Until recently, we could talk about “the politics of climate change”. The belief was that climate, like trade, was an “issue,” a problem that could be contained and addressed by targeted institutions and regulations. This view is no longer tenable. We have crossed a threshold – it’s not that climate change is the only “issue”, but rather that nothing escapes it. All politics are climate politics.
The upshot of this is an inchoate condition of permanent emergency, and the extraordinary uncertainty that follows. Economic growth projections and demographic models are still based on the assumption that the next century will be much like the last, but no one really knows what is going to happen to the world over the coming decades. This is especially true for the social impacts of global temperature changes. How will human communities be organised? How will societies react to climate-induced “shocks” as they accumulate? Will existing political and economic institutions and relations survive? That the effects of planetary warming will vary across time and space only makes these questions harder to answer. Who will live, how will they live, and who will decide? No one knows.
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