SOAS Research Online

Abstract

In a 2018 special report, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the world’s leading climate research body—warned of “catastrophic” outcomes unless states were to undertake “unprecedented” action “across all sectors of society” before 2030. In the years since, hundreds of governments have declared a “climate emergency.” Not surprisingly, then, scholars in many disciplines—from environmental science to economics—have begun to give a more central place to the potential for climate catastrophe and collapse in their research. This book extends this interdisciplinary conversation to the field of normative political theory, investigating what exactly counts as a “climate catastrophe” and what catastrophic climate change portends for contemporary societies. It argues that climate change is politically catastrophic insofar as it threatens to undermine the material conditions that make justice and, by extension, (stable) democratic government possible. It then uses the lens of catastrophe to bring into focus pressing questions about how to navigate trade-offs between fairness and precautionary efficacy in the design of climate policy, the legitimacy of authoritarian climate emergency powers, and the nature and role of climate disobedience. Apart from the specter of nuclear annihilation, human civilization has never had to reckon with a threat so final and encompassing as that of climate catastrophe. This book starts from the premise that, much as “supreme necessity” is thought to alter the contours of what is permissible in war, the credible threat of politically catastrophic climate change upends many of our most basic and widely shared assumptions in liberal and democratic thought.