Climate science, the politics of climate change and futures of IR
| Author | Richard Beardsworth |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0047117820946365 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117820946365
International Relations
2020, Vol. 34(3) 374 –390
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117820946365
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Climate science, the politics
of climate change and
futures of IR
Richard Beardsworth
University of Leeds
Abstract
This article considers what is necessary politically to respond to the empirical challenge of climate
change and to the present calls of climate science (a carbon-neutral world by 2050). Its basic
argument is that, among an array of national and international actors, it remains the state that
can drive a successful politics of climate change. Without the heavy-lifting of the state and the
state’s ability as a national entity to motivate behavioural change, neither the daunting scale nor
imminent time-horizon of climate mitigation and adaptation is possible. The article shows how
this specific argument, far from pitching anew nationalism against internationalism, can bring the
two presently polarized movements together. The article then suggests that if these arguments
are essentially valid, the discipline of International Relations needs to focus much more on the
climate challenge, re-engage with its traditions of thought on the state and help harbour a specific
disposition or mindset in the research and teaching of the discipline for the next decades: a fierce
optimism.
Keywords
climate science, fierce optimism, governance, political agency, politics of climate change
Introduction
The special report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in October
2018 made three calls.1 It rehearsed the importance of keeping to a global average
increase in temperature of 1.5°C relative to pre-industrial levels (rather than the previous
2°C agreed in Copenhagen in 2009 and ratified in Paris in 2015). It established the need
for a 50 percent reduction in global CO2eq emissions by 2030 if this goal was to be
achieved. It concluded with an urgent call for appropriate political response.2 The report
thereby confirmed two close relations at this historical juncture: the relation between
Corresponding author:
Richard Beardsworth, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK.
Email: r.beardsworth@leeds.ac.uk
946365IRE0010.1177/0047117820946365International RelationsBeardsworth
research-article2020
Article
Beardsworth 375
global warming and anthropogenic emissions, and the relation between climate science
and the need for political action to resolve the former relation. Greenhouse gas emissions
have nevertheless continued to go up since 2018 by 1.5 percent (percent since 2015 the
in temperature of 1.5°C has become all the more daunting in terms of both time and
scale. The IPCC special report accelerated a broad social movement asking for ‘climate
action now’: foremost in the northern hemisphere, student climate strikes, led by the
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, and Extinction Rebellion. This activism has also been
mirrored by multiple Climate Emergency calls at municipal levels of government and by
accelerating arguments for a Green New Deal (invoking the New Deal of the 1930s).4
The present global pandemic, COVID-19, is also being increasingly tied to climate
change and climate action. The everyday, corporal recognition that there has been a
global shock to the system has precipitated a collective desire for forms of reflection and
action that focus on wellbeing and a regenerative economy. A consensus may also have
begun to form, during a period of populism in which emotions have trumped rational
argument and decision-making, that the authority of science has again become the most
trustworthy. There is, finally, a growing sense that government is still able – despite
many protestations to the contrary on the Right, but also on the Left of the political spec-
trum – to deliver a political response to a global challenge that is appropriate in time and
scale to the nature of the challenge. In sum, from the autumn of 2018 to the spring of
2020, the vital nature of the relationship between climate change and political action has
been put in diverse ways to the foreground of societal concern. The question remains
whether this relation can be effectively rehearsed in time and at scale to prevent catastro-
phe: that is, the question remains not only whether a political response to climate change
is still possible within the parameters given but what political response is appropriate and
what political agency is necessary that can make the first question of ‘whether’ less
immediate. Against the background of a rapidly changing social landscape, the following
article rehearses this relation between the empirical challenge of climate change, on the
one hand, and the nature of our normative response to it through politics, on the other.
The article is divided into three sections. The first section considers the main points
of climate science in the IPCC special report of 2018 and unties the major implications
lying behind them from a social science perspective, particularly that of political theory
and International Relations (IR).5 The second section considers what kind of politics is
necessary to address the scale of the challenge and the time-horizon it sets. My argument
is essentially that the state must constitute the vital agent of political change for the next
decades ahead, both nationally and internationally. That said, state action can only be
effective if it proves able to provide a vision and a plan that integrates solutions to the
climate challenge as well as a canopy/steer for other types of agency to accelerate their
own actions through this vision and plan (from the action of individuals and local com-
munities to international institutions). These two sections pick up many of the themes of
this Special Issue (SI) on ‘Facing Human Interconnections: Thinking IR into the Future’:
in particular, human interconnectedness, the interconnected nature of global challenges
and alternative futures and governance. It emphasizes the importance of the next three
decades within the forthcoming century specifically. It is in the context of this emphasis
on the next three decades that the third section specifically focuses on the SI theme of the
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