The Politics of Climate Change

Photo courtesy of Good50x70.org

Climate change not only presents us with a major ecological crisis but a global political crisis as well. It is clear from the failure of the Copenhagen talks that the international system of states is too inadequate to enable a response to the challenge of climate change. Many people blame political leaders for the failure of these discussions, but the problem is not our leaders (many of whom seem to be genuinely concerned with responding to climate change). The problem is the system of competing states, the international system, which has come to define the general political climate. The global capitalist system that we know today has grown up through competition and negotiation between states, facilitated by international law. However, because the international system is premised on competition, it makes it difficult for coalitions of states to band together to address common problems.

I think that climate change calls for a new political ecology. This problem is like nothing the human race has ever faced before: it is global in scope and potentially cataclysmic in its effects. The political system of competing states that we have at the moment prevents us from even responding to the problem. Our only hope is to transform the political workings that are currently in place. Fortunately, this is not as difficult as it sounds: the infrastructure that will enable this transformation is already in place and the process is underway. The use of the internet is not so much a new idea for tackling climate change as it is an attempt to focus attention on how new internet technologies are already transforming the way that people all over the world understand themselves as empowered political agents. I think that in the next few years we will see global climate action networks start to play an increasingly powerful role in world affairs, as people come to appreciate the impotence of the international state system for tackling climate change. The way ahead lies in global grassroots action, coordinated through online platforms for participation. If we continue with politics as usual, there is no hope for the future.

The internet is rapidly evolving from a space for sharing information to a space for collaboration. The open source movement is leading this development. Ten years ago, “open source” was a collaborative approach to designing software online. Today open source is becoming a generalized “culture”–an attitude and approach to designing innovative solutions to all sorts of problems, used in business, government, and the non-profit sector. My thought is that an open source approach to the war on global climate change could transform the nature of this struggle. Currently people all over the planet are waiting for their governments to take action on this problem. For people who care about the future of the planet, it is deeply frustrating to see how slowly the process is going, but we don’t need to wait for governments to fight this war themselves. By setting up a series of online platforms for collaboration that would enable people to freely contribute to the grassroots struggle against climate change, we would not only encourage all sorts of new ideas, interventions, and initiatives; we would also facilitate the kind of global transformation in political consciousness that I was speaking of before. By working and creating together across borders, acting towards a common goal, people would come to realize a new form of political identity beyond the nation state.

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