Climate Catastrophe as a Structural Injustice

There is no denying that the people and states who will suffer the most from planetary warming are not those who have contributed the most to that warming; instead, rising seas, increased storms and floods, raging wildfires, unsafe temperatures, and other risks will threaten those groups who are geographically vulnerable and without the resources to mitigate or otherwise escape these harms. As Gerard Toal notes in a Critical Dialogue in this issue, it is “small, remote low-lying island states in the Pacific, like Kiribati and Tuvalu, [that] are in danger of disappearing under rising ocean tides,” even though the bulk of carbon expenditure has historically stemmed from major states in the Global North. Planetary warming also unfairly threatens the livelihoods of future generations (for more on this dimension, see Stephen Gardiner’s 2011 book, A Perfect Moral Storm).

For political theorists, then, climate change presents a distinctive kind of normative problem—namely, it constitutes what Iris Marion Young theorized as a structural injustice (see her 2000 book, Inclusion and Democracy). By structural injustice, Young meant those modes of socially produced and unjust harms that could not be traced back to the intentional and malicious actions of any one individual actor or institution. Instead, they result from “social structural processes in which many, perhaps most of us, participate,” as Catherine Lu summarizes (see her review of Robert Goodin’s Perpetuating Advantage, this issue). In global climate discussions, the default response to this unjust predicament has been that the “polluter pays.” Where petrostates or big fossil fuel companies are concerned, that normative logic is hard to dispute. And yet it becomes difficult to assign moral blame for these unjust outcomes to many ordinary actors whose routine choices to, say, drive a car to work or consume a beef burger contribute to the sorts of carbon expenditure that have produced these harms (and continue to threaten life as we know it).

How, then, ought we to think about these questions of moral responsibility in contexts of structural advantage and disadvantage? Lu notes that the existence of structural and systemic injustices does not “require negating human agency—as if injustice can only be structural when no human agency is involved or as if injustice would never be structural as soon as human agents are involved.” Instead, Goodin argues that those individuals who are structurally advantaged within these unjust contexts have special responsibilities to be “informed” about how the system works in their favor—and to work toward countermanding those unfair advantages where possible. And yet achieving this sort of “informed” state about structural injustices like climate change—and then acting in accordance with one’s moral responsibility—might be more difficult for many people in practice than political theorists might like to imagine. As Josée Johnston and colleagues explore in their book, Happy Meat, many people are persuaded by moral objections to ongoing meat consumption, including (1) that raising animals for slaughter causes undue suffering and (2) that consuming meat and other animal products is bad for the environment. And yet in focus groups, many of them continued to justify their consumption on the grounds that organic farmers could raise “happy meat.” Such an ideological narrative seemed, paradoxically, to address their ambivalences about eating animals, even though “happy meat” is also killed very young, is processed in the same slaughterhouses, and has an even greater environmental impact. Or as Tyler Doggett puts it in his review, “[h]appy and unhappy cows alike produce methane. Happy and unhappy pigs and chickens alike produce waste. Free-range animals take up significantly more space than factory-farmed animals.”

Challenging Popular (Mis)Conceptions of Climate Change

Other popular narratives can also mislead citizens into believing that they can continue to consume as “normal” while still avoiding the worst effects of climate change. As Genevieve Guenther details in her book, The Language of Climate Politics, a coalition of actors—including fossil fuel companies, conservative politicians, tech entrepreneurs, and a subsection of well-positioned scientists and economists—have increasingly promulgated the idea that climate activists’ radical solutions would be too costly for economic growth and that we should instead put our faith in the “techno-optimist solutions” that a “green capitalism” will provide. As Guenther shows, such narratives may be comforting, but they delegitimate the push for the sorts of radical changes actually required, both within a nation-state like the United States and internationally, to mitigate against the impending climate catastrophe. Guenther is not alone in worrying about the ideological narratives that circulate in today’s media discourses and that continue to normalize, legitimate, and naturalize fossil fuel capitalism. For instance, Hanna E. Morris shows that nationalistic appeals in the US—when combined with a “celebration of planetary-scale ‘solutions’” and a tacit acknowledgement that some racially minoritized communities will face premature death from planetary warming—all have obscured the possibilities of more radical climate organizing (see her Critical Dialogue exchange with Guenther, this issue). In turn, Anna Varfolomeeva contends that popular imaginaries of the Arctic as “empty or as primarily defined by its pristine wilderness” have long worked to legitimate colonial extractivism in the region (see her symposium contribution on Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds’s new book, Unfrozen, this issue). Such narratives, while long challenged by Indigenous communities themselves, are still being used to legitimate new forms of “green colonialism” in the Arctic as tech capitalists and states alike target its mineral resources and set up data centers.

Tackling misleading or politically demobilizing narratives around climate change is one of the primary goals that R. Jisung Park sets himself in his recent book, Slow Burn: The Hidden Costs of a Warming World (see the symposium on this book, this issue). Park’s book seeks to plot “a middle-path approach to climate discourse, steering between climate denial or defeatism on one hand and warnings of imminent doom on the other,” as Michael Ross summarizes. To do so, Park draws on a range of detailed data from environmental economics to show that even small increases in temperature can have—and are already having—huge impacts on diverse domains of human life, from crime rates, to educational attainment, to agricultural yields, to judicial decision making. If people were more aware of the “slow burn” of planetary warming, the book suggests, then they might be more motivated to push their national governments to take steps to mitigate and especially to adapt to climate risks. But as several symposium contributors note, such political optimism might be misplaced. “As anyone who pays attention to climate politics knows,” remarks Fergus Green, “better evidence rarely leads to better climate policy.”

Liberal Democracies, Vested Interests, and Climate Action

Liberal democracies have not proven particularly responsive to the threat of climate disaster. Or as Nicolas Longuet-Marx points out in his review of Slow Burn, “the broader pattern may be that politicians and governments often face incentives that push in the wrong direction” when it comes to averting ecological damage. In liberal democracies, political leaders tend to cater to elite interests, including those of the fossil fuel industry, and to voters worried about higher energy costs. As Aidan Regan and colleagues note in their new book, Growth, Democracy, or Climate Action?, many states today are caught in a triple bind: they must manage an “inescapable trade-off between sustaining economic growth, maintaining democratic legitimacy, and delivering effective climate action” (p. 1). While some liberal democracies can manage two of these competing priorities, they contend it is difficult to achieve all three, especially in the face of the intensive energy demands that sustain capitalist growth and satisfy consumption as voters know it in the Global North (see Daniel Fiorino’s review, this issue). When the rubber hits the road, many governments are willing to prioritize “economic expansion, corporate profits, and electoral responsiveness over ecological survival,” Regan and colleagues conclude (p. 26).

This is why political scientists are increasingly explaining the impasse of domestic climate politics as the result of distributive conflicts between “asset holders” whose property, wealth, and income would be threatened by systemic shifts away from massive fossil fuel consumption. For instance, in “Asset Revaluation and the Existential Politics of Climate Change,” their 2021 article for International Organization, Jeff Colgan, Jessica Green, and Thomas Hale argue that climate change politics poses a “stark distributional struggle” between holders of “climate-forcing assets” such as “oil fields [and] beef farms,” on the one hand, and holders of “climate-vulnerable assets” such as “coastal property [and] fisheries,” on the other (pp. 586–87). Under this interest-based approach to the winners and losers of climate change mitigation, Jessica Green goes on to argue in her book, Existential Politics, that we should focus on organizing vulnerable asset holders—those who stand to lose “lives, homes, regions, industries, and eventually, perhaps entire nations” (p. 6). In turn, there is also a third class of asset holders who are relevant in this distributional struggle: those “green” asset holders who will be able to capitalize or increase the value of their holdings if liberal democracies adopted more climate-friendly policies. These asset holders will be “the job creators in areas such as critical minerals, renewable energy, and related infrastructure,” as reviewer Carina Keskitalo notes. Similarly, Fergus Green suggests that unions should be a key marketing target for Slow Burn, given that many workers—especially in the agricultural sector—have a vested interest in the climate adaptation strategies that will make their jobs bearable in increasing temperatures (see his symposium contribution, this issue). Perhaps a new coalition of the climate vulnerable—including vulnerable asset holders, affected workers, smoke-impacted students, and concerned parents—could be mobilized to support something like the much-maligned US Green New Deal package, which would have put broad state resources and support behind efforts to simultaneously decarbonize while tackling economic inequality. Or as Daniel Fiorino concludes in his review of Growth, Democracy, or Climate Action?, “[t]he answer, again for democracies, is to get away from elite-driven policies and build a broad, urban-rural coalition that unites the middle and working classes.”

Another part of the difficulty confronting liberal democracies, according to Thomas Hale, is that climate change constitutes a prime example of what he calls a “long problem” (see Markus Gastinger’s review of Hale’s recent book, Long Problems, this issue). Long problems, Gastinger summarizes, are those that “unfold over timescales much longer than those of elections, policy cycles, and even the analytical horizons of much contemporary political science.” As such, Hale contends, they prove particularly hard for liberal democracies to govern for three reasons. First, action must be taken before the harms of long problems are truly felt, which often makes such policies difficult to sell to an electorate. Second, the constituencies most affected by today’s inaction are not yet born and therefore cannot weigh in; they therefore constitute what Hale calls “shadow interests.” And third, institutional lags in liberal democracies mean that effective interventions take time to cascade through the complex legislative and executive mechanisms of government.

By contrast, authoritarian states might be better positioned to respond quickly to long-term threats. Several books reviewed in this issue mentioned the case of China as a “big green state,” which is using its role as a leader in green infrastructure to accrue increased political capital on the world stage. As Regan and colleagues point out in Growth, Democracy, or Climate Action?, states like China, Singapore, and Middle Eastern petrostates can use “centralized, technocratic state power to drive rapid decarbonization” (p. 3). But, of course, China remains the world’s largest carbon dioxide emitter, for all that its emissions have flatlined recently. Nor are many petrostates interested in weaning themselves off fossil fuel. “The United States under Trump is a petrostate power still chasing a glorious masculinist dominance over nature,” Toal notes in his Critical Dialogue exchange (hence, Trump’s efforts to make the US into an “Arctic aggressor,” as Kathryn Lavelle points out in her symposium contribution). The “great power competition” between states like China and the US has in general been much more damaging to the planet and to its inhabitants than it has beneficial. As Toal notes in his book, Oceans Rise, Empires Fall, “[i]n seeking to secure their own living spaces, the competitive territorial practices of great powers have undermined the broader living spaces that sustain human flourishing on Earth” (p. 86).

This intensifying geopolitical competition for resources, territory, and trade routes in the wake of planetary warming is perhaps most visible in the Arctic. As Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds describe in Unfrozen, this “emerging Arctic Anthropocene” has upended decades of cooperation in the region and is producing new “flashpoints” between the world’s major powers (see the symposium on this book, this issue). Against this backdrop, the Trump administration’s recent threats to annex Greenland/Kalaallit Nunaat show how older institutional norms and settlements are crumbling, much as the Arctic ice floes are. In turn, “environmental change, especially melting sea ice, has made Arctic resources potentially more accessible and their extraction economically more profitable,” Stefan Wolff notes in his review. This has only increased the interest of states like the US and China, which are each now trying to make their own claims to the region and its resources. But for all that these geopolitical developments pose real risks—and have already encouraged greater militarization—Jennifer Spence notes that they could also “serve as focal points for institutional innovation, where new forms of cooperation and coordination can be tested” among diverse actors. For instance, the Arctic Council is one of the few global governance institutions to have “permanent participant” status for Indigenous peoples, who make up a quarter of the region’s population. Yet as Rauna Kuokkanen suggests, Indigenous communities in the Arctic today need “enhanced jurisdictional authority, territorial restitution, and capacity building” to secure their futures on their own terms (see Kuokkanen’s review of Unfrozen, this issue).

Scholars Toal and Vanhala, however, remain largely skeptical about “the capacity of the existing state system, and global governance mechanisms, to confront the entrenched power of wealthy states, fossil fuel interests, and a modernity organized around energy-intensive ways of life,” as Toal summarizes in their Critical Dialogue exchange. For instance, Vanhala spent eight years studying the United Nations Executive Committee’s attempts to create a robust “loss and damage” system that would facilitate payments from rich developed states to poorer countries vulnerable to climate change. For all the good intentions of many individuals involved, she found that wealthy states repeatedly used strategies to deflect and evade their responsibilities, even in the face of overwhelming evidence of climate threats. Ultimately, Vanhala offers a rather pessimistic assessment of these international initiatives: “This book suggests that, at its worst, the global governance process is symbolic window dressing that lends a fig leaf of legal legitimacy to business as usual.” These existing institutional failures gesture toward why scholars Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman have argued in their recent book, Children of a Modest Star, for the creation of new planetary-level governance structures as the main conduit to effective climate action. Yet others, such as Columba Peoples, have put more faith in technological fixes in the face of such political impasses. As Peoples details in his book, Security in Crisis, geoengineering projects may yet help the world to avoid the worst of climate catastrophe’s effects without necessarily shifting us away from business as usual (see Simon Dalby’s review, this issue).

Beyond Capitalism: Ecosocialism and Alternative Relations to Land

For several scholars featured in this issue, technological or “green capitalist” solutions, however, are not solutions at all. Instead, as Fiorino suggests, degrowth might offer “an effective, scientifically sound climate mitigation strategy,” although it may yet remain politically unpopular. Thinkers like William Connolly or John Maerhofer argue there is no way to effectively avoid planetary catastrophe while continuing with capitalism and its reifying relations to the nonhuman world. As Bradley Macdonald summarizes in his review of Connolly’s recent book, Stormy Weather, Connolly traces our contemporary predicament back to “European drives to empire” that “precede, include, and exceed capitalism” (Stormy Weather, p. 181). For Connolly, then, there is no way out of planetary catastrophe unless we can learn to embrace alternative “pagan” cosmologies that allow us to relate to ourselves, to one another, and to the natural world as coagents, rather than as dominant subjects. In turn, Maerhofer contends that climate activists today should embrace what he calls “guerilla ecologies” if they are to effectively contest the entrenched interests of fossil fuel capitalism and create livable alternatives. In his book, Guerrilla Ecologies, he draws on examples of revolutionary praxis from history to make a number of strategic recommendations for climate movements today, including the rejection of climate reformism, the use of communing to create “regenerative economies,” the linking of struggles across communities and geographies, and the defense of Indigenous peoples against intensifying colonial extraction. As Clare Saunders notes in her review, “the struggle for eco-socialism needs to address all of capitalism’s attempts to dislocate humans from the land and its resources.”

Other scholars have looked at just what climate justice might mean for how we relate to, and redistribute, land. For instance, Anthony Pahnke argues in From “Climate-Smart” to “Climate-Just Agriculture” that the world needs to transition away from “corporate” climate-smart agriculture and should instead embrace climate-just agriculture that foregrounds Indigenous communities’ nonextractive ways of relating to the land (see Alexandra Bögner’s review, this issue). In Making Do, Mardi Reardon-Smith explores how agricultural land practices in the Australian periphery remain overdetermined and precarious due to the demands of global capitalist markets. Rather than embracing purist notions of conservation that treat the land as something apart from human practices, Reardon-Smith defends the idea of an “environmental politics that is informed by the interests of people who live in a place, and that values the work that they do there” (see Paul Kohlbry’s review, this issue). Finally, Merrill Baker-Médard shows in Feminist Conservation that Global North nongovernmental organizations, in their desire to protect “biodiversity,” can pursue exploitative conservation projects without sufficient buy-in or feedback from local communities, as evidenced by her study of such work in Madagascar (see Catherine Corson’s review, this issue). Perhaps it should come as no surprise that questions about who controls land, and for whose gain, will intersect with and entrench existing social hierarchies. As Michael Albertus argues in his Land Power, “landholding patterns shape citizenship and belonging; they define who can exercise voice; they structure racial and gender hierarchies; and they influence whether states pursue inclusive development or predatory political control” (see Sandra Joireman’s review, this issue).

For all these intense and heated debates over just how an effective climate politics might be waged against carbon capitalism, the books reviewed in this issue agree that human societies cannot continue with the status quo. Instead, we must find some way to reclaim a faith in human agency and our collective capacity to make a different future than the one that climate scientists warn is coming. For all that these apocalyptic visions of climate wreckage can seem all-consuming, as if there were nothing we could do to combat the planetary shifts that are barreling our way, David Livingstone’s The Empire of Climate reminds us that climate determinism itself has a checkered past. As Emily Kern notes in her review, empirical studies designed to test climate’s supposed deterministic impacts on humans “frequently returned results that pointed instead to the persistent and much more marked influence of ordinary human activities: political marginalization, social fragmentation, economic turmoil.” Fortunately, political science has long been addressing itself to just these sorts of human-made problems.