Toward a Political Economy of Neoliberal Climate Science

Perhaps even more than the other types of “nature” that are said to constitute the subject matters of the sciences, “the climate”, “climate change” and “the climate system” are often construed today as monoliths, essentialized and externalized from a similarly block-like “society”. Policymakers, environmentalists and flood refugees are commonly understood to be connected to an independently-coherent natural world of climate through interaction points across which biophysical processes are held to impinge on an otherwise relatively self-enclosed social or human world. This is seen to happen in two ways. The first is through brute “external shocks to social and environmental systems” (Taylor 2015: 32; see also Hulme 2011) to which society must “adapt”. The second is through representation of those “external” biophysical processes or systems within various “internal cultural frames” (Taylor 2015: 39), notably those of a climate-scientist profession commonly understood to have a privileged method for interpreting signals passing through interfaces with nature (Rouse 2002) while filtering out static from society. Conversely, human influence on climate is seen, as Marcus Taylor puts it, as an “outside ‘forcing’ to an otherwise coherent model of atmospheric dynamics” (Taylor 2015: 38). Changes in a climate pre-formulated in terms of heat transfers, CO₂ molecules, cloud albedo and methane clathrates are to be collectively “mitigated” via a management gateway through which a sparsely specified “internal” reorganization of society via energy or economic policy can be focused on a separate physical world. Thus it was considered a normal piece of global policymaking for the 2015 Paris climate agreement to set itself up as a passage-point through which a unitary “international community” would be able to formulate ways to hold global average temperature rise in a similarly black-boxed physical climate system to “well below 2° C above pre-industrial levels” (UNFCCC 2015: 21). In this way, the environmentalist homily that society or the economy depends on and subsists within a climate system, “far from marking humanity's reintegration into the world, signals the culmination of a process of separation” (Ingold 2000: 209) involving distinct systems “locked into an endless dance of adaptation” (Taylor 2015: 39).