climate risks
Marx et al 7 (Sabine M, Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED) @ Columbia
University, Elke U. Weber, Graduate School of Business and Department of Psychology @ Columbia
University, Benjamin S. Orlovea, Department of Environmental Science and Policy @ University of
California Davis, Anthony Leiserowitz, Decision Research, David H. Krantz, Department of Psychology @
Columbia University, Carla Roncolia, South East Climate Consortium (SECC), Department of Biological
and Agricultural Engineering @ University of Georgia and Jennifer Phillips, Bard Centre for
Environmental Policy @ Bard College, “Communication and mental processes: Experiential and analytic
processing of uncertain climate information”, 2007,
http://climate.columbia.edu/sitefiles/file/Marx_GEC_2007.pdf)
Based on the observation that experiential and analytic processing systems compete and that personal experience and vivid
descriptions are often favored over statistical information, we suggest the following research and policy implications.¶
Communications designed to create, recall and highlight relevant personal experience and to elicit affective
responses
can lead to more public attention to, processing of, and engagement with forecasts of
climate variability and climate change. Vicarious experiential information in the form of
scenarios, narratives, and analogies can help the public and policy makers imagine the
potential consequences of climate variability and change, amplify or attenuate risk
perceptions, and influence both individual behavioral intentions and public policy
preferences. Likewise, as illustrated by the example of retranslation in the Uganda studies, the translation of
statistical information into concrete experience with simulated forecasts, decisionmaking and
its outcomes can greatly facilitate an intuitive understanding of both probabilities and
the consequences of incremental change and extreme events, and motivate
contingency planning.¶ Yet, while the engagement of experience-based, affective decision-making can make risk
communications more salient and motivate behavior, experiential processing is also subject to its own biases, limitations and
distortions, such as the finite pool of worry and single action bias. Experiential processing works best with easily imaginable,
emotionally laden material, yet many aspects of climate variability and change are relatively abstract and require a certain level of
analytical understanding (e.g., long-term trends in mean temperatures or precipitation). Ideally, communication of climate
forecasts should encourage the interactive engagement of both analytic and experiential
processing systems in the course of making concrete decisions about climate, ranging from individual
choices about what crops to plant in a particular season to broad social choices about how to mitigate or adapt to global climate
change.¶ One
way to facilitate this interaction is through group and participatory decision-making.
As the Uganda example suggests, group processes allow individuals with a range of knowledge,
skills and personal experience to share diverse information and perspectives and work
together on a problem. Ideally, groups should include at least one member trained to understand statistical forecast
information to ensure that all sources of information—both experiential and analytic—are considered as part of the decisionmaking process. Communications to groups should also try to translate statistical information into formats readily understood in
the language, personal and cultural experience of group members. In a somewhat iterative or cyclical process, the
shared
concrete information can then be re-abstracted to an analytic level that leads to
action.¶ Risk and uncertainty are inherent dimensions of all climate forecasts and related
decisions. Analytic products like trend analysis, forecast probabilities, and ranges of
uncertainty ought to be valuable contributions to stakeholder decision-making. Yet
decision makers also listen to the inner and communal voices of personal and collective experience, affect and emotion, and
cultural values. Both
systems—analytic and experiential—should be considered in the
design of climate forecasts and risk communications. If not, many analytic products will fall on deaf ears
as decision makers continue to rely heavily on personal experience and affective cues to make plans for an uncertain future. The
challenge is to find innovative and creative ways to engage both systems in the process of individual and group decision-making.
Technical Fixes Good
Focusing on the metaphysics of climate destroys progressive actions to solve the
problem---technical fixes are key
Hayward 6—Senior Fellow, Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy (Steven, The Fate of the Earth in
the Balance, http://www.aei.org/article/society-and-culture/the-fate-of-the-earth-in-the-balance/)
This small example of environmental atavism reveals a more fundamental aspect of the public discourse about climate change. At the core of environmentalist animus against nuclear power is a categorical suspicion about
connected to a larger philosophical pessimism about human civilization and man’s supposed separation
oralienation from nature. We have seen this style of argument during the long controversy over the arms race in the late stages of the Cold
War, during which the immense political and technical aspects of the problem were, for a certain cast of
mind,entirely subsumed beneath a more general critique of how the arms race was merely symptomatic
of a larger crisis of civilization. Unless this larger crisis was addressed, it was suggested, there would be no hope the arms race could be solved.¶It was not but twenty years ago that the large
technology itself, which is
nuclear weapons arsenals of the superpowers threatened the instantaneous destruction of civilization and perhaps human life itself. Today, climate change is said to threaten the same things, only more slowly. It is remarkable how
In the case of both the arms race thenand climate change today,
we are told that the issue is ultimately philosophical in nature, and that wholesale changes in our philosophical
perspective must necessarily precede political and policy remedies to the problem. Should this perspective be taken seriously? What can it really mean?¶ The Fate
similarly the leading advocates for these two problems understand and conceptualize them.
of the Earth in the Balance¶ The peculiarity of this approach to major global problems is best seen by comparing the two leading popular books on each issue, Jonathan Schell’s 1982 bestseller The Fate of the Earth, and Al Gore’s
1991 bestseller Earth in the Balance (whose main arguments reappear in truncated form in An Inconvenient Truth). It is not just the titles that are strikingly similar; a close reading reveals the two books to be identical in their
overarching philosophy.[5] In both, mankind is poised on the abyss, facing, in Gore’s words, “the most serious threat that we have ever faced,”[6] or “the nearness of extinction,”[7] to use only one of Schell’s many apocalyptic
formulations. (An index entry--“despair; see also futility”[8]--conveys the mood better than any quotation from the main text.) In fact, if one substitutes “global warming” for “nuclear weapons” in the text of Fate of the Earth, the
result is so shockingly close to Earth in the Balance that one could almost make out a case for plagiarism on Gore’s part. Perhaps some publisher will have the wit to meld the two books into one: The Fate of the Earth in the
Balance.¶ But such a combination is not necessary. The two books directly intersect in several places. Gore writes, for example, that: ¶ the political will that led to mass protests against escalating the arms race during the early
1980s came from a popular awareness that civilization seemed to be pulled toward the broad lip of a downslope leading to a future catastrophe--nuclear war--that would crush human history forever into a kind of black hole. . . .
This is not unlike the challenge we face today in the global environmental crisis. The potential for true catastrophe lies in the future, but the downslope that pulls us toward it is becoming recognizably steeper with each passing
year.[9]¶ In this, Gore was only returning the favor to Schell, who occasionally paused long enough from his lament over nuclear catastrophe to include a few nods to ecocatastrophe. For his part, Schell mentions “global heating
through an increased ‘greenhouse effect,’” adding:¶ The nuclear peril is usually seen in isolation from the threats to other forms of life and their ecosystems, but in fact should be seen as the very center of the ecological crisis--as
the cloud-covered Everest of which the more immediate, visible kinds of harm to the environment are the mere foothills. Both the effort to preserve the environment and the effort to save the species from extinction by nuclear
arms would be enriched and strengthened by this recognition.[10]¶ Both books display an affectation for gilding their arguments with lots of brief references to major thinkers from a wide variety of disciplines. Consider Schell on
Heisenberg:¶ The famous uncertainty principle, formulated by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, has shown that our knowledge of atomic phenomena is limited because the experimental procedures with which we must
carry out our observations inevitably interfere with the phenomena that we wish to measure. ¶ Schell applies Heisenberg’s scientific insight to all forms of human investigation, writing that “a limit to our knowledge is fixed by the
fact that we are incarnate beings, not disembodied spirits.”[11] The supposed separation from nature implied by Heisenberg’s idea limits our appreciation for both nature and our predicament.¶ Gore follows down the same
track:¶ Earlier this century, the Heisenberg Principle established that the very act of observing a natural phenomenon can change what is being observed. Although the initial theory was limited in practice to special cases in
subatomic physics, the philosophical implications were and are staggering. It is now apparent that since Descartes reestablished the Platonic notion and began the scientific revolution, human civilization has been experiencing a
kind of Heisenberg Principle writ large. . . . [T]he world of intellect is assumed to be separate from the physical world.[12] ¶ Gore opens his hit movie and companion book An Inconvenient Truth with an homage to the famous
photo of the Earth taken from the moon by the Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968. This image, he tells us, played a key role in galvanizing the world’s environmental consciousness, underscoring the fragility of the planet. As he put it
fulsomely in Earth in the Balance:¶ Those first striking pictures taken by the Apollo astronauts of the earth floating in the blackness of space were so deeply moving because they enabled us to see our planet from a new
perspective--a perspective from which the preciousness and fragile beauty of the earth was suddenly clear.[13] ¶ Schell uses the same trope:¶ As it happens, our two roles in the nuclear predicament have been given visual
representation in the photographs of the earth that we have taken with the aid of another technical device of our time, the spaceship. These pictures illustrate, on the one hand, our mastery over nature, which has enabled us to
take up a position in the heavens and look back on the earth as though it were just one more celestial body, and, on the other, our weakness and frailty in the face of that mastery, which we cannot help feeling when we see the
smallness, solitude, and delicate beauty of our planetary home.[14]¶ These are only a few of the many examples that can be drawn of both books’ derivative and allusive nature. Both
authors offer up
references to Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Francis Bacon, Einstein, Descartes, and Hannah Arendt in what might be called, to paraphrase Arendt, the banality of promiscuous allusion,
all to bolster a superficial philosophical or anthropological point that is far distant from the politics and policy of
either issue.¶Most troubling is that bothauthors depict dissent from their point of view to be a pathology of
some kind, foreclosing that there could be any rational basis for a different point of view. Gore
comparesdissenters to his view of our environmental predicament togarden-variety substance abusers, arguing that people who are oblivious to
our “collision” with nature are “enablers” who are “helping to ensure that the addictive behavior
continues. The psychological mechanism of denial is complex, but again addiction serves as a model.”[15] Elsewhere Gore compares our “dysfunctional
civilization” to dysfunctional families, whose members suffer from “a serious psychological disorder.” While Gore begins this discussion by saying that family dysfunctionality is a metaphor, he ends by applying the concept literally:
“The model of the dysfunctional family has a direct bearing on our ways of thinking about the environment.”[16] Schell is close aboard: “A society that systematically shuts its eyes to an urgent peril to its physical survival and fails
to take any steps to save itself cannot be called psychologically well.”[17] ¶Both authors call for making their particular issue the paramount global priority in the same terms. Gore argues that “we must make the environment the
central organizing principle [emphasis added] for civilization. . . . [T]he tide in this battle will turn only when the majority of people in the world become sufficiently aroused by a shared sense of urgent danger to join in an all-out
effort.”[18] Schell wrote, “If we felt the peril for what it is--an urgent threat to our whole human substance--we would let it become the organizing principle [emphasis added] of our global collective existence: the foundation on
which the world was built.”[19]¶Having laid the groundwork for a wholesale change in our priorities, both Schell and Gore are surprisingly light on the social and political architecture of their alternative world. This is explicitly so in
Schell’s case: “I have not sought to define a political solution to the nuclear predicament. . . . I have left to others those awesome, urgent tasks.”[20] Gore’s approach is better supported; he offers a laundry list of specific policy
recommendations mostly on energy and resource use, but it falls far short of his desired “wrenching transformation” of civilization. If the broader solution to our predicament is not clear even in outline, it is because neither author
fully grasps the magnitude of the critique he is making, such that a political solution--at least, a solution that is compatible with liberal democracy--is impossible. Neither man understands why.¶ The Real Source for The Fate of the
there is one thinker conspicuously absent from both Schell and Gore’s
numerous citations but whose spirit is present on almost everypage of both books: Martin Heidegger. Perhaps the absence of a reference to
Earth in the Balance¶ Despite the parade of quotes and references from Plato and Arendt,
Heidegger is due to reticence or discretion, given Heidegger’s dubious and complicated association with Nazism. Nothing derails an argument faster than playing the reductioadHitlerum card. More likely it is the abstruse and
difficult character of Heidegger’s arguments; Gore and Schell may not realize how closely the core of their argument about the technological alienation of man from nature tracks Heidegger’s more thorough account in his famous
1953 essay “The Question Concerning Technology.”[21]¶ Heidegger asks, “What is modern technology?” His understanding of technology is sometimes rendered in translation as “technicity” to convey a defective way of knowing
about phenomena, and to distinguish the term from its more common usage to mean mere scientific instrumentality (think gadgets).
Heidegger believed that our mode of
objectifying nature alienates mankind from perceiving and contemplating pure “Being.”Whatever this
may mean--and even Heidegger’s followers admit it is obscure(Heidegger himself wrote that “we are asking about
something which we barely grasp”[22])--Heidegger suggests that philosophy has been asking the wrong questions since the very beginning, and the culmination of this wrong track is modern
technology, which completes the alienation of man from nature. This is where Heidegger prepares the way for Gore.¶ Modern technology, according to Heidegger,¶ puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy
which can be extracted and stored as such. . . . The earth now reveals itself as a coal-mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order appears different from how it did
when to set in order still meant to take of and maintain. . . . But meanwhile even the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon [italics in original] nature. It sets upon it in
the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example; uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy, which can be
released either for destruction or for peaceful use.[23]¶ Here are Gore’s parallel passages:¶ [O]ur civilization is holding ever more tightly to its habit of consuming larger and larger quantities every year of coal, oil, fresh air and
water, trees, topsoil, and the thousand other substances we rip from the crust of the earth. . . . We seem increasingly eager to lose ourselves in the forms of culture, society, technology, the media, and the rituals of production and
consumption, but the price we pay is a loss of our spiritual lives.[24] ¶ And:¶ Our seemingly compulsive need to control the natural world . . . has driven us to the edge of disaster, for we have become so successful at controlling
nature than we have lost our connection to it.[25]¶ It is possible to compile a long inventory of close parallels between Heidegger and Gore. For example, Heidegger told interviewers in 1966:¶ [T]echnicity increasingly dislodges
man and uproots him from the earth. . . . The last 30 years have made it clearer that the planet-wide movement of modern technicity is a power whose magnitude in determining [our] history can hardly be overestimated.[26] ¶
Heidegger also found the earth-from-space photos as affecting as Gore and Schell:¶ I don’t know if you were shocked, but [certainly] I was shocked when a short time ago I saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon. We
do not need atom bombs at all [to uproot us]--the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an earth than man lives today.[27]¶ Gore likes to cite the supposed
proverb that the Chinese symbol for “crisis” also means “opportunity.” Heidegger was fond of quoting a line from the German poet Hölderlin: “Where danger lies, there too grows the chance for salvation.” And is it necessary to
mention that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle also shows up for duty in Heidegger’s essay on technology? Heidegger is often said to have advocated a return to pre-Socratic philosophy, though in fact he was skeptical that there
was any philosophical solution to the problem he perceived. Gore follows Heidegger closely when he criticizes Plato and the Western philosophic tradition for preparing the ground for modern man’s estrangement from nature:¶
The strange absence of emotion, the banal face of evil so often manifested by mass technological assaults on the global environment, is surely a consequence of the belief in an underlying separation of intellect from the physical
world. At the root of this belief lies a heretical understanding of humankind’s place in the world as old as Plato, as seductive in its mythic appeal as Gnosticism, as compelling as the Cartesian promise of Promethean power--and it
can a reconnection of intellect and the
physical world be accomplished through politics--or led by politicians? Heidegger did not think so,which is why he
said it would be impossible for him to write an ethical or political treatise.[29] He doubted democracy offered any hope. In an interview
has led to tragic results.[28]¶ Political Implications¶ Assuming for the purposes of discussion that Gore’s Heideggerian analysis is correct,
late in life, Heidegger said, “For me today it is a decisive question as to how any political system--and which one--can be adapted to an epoch of technicity. I know of no answer to this question. I am not convinced that it is
Heidegger was contemptuous of postwar democratic reforms--calling them “halfway measures”-including individual constitutional rights, because:¶ I do not see in them any actual confrontation with the world of technicity, inasmuch as behind them all, according to my
democracy.”[30]
view, stands the conception that technicity in its essence is something that man holds within his own hands. ¶ Heidegger thought American democracy was the most hopeless of all, in words that sound in substance exactly like
Gore’s complaint:¶ [Americans] are still caught up in a thought that, under the guise of pragmatism, facilitates the technical operation and manipulation [of things], but at the same time blocks the way to reflection upon the
genuine nature of modern technicity.[31]¶ (Separately, Heidegger wrote that America epitomized “the emerging monstrousness of modern times.”[32]) ¶From here it is possible to comprehend more dispassionately Heidegger’s
attraction to the Nazi movement in the 1930s. He had no brief for fascism in general or National Socialism in particular, nor was he an anti-Semite.[33] What he expressed in his famous “Rector’s Address”[34] in 1934 was that the
“inner truth and greatness” of the Nazi movement was its potential “encounter between technicity on the planetary level and modern man,” and that it “casts its net in these troubled waters of ‘values’ and ‘totalities,’” or, as he
put it a 1948 letter to Herbert Marcuse, “a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety.”[35] In other words, the “wrenching transformation” of Germany that the Nazi revolution set in motion held the potential for reconnecting
humankind with the essence of Being in a primal, pre-Socratic way. Heidegger’s moral blindness to the phenomenon in front of him exposes the hazard of an excessively abstract approach to human existence. As Heidegger’s
example shows, the idea of transforming human consciousness through politics is likely an extremist--and potentially totalitarian--project.¶ Reviewing the fundamentally Heideggerian understanding of our environmental
predicament in Gore’s thought throws new light on the deeper meaning of Gore’s call for a “wrenching transformation” of civilization on the level of thought. Gore would no doubt be sincerely horrified at the suggested parallel
between his themes and Heidegger’s moral blindness toward political extremism, and rightly reject it as the implication of his views. He is, thankfully, too imbued with the innate American democratic tradition to embrace any such
extremism.[36] But it is fair to ask whether he has fully thought through the implications of his ambitious critique. In the case of both Gore and Schell before him, the Heideggerian approach reveals a certain cast of mind: deeply
pessimistic, but utopian at the same time. Our salvation demands submitting to the moral authority of their “vision” to change our “consciousness.” After all, one aspect of Plato that Heidegger approves of is the view that mankind
will suffer unremitting disaster until either rulers become philosophers or philosophers become rulers. (Indeed it was the failure of intellectuals to guide the Nazi movement that led to its ruin, Heidegger thought.) Gore seems to be
making a round trip, looking to end up on either end of this potentiality, envisioning himself either as a ruler who has become a philosopher or as a philosopher who may yet (again) become a ruler. ¶ Is it so farfetched to suggest
that this has some problematic, if unintended, political implications? One of Gore’s sound and important arguments in Earth in the Balance and An Inconvenient Truth is that it is a profound error to suppose that the earth’s
environment is so robust that there is little or nothing that mankind could do to damage it seriously. He is right, as was Heidegger, to point out the immense earthshaking power of modern technology. But there is a symmetrical
observation to be made of Gore’s metaphysical approach to the problem, which is that it is an equally profound error to suppose that the environment of human liberty is so robust that there is no political intervention on behalf of
the environment that could not damage liberty in serious ways, especially if the environment is elevated to the central organizing principle of civilization. Implicit in this goal is downgrading human liberty as the central organizing
principle of civilization. There are no index entries in Earth in the Balance for “liberty,” “freedom,” or “individualism.” Heidegger believed the liberal conceptions of these great terms were meaningless or without foundation. There
is no acknowledgement in Gore’s book that this is even a serious consideration. Gore’s one discussion of the matter is not reassuring:¶ In fact, what many feel is a deep philosophical crisis in the West has occurred in part because
this balance [between rights and responsibilities] has been disrupted: we have tilted so far toward individual rights and so far away from any sense of obligation that it is now difficult to muster an adequate defense of any rights
Do we
really have to resolve or unwind the problem of Platonic idealism and Cartesian dualism to address the problem of
climatechange? The example of the previous case in point--the arms race--suggests an answer. The arms race did not require a
revolution in human consciousness or a transformation of national and global political institutions to
bring about rapid and favorable changes. The kind of grandiose, pretentiousthinking exemplified in Fate of
the Earth playedlittle orno role in these shifts. The problem turned out to be much simpler.The acute problem of
the superpower arms race was mostly a moral problem--not a metaphysical problem--arising from the character of the irreconcilable regimes. As was frequently
vested in the community at large or the nation--much less rights properly vested in all humankind or in posterity.[37]¶ But Is It Necessary?¶ Is Gore’s high-level metaphysical analysis necessary in the first place?
pointed out, the United States never worried about British or French nuclear weapons. Once the United States and the Soviet Union were able to establish a level of trust and common interest, unwinding the arms race became a
relatively easy matter. Nuclear weapons and the threat of nuclear proliferation in unsavory regimes (Iran, North Korea) is still around today, but the acute existential threat of the arms race has receded substantially. ¶ In the early
1980s, The Fate of the Earth became the Bible for the nuclear freeze movement--the simplistic idea brought to you by the same people who thought Ronald Reagan was a simpleton. To his credit, then representative and later
senator Gore opposed the nuclear freeze. Nowadays Gore has started to call for an immediate freeze on greenhouse-gas emissions, which he must know is unrealistic. His explanation in a recent speech shows that he missed
entirely the lesson from that earlier episode:¶ An immediate freeze [on CO2 emissions] has the virtue of being clear, simple, and easy to understand. It can attract support across partisan lines as a logical starting point for the more
difficult work that lies ahead. I remember a quarter century ago when I was the author of a complex nuclear arms control plan to deal with the then rampant arms race between our country and the former Soviet Union. At the
time, I was strongly opposed to the nuclear freeze movement, which I saw as simplistic and naive. But, three-quarters of the American people supported it--and as I look back on those years I see more clearly now that the
outpouring of public support for that very simple and clear mandate changed the political landscape and made it possible for more detailed and sophisticated proposals to eventually be adopted.[38]¶ The irony of this statement is
since the moral and political differences between the United States and the Soviet Union could not be
resolved diplomatically, the way to move relations forward was to convert relations into a technical
problem(i.e., negotiations over the number and specifications of weapons systems). Gore remained firmly
within the technocratic arms-control community throughout this period, even as Schell and others tried to moralize the
arms-control problem with the nuclear freeze proposal. But the moral confusion (some critics said the premise of moral equivalence) of the freeze idea
made it asideshow at best and ahindranceat worst. On the contrary, President Reagan’s resistance to the freeze, as well as the conventions of the arms-control process to which
Gore held, were crucial to his strategy for changing the dynamic of the arms race. Having been an arms-control technocrat in the 1980s, Gore today
that
wants to turn the primarily technical and economic problems of climate changeinto a moral problem.¶
Gore’s argument that climate change is a moral problem and not a political problem is not serious, since
the leading prescriptions
for treating the problem all require massive applications of political power on a global scale. Skeptics and cynics might
dismiss Gore’s metaphysical speculations as mere intellectual preening, as many critics did with Fate of the Earth in the 1980s. But
such an approach to environmental issues may be an obstacle to many practical, incremental steps
that can be taken to solve real climate-policy problems . Once one grasps the Heideggerian character of the Gore
approach to thinking about environmental problems, the hesitance about nuclear power comes into better focus. Gore and others in his mold
dislike large-scale technologies because they are intrinsic to mankind’s mastery of nature that is driving our
supposed alienation from nature. This same premise also explains the frequently hostile reaction of many environmentalists to suggestions that adaptation to climate change should be a part
of any serious climate policy, even though many leading climate scientists and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have embraced adaptation. The suggestion that technologies for climate modification might be
Will climate policy ultimately be
guided by physicians or metaphysicians? Gore’s high-profile position on these issues tilts the balance toward metaphysicians. This is certain to generate ferocious resistance to
change well beyond merely self-interested industries. Gore would be better off following the advice of Heidegger critic Stanley Rosen, and
“step downward, out of the thin atmosphere of the floating island of Laputa or of the balloons in which so many of our
advanced thinkers are currently suspended, back into the rich air of everyday life.”[39] That’s a fancy way of saying, “Take a deep
developed, which would be the climate policy equivalent of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, are greeted contemptuously for the same reason.¶
breath, Al.”
Pragmatism is the only way to get effective technical solutions
Light 5 (Andrew, Environmental Philosophy @ NYU, “What is Pragmatic Philosophy”,
http://faculty.washington.edu/alight/papers/Light.What%20Pragmatic.pdf. P. 349-351)
I have no easy answer to this question of how practical or “do-able” reform proposals made by philosophers should be. As suggested above, it
is a question that has obvious important implications for the application of philosophical principles to environmental policy. My intuition
though is that the
pragmatist ought to have a long-term end in view while at the same time she must have
at the ready viable alternatives which assume current political or economic systems and structures
whenever possible. This is not to say that the pragmatic philosopher gives up on the tasks of defending
alternatives to current structures, and the pursuit of those alternatives in democratic debates on the reallocation of resources. It
only means that our position may require, for consistency sake to our pragmatic intentions at least, that we not rely
exclusively on such changes in articulating our preferred ends for better public policies. In this context, there
are at least two senses in which one could understand the meaning of “pragmatic” philosophy as discussed so far. (1) Philosophy that has
practical intent, anchored to practical problems, and (2) Philosophy which aids in the development of policy solutions that can actually achieve
support and consensus. While Young’s approach certainly encompasses (1) the question is whether she also does (2). My own pragmatist
approach assumes that there is a connection between (1) and (2) (indeed, that (1) implies (2)). Assuming a successful argument that (1) and (2)
are related in this way (for some this may take some argument, for others it will be obvious) then a question remains concerning how to go
about achieving (2). Let me make just one suggestion for how the pragmatist could go about reconciling her desire to change systems with the
need to make achievable policy recommendations. As is suggested by my approach, my view is that if a
pragmatic philosophy in the
end is in the service of an argument to create better polices, then in our democratic society it must be prepared
to argue its case before the public, andperhaps sometimes only before policy makers. As Said puts it, the public
intellectual not only wants to express her beliefs but also wants to persuade others—meaning the public at
large—of her views (1994, p. 12). This raises the critical issue of how such appeals to the public are to be made. It raises the issue of how
important persuasion is to the creation of pragmatic arguments. All philosophy is in some sense about persuasion, though to differentiate
ourselves from rhetoricians (if we are interested in making such distinctions, which I still am) we must restrict ourselves to persuasion through
some form of argument given more or less agreed upon (and revisable) standards for what counts as a good argument. But the
pragmatic
philosopher isnot simply concerned with per- suading other philosophers. She is also interested inpersuading the public either
directly (in hopes that they will in turn influence policy makers) or indirectly, by appealling to policy makerswho in turn help to shape
public opinion. The work of a public philosophy is not solely for intramural philosophical discussion; it is aimed at larger forums. But as I
suggested before, such
a task requiressome attention to the question of what motivates either the public,
policy makers, or both to act. Our bar is set higher than traditional philosophical standards of validity and abstractly conceived soundness.
For if we are to direct our philosophy at policies in a context other than a hypothetical philosophical framework, we must also make arguments
which will motivate our audiences to act. Since we are dealing in ethi- cal and political matters, the question for pragmatic philosophers like
Young and myself is how much we must attend to the issue of moral motivation in forming our pragmatic arguments. If we agree that the issue
of moral motivation is always crucial for a pragmatic philosophy then at least two issues arise. First, as I suggested before, we
mustbe
a theoreticalor conceptual pluralism which allows us to pick and choose from a range of
conceptual frameworksin making our arguments without committing to the theoretical monism which
may be assumed in some versions of these frameworks. The reason is that we need to be able to make arguments that will
appeal to the conceptual frameworks of our audiences while recognizing that these frameworks can change from audience to
audience. So, if we think a utilitarian argument will be useful for talking to economists in decision making
positions, then we should be allowed to engage such a framework without completely committing
ourselves to utilitarianism.
prepared to embrace
No practical solution means the alternative will be coopted by the right – powerful
rhetoric coupled with a pragmatic solution is the only way to solve
Hailwood 4 (Simon, Philosophy @ Liverpool ‘How to be a Green Liberal p. 155-156)
For me, the main worryemerging from such considerations is
not that liberal societies are incapable of embracing
meaningful change towards "eco-sanity", such that anarchism is the only hope. That hope seems more unrealistic - more utopian
in that sense - than that of liberal reform. The main worry is that those from the authoritarian end of the spectrum
will convince people that the liberal mainstream is inherently incapable of reform, andso must be
replaced by more coercive forms of green politics, and people from the radical left will help with the
critique, provide no realistic, non-utopian alternativethemselves, thus leaving the door open for the
"Leviathan or oblivion" school: nakedly authoritarian, radically hierarchical programmes regarding substantive
political equality as an obstacle to progress. 10) Sometimes the point about the practical need to oppose the state is made with impatience
about philosophy and abstract theorizing. This does not apply to Carter. But it does to Sale, for example, who denounces abstract philosophical
discussion of ethical responses to the "environmental crisis", mainly because dithering over abstruse conceptual matters is to ignore the simple
practical issue of scale. '°4 It
would be better if those with such powerful rhetorical skills used them to further
the green cause as continuous with furthering the liberal cause againstmore reactionary elements. Perhaps
this is particularly true in the USA, clearly the main player in the scientific-industrial-capitalist global order
and, in terms of environmental policy agenda, in various ways a beacon of unreconstructed unreason. That wouldprobably
be of greater practical benefit than giving fellow citizens of the modern world a collection of quasireligiose blueprinting ideas coloured with the dismal tinge of an anxious instrumentalism. That is, it seems more practically
feasible to seek to work with the flow of modernity in order to help channel it on to a course more
respectful of nature. That it is, in principle, possible to do this within the terms of what is often taken to be the main political philosophy
of modernity, has been the point of this book.
A2 Cap = Root Cause
Incentives for environmental reform of capitalism solve climate change – crisis or
revolution fails.
NEWELL AND PATTERSON ’10
Peter IR @ Sussex Matthew Political Studies @ Ottawa Climate Capitalism p. 8-10
But if one premise for this book is that climate change entails an enormous transformation of how capitalism operates, then our other premise
is that despite resistance, in fact an embryonic form of climate capitalism is already emerging. The chapters that follow
elaborate how the ways that governments, corporations and non-governmental actors have responded to climate change are best understood
as an effort to decarbonise the global economy. Of course this development is patchy - some governments are more active than others, some
businesses much more entrepreneurial and far-sig~ted than others - but the foundations of such an economy are nevertheless in the process of
being built. These foundations can be characterised as different types of carbon markets, which put a price on carbon, and thus create
incentives to reduce emissions. These
sorts of response to climate change arealso highly problematic of course. Many
readerswill already have prejudices against, or at least worries about, treating the atmosphere like a commodity to
be bought and sold, or about buying carbon offsets to enable the rich to continue their high-consuming lifestyles with a clear conscience. We
share these worries. But there is something about climate change that makes it unique amongst
environmental problems. The origins of climate change are deeply rooted in the development of the
global capitalist economy. The ways the world has responded to climate change have been conditioned by the sort of free-market
capitalism which has prevailed since the early 1980s. To respond to climate change successfully entails decarbonising
that economy, to re-structure or dismantle huge economic sectors on which the whole of global development has been based. This is
in sharp contrast to efforts to deal with ozone depletion, which involved the elimination of a relatively small batch of
chemicals with specific uses by a handful of leading companies. Likewise, we can deal with most forms of water pollution
by banning certain applications offertilisers, dealing with human and animal wastes, and controls on
what chemical industries can discharge into rivers and lakes. To ban these practices, while often inconvenient for the
companies involved, is hardly a challenge to the whole edifice of global capitalism. In contrast, to propose to
ban all further coal and oil use, as some have done, is both unrealistic and deeply problematic. The use of
these fuels is currently so widespread that simply
to ban them would cause economic growth to collapse . And a lack of
growth is something that the capitalist system in which we live simply cannot tolerate - it would collapse as a system. So the
challenge of
climate change means, in effect, either abandoning capitalism, or seeking to find a way for it to grow while gradually
replacing coal, oil and gas. Assuming the former is unlikely in the short term, the questions to be asked are, what can growth be based
on? What are the energy sources to power a decarbonised economy? Which powerful actors might be brought on board to
overcome resistance from the oil and coal companies? And for those worried (including us) about the image of unbridled
free-market capitalism as managing the climate for us, then we are forced to address the questions: What type of climate capitalism do we
want? Can it be made to serve desirable social, as well as environmental, ends? And what might it take to bring it about? 9In this context, a
response that focuses on creating markets, where money can be made for trading carbon allowances within limits set by
governments,is rather appealing. Against the backdrop of the problems of recalcitrant industries and reluctant
consumers, it creates the possibility of economic winners from decarbonisation. What's more, those
winners - financiers - are rather powerful, and can support you as you build the policies which might produce
decarbonisation overall. Trading on its own clearly won't be enough, but it does provide a powerful constituency that benefits from
climate-change policy, which is crucial politically. Turning this into a successful project for decarbonisation requires constructing altogether
different models of growth that do not depend on abundant and cheap fossil fuels, one that may actually reward reductions in energy use and
its more efficient use. This means decoupling emissions growth from economic growth. The key question is whether capitalists can find ways of
doing new business in a way that helps to achieve decarbonisation. They need to be able to do this in a way which brings on board those that
will be doing less business in a low-carbon economy, or at least to provide enough growth overall for policymakers to be able to override their
resistance.
A2 Epistemology First
Abstract intellectualism is useless—environmental activism should orient itself
towards real-life problems and being able to convey them to everyday people
Avner De-Shalit, 2k. Professor of Political Theory at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Associate
Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Environment, Ethics, and Society, Mansfield College, Oxford University.
“The Environment: Between Theory and Practice,” p. 20, Questia.
animal rights philosophers have been missing the chance to find a way to many people's hearts
this
is crucial because it is the wrong way of practising political philosophy
Weber presented an important distinction between two approaches to moral reasoning. One is the
'ethics of conviction', which often follows deontology
the other is the ethics of responsibility,
according to which it would be irresponsible to act according to one's principles alone: rather, one
should also consider what others will do as a result of one's actions
Political
philosophy should orient itself towards real-life problems, including the problem of public good and
collective action, where people tend to react in certain undesirable ways to what others do
Political reasoning would then have two
stages: first, a discussion of principles, but second, a consideration of their actual application and their
effect on others'behaviour However, many environmental philosophers
ignore the way
others may react
people who might have been persuaded of the importance of treating animals
fairly
will regard the notion of animal rights as so obscure or absurd that they
dismiss as mad philosophers who suggest this idea, and scorn all such claims as nonsense
So
. But why is
so crucial? I think it
. To see why, let us recall a classical book by Max Weber (1968). In Politics
alsBeruf,
, or a set of rules of conduct;
. It seems to me that political philosophy has this approach in mind.
. In such cases there must be a way
of taking into account the effect that my actions have (we include here both what I claim to be doing and the reasons I give for doing it) on others' behaviour and actions.
.
, while ascribing rights to animals,
. I believe that many
(using the argument of what cruelty can do to the human soul)
.
A2 Fiat Illusory
Holding the USFG responsible for warming is an ethical act to be held accountable for
its past actions
Claussen 6 (Eileen, October 5, “Climate Change: The State of The Question and The Search For The Answer”, President of the PEW center
for climate change, http://www.pewclimate.org/press_ room/speech_transcripts/stjohns2of2.cfm)
But Africa produces just 2 to 3 percent of worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases. The
United States, by contrast, with just 5 percent
responsible for more than 20 percent of worldwide emissions. And there is also the
issue of cumulative emissions. The fact is that climate change is a problem that has been decades in the making as carbon dioxide and
other gases have accumulated in the atmosphere over time. These gases have a long life and can remain in the
atmospherefor decades or even centuries. And, in the span of the last century or so, it was the United States and other already
developed countries that were producing the lion’s share of these emissions. Looking only at carbon dioxide, the United
States was responsible for more than 30 percent of global emissions between 1850 and 2000. The comparable
figure for China: just 7 or 8 percent. Even considering the high rates of projected growth in China’s and India’s emissions, the
of the global population, is
cumulative contributions of developed and developing countries to climate change will not reach parity until sometime between 2030 and
2065. Clearly all of the major emitting countries need to be a part of the solution to climate change. But saying that all of today’s big emitters
should be equally responsible for reducing their emissions is like going to a restaurant and having a nice dinner and then running into a friend
who joins you for coffee. And, when the check comes, you make your friend who only had the coffee split the cost of the entire dinner. Yes,
developing countries need to do their part, but there is no denying that the developed world, including the
United States, has a
moral and ethical responsibility to act first. We also have a responsibility to help developing nations adapt to a warming world.
No matter what we do, some amount of global warming already is built into the climate system. There will be impacts; there already are
impacts. And it is people living in poverty in the developing world who will face the most serious consequences. So it really comes down, again,
to a question of responsibility. What
is our responsibility? And it is not just our responsibility to our fellow man (or
woman). There is also our responsibility to the natural world, to the earth. Beyond human societies, the natural world
also will suffer from the effects of climate change. In fact, we are already seeing changes in the natural world due to climate change. Coral reefs
are at risk because of warmer and more acidic ocean waters. Polar bears are threatened by declines in sea ice. Species already are disappearing
because of new diseases connected to climate change. In short, climate change holds the potential of inflicting severe damage on the
ecosystems that support all life on earth. So why, then, have we failed
absence of political will?
to take responsibility? Why has there been such an
Even if fiat illusory, our explicit rejection of NIMBYism leads to individual level change
Martin-Schramm ‘5
(Jim, “Skull Valley: Nuclear Waste, Tribal Sovereignty, and Environmental Racism,” Journal of Lutheran
Ethics (JLE) Volume 5, Issue 10 http://www.elca.org/What-We-Believe/Social-Issues/Journal-ofLutheran-Ethics/Issues/October-2005/Skull-Valley-Nuclear-Waste-Tribal-Sovereignty-andEnvironmental-Racism.aspx)
[24] From this overview, it
is clear that the storage and ultimate disposal of high-level nuclear waste is a major
public policy issue on the verge of becoming a national crisis. From California to New York, people all around the
nation are saying, "Not in my backyard!" This NIMBY syndrome is behind the decision of Congress to
focus solely on Yucca Mountain as a permanent repository. The NIMBY syndrome also fuels political and legal battles
around the nation aimed at rejecting pleas by utilities to increase the amount of spent nuclear fuel that can be stored on a temporary basis in
casks above ground. All
citizens of the United States must shoulder some of the blame for failing to muster
the political will to deal with this problem in an effective way. In many respects, U.S. citizens driven by the
NIMBY syndrome have helped to drop this issue in the laps of the Goshutes. After all, no other community
in the nation has stepped forward to store high-level nuclear waste on either an interim or a permanent
basis. Over 50 million people in the nation enjoy the benefits of nuclear power but refuse to accept the
burdens associated with its waste. [25] Some environmentalists see this waste bottleneck as the most
effective way to bring to an end the nuclear energy industry in the United States. When utilities run out of places to store
spent nuclear fuel on an interim basis, federal law requires them to shut down the reactors. Over time, this means that people of the United
States will have to find other ways to either produce or conserve twenty percent of the nation's current energy supply. Investments
in
renewable energy production, energy-efficient technologies, and changes in patterns of consumption
could go a long way to meet this challenge, but none of these measures resolve the issue of what to do
with the nuclear waste. [26] Even if nuclear waste is not produced in the future, the United States is still
faced with the challenge of storing temporarily or disposing permanently the high-level nuclear waste
that has been produced to date. This raises the question of whether it would be better to store existing stockpiles at over seventy
locations around the country, or to consolidate these stockpiles in one place. PFS contends that it would be more cost-effective and easier to
provide a high level of security if spent nuclear fuel was all stored in one place. The
state of Utah, however, argues that if it is
safe to store spent nuclear fuel where it is now, then it should remain where it is-presumably in
perpetuity. [27] There lies the rub. The radioactivity of some elements in spent nuclear fuel has a half-life
of at least 10,000 years. Is it morally responsible to store thousands of steel and concrete casks
containing this waste above ground at dozens of locations around the nation for thousands of years? Is it
safer to entomb such highly radioactive waste in a geological repository deep under ground? Like it or not, and absent any new alternative
strategies, disposal underground still appears to be the best option.6 But Yucca Mountain is not open, and it is not clear it will open any time
soon. If the NRC awards a license for the PFS/Goshute interim storage facility, this could give the nation forty more years to figure out how to
dispose of the waste permanently. At the same time, once the waste has been transferred to an Indian reservation, it is possible that the nation
would forget that a long-term disposal problem still exists. [28] So, who should bear the burden (and reap the benefits) from storing the
nation's high-level nuclear waste, either on an interim or a permanent basis? On the face, it
seems clear that those who benefit
the most from nuclear energy should also shoulder most of the waste burden. But how realistic is it to
expect that millions of people in 31 states will abandon the NIMBY syndrome in order to muster the
courage and political will to address this problem in a responsible manner? Isn't it more likely that they
will still try to externalize the costs by dumping the problem on others?
A2 Individual Alts
Public advocacy of climate solutions key to change governmental policy---individual
change insufficient
CAG 10—Climate Change Communication Advisory Group. Dr Adam Corner School of Psychology, Cardiff University - Dr Tom Crompton
Change Strategist, WWF-UK - Scott Davidson Programme Manager, Global Action Plan - Richard Hawkins Senior Researcher, Public Interest
Research Centre - Professor Tim Kasser, Psychology department, Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois, USA. - Dr Renee Lertzman, Center for
Sustainable Processes & Practices, Portland State University, US. - Peter Lipman, Policy Director, Sustrans. - Dr Irene Lorenzoni, Centre for
Environmental Risk, University of East Anglia. - George Marshall, Founding Director, Climate Outreach , Information Network - Dr Ciaran
Mundy, Director, Transition Bristol - Dr Saffron O’Neil, Department of Resource Management and Geography, University of Melbourne,
Australia. - Professor Nick Pidgeon, Director, Understanding Risk Research Group, School of Psychology, Cardiff University. - Dr Anna
Rabinovich, School of Psychology, University of Exeter - Rosemary Randall, Founder and director of Cambridge Carbon Footprint - Dr Lorraine
Whitmarsh, School of Psychology, Cardiff University & Visiting Fellow at the, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. (Communicating
climate change to mass public audience, http://pirc.info/downloads/communicating_climate_mass_audiences.pdf)
This short advisory paper collates a set of recommendations about how best to shape mass public
communications aimed at increasing concern about climate change and motivating commensurate
behavioural changes.¶ Its focus is not upon motivating small private-sphere behavioural changes on a
piece-meal basis. Rather, it marshals evidence about how best to motivate the ambitious and systemic
behavioural change that is necessary – including, crucially, greater public engagement with the policy
process (through, for example, lobbying decision-makers and elected representatives, or participating in
demonstrations), as well as major lifestyle changes. ¶Political leaders themselves have drawn attention
to the imperative for more vocal public pressure to create the ‘political space’ for them to enact more
ambitious policy interventions. 1 While this paper does not dismiss the value of individuals making
small private-sphere behavioural changes (for example, adopting simple domestic energy efficiency
measures) it is clear that such behaviours do not, in themselves, represent a proportional response
tothe challenge of climate change. As David MacKay, Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Department of
Energy and Climate change writes: “Don’t be distracted by the myth that ‘every little helps’. If everyone
does a little, we’ll achieve only a little” (MacKay, 2008).¶The task of campaigners and communicators
from government, business and non-governmental organisations must therefore be to motivate both (i)
widespread adoption of ambitious private-sphere behavioural changes; and (ii) widespread acceptance
of – and indeed active demand for – ambitious new policy interventions. ¶Current public
communication campaigns, as orchestrated by government, business and non-governmental
organisations, are not achieving these changes. This paper asks: how should such communications be
designed if they are to have optimal impact in motivating these changes? The response to this question
will require fundamental changes in the ways that many climate change communication campaigns are
currently devised and implemented. ¶This advisory paper offers a list of principles that could be used to
enhance the quality of communication around climate change communications. The authors are each
engaged in continuously sifting the evidence from a range of sub-disciplines within psychology, and
reflecting on the implications of this for improving climate change communications. Some of the
organisations that we represent have themselves at times adopted approaches which we have both
learnt from and critique in this paper – so some of us have first hand experience of the need for ongoing improvement in the strategies that we deploy. ¶The changes we advocate will be challenging to
enact – and will require vision and leadership on the part of the organisations adopting them. But
without such vision and leadership, we do not believe that public communication campaigns on climate
change will create the necessary behavioural changes – indeed, there is a profound risk that many of
today’s campaigns will actually prove counter-productive. ¶ Seven Principles¶ 1. Move Beyond Social
Marketing¶ We believe that too little attention is paid to the understanding that psychologists bring to
strategies for motivating change, whilst undue faith is often placed in the application of marketing
strategies to ‘sell’ behavioural changes. Unfortunately, in the context of ambitious pro-environmental
behaviour, such strategies seem unlikely to motivate systemic behavioural change.¶ Social marketing is
an effective way of achieving a particular behavioural goal – dozens of practical examples in the field of
health behaviour attest to this. Social marketing is really more of a framework for designing behaviour
change programmes than a behaviour change programme - it offers a method of maximising the success
of a specific behavioural goal. Darnton (2008) has described social marketing as ‘explicitly
transtheoretical’, while Hastings (2007), in a recent overview of social marketing, claimed that there is
no theory of social marketing. Rather, it is a ‘what works’ philosophy, based on previous experience of
similar campaigns and programmes. Social marketing is flexible enough to be applied to a range of
different social domains, and this is undoubtedly a fundamental part of its appeal.¶ However, social
marketing’s 'what works' status also means that it is agnostic about the longer term, theoretical merits
of different behaviour change strategies, or the cultural values that specific campaigns serve to
strengthen. Social marketing dictates that the most effective strategy should be chosen, where effective
means ‘most likely to achieve an immediate behavioural goal’. ¶This means that elements of a behaviour
change strategy designed according to the principles of social marketing may conflict with other,
broader goals. What if the most effective way of promoting pro-environmental behaviour ‘A’ was to
pursue a strategy that was detrimental to the achievement of long term pro-environmental strategy ‘Z’?
The principles of social marketing have no capacity to resolve this conflict – they are limited to
maximising the success of the immediate behavioural programme. This is not a flaw of social marketing
– it was designed to provide tools to address specific behavioural problems on a piecemeal basis. But it
is an important limitation, and one that has significant implications if social marketing techniques are
used to promote systemic behavioural change and public engagement on an issue like climate change.
¶2. Be honest and forthright about the probable impacts of climate change, and the scale of the
challenge we confront in avoiding these. But avoid deliberate attempts to provoke fear or guilt. ¶There is
no merit in ‘dumbing down’ the scientific evidence that the impacts of climate change are likely to be
severe, and that some of these impacts are now almost certainly unavoidable. Accepting the impacts of
climate change will be an important stage in motivating behavioural responses aimed at mitigating the
problem. However, deliberate attempts to instil fear or guilt carry considerable risk. ¶ Studies on fear
appeals confirm the potential for fear to change attitudes or verbal expressions of concern, but often
not actions or behaviour (Ruiter et al., 2001). The impact of fear appeals is context - and audience specific; for example, for those who do not yet realise the potentially ‘scary’ aspects of climate change,
people need to first experience themselves as vulnerable to the risks in some way in order to feel moved
or affected (Das et al, 2003; Hoog et al, 2005). As people move towards contemplating action, fear
appeals can help form a behavioural intent, providing an impetus or spark to ‘move’ from; however such
appeals must be coupled with constructive information and support to reduce the sense of danger
(Moser, 2007). The danger is that fear can also be disempowering – producing feelings of helplessness,
remoteness and lack of control (O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole, 2009). Fear is likely to trigger ‘barriers to
engagement’, such as denial2 (Stoll-Kleemann et al., 2001; Weber, 2006; Moser and Dilling, 2007;
Lorenzoni, Nicholson-Cole & Whitmarsh, 2007). The location of fear in a message is also relevant; it
works better when placed first for those who are inclined to follow the advice, but better second for
those who aren't (Bier, 2001).¶ Similarly, studies have shown that guilt can play a role in motivating
people to take action but can also function to stimulate defensive mechanisms against the perceived
threat or challenge to one’s sense of identity (as a good, moral person). In the latter case, behaviours
may be left untouched (whether driving a SUV or taking a flight) as one defends against any feelings of
guilt or complicity through deployment of a range of justifications for the behaviour (Ferguson &
Branscombe, 2010). ¶ Overall, there is a need for emotionally balanced representations of the issues at
hand. This will involve acknowledging the ‘affective reality’ of the situation, e.g. “We know this is scary
and overwhelming, but many of us feel this way and we are doing something about it”.¶3. Be honest and
forthright about the impacts of mitigating and adapting to climate change for current lifestyles, and the
‘loss’ - as well as the benefits - that these will entail. Narratives that focus exclusively on the ‘up-side’ of
climate solutions are likely to be unconvincing. While narratives about the future impacts of climate
change may highlight the loss of much that we currently hold to be dear, narratives about climate
solutions frequently ignore the question of loss. If the two are not addressed concurrently, fear of loss
may be ‘split off’ and projected into the future, where it is all too easily denied. This can be dangerous,
because accepting loss is an important step towards working through the associated emotions, and
emerging with the energy and creativity to respond positively to the new situation (Randall, 2009).
However, there are plenty of benefits (besides the financial ones) of a low-carbon lifestyle e.g., health,
community/social interaction - including the ‘intrinsic' goals mentioned below. It is important to be
honest about both the losses and the benefits that may be associated with lifestyle change, and not to
seek to separate out one from the other.¶ 3a. Avoid emphasis upon painless, easy steps. ¶Be honest
about the limitations of voluntary private-sphere behavioural change, and the need for ambitious new
policy interventions that incentivise such changes, or that regulate for them. People know that the
scope they have, as individuals, to help meet the challenge of climate change is extremely limited. For
many people, it is perfectly sensible to continue to adopt high-carbon lifestyle choices whilst
simultaneously being supportive of government interventions that would make these choices more
difficult for everyone. ¶The adoption of small-scale private sphere behavioural changes is sometimes
assumed to lead people to adopt ever more difficult (and potentially significant) behavioural changes.
The empirical evidence for this ‘foot-in-thedoor’ effect is highly equivocal. Some studies detect such an
effect; others studies have found the reverse effect (whereby people tend to ‘rest on their laurels’
having adopted a few simple behavioural changes - Thogersen and Crompton, 2009). Where attention is
drawn to simple and painless privatesphere behavioural changes, these should be urged in pursuit of a
set of intrinsic goals (that is, as a response to people’s understanding about the contribution that such
behavioural change may make to benefiting their friends and family, their community, the wider world,
or in contributing to their growth and development as individuals) rather than as a means to achieve
social status or greater financial success. Adopting behaviour in pursuit of intrinsic goals is more likely to
lead to ‘spillover’ into other sustainable behaviours (De Young, 2000; Thogersen and Crompton, 2009).¶
People aren’t stupid: they know that if there are wholesale changes in the global climate underway,
these will not be reversed merely through checking their tyre pressures or switching their TV off
standby. An emphasis upon simple and painless steps suppresses debate about those necessary
responses that are less palatable – that will cost people money, or that will infringe on cherished
freedoms (such as to fly). Recognising this will be a key step in accepting the reality of loss of aspects of
our current lifestyles, and in beginning to work through the powerful emotions that this will engender
(Randall, 2009). ¶ 3b. Avoid over-emphasis on the economic opportunities that mitigating, and adapting
to, climate change may provide. ¶There will, undoubtedly, be economic benefits to be accrued through
investment in new technologies, but there will also be instances where the economic imperative and the
climate change adaptation or mitigation imperative diverge, and periods of economic uncertainty for
many people as some sectors contract. It seems inevitable that some interventions will have negative
economic impacts (Stern, 2007).¶ Undue emphasis upon economic imperatives serves to reinforce the
dominance, in society, of a set of extrinsic goals (focussed, for example, on financial benefit). A large
body of empirical research demonstrates that these extrinsic goals are antagonistic to the emergence of
pro-social and proenvironmental concern (Crompton and Kasser, 2009).¶ 3c. Avoid emphasis upon the
opportunities of ‘green consumerism’ as a response to climate change.¶ As mentioned above (3b), a
large body of research points to the antagonism between goals directed towards the acquisition of
material objects and the emergence of pro-environmental and pro-social concern (Crompton and
Kasser, 2009). Campaigns to ‘buy green’ may be effective in driving up sales of particular products, but
in conveying the impression that climate change can be addressed by ‘buying the right things’, they risk
undermining more difficult and systemic changes. A recent study found that people in an experiment
who purchased ‘green’ products acted less altruistically on subsequent tasks (Mazar & Zhong, 2010) –
suggesting that small ethical acts may act as a ‘moral offset’ and licence undesirable behaviours in other
domains. This does not mean that private-sphere behaviour changes will always lead to a reduction in
subsequent pro-environmental behaviour, but it does suggest that the reasons used to motivate these
changes are critically important. Better is to emphasise that ‘every little helps a little’ – but that these
changes are only the beginning of a process that must also incorporate more ambitious private-sphere
change and significant collective action at a political level.¶ 4. Empathise with the emotional responses
that will be engendered by a forthright presentation of the probable impacts of climate change. ¶ Belief
in climate change and support for low-carbon policies will remain fragile unless people are emotionally
engaged. We should expect people to be sad or angry, to feel guilt or shame, to yearn for that which is
lost or to search for more comforting answers (Randall, 2009). Providing support and empathy in
working through the painful emotions of 'grief' for a society that must undergo changes is a prerequisite
for subsequent adaptation to new circumstances.¶ Without such support and empathy, it is more likely
that people will begin to deploy a range of maladaptive ‘coping strategies’, such as denial of personal
responsibility, blaming others, or becoming apathetic (Lertzman, 2008). An audience should not be
admonished for deploying such strategies – this would in itself be threatening, and could therefore
harden resistance to positive behaviour change (Miller and Rolnick, 2002). The key is not to dismiss
people who exhibit maladaptive coping strategies, but to understand how they can be made more
adaptive. People who feel socially supported will be more likely to adopt adaptive emotional responses so facilitating social support for proenvironmental behaviour is crucial.¶ 5. Promote pro-environmental
social norms and harness the power of social networks¶One way of bridging the gap between privatesphere behaviour changes and collective action is the promotion of pro-environmental social norms.
Pictures and videos of ordinary people (‘like me’) engaging in significant proenvironmental actions are a
simple and effective way of generating a sense of social normality around pro-environmental behaviour
(Schultz, Nolan, Cialdini, Goldstein and Griskevicius, 2007). There are different reasons that people
adopt social norms, and encouraging people to adopt a positive norm simply to ‘conform’, to avoid a
feeling of guilt, or for fear of not ‘fitting in’ is likely to produce a relatively shallow level of motivation for
behaviour change. Where social norms can be combined with ‘intrinsic’ motivations (e.g. a sense of
social belonging), they are likely to be more effective and persistent.¶ Too often, environmental
communications are directed to the individual as a single unit in the larger social system of consumption
and political engagement. This can make the problems feel too overwhelming, and evoke unmanageable
levels of anxiety. Through the enhanced awareness of what other people are doing, a strong sense of
collective purpose can be engendered. One factor that is likely to influence whether adaptive or
maladaptive coping strategies are selected in response to fear about climate change is whether people
feel supported by a social network – that is, whether a sense of ‘sustainable citizenship’ is fostered. The
efficacy of groupbased programmes at promoting pro-environmental behaviour change has been
demonstrated on numerous occasions – and participants in these projects consistently point to a sense
of mutual learning and support as a key reason for making and maintaining changes in behaviour (Nye
and Burgess, 2008). There are few influences more powerful than an individual’s social network.
Networks are instrumental not just in terms of providing social support, but also by creating specific
content of social identity – defining what it means to be “us”. If environmental norms are incorporated
at this level (become defining for the group) they can result in significant behavioural change (also
reinforced through peer pressure).¶ Of course, for the majority of people, this is unlikely to be a network
that has climate change at its core. But social networks – Trade Unions, Rugby Clubs, Mother & Toddler
groups – still perform a critical role in spreading change through society. Encouraging and supporting
pre-existing social networks to take ownership of climate change (rather than approach it as a problem
for ‘green groups’) is a critical task. As well as representing a crucial bridge between individuals and
broader society, peer-to-peer learning circumnavigates many of the problems associated with more ‘top
down’ models of communication – not least that government representatives are perceived as
untrustworthy (Poortinga & Pidgeon, 2003). Peer-to-peer learning is more easily achieved in groupbased dialogue than in designing public information films: But public information films can nonetheless
help to establish social norms around community-based responses to the challenges of climate change,
through clear visual portrayals of people engaging collectively in the pro-environmental behaviour.¶ The
discourse should be shifted increasingly from ‘you’ to ‘we’ and from ‘I’ to ‘us’. This is starting to take
place in emerging forms of community-based activism, such as the Transition Movement and Cambridge
Carbon Footprint’s ‘Carbon Conversations’ model – both of which recognize the power of groups to help
support and maintain lifestyle and identity changes. A nationwide climate change engagement project
using a group-based behaviour change model with members of Trade Union networks is currently
underway, led by the Climate Outreach and Information Network. These projects represent a method of
climate change communication and engagement radically different to that typically pursued by the
government – and may offer a set of approaches that can go beyond the limited reach of social
marketing techniques.¶One potential risk with appeals based on social norms is that they often contain a
hidden message. So, for example, a campaign that focuses on the fact that too many people take
internal flights actually contains two messages – that taking internal flights is bad for the environment,
and that lots of people are taking internal flights. This second message can give those who do not
currently engage in that behaviour a perverse incentive to do so, and campaigns to promote behaviour
change should be very careful to avoid this. The key is to ensure that information about what is
happening (termed descriptive norms), does not overshadow information about what should be
happening (termed injunctive norms). ¶ 6. Think about the language you use, but don’t rely on language
alone¶ A number of recent publications have highlighted the results of focus group research and talkback tests in order to ‘get the language right’ (Topos Partnership, 2009; Western Strategies & Lake
Research Partners, 2009), culminating in a series of suggestions for framing climate-change
communications. For example, these two studies led to the suggestions that communicators should use
the term ‘global warming’ or ‘our deteriorating atmosphere’, respectively, rather than ‘climate change’.
Other research has identified systematic differences in the way that people interpret the terms ‘climate
change’ and ‘global warming’, with ‘global warming’ perceived as more emotionally engaging than
‘climate change’ (Whitmarsh, 2009).¶ Whilst ‘getting the language right’ is important, it can only play a
small part in a communication strategy. More important than the language deployed (i.e. ‘conceptual
frames') are what have been referred to by some cognitive linguists as 'deep frames'. Conceptual
framing refers to catchy slogans and clever spin (which may or may not be honest). At a deeper level,
framing refers to forging the connections between a debate or public policy and a set of deeper values
or principles. Conceptual framing (crafting particular messages focussing on particular issues) cannot
work unless these messages resonate with a set of long-term deep frames.¶ Policy proposals which may
at the surface level seem similar (perhaps they both set out to achieve a reduction in environmental
pollution) may differ importantly in terms of their deep framing. For example, putting a financial value
on an endangered species, and building an economic case for their conservation ‘commodifies’ them,
and makes them equivalent (at the level of deep frames) to other assets of the same value (a hotel
chain, perhaps). This is a very different frame to one that attempts to achieve the same conservation
goals through the ascription of intrinsic value to such species – as something that should be protected in
its own right. Embedding particular deep frames requires concerted effort (Lakoff, 2009), but is the
beginning of a process that can build a broad, coherent cross-departmental response to climate change
from government.¶ 7. Encourage public demonstrations of frustration at the limited pace of government
action¶Private-sphere behavioural change is not enough, and may even at times become a diversion
from themore important process of bringing political pressure to bear on policy-makers. The
importance of public demonstrations of frustration at both the lack of political progress on climate
change and the barriers presented by vested interests is widely recognised – including by government
itself. Climate change communications, including government communication campaigns, should work
to normalise public displays of frustration with the slow pace of political change. Ockwell et al (2009)
argued that communications can play a role in fostering demand for - as well as acceptance of - policy
change. Climate change communication could (and should) be used to encourage people to
demonstrate (for example through public demonstrations) about how they would like structural barriers
to behavioural/societal change to be removed.
A2 Threats Exaggerated
Crisis rhetoric is not exaggerated – current data are without precedent
Princen 10 (Thomas, School of Natural Resources and Environment @ Michigan Treading Softly p. 6-7)
To my mind, these changes
are quite unlike those of the past. And what they portend for the future is quite unimaginable.
My thirty-plus years of observation and study, of teaching and tinkering have led me to conclude, only in the
last few years, that fundamental shifts are now occurring, and more are on the way. It is not just that things
are changing; indeed, they always have. It is that they are changing in ways previously unimaginable
to scientists, business leaders, policy makers, and citizens alike. In the scientific community, terms like
surprise (which now has a technical definition), threshold (as in, "cross that threshold and your environment is completely different"),
irreversibility (there is no going back, no recovery), nonsubstitutability (things like an atmosphere and water cannot be replaced),
unprecedented rates of change (trends of the past are poor indicators of the present, let alone the future), and that allpurpose,
ever-popular crisis (both fast and slow): these terms are now commonplace. This is not alarmism; it is a reflection of
many people's struggle to fathom fundamental shifts, changes for which there are few if any
precedents, and thus unimaginable, and for which appropriate social responses are equally unprecedented and unimaginable. So,
for example, bark beetles, once restricted to two-year cycles by winter cold, are now reproducing
annually. It is not just that they are devastating broad swaths of Rocky Mountain forests but that those forests
may never recover. Frogs are disappearing worldwide. It is not just that it is a shame to lose species; species have
always gone extinct, after all. It is that the mysteries of their disappearance, combined with their status as amphibian
"canaries in the mineshaft," due to their thin porous skin, render conventional conservation irrelevant for frogs and perhaps also for a good
many other terrestrial vertebrates. We cannot save one species at a time or even one habitat at a time when systemic instability is the issue.
Sea levels are rising, already prompting island nations and other communities in low-lying areas to prepare to migrate. It is not
that migrations have not occurred before, but that, with 6 billion people on earth, all the good places
are taken. In these cases, and in so many more in the physical and biological realms, no one knows what to do, except proclaim more-ofthe-same, only new and improved, greener and cleaner. Turning to the social realm, the shifts are murkier, more contested, and yet no less
fundamental. A ISO-year "law" of oil supply says that when oil supplies are tight, prices go up, which stimulates investment, exploration, and
technological innovation, bringing on more supply, all of which pushes prices back down. The cycle may take months or a few years, but it is a
cycle, as inevitable as the business cycle itself, or the life cycle. Now, according to the International Energy Agency, the investments are not
being made.2 And even a few mainstream commentators are violating a taboo: they are saying that world oil supply has peaked, or is about to,
which is to say that all the cheap oil is gone. Whatever the case, hardly anyone predicts a return to cheap, abundant oil.
Framework
Energy Debates Good
Academic debate over energy policy facilitates deliberation and more effective
decision-making---otherwise special interests poison neutrality
Mitchell 10 (Gordon R, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of
Communication at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also directs the William Pitt Debating Union,
“SWITCH-SIDE DEBATING MEETS DEMAND-DRIVEN RHETORIC OF SCIENCE”,
http://www.pitt.edu/~gordonm/JPubs/Mitchell2010.pdf)
Yet the picture grows more complex when one considers what is happening over at
the Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA), where environmental scientist Ibrahim Goodwin is collaborating with John W. Davis on a
project that uses switch-side debating to clean up air and water. In April 2008, that initiative
brought top intercollegiate debaters from four universities to Washington, D.C., for a series of debates on
the topic of water quality, held for an audience of EPA subject matter experts working on
interstate river pollution and bottled water issues. An April 2009 follow-up event in Huntington Beach,
California, featured another debate weighing the relative merits of monitoring versus remediation
as beach pollution strategies. “We use nationally ranked intercollegiate debate programs to
research and present the arguments, both pro and con, devoid of special interest in the outcome,”
explains Davis. “In doing so, agency representatives now remain squarely within the decision-making
role thereby neutralizing overzealous advocacy that can inhibit learned discourse.”7 The intelligence
community and EPA debating initiatives vary quite a bit simply by virtue of the contrasting policy objectives pursued by their
sponsoring agencies (foreign policy versus environmental protection). Significant process-level differences mark off the respective
initiatives as well; the former project entails largely one-way interactions designed to sluice insight from “open sources” to
intelligence analysts working in classified environments and producing largely secret assessments. In contrast, the
EPA’s
debating initiative is conducted through public forums in a policy process required by law to be
transparent. This granularity troubles Greene and Hicks’s deterministic framing of switch-side debate as an ideologically
smooth and consistent cultural technology. In an alternative approach, this essay positions debate as a malleable
method of decision making, one utilized by different actors in myriad ways to pursue various
purposes. By bringing forth the texture inherent in the associated messy “mangle of practice,”8
such an approach has potential to deepen our understanding of debate as a dynamic and
contingent, rather than static, form of rhetorical performance. Juxtaposition of the intelligence
community and EPA debating initiatives illuminates additional avenues of inquiry that take overlapping elements of the two
projects as points of departure. Both tackle complex, multifaceted, and technical topics that do not lend themselves to
reductionist, formal analysis, and both tap into the creative energy latent in what Protagoras of Abdera called dissoilogoi, the
process of learning about a controversial or unresolved issue by airing opposing viewpoints.9 In short, these
institutions
are employing debate as a tool of deliberation, seeking outside expertise to help accomplish
their aims. Such trends provide an occasion to revisit a presumption commonly held among
theorists of deliberative democracy—that debate and deliberation are fundamentally opposed
practices—as the intelligence community’s Analytic Outreach program and the EPA’s debating
initiatives represent examples where debating exercises are designed to facilitate, not
frustrate, deliberative goals.
Debates over energy policy are necessary to produce the policies needed to solve
Wirth, Gray & Podesta, very qualified, ‘3The Future of Energy Policy Timothy E. Wirth, C. Boyden Gray, and John D.
Podesta Timothy E. Wirth is President of the United Nations Foundation and a former U.S. Senator from Colorado. C. Boyden Gray is a partner
at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering and served as Counsel to former President George H.W. Bush. John D. Podesta is Visiting Professor of Law at
Georgetown University Law Center and served as Chief of Staff to former President Bill Clinton. Volume 82 • Number 4 Foreign Affairs 2003
Council on Foreign Relations
The big questions A century ago, Lord Selborne, the first lord of the Admiralty, dismissed the idea of fueling the British navy with something
other than coal, which the island nation had in great abundance. “The substitution of oil for coal is impossible,” he pronounced, “because oil
does not exist in this world in su⁄cient quantities.” Seven years later, the young Winston Churchill was appointed first lord and charged with
winning the escalating Anglo-German race for naval superiority. As Daniel Yergin chronicled in The Prize, Churchill saw that oil would increase
ship speed and reduce refueling time—key strategic advantages—and ordered oil-burning battleships to be built, committing the navy to this
new fuel. Churchill’s was a strategic choice, bold, creative, and farsighted. The
energy choices the world faces today areno less
consequential, and America’s response must be as insightful. Energy is fundamental to U.S. domestic prosperity and
national security. In fact, the complex ties between energy and U.S. national interests have drawn tighter over time. The advent of
globalization, the growing gap between rich and poor, the war on terrorism, and the need to safeguard the earth’s environment are all
intertwined with energy concerns. The profound changes of recent decades and the pressing challenges of the twenty-first century warrant
recognizing energy’s central role in America’s future and the need for much more ambitious and creative approaches.
Yet the current
debate about U.S. energy policy ismainly about tax breaks for expanded production, access to public lands, and nuances of
electricity regulation difficult issues all, butinadequate for the larger challenges the United States faces. The
staleness of the policy dialogue reflects a failure to recognize the importance of energy to the issues it
affects: defense and homeland security, the economy, and the environment. What is needed is a
purposeful, strategic energy policy, not a grab bag drawn from interest-group wish lists. U.S. energy policies to date have failed
to addressthree great challenges. The first is the danger to political and economic security posed by the world’s dependence on oil.
Next is the risk to the global environment from climate change, caused primarily by the combustion of fossil fuels. Finally, the lack of access by
the world’s poor to modern energy services, agricultural opportunities, and other basics needed for economic advancement is a deep concern.
None of these problems of dependence, climate change, or poverty can be solved overnight, but aggressive goals and
practical short-term initiatives can jump-start the move to clean and secure energy practices. The key
challenges can be overcome with a blend ofcarefully targeted policy interventionsthat build on the power of the
market, publicprivate partnerships in financing and technology development, and, perhaps most important, the development of
a political coalition that abandons traditional assumptions and brings together energy intereststhat have so far engaged
only in conflict. Turning this ambitious, long-term agenda into reality requires a sober assessment of the United States’ critical
energy challenges and the interests that can be mobilized for the necessary political change.
Student Involvement Good
Students interrogating environmental issues is critical to developing sustainable
solutions – Must also be coupled with policy advocacy in order to succeed
Cotgrave and Alkhaddar 6 – Alison Cotgrave has a PhD in Sustainability Literacy, she is currently the Deputy Director of the School of
the Built Environment and a researcher in construction education, she is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, RafidAlkhaddar has a
PhD in Civil Engineering and currently teaches at the School of the Built Environment John Moores University in Liverpool as a Professor of
Water and Environmental Engineering (March 2006, “Greening the Curricula within Construction Programmes,” Journal for Education in the
Built Environment, Vol.1, Issue 1, March 2006 pp. 3-29, http://131.251.248.49/jebe/pdf/AlisonCotgrave1(1).pdf)
Environmental education
Many writers have determined that the
main aim of environmental education is to change attitudes, that will in
turn change behaviour. As long ago as 1976, Ramsey and Rickson identified that it has long been known that the basis
for many environmental problems is irresponsible behaviour. Without a doubt, one of the most
important influences on behaviour is attitude, that in turn is influenced by education. Campbell Bradley
et al. (1999) stress the need for trying to change young people’s environmental attitudes because young
people ultimately will be affected by, and will need to provide, solutions to environmental problems
arising from present day actions. As future policymakers, the youth of today will be responsible for
‘fixing’ the environment and they will be the ones who must be persuaded to act now in order to avoid
paying a high price to repair damage to the environment in the future, if indeed it is repairable.
Therefore it appears that effective environmental education, which changes the attitudes of young
people, is crucial. The (then) Department for Education (DFE) report, commonly known as the ‘Toyne Report’ (DFE, 1993), concluded that
as education seeks to lead opinion, it will do so more effectively if it keeps in mind the distinctive nature
of its mission, which is first and foremost to improve its students’ understanding. Their concern may well be awakened as a
result; but it must be a properly informed concern.This does not necessarily mean treating the
environment as a purely scientific issue, but does mean that the respective roles of science and ethics
need to be distinguished, and the complexities of each need to be acknowledged. Failure to do this may
lead all too readily to an ‘environmentalism’ which, by depicting possibilities as certainties, can only discredit
itself in the long run and feed the complacency which it seeks to dispel. McKeown-Ice and Dendinger (2000) have
identified the fact that scientific knowledge and political intervention will not solve the environmental
problem on their own, thus implying that something additional is required to change behaviour. As has already
been discussed, behaviour changes can only occur if attitudes change and this can be achieved through
education. As Fien (1997) identifies, environmental education can play a key role by creating awareness, and changing
people’s values, skills and behaviour. Introducing environmental elements into the curriculum can therefore be seen as a
potentially effective way of transferring knowledge. This should in turn improve attitudes that will lead to improvements in environmental
behaviour. Graham (2000) believes that
it is crucial that building professionals not only participate in the creation of
projects that have low environmental impact, but equally it is important that they learn to conceive, nurture,
promote and facilitate the kind of paradigm changes seen as necessary to create a sustainable society.
There are however limitations as to what education can achieve on its own, for as Jucker (2002) believes, if we do
not do everything we can to transform our political, economic and social systems into more sustainable
structures, we might as well forget the educational part.
Switch-Side
Switch-side debate inculcates skills that empirically improve climate policy outcomes
Mitchell 10 Gordon R. Mitchell is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the
Department
of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also directs the William Pitt Debating
Union. Robert Asen’s patient and thoughtful feedback sharpened this manuscript, which was also
improved by contributions from members of the Schenley Park Debate Authors Working Group
(DAWG), a consortium of public argument scholars at the University of Pittsburgh that strives
to generate rigorous scholarship addressing the role of argumentation and debate in society. SWITCH-SIDE DEBATING MEETS DEMAND-DRIVEN
RHETORIC OF SCIENCE. MITCHELL, GORDON R.1 Rhetoric & Public Affairs; Spring2010, Vol. 13 Issue 1, p95-120, 26p
The watchwords for the intelligence community’s debating initiative— collaboration, critical thinking, collective awareness—resonate with key
terms anchoring the study of deliberative democracy. In a major new text, John Gastil defines deliberation as a process whereby people
“carefully examine a problem and arrive at a well-reasoned solution aft er a period of inclusive, respectful consideration of diverse points of
view.”40 Gastil and his colleagues in organizations such as the Kettering Foundation and the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation
are pursuing a research program that foregrounds the democratic telos of deliberative processes. Work in this area features a blend of concrete
interventions and studies of citizen empowerment.41 Notably, a key theme in much of this literature
concerns the relationship
between deliberation and debate, with the latter term often loaded with pejorative baggage and working as
a negative foil to highlight the positive qualities of deliberation.42 “Most political discussions, however, are debates. Stories in the media turn
politics into a never-ending series of contests. People get swept into taking sides; their energy goes into figuring out who or what they’re for or
against,” says Kettering president David Mathews and coauthor Noelle McAfee. “Deliberation is different. It is neither a partisan argument
where opposing sides try to win nor a casual conversation conducted with polite civility. Public deliberation is a means by which citizens make
tough choices about basic purposes and directions for their communities and their country. It is a way of reasoning and talking together.”43
Mathews and McAfee’s distrust of the debate process is almost paradigmatic amongst theorists and practitioners of
Kettering-style deliberative democracy. One conceptual mechanism for reinforcing this debate-deliberation opposition is characterization of
debate as a process inimical to deliberative aims, with debaters adopting dogmatic and fixed positions that frustrate the deliberative objective
of “choice work.” In this register, Emily Robertson observes, “unlike deliberators, debaters are typically not open to the possibility of being
shown wrong. . . . Debaters are not trying to find the best solution by keeping an open mind about the opponent’s point of view.”44 Similarly,
founding documents from the University of Houston–Downtown’s Center for Public Deliberation state, “Public deliberation is about choice
work, which is different from a dialogue or a debate. In dialogue, people oft en look to relate to each other, to understand each other, and to
talk about more informal issues. In debate, there are generally two positions and people are generally looking to ‘win’ their side.”45 Debate,
cast here as the theoretical scapegoat, provides a convenient, low-water benchmark for explaining how other forms of deliberative interaction
better promote cooperative “choice work.” The Kettering-inspired framework
receives support from perversions of the
debate process such as vapid presidential debates and verbal pyrotechnics found on Crossfire-style
television shows.46 In contrast, the intelligence community’s debating initiative stands as a nettlesome anomaly
for these theoretical frameworks, with debate serving, rather than frustrating, the ends of deliberation. The presence of such an anomaly
would seem to point to the wisdom of fashioning a theoretical orientation that frames the debate-deliberation connection in contingent, rather
than static terms, with the relationship between the categories shift ing along with the various contexts in which they manifest in practice.47
Such an approach gestures toward the importance of rhetorically informed critical work on multiple levels. First, the contingency of situated
practice invites analysis geared to assess, in particular cases, the extent to which debate practices enable and/ or constrain deliberative
objectives. Regarding the intelligence community’s debating initiative, such an analytical perspective highlights, for example, the tight
connection between the deliberative goals established by intelligence officials and the cultural technology manifest in the bridge project’s
online debating applications such as Hot Grinds. An additional dimension of nuance emerging from this avenue of analysis pertains to the
precise nature of the deliberative goals set by bridge. Program descriptions notably eschew Kettering-style references to democratic citizen
empowerment, yet feature deliberation prominently as a key ingredient of strong intelligence tradecraft . Th is caveat is especially salient to
consider when it comes to the second category of rhetorically informed critical work invited by the contingent aspect of specific debate
initiatives. To grasp this layer it is useful to appreciate how the name of the bridge project constitutes an invitation for those outside the
intelligence community to participate in the analytic outreach eff ort. According to Doney, bridge “provides an environment for Analytic
Outreach—a place where IC analysts can reach out to expertise elsewhere in federal, state, and local government, in academia, and industry.
New communities of interest can form quickly in bridge through the ‘web of trust’ access control model—access to minds outside the
intelligence community creates an analytic force multiplier.”48 This presents a moment of choice for academic scholars in a position to respond
to Doney’s invitation; it is an opportunity to convert scholarly expertise into an “analytic force multiplier.” In reflexively pondering this
invitation, it may be valuable for scholars to read Greene and Hicks’s proposition that switch-side
debating should be viewed as
a cultural technology in light of Langdon Winner’s maxim that “technological artifacts have politics.”49 In the case of bridge, politics are
informed by the history of intelligence community policies and practices. Commenter Th omas Lord puts this point in high relief in a post off
ered in response to a news story on the topic: “[W]hy should this thing (‘bridge’) be? . . . [Th e intelligence community] on the one hand
sometimes provides useful information to the military or to the civilian branches and on the other hand it is a dangerous, out of control, relic
that by all external appearances is not the slightest bit reformed, other than superficially, from such excesses as became exposed in the
cointelpro and mkultra hearings of the 1970s.”50 A debate scholar need not agree with Lord’s full-throated criticism of the intelligence
community (he goes on to observe that it bears an alarming resemblance to organized crime) to understand that participation in the
community’s Analytic Outreach program may serve the ends of deliberation, but not necessarily democracy, or even a defensible politics.
Demand-driven rhetoric of science necessarily raises questions about what’s driving the demand, questions that scholars with relevant
expertise would do well to ponder carefully before embracing invitations to contribute their argumentative expertise to deliberative projects.
By the same token, it would be prudent to bear in mind that the technological determinism about switch-side debate endorsed by Greene and
Hicks may tend to flatten reflexive assessments regarding the wisdom of supporting a given debate initiative—as the next section illustrates,
manifest differences among initiatives warrant context-sensitive judgments regarding the normative political dimensions featured in each case.
Public Debates in the EPA Policy Process Th e preceding analysis of U.S. intelligence community debating initiatives highlighted how analysts
are challenged to navigate discursively the heteroglossia of vast amounts of diff erent kinds of data flowing through intelligence streams.
Public policy planners are tested in like manner when they attempt to stitch together institutional
arguments from various and sundry inputs ranging from expert testimony, to historical precedent, to public comment. Just as
intelligence managers find that algorithmic, formal methods of analysis often don’t work when it comes to the
task of interpreting and synthesizing copious amounts of disparate data, public-policy planners encounter similar
challenges. In fact, the argumentative turn in public-policy planning elaborates an approach to publicpolicy analysis that foregrounds deliberative interchange and critical thinking as alternatives to “decisionism,” the
formulaic application of “objective” decision algorithms to the public policy process. Stating the matter plainly, Majone suggests, “whether in
written or oral form, argument is
central in all stages of the policy process.” Accordingly, he notes, “we miss a great
deal if we try to understand policy-making solely in terms of power, influence, and bargaining, to the exclusion
of debate and argument.”51 One can see similar rationales driving Goodwin and Davis’s EPA debating project, where debaters are invited
to conduct on-site public debates covering resolutions craft ed to reflect key points of stasis in the EPA decision-making process. For
example, in the 2008 Water Wars debates held at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., resolutions were craft ed to focus attention on the
topic of water pollution, with one resolution focusing on downstream states’ authority to control upstream states’ discharges and sources of
pollutants, and a second resolution exploring the policy merits of bottled water and toilet paper taxes as revenue sources to fund water
infrastructure projects. In the first debate on interstate river pollution, the team of Seth Gannon
and Seungwon Chung from Wake
Forest University argued in favor of downstream state control, with the Michigan State University team of Carly Wunderlich and Garrett
Abelkop providing opposition. In the second debate on taxation policy, Kevin Kallmyer and Matthew Struth from University of Mary
Washington defended taxes on bottled water and toilet paper, while their opponents from Howard University, Dominique
Scott and Jarred McKee, argued against this proposal. Reflecting on the project, Goodwin noted how the intercollegiate SwitchSide Debating Meets Demand-Driven Rhetoric of Science 107 debaters’ ability to act as “honest brokers” in the policy
arguments contributed positively to internal EPA deliberation on both issues.52 Davis observed that since the invited
debaters “didn’t have a dog in the fight,” they were able to give voice to previously buried arguments that some EPA subject matter experts felt
reticent to elucidate because of their institutional affiliations.53 Such
findings are consistent with the views of policy
analysts advocating the argumentative turn in policy planning. As Majone claims, “Dialectical confrontation
between generalists and experts often succeeds in bringing out unstated assumptions, conflicting interpretations
of the facts, and the risks posed by new projects.”54 Frank Fischer goes even further in this context, explicitly appropriating
rhetorical scholar Charles Willard’s concept of argumentative “epistemics” to flesh out his vision for policy studies: Uncovering the epistemic
dynamics of public controversies would allow for a more enlightened understanding of what is at stake in a particular dispute, making possible
a sophisticated evaluation of the various viewpoints and merits of diff erent policy options. In so doing, the diff ering, oft en tacitly held
contextual perspectives and values could be juxtaposed; the viewpoints and demands of experts, special interest groups, and the wider public
could be directly compared; and the dynamics among the participants could be scrutizined. This
would by no means sideline or
even exclude scientific assessment; it would only situate it within the framework of a more
comprehensive evaluation.55 As Davis notes, institutional constraints present within the EPA communicative milieu can complicate
eff orts to provide a full airing of all relevant arguments pertaining to a given regulatory issue. Thus, intercollegiate
debaters can
play key roles in retrieving and amplifying positions that might otherwise remain sedimented in the
policy process. Th e dynamics entailed in this symbiotic relationship are underscored by deliberative planner John Forester, who observes,
“If planners and public administrators are to make democratic political debate and argument possible, they will need strategically located allies
to avoid being fully thwarted by the characteristic self-protecting behaviors of the planning organizations and bureaucracies within which they
work.”56 Here, an institution’s need for “strategically located allies” to support deliberative practice constitutes the demand for rhetorically
informed expertise, setting up what can be considered a demand-driven rhetoric of science. As
an instance of rhetoric of science
scholarship, this type of “switch-side public 108 Rhetoric & Public Affairs debate” diff ers both from insular contest
tournament debating, where the main focus is on the pedagogical benefit for student participants, and first-generation rhetoric of science
scholarship, where critics concentrated on unmasking the rhetoricity of scientific artifacts circulating in what
many perceived to be purely technical spheres of knowledge production.58 As a form of demand-driven rhetoric of science,
switch-side debating connects directly with the communication field’s performative tradition of
argumentative engagement in public controversy—a different route of theoretical grounding than rhetorical
criticism’s tendency to locate its foundations in the English field’s tradition of literary criticism and textual
analysis.59 Given this genealogy, it is not surprising to learn how Davis’s response to the EPA’s institutional need for rhetorical expertise
took the form of a public debate proposal, shaped by Davis’s dual background as a practitioner and historian of intercollegiate debate. Davis
competed as an undergraduate policy debater for Howard University in the 1970s, and then went on to enjoy substantial success as coach of
the Howard team in the new millennium. In an essay reviewing the broad sweep of debating history, Davis notes, “Academic debate began at
least 2,400 years ago when the scholar Protagoras of Abdera (481–411 bc), known as the father of debate, conducted debates among his
students in Athens.”60 As John Poulakos points out, “older” Sophists such as Protagoras taught
Greek students the value of
dissoi logoi, or pulling apart complex questions by debating two sides of an issue.61 Th e few surviving fragments
of Protagoras’s work suggest that his notion of dissoi logoi stood for the principle that “two accounts [logoi] are present about every ‘thing,’
opposed to each other,” and further, that humans could “measure” the relative soundness of knowledge claims by engaging in give-and-take
where parties would make the “weaker argument stronger” to activate the generative aspect of rhetorical practice, a key element of the
Sophistical tradition.62 Following in Protagoras’s wake, Isocrates would complement this centrifugal push with the pull of synerchesthe, a
centripetal exercise of “coming together” deliberatively to listen, respond, and form common social bonds.63 Isocrates incorporated
Protagorean dissoi logoi into synerchesthe, a broader concept that he used flexibly to express interlocking senses of (1) inquiry, as in groups
convening to search for answers to common questions through discussion;64 (2) deliberation, with interlocutors gathering in a political setting
to deliberate about proposed courses of action;65 and (3) alliance formation, a form of collective action typical at festivals,66 or in the
exchange of pledges that deepen social ties.67 Switch-Side Debating Meets Demand-Driven Rhetoric of Science 109 Returning once again to the
Kettering-informed sharp distinction between debate and deliberation, one
sees in Isocratic synerchesthe, as well as in the EPA
debating initiative, a fusion of debate with deliberative functions. Echoing a theme raised in this essay’s earlier discussion of
intelligence tradecraft , such a fusion troubles categorical attempts to classify debate and deliberation as fundamentally opposed activities. Th e
significance of such a finding is amplified by the frequency of attempts in the deliberative democracy literature to insist on the theoretical
bifurcation of debate and deliberation as an article of theoretical faith. Tandem
analysis of the EPA and intelligence community
debating initiatives also brings to light dimensions of contrast at the third level of Isocratic synerchesthe, alliance formation. Th e
intelligence community’s Analytic Outreach initiative invites largely one-way communication flowing from outside experts into the black box of
classified intelligence analysis. On the contrary, the EPA debating program gestures toward a more expansive project of deliberative
alliance building. In this vein, Howard University’s participation in the 2008 EPA Water Wars debates can be seen as the harbinger of a
trend by historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) to catalyze their debate programs in a strategy that evinces Davis’s dual-focus vision.
On the one hand, Davis aims to recuperate Wiley College’s tradition of competitive excellence in intercollegiate debate, depicted so powerfully
in the feature film The Great Debaters, by starting a wave of new debate programs housed in hbcus across the nation.68 On the other hand,
Davis sees potential for these new programs to complement their competitive debate programming with participation in the EPA’s public
debating initiative. Th is dual-focus vision recalls Douglas Ehninger’s and Wayne Brockriede’s vision of “total” debate programs that blend
switch-side intercollegiate tournament debating with forms of public debate designed to contribute to wider communities beyond the
tournament setting.69 Whereas the political telos animating Davis’s dual-focus vision certainly embraces background assumptions that Greene
and Hicks would find disconcerting—notions of liberal political agency, the idea of debate using “words as weapons”70—there is little doubt
that the project of pursuing environmental protection by tapping the creative energy of hbcu-leveraged dissoi logoi diff ers significantly from
the intelligence community’s eff ort to improve its tradecraft through online digital debate programming. Such diff erence is especially evident
in light of the EPA’s commitment to extend debates to public realms, with the attendant possible benefits unpacked by Jane Munksgaard and
Damien Pfister: 110 Rhetoric & Public Affairs Having
a public debater argue against their convictions, or confess their
shake up the prevailing view of
indecision on a subject and subsequent embrace of argument as a way to seek clarity, could
debate as a war of words. Public uptake of the possibility of switch-sides debate may help lessen the
polarization of issues inherent in prevailing debate formats because students are no longer seen as wedded to their arguments. This
could transform public debate from a tussle between advocates, with each public debater trying to convince the audience in a Manichean
struggle about the truth of their side, to a more inviting exchange focused on the content of the other’s
argumentation and the process of deliberative exchange.71 Reflection on the EPA debating initiative reveals a
striking convergence among (1) the expressed need for dissoi logoi by government agency officials
wrestling with the challenges of inverted rhetorical situations, (2) theoretical claims by scholars regarding the centrality of argumentation in the
public policy process,
and (3) the practical wherewithal of intercollegiate debaters to tailor public switch-side
debating performances in specific ways requested by agency collaborators. These points of convergence both underscore
previously articulated theoretical assertions regarding the relationship of debate to deliberation, as well as deepen understanding of the
political role of deliberation in institutional decision making. But they also suggest how decisions by rhetorical scholars about whether to
contribute switch-side debating acumen to meet demand-driven rhetoric of science initiatives ought to involve careful reflection. Such an
approach mirrors the way policy
planning in the “argumentative turn” is designed to respond to the
weaknesses of formal, decisionistic paradigms of policy planning with situated, contingent judgments
informed by reflective deliberation. Conclusion Dilip Gaonkar’s criticism of first-generation rhetoric of science scholarship rests on
a key claim regarding what he sees as the inherent “thinness” of the ancient Greek rhetorical lexicon.72 That lexicon, by virtue of the fact that it
was invented primarily to teach rhetorical performance, is ill equipped in his view to support the kind of nuanced discriminations required for
eff ective interpretation and critique of rhetorical texts. Although Gaonkar isolates rhetoric of science as a main target of this critique, his
choice of subject matter Switch-Side Debating Meets Demand-Driven Rhetoric of Science 111 positions him to toggle back and forth between
specific engagement with rhetoric of science scholarship and discussion of broader themes touching on the metatheoretical controversy over
rhetoric’s proper scope as a field of inquiry (the so-called big vs. little rhetoric dispute).73 Gaonkar’s familiar refrain in both contexts is a
warning about the dangers of “universalizing” or “globalizing” rhetorical inquiry, especially in attempts that “stretch” the classical Greek
rhetorical vocabulary into a hermeneutic metadiscourse, one pressed into service as a master key for interpretation of any and all types of
communicative artifacts. In other words, Gaonkar warns against the dangers of rhetoricians pursuing what might be called supply-side
epistemology, rhetoric’s project of pushing for greater disciplinary relevance by attempting to extend its reach into far-flung areas of inquiry
such as the hard sciences. Yet this essay highlights how rhetorical scholarship’s relevance can be credibly established by outsiders, who seek
access to the creative energy flowing from the classical Greek rhetorical lexicon in its native mode, that is, as a tool of invention designed to
spur and hone rhetorical performance. Analysis
of the intelligence community and EPA debating initiatives shows
how this is the case, with government agencies calling for assistance to animate rhetorical processes such as dissoi logoi
(debating different sides) and synerchesthe (the performative task of coming together deliberately for the purpose
of joint inquiry, collective choice-making, and renewal of communicative bonds).74 Th is demand-driven epistemology is diff
erent in kind from the globalization project so roundly criticized by Gaonkar. Rather than rhetoric venturing out from its own academic home to
proselytize about its epistemological universality for all knowers, instead here we have actors not formally trained in the rhetorical tradition
articulating how their own deliberative objectives call for incorporation of rhetorical practice and even recruitment of “strategically located
allies”75 to assist in the process. Since the productivist content in the classical Greek vocabulary serves as a critical resource for joint
collaboration in this regard, demand-driven rhetoric of science turns Gaonkar’s original critique on its head. In
fairness to Gaonkar, it should be stipulated that his 1993 intervention challenged the way rhetoric of science had been done to date, not the
universe of ways rhetoric of science might be done in the future. And to his partial credit, Gaonkar did acknowledge the promise of a
performance-oriented rhetoric of science, especially one informed by classical thinkers other than Aristotle.76 In his Ph.D. dissertation on
“Aspects of Sophistic Pedagogy,” Gaonkar documents how the ancient
sophists were “the greatest champions” 112 Rhetoric
& Public Affairs of “socially useful” science,77 and also how the sophists essentially practiced the art of rhetoric in a translational,
performative register: Th e sophists could not blithely go about their business of making science useful, while science itself stood still due to
lack of communal support and recognition. Besides, sophistic pedagogy was becoming increasingly dependent on the findings of contemporary
speculation in philosophy and science. Take for instance, the eminently practical art of rhetoric. As taught by the best of the sophists, it was not
simply a handbook of recipes which anyone could mechanically employ to his advantage. On the contrary, the strength
and vitality of
sophistic rhetoric came from their ability to incorporate the relevant information obtained from the ongoing research in other fields.78 Of course, deep trans-historical diff erences make uncritical appropriation of classical Greek rhetoric
for contemporary use a fool’s errand. But to gauge from Robert Hariman’s recent reflections on the enduring salience of Isocrates, “timely,
suitable, and eloquent appropriations”
can help us postmoderns “forge a new political language” suitable for
addressing the complex raft of intertwined problems facing global society. Such retrospection is long overdue, says
Hariman, as “the history, literature, philosophy, oratory, art, and political thought of Greece and Rome have never been more accessible or less
appreciated.”79 Th is essay has explored ways that some of the most venerable elements of the ancient Greek rhetorical tradition—those
dealing with debate and deliberation—can
be retrieved and adapted to answer calls in the contemporary milieu for
cultural technologies capable of dealing with one of our time’s most daunting challenges. This challenge
involves finding meaning in inverted rhetorical situations characterized by an endemic surplus of