Climate Crisis: Social Science Crisis

 Two decades ago, pollution trading seemed to the small clique of US traders, economists and non-governmental organisations that had begun developing the idea to have the potential to recruit industry to the environmentalist cause, since it was designed to save costs for big polluters and give them breathing space before they would have to cut their emissions. In Kyoto in 1997, the idea was successfully pushed onto UN climate negotiators by the US delegation, and a cluster of carbon markets today constitutes the major international response to global warming.

The enormous commercially-oriented social and political infrastructure that has resulted has not only diverted resources toward reinforcing richer societies' addiction to fossil fuels; it has also helped narrow the range of social science inquiry into ways of tackling climate change. Today, this draft chapter suggests, it is less a lack of natural science knowledge that is hampering progress on global warming than a lack of social science knowledge.

Related articles of interest:

• Carbon Trading How It Works and Why It Fails
• The CO2 Alibi (video)
• Toward a Different Debate in Environmental Accounting The Cases of Carbon and Cost-Benefit
• How Carbon Trading Undermines Positive Approaches to the Climate Crisis
• Trading Our Way into Trouble? An Article from Environmental Finance magazine
• Aid, the Clean Development Mechanism and Some Open Questions An Article for Development Today
• Carbon Trading A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and Power
• Making and Marketing Carbon Dumps Commodification, Calculation and Counterfactuals in Climate Change Mitigation