Description
As if climate change was not challenging enough already, humanity’s efforts to address it are currently unfolding against a backdrop of escalating great power tensions, multiple wars, entrenched authoritarianism, resurgent far-right movements and, not least, a genocide. But what actually are the implications of this extremely fraught geopolitical conjuncture for climate politics? How are today’s international climate negotiations being affected by the terrible wars in Ukraine, the Middle East and elsewhere? And how, more broadly, should we understand the relationships between climate change on the one hand, and such ‘big politics’ on the other? Reflecting on these difficult questions and several decades of work on climate and environmental issues, this paper will argue that both climate change and our responses to it are deeply political, and inevitably shaped by political and conflict contexts. And in light of the ongoing Western-backed atrocities in Gaza plus the re-election of Donald Trump, the paper will also venture a more specific thesis: that if humanity is to successfully transition away from fossil fuels, then a fundamental shift towards a global politics centred upon practices of solidarity, demilitarisation and reconciliation will be required.
