Postmodern Climate Change

by Glover; Leigh

• ISBN13: 9780415357340
• ISBN10: 0415357349
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-08-31
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

International responses to the crisis of climate change have been controversial, contentious, and to date, largely unsuccessful. Despite concern and action for over two decades, the global rise in greenhouse gas emissions has yet to be arrested. Leigh Glover argues that efforts by the international community to control climate change using modernity's usual scientific, economic, and governmental tools are inherently flawed, so that the problem of climate change defines modernity's end in ecological terms. This book offers a new way to understand the climate change problem and is concerned with problems of modernity and postmodernity in the context of contemporary environmental thought. Focussing on the international politics surrounding the UN agreement on climate change, the Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol, the author examines this important issue using the key aspects of climate change science, global environmental politics, and global environmental management. This book will be of interest to students and research in fields of environmental politics, environmental theory, political science, and international relations, with an interest in climate change. It will also appeal to those in environmental studies, geography, cultural studies, and other relevant aspects of the social sciences dealing with global environmental governance, global environmental problems, ecological justice, and environmentalism.

Author Biography

Leigh Glover is Policy Fellow at the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy, University of Delaware, USA

Table of Contents

Preface	x
List of abbreviations	xii
1 Climate change and modernity	1	(18)
Introduction	1	(9)
Climate change as crisis	10	(9)
2 Modernity and postmodernity	19	(50)
Modernity	19	(17)
Postmodernity	36	(10)
Postmodernity and environmentalism	46	(19)
Climate change's challenge to modernity	65	(4)
3 Climate change science: modern knowledge of a decreasingly natural world	69	(68)
A history of climate change science	69	(17)
Climate change science and modernity	86	(6)
A political economy of knowledge	92	(12)
Postmodern science	104	(22)
Post-normal science	126	(11)
4 Climate change governance: an international liberal-democratic system	137	(74)
Devising a system for global climate governance	137	(30)
Liberal-democratic climate governance	167	(14)
Political economy of the FCCC	181	(11)
Searches for ecological justice in the greenhouse	192	(19)
5 Global environmental management of climate	211	(31)
Growing threats and expanding goals	212	(12)
Global climate management	224	(7)
Political and economic interests in global climate management	231	(2)
Critiques from political ecology	233	(9)
6 Conclusion: climate change and ecological postmodernity	242	(13)
Modernity and ecologism	242	(3)
Climate change and the limits of modernity	245	(5)
Alternative pathways for responding to climate change	250	(3)
Coda: ecological postmodernity	253	(2)
References	255	(28)
Index	283