Product Description

"A landmark study in the struggle to contain climate change, the greatest challenge of our era. I urge everyone to read it."
Bill Clinton, 42nd President of the United States of America

Climate change differs from any other problem that, as collective humanity, we face today. If it goes unchecked, the consequences are likely to be catastrophic for human life on earth. Yet for most people, and for many policy-makers too, it tends to be a 'back of the mind' issue. We recognise its importance and even its urgency, but for the most part it is swamped by more immediate concerns. Politicians have woken up to the dangers, but at the moment their responses are mainly on the level of gesture rather than being, as they have to be, both concrete and radical.

Political action and intervention, on local, national and international levels, is going to have a decisive effect on whether or not we can limit global warming, as well as how we adapt to that already occurring. At the moment, however, Anthony Giddens argues controversially, we do not have a systematic politics of climate change. Politics-as-usual won't allow us to deal with the problems we face, while the recipes of the main challenger to orthodox politics, the green movement, are flawed at source. Giddens introduces a range of new concepts and proposals to fill in the gap, and examines in depth the connections between climate change and energy security.

This book is likely to become a classic in the field. It will be of appeal to everyone concerned about how we can cope with what amounts to a crisis for our civilisation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #211539 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780745646930
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"Giddens' is a simple message, argued with great clarity and power, that brings a new dimension to the debate."
Book of the week in the Times Higher Education

"A very useful introduction to the issues, and crucially shifts the focus away from targets and environmentalist frames towards the substance of economic and energy security interests, technology, state intervention and the limitations of the formal international climate negotiations."
Public Policy Research

"As well as providing a useful summary of a number of current debates in climate change policy - from the robustness of carbon markets and green taxes through to the role of government in fostering new technological solutions - Giddens makes a powerful contribution to the emerging debate."
Progress

"The Politics of Climate Change stands out in the crowded terrain of climate change publications by placing politics - rather than science or economics - at the center of the analysis ... there is much to recommend this book. It is up to date, with discussions of the recent global financial crisis and the change of leadership in the US. It takes a multilevel governance perspective on climate change governance and attempts to think about how the various components relate to one another. The book is accessible for the nonspecialist, making it appropriate for use in the classroom."
Environment and Planning C

"How do you create, maintain and renew majorities that encourage people, organisations and institutions to behave responsibly and well, especially when they have become accustomed to behaving irresponsibly and badly? This key question ... underlies everything in Anthony Giddens' important new book, The Politics of Climate Change. Giddens is clear that politicians make things worse by the tactic - much used by Brown in the economic field too - of simultaneously dramatising the threat and then pretending to have the unique measure of it, as the G20 may show."
Martin Kettle, The Guardian

"In challenging the standard criteria used by policy-makers to think about climate change, and by offering an alternative set, Giddens shows how a real national and European debate can finally occupy the political foreground."
Times of Malta

"The prospect of disruptive climate change should be high on the international agenda: it raises issues of politics, economics and equity that are even more complex than the science. This balanced and comprehensive assessment by a distinguished author should be widely read by politicians and policymakers."
Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge

"An incisive and highly original contribution."
Ulrich Beck, University of Munich

From the Back Cover
"A landmark study in the struggle to contain climate change, the greatest challenge of our era. I urge everyone to read it."
Bill Clinton, 42nd President of the United States of America

Climate change differs from any other problem that, as collective humanity, we face today. If it goes unchecked, the consequences are likely to be catastrophic for human life on earth. Yet for most people, and for many policy-makers too, it tends to be a "back of the mind" issue. We recognise its importance and even its urgency, but for the most part it is swamped by more immediate concerns. Politicians have woken up to the dangers, but at the moment their responses are mainly on the level of gesture rather than being, as they have to be, both concrete and radical.

Political action and intervention, on local, national and international levels, is going to have a decisive effect on whether or not we can limit global warming, as well as how we adapt to that already occurring. At the moment, however, Anthony Giddens argues controversially, we do not have a systematic politics of climate change. Politics as usual won't allow us to deal with the problems we face, while the recipes of the main challenger to orthodox politics, the green movement, are flawed at source. Giddens introduces a range of new concepts and proposals to fill in the gap, and examines in depth the connections between climate change and energy security.

This book is likely to become a classic in the field. It will be of appeal to everyone concerned about how we can cope with what amounts to a crisis for our civilisation.

About the Author
Anthony Giddens is the former director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is now a member of the House of Lords. His many books include The Third Way and Europe in the Global Age.

Customer Reviews

Good on climate change, pretty feeble on the politics
This review first appeared on Oxfam's 'From Poverty to Power' blog on http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p

This is definitely the right subject - enough of `if I ruled the world' policy solutions by environmental snake-oil salesmen, what are the politics of getting a breakthrough on climate change in time to stop the earth frying? Giddens' new book even gets in a dig at his fellow LSE peer Nicholas Stern, saying `"Extraordinarily, there is no mention of politics in Stern's discussion, no analysis of power. It is as if the `global deal' will be reached as soon as the nations of the world see reason." Although there is a lot of good stuff in here, sadly, Giddens fails to deliver on the title's promise - lots of policy wonkery and techno-whizzery, but the politics is actually rather thin. Very frustrating.

Here are some of the main arguments:
- he starts off with a sideswipe at the Greens, claiming that their origin as a reaction to industrialization and modernity and insistence on participatory approaches to everything `is now more of a problem rather than any help'. He is particularly critical of the `precautionary principle', aka `better safe than sorry', arguing that when it comes to climate change, its opposite `he who hesitates is lost' is more relevant - hare argues that we must be prepared to take at least some technological risks in battling climate change.
- Similarly, he is critical of the hairshirtists: `most prescriptions are about saving, cutting back, retreating. Many are important, but no approach based mainly upon deprivation is going to work. We must create a positive model of a low carbon future. There is no such model at the moment.'
- He reckons the shock tactics and `politics of fear' practiced by some climate change activists undermines the chance of building a broad coalition, pointing out that Martin Luther King didn't stir people to action by declaring `I have a nightmare.'
- He's big on the state, bigger in fact than when he was when promoting the `Third Way' that so captivated Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. He believes `it will be national policy-making which will in the end determine how much progress really is made.' Climate change, he argues, requires an `ensuring state' not just an enabling one - there are now absolute carbon reduction targets that the state has to meet. However, he defaults to Blairite market-friendly approaches when he criticises the thinking behind the Green New Deal as being too much about governments picking winners.
- He's been listening to yet another LSE peer, Richard Layard: `We can no longer equate progress with economic growth. Above a certain level of affluence, growth no longer correlates highly with wider criteria of welfare. Placing the notion of welfare at the forefront might mesh very closely with climate change goals. Economic growth elevates emissions: what is the point of making a fetish of growth if in some large part it diminishes rather than promotes welfare?' He calls it `over-development' - nice.
- He insists on the need to reunite the debates on climate change and energy security. This is where he sees the real politics at work, (for good or ill) and this is where the solutions to climate change must lie.

Overall, he's much clearer on what he thinks won't work, than what will: he's critical of carbon markets (he prefers carbon taxes, provided their impact on inequality is taken into account). He thinks the Kyoto negotiators are largely wasting their breath, arguing that the process is like the WTO - a few systemically significant `major emitters' being held back from reaching agreement by the need for cat-herding universalism. Instead he thinks progress on reducing emissions (mitigation) will come through the climate equivalent of regional trade agreements between the big emitters, while the UN system channels finance to the poor countries to help them cope with the impacts (adaptation).

So what's missing? There are tantalising glimpses of history, but nowhere near enough substance - what have been the domestic and international conditions that allowed Sweden, Germany and others to get their emissions down in recent decades? Are they replicable or were they driven by specific events, national institutions, traditions etc? What magnitude of shock might shift governments sufficiently (The Great Depression? World War Two?), and where might it come from? What analogous international or national processes can be identified, like arms control, nuclear weapons reductions, bans on chemical warfare etc?

At its heart this shares the same weaknesses as Stern's work - a technocrat's view of climate change, with little emphasis on power or how change actually happens. It's much more about policies, planning and wise governments busily seeking win wins, along with the `peacetime politics' of diplomacy, agenda setting and shaping public opinion. He calls for consensus and urges politicians not to make climate change a party political issue, but has few ideas (beyond standing committees) about how to achieve this. This is exhortation not politics. None of it approaches the kind of radical political and institutional step change that is required to keep emissions within the planet's atmospheric limits.

`We have no politics of climate change' laments the introduction. After Lord Giddens' efforts, we still don't. And it's not as if the NGOs or anyone else really has a convincing answer, so the disappointment really matters. Anyone else want to give it a go?

Carbon taxes better than carbon trading
This book offers to the climate change solution discussion the considerable informed experience of a renowned social scientist, political adviser and modern thinker. The short summary of this book is that national carbon taxes are the way to go, not carbon trading based on big international agreements like Kyoto. Climate action and agreement at the international level, like Kyoto, is unlikely to succeed or to produce significant results. Most fruitful is work at the national level, followed by the regional and bilateral level, where action can be based on self interest and targeted to specific needs and local conditions. New forms of collaboration may well be needed. International universal agreement, as the World Trade Organization has shown, is too hard to reach and too watered down to be meaningful. Going deeper, practical politics needs to be based on the key driving forces on the world scene: economics, energy and security. Projects that can combine two or more of these forces have greater potential, for example, the energy saving work in Germany and Sweden give both energy security and economic advantage. Finally, population control (reduction) and conflict resolution/stability can only be achieved in a convergent world, where poverty is eliminated and nations feel an equal responsibility. Until that time, the rich nations (and the rich segments of poorer nations?) must take the lead and solve their self-created problem. Corollary to this is that Kyoto CDM activities, in which rich nations get credit for carbon reduction projects that they finance in poor nations, are insignificant. What is needed is a complete restructuring of the existing developed nations' own economies to low carbon societies.

The author speaks from the practical experience of top political circles. Politicians and business leaders, who are probably the main intended audience, are well advised to listen. For an environmentally concerned person like myself, the main message is probably: vote for well-thought-out carbon taxes and other measures in your own country and stop hoping for a miracle from Kyoto.

Note: the author could have presented his main ideas in a more focused manner (there is a lot of extraneous material, particularly criticism of others, which detracts from his worthwhile contributions). Archie Duncanson, author of Ecology Begins at Home, [...].