COP 21 Charades: Spin,Lies and Real Hope in Paris

Abstract

UN Climate talks have become an annual fixture on the global diplomatic calendar since 1995. Some have been praised, others denounced, but the levels of greenhouse gas emissions have risen regardless year-on-year. This essay and eyewitness account argues that the Paris COP 21 talks like its predecessors failed to deliver a meaningful result, judged from either a scientific or social justice point-of-view. However it did reveal the presence of a growing and increasingly sophisticated and powerful climate justice movement that heralds the most hope for a just response to the global climate crisis     

Negotiating Sustainability: Climate Change Framing in the Communications,Energy and Paperworkers Union

Environmental problems are often reduced to a catch‐22 that portrays sustainability‐oriented policies as disastrous for resource sector workers. Despite efforts by many industry leaders to frame climate change in “jobs versus environment” terms, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP) has supported ambitious greenhouse gas reduction policies. Using interviews with union members and staff, this study examines CEP's climate change framing. It finds that CEP extended the environmental justice master frame to define its response to climate change, neutralize anti‐Kyoto rhetoric, and work with the environmental movement. CEP's framing was accomplished through negotiation processes that continue to unfold as members work out the union's positions relative to their own values, experiences, and interpretations of what is possible. These findings suggest sustainability can be understood as an emergent, localized, and contested social order, and point to “self‐negotiation” in longer‐term social change struggles as a potential area of further study.     

Global Climate Emergency: after COP24, climate science,urgency, and the threat to humanity

ABSTRACT

This Special Editorial on the Climate Emergency makes the case that although we are living in the time of Global Climate Emergency we are not yet acting as if we are in an imminent crisis. The authors review key aspects of the institutional response and climate science over the past several decades and the role of the economic system in perpetuating inertia on reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Humanity is now the primary influence on the planet, and events in and around COP24 are the latest reminder that we live in a pathological system. A political economy has rendered the UNFCCC process as yet a successful failure. Fundamental change is urgently required. The conclusions contain recommendations and a call to action now.     

Action,Technology, and the Homogenisation of Place: Why Climate Change is Antithetical to Political Action

According to Hannah Arendt, the concept of ‘political action’ is a fundamental component of the human condition because it encapsulates how the uniqueness of each human being intersects to create unpredictable political initiatives and effects. Recently, despite being one of the most daunting political challenges ever faced by humanity, there has been a noted collective action failure, or inaction, concerning the global threat of anthropogenic climate change. Why? This article seeks to explain this political inaction in a new way: by examining the metaphysical role that technology plays in disclosing the climate as a thinkable and global object. After applying the philosophy of Martin Heidegger to the complex mathematical general circulation models (GCMs) used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this article details how the metaphysics underlying GCMs manifests the perceivable world by ‘enframing’ it, or by implicitly representing subjects, objects, and Nature itself, as a predictable, calculable, and orderable relation of static forces. When this metaphysical and mathematical uniformity constructs the climate as a calculable object that is globalised through the IPCC, it is ultimately found to be contradictory to the distinctness and unpredictability necessary for distinct human action to occur. Paradoxically, therefore, political action is argued to be metaphysically antithetical to the technologically enframed science, politics, and discourse, of global climate change itself. The importance of distinct and plural human places, when filtered through GCMs, becomes subsumed by the climate as a homogenous, calculative, and politically inactive, global object.     

Climate Change,the Quadrilemma of Globalization,and Other Politically Incorrect Reactions

Abstract

Current global climate change negotiations face some contradictions that are not always addressed as they are considered politically incorrect. These include, first, the decoupling of commitments for planetary environmental policies with the actual national strategies. A relevant example is the Bolivian administration, which presents a strong rhetoric for biospheric Mother Earth Rights, but its national development strategies generate more environmental impacts and weaken enforcement at the local level. Second, the core ideas and beliefs that explain development varieties that generate climate change are deeply rooted, so changes in political ideologies, either from traditional ‘left’ or ‘right’, do not determine policies to effectively overcome climate change. Third, accumulation of scientific information is not enough to promote the necessary changes, because these deep roots conditioned perceived and acceptable alternatives. Fourth, this lead to tensions among the pursuit of economic financial globalization, the sovereignty of the nations-states, democracy, and the basement of global environmental conservation. This is a quadrilemma, because if one or two of these objectives are pursued, at least one other is violated. Nevertheless, international negotiations rest on wishful thinking that this is possible. Uncovering these contradictions is politically incorrect for many realms.     

Climate,class and culture: political issues as cultural signifiers in the US

Since the 1970s, social scientists have argued that general pro‐environmental attitudes have diffused throughout American society, rendering socio‐demographics largely irrelevant in predicting support for such issues. The public reaction to the issue of climate change, however, is an exception to this narrative. While media bias, ideological framing, and business influence are often invoked to explain public apathy, I argue that ignoring class and culture in determining why climate change is so divisive is a potentially significant oversight. Using the cultural theory of Bourdieu, I examine how the conception of and reaction to climate change varies with economic and cultural capital using data from 40 interviews of Boston‐area respondents. The results suggest that climate change may indeed be a ‘classed’ issue – both in how the respondents conceive of it in the first place, and how they speak of social class in the context of it. The results suggest that social scientists should go beyond rational‐choice and media framing explanations, to take two prolific examples, in exploring how disagreements on the importance of climate change persist in the US.     

The Personal Is Scientific,the Scientific Is Political: The Public Paradigm of the Environmental Breast Cancer Movement

This paper introduces the concept of boundary movements to characterize the distinctive growth and strategies of movements involving citizen/science alliances to contend with environmentally related illnesses. This concept is applied to a case study of the environmental breast cancer movement, which has induced changes in treatment options and public perception of breast cancer. Since the early 1990s, a segment of this movement has consistently criticized the traditional paradigms governing research, the epistemology of breast cancer, and popular understandings. Against the traditional focus on genetics, lifestyles, and personal responsibility, this segment's broader messages stress environmental causation and women's participation in science and politics.     

Social Movement,Action and Change: The Influence of Women's Movements on City Government in Mumbai and London

This article reports on a research investigation into gender and local government in Mumbai in India and London in England. In both these cities female representation at the political level stands at around one third, achieved in London slowly in recent years and in Mumbai more rapidly through the adoption of a quota, or seat reservation system, implemented in 1992. In considering the experience of the women concerned it is argued that their presence and aspirations have been influenced through the networks of their respective women's movements, operating through civil society and the local state. In considering the ways in which they organize and manage the duties of office and their gendered identities, as well as in their focus on the most disadvantaged in their communities and in their dealings with others, the part played by social movements in influencing change is examined.     

The changing dynamics of land conflict in the Brazilian Amazon: The rural-urban complex and its environmental implications

The Brazilian Amazon is an area of both serious environmental degradation and social instability. Despite billions of dollars spent on economic development and the rapid pace of urbanization, deforestation is extreme and violent land conflict is intense. Although episodes of conflict over land are common in Brazilian history, this paper focuses on agrarian issues that arose with the opening of the Amazon frontier in the 1970s. The paper argues that the nature of land conflict in the eastern Brazilian Amazon is dynamic, and proposes a two-stage model to illustrate how the struggle has evolved from an agrarian phenomenon to an organized resistance that is urban-based. Recognizing the interaction between cities and rural areas in the frontier reaches of the Brazilian Amazon is key to understanding the land struggle in the face of urbanization. The analytical framework deployed considers the transformation of the region from an agrarian frontier to an urbanized frontier, assessing the dynamic nature of the land struggle and examining the implications for land cover change.     

Resistance,Space and Political Identities: The Making of Counter-Global Networks

Activists in seven US cities were interviewed about why they thought people in their communities mobilized against alcohol-related problems. The data were analyzed in light of the focus on resource mobilization theory in the social movement literature. In contrast with claims that resources are the primary catalyst for change, informants emphasized the role of grievances, and to a lesser extent, bridging factors that caused residents to be more aware of or frustrated by problems, and thus ready for change. Resources seemed to provide necessary but insufficient conditions for explaining movement participation, suggesting that, to be effective, resources must be channeled to address and be linked to the grievous social conditions of inner city communities.     

Organizational Environments, Framing Processes, and the Diffusion of the Program to Address Global Climate Change Among Local Governments in the United States

Few researchers have examined how organizational environments and framing processes simultaneously influence the diffusion of organizational practices. This article combines insight from major perspectives on the diffusion of organizational innovations and from social movement studies, and shows that the adoption of a program to address global climate change by U.S. municipalities is shaped by social contagion and organizational linkages, as well as by the actions of change-promoting agents. The findings emphasize the potential as well as the limitation of the strategic efforts on the part of innovation promoters to frame adoption in a way that will appeal to potential adopters.

Life politics,nature and the state: Giddens' sociological theory and The Politics of Climate Change

Anthony Giddens' The Politics of Climate Change represents a significant shift in the way in which he addresses ecological politics. In this book, he rejects the relevance of environmentalism and demarcates climate‐change policy from life politics. Giddens addresses climate change in the technocratic mode of simple rather than reflexive modernization. However, Giddens' earlier sociological theory provides the basis for a more reflexive understanding of climate change. Climate change instantiates how, in high modernity, the existential contradiction of the human relationship with nature returns in new form, expressed in life politics and entangled with the structural contradictions of the capitalist state. The interlinking of existential and structural contradiction is manifested in the tension between life politics and the capitalist nation‐state. This tension is key for understanding the failures so far of policy responses to climate change.     

The Transnational Tilt of the Treadmill and the Role of Trade Openness on Carbon Emissions: A Comparative International Study, 1965–2010

There are various schools of thought regarding the relationship between the environment and economy. Ecological modernization argues that the harmful effects of economic growth and development on the environment decline through time, whereas the treadmill of production and ecologically unequal exchange postulate different perspectives. This study relies on World Bank and World Resources Institute data for the period of 1965–2010. Time‐series cross‐sectional Prais‐Winsten (PW) regression models with panel‐corrected standard errors (PCSE) are employed to examine whether economic growth and trade openness intensified or decoupled in relation to three measures of carbon dioxide (CO₂₎ emissions during this period. The findings of this study indicate that there has been a “tilt” in the treadmill of production—that is, the most environmentally degrading production processes have moved to less developed countries. Furthermore, integration into the world economy has been associated with an intensification in CO₂ emissions for less developed countries. Surprisingly, however, this phenomenon does not seem to be driven by exports sent to high‐income nations, suggesting that there are mechanisms embodied within the global organization of production that require further exploration.     

Change in Gender‐Ideology, 1977–1996:The Contributions of Intracohort Change and Population Turnover

This paper addresses the processes underlying the dramatic shift in beliefs about women's work and family roles in the United States over the past two decades. Following Mason and Lu (1988) , we posited this shift to be a function of actual change in individual opinions, as well as changes in population membership that result from births and deaths. Using pooled cross‐sections from the General Social Surveys (1977 to 1996), we found that although demographic processes and microlevel attitude change are both important in understanding attitude trends, the contribution of cohort succession is substantially greater now than in the period that Mason and Lu examined. Multivariate analyses show that (a) the sex difference in attitudes is greater among recent cohorts, and (b) the strong association between education and attitudes that characterized earlier cohorts is significantly weaker among cohorts born after 1945.     

Gender,social change,and the professions: The case of pharmacy

This paper examines the nature of increasing female entry into the profession of pharmacy. Using data from a survey of Ontario pharmacists, it compares the work experiences and career paths of 668 men and women in the profession. In terms of hours worked, where they work, and the nature of the work that they do, we found considerable differences between males and females that are becoming increasingly pronounced as more women enter the profession. These findings are then discussed in terms of available theories of gender, professions and social change.     

Welfare,Premarital Childbearing,and the Role of Normative Climate: 1968–1994

Nationally representative, longitudinal survey data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics were used to examine the conditions under which welfare benefit levels affected the likelihood that low‐income women age 15–24 bore their first child prior to marriage. Benefit levels had a positive effect on premarital childbearing during the 1980s and early 1990s but not during the 1970s or late 1960s. The effect of benefit levels was also stronger where community attitudes toward premarital sex were more tolerant than where attitudes were less tolerant, but this did not account for the varying effect of benefit levels over time. The study introduces a new way of measuring normative climate using attitudinal data from the General Social Surveys.     

Bioecological Implications of Narrative Exposure Therapy in Low‐Resource Settings: Individual,Family, Community,and Socio‐Political Contexts

Traumatic stress can have detrimental effects on individuals, families, and communities. Narrative exposure therapy (NET) is an evidence‐based intervention for decreasing individuals’ post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and has been tested in some of the most challenging contexts, such as in post‐conflict refugee camps. Although the focus of NET is on reducing individual PTSD symptoms, the impact of NET can be seen beyond the individual level. The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the ecological implications of using NET with trauma‐affected populations in low‐resource settings. We describe the implications of NET at the family, community, and sociopolitical levels using several case examples. Finally, we outline limitations and future directions for improving the delivery of NET in settings with limited resources.     

The Diffusion of Tolerance: Birth Cohort Changes in the Effects of Education and Income on Political Tolerance

Political tolerance—the willingness to extend civil liberties to traditionally stigmatized groups—is pivotal to the functioning of democracy and the well‐being of members of stigmatized groups. Although political tolerance has traditionally been more common among American elites, we argue that as tolerance has increased, it has also diffused to less educated and less affluent segments of the population. The relative stability of political attitudes over the life course and the socialization of more recent birth cohorts in contexts of increased tolerance suggest that this diffusion of tolerance occurs across birth cohorts rather than time periods. Using age‐period‐cohort models and more than three and a half decades of repeated cross‐sectional survey data, we find persistent and robust across‐cohort declines in the importance of both income and higher education in determining levels of political tolerance. Declines in the effects of socioeconomic status are evident with tolerance toward all five out‐groups in the analysis—anti‐religionists, gays and lesbians, communists, militarists, and racists—but to varying degrees. These findings fit with a model of changes in public opinion, particularly views of civil and political rights, through processes of cultural diffusion and cohort replacement.     

The Reproductive Context of Cohabitation in the United States: Recent Change and Variation in Contraceptive Use

Drawing on data from 2 waves of the National Survey of Family Growth (N = 11,065), the current research addressed 2 overarching questions about the reproductive context of cohabitation in the United States. First, did patterns of contraceptive use among cohabitors change during the last 2 decades of the 20th century? Second, did patterns of contraceptive use among cohabiting women tend to vary by education or race/ethnicity? Results point to a growing resemblance between never‐married cohabiting women and those in first marriages in the likelihood of using a “very effective” contraceptive method and suggest that cohabitation is most “marriage like” with respect to reproductive behavior among the least educated.     

Focusing on Focusing Events: Event Selection,Media Coverage,and the Dynamics of Contentious Meaning‐Making

Despite the prevalent assumption among scholars of social movements and contentious politics that transformative contentious events are also the focus of public attention and discussion, there has been little attempt to substantiate this. After making a case for why to focus on focusing events and suggesting that these events should be thought of as products of a dialogical contentious meaning‐making process, we develop a coverage attribute‐based method for identifying focusing events. For illustrative purposes, we apply our method to the coverage of contentious events during the “first” intifada by Israeli‐Jewish, Jewish settler, and Palestinian newspapers. Findings from analyses of 11,868 news items reveal that newspapers are likely to strategically quiet contentious events that are strategically amplified by newspapers affiliated with opposing or targeted parties, and vice versa, depending on their interpretation of these events as political opportunities or threats. Analyses of variations across and within contending parties reveal the role of structure and agency in the dialogical seesaw‐like dynamics of contentious meaning‐making.