ABSTRACT
Decarbonisation is largely uncontested as the primary goal and institutional paradigm of current climate change governance. It is derived, seemingly unproblematically, from the internationally recognised and agreed requirement to maintain global temperature increases to 2 °C and preferably 1.5 °C. In this sense, decarbonisation has simply become the de facto shorthand for global climate change policy. However, the transformational nature of decarbonisation and its necessary restructuring of the relationships between the global economy and a sustainable global environment are poorly understood by the policymakers who advocate for it. This chapter argues that an important part of the failure to appreciate the necessary scale and speed of change to global economic systems, and their subsequent thorough restructuring, has paradoxically arisen due to the development, stabilisation, and resultant impacts of decarbonisation as it is currently understood. After outlining the current incoherence of decarbonisation, this chapter shows how this both results from, and is maintained by, a series of exclusionary process: the exclusion of (certain) people; the exclusion of nature and particularly climate change itself; and the exclusion of systemic change. This has resulted in a process that is neither inherently transformative nor even desirable as the primary goal of climate change governance.
