Before Collapse: Climate Change as Political Catastrophe
I recently completed a book project entitled Before Collapse: Climate Change as Political Catastrophe. The manuscript investigates what exactly counts as a “climate catastrophe,” and what catastrophic climate change portends for contemporary societies. While much of the existing literature answers these questions in terms of property damage and human casualties, I draw on empirical studies of societal collapse to develop a more explicitly political account. I argue that climate change is politically catastrophic in the sense that it threatens material scarcity so extreme and enduring that many will be unable to meet their basic needs without denying others the ability to do the same. Under these zero-sum conditions, realizing or sustaining fair and uncoerced forms of social cooperation becomes impossible, thus critically endangering the possibility of stable democratic governance.
Understanding this political dimension of catastrophic climate change provides a revitalized set of motives for undertaking aggressive climate action now: states should act not only to fulfill moral obligations to present and future generations, but also to preserve their own existence by safeguarding the material conditions in which sustaining justice remains possible. Locating the imperative to act on this more existential terrain helps to integrate realist and moralist approaches to climate change. The lens of catastrophe also brings into focus pressing questions about the relative priority of precaution and fairness in responding to climate change, the present value of future welfare when setting emissions prices, the extent to which climate inaction undermines political legitimacy, the justified use of international coercion against climate laggards, and the nature and aim of climate disobedience—all of which I explore in separate chapters.
Apart, perhaps, from the specter of nuclear annihilation, political theory has never had to reckon with a threat so complete and final as that of climate catastrophe. Much as Michael Walzer once argued that “supreme necessity” alters the contours of what is permissible in war, I claim that politically catastrophic climate change upends many of the most widely shared assumptions in liberal and democratic theory.
Understanding this political dimension of catastrophic climate change provides a revitalized set of motives for undertaking aggressive climate action now: states should act not only to fulfill moral obligations to present and future generations, but also to preserve their own existence by safeguarding the material conditions in which sustaining justice remains possible. Locating the imperative to act on this more existential terrain helps to integrate realist and moralist approaches to climate change. The lens of catastrophe also brings into focus pressing questions about the relative priority of precaution and fairness in responding to climate change, the present value of future welfare when setting emissions prices, the extent to which climate inaction undermines political legitimacy, the justified use of international coercion against climate laggards, and the nature and aim of climate disobedience—all of which I explore in separate chapters.
Apart, perhaps, from the specter of nuclear annihilation, political theory has never had to reckon with a threat so complete and final as that of climate catastrophe. Much as Michael Walzer once argued that “supreme necessity” alters the contours of what is permissible in war, I claim that politically catastrophic climate change upends many of the most widely shared assumptions in liberal and democratic theory.