climate change - ReviseSociology

America’s Climate Change Bill

The United States recently introduced a huge climate change bill which promotes investment in green energy through indirect subsidies. This bill represents one the largest state-level investments in green energy in history and seems to suggest we are moving away neoliberal models of development.

The green-subsidies are included in the broader Inflation Reduction Act which came into force in August 2022 and is primarily designed to tackle climate change through boosting the country’s green energy sector, mostly through indirect subsidies in the form of tax credits.

The main aims of the bill are to reduce carbon emissions and create millions of new jobs in the green energy sector, in industries such as manufacturing solar panels, wind turbines, heat pumps and carbon capture technologies.

The bill is also designed to help the U.S. reduce its reliance on imports from China, in a process it calls ‘onshoring’, and there is hope that it will encourage trillions of dollars in private investment into manufacturing green technologies.

To give a specific example, the U.S. now offers a tax credit of $7500 for buyers of most electric and hydrogen powered cards. However, this is conditional on final assembly taking place in the U.S. or other countries which have free-trade treaties with the U.S. such as Canada and Mexico.

There are also a ‘domestic-content’ rules: the more components and raw materials sourced in America, the higher the tax-credit, but there are no credits available if if critical minerals have been sourced from ‘foreign entities of concern’ such as China, Russia or Iran.

It is estimated that the IRA will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 10% more than if it hadn’t been passed.

In the six months since the bill was passed there has already been $89 billion of investment into the green energy sector, and 100 000 new jobs created. Companies such as BMW, Honda, and Tesla have either moved manufacturing of batteries to the U.S. or are considering a move.

The end of Neoliberalism?

This policy shift feels like we are moving away from the neoliberal development model in which nation states do less. Here we have the United States government actively supporting, selectively, green technology.

Maybe climate change is such an important global issue that we need co-ordination at the level of the nation state.

Limitations of the Climate Change Bill

Indirect subsidies are protectionist and they distort the free market.

Even after only six months green tech companies are already pulling out of Europe and seeking to relocate the the United States, meaning that this policy is hurting U.S. allies as well as its perceived ‘enemies’ such as China.

When nation states provide subsidies it can promote something of a ‘race to the bottom’ among competitors, with the EU already considering its own Green Deal Industrial Plan, simplifying regulation for green companies.

The bill potentially violates World Trade Organisation free trade rules, and the EU is challenging it on these grounds.

And let’s not forget, where manufacturing is concerned, green energy isn’t necessarily than green: there is a lot of metal and plastic in wind turbines and batteries, and a lot of toxic-chemical processes that go into their manufacture, and we haven’t exactly figured out a pollution free strategy for storing used-batteries when they are past their use-by date.

In other words, light regulation now might not be an effective way of promoting green development in the greener sense of the world.

While lowering emissions will benefit developing countries more (because they are more exposed to the extreme consequences of global warming) this kind of development is all about developed countries in economic terms.

The bill only passed the senate by one single vote and it had to be ‘disguised’ in a larger ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ which included a range of other measures on healthcare and tax.

There is still plenty of political resistance to state-subsidies for green technology, meaning the bill could be watered down or countered by subsidies for petrochemical industries in future years.

Signposting

This material is mainly relevant to the global development and globalisation module, sometimes taught during the second year of A-level sociology.

Wiki Entry: America’s Climate Reduction Act

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COP 27 – A Sociological Analysis

COP 27 – where 198 nations met to discuss climate change and agreed to do very little about it!

36 000 people representing 198 nations, companies, international organisations and civil society met in Egypt in November 2022 to try and agree further commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and slow down global warming, but little progress was made.

This post summarises the outcomes and applies some sociological concepts to this contemporary event.

What is COP 27?

Cop stands for ‘Conference of the Parties’ who meet to discuss actions to combat climate change under the United Nations Conference on Climate Change. In 2022 this was attended by representatives of 198 countries and several other representative from companies, international organisations and civil society groups.

2022 was the 27th international meeting on Climate Change since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, this year it was held in Egypt and was attended by 35 000 people.

Paris 2015

The 2015 COP meeting in Paris was especially signficant because this was the first time countries agreed to try and reduce global warming to within 1.5 degrees of pre-industrial levels by the year 2030.

Nationally Determined Contributions

Nationally Determined Contributions or NDCs are fundamental to reducing global emissions and keeping the rate of global warming in check. They are specific country agreements which contain policy measures countries are prepared to implement to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

Countries are supposed to publish these regularly, but only 24 had published revised NDCs since the previous COP meeting in Glasgow in 2021 and only 54 countries have long-term plans for reducing dependence on fossil fuels.

Main Outcomes of COP 27

The main outcomes of Cop 27 were:

The creation of a loss and damage fund to compensate developing countries for the disproportionate damage they have suffered from climate change caused primarily by developed countries which have been the main beneficiaries of the wealth generated by the industrial revolution. However there are no details of who is going to contribute, when, to what organisations or how much money is involved.

Countries failed to agree to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to hit the 1.5 degree increase by 2020 target, although in the last year a few countries have got more ambitious and so now we are on target to only increase out emissions by 10% rather than 13%.
Countries failed to commit to phasing out all fossil fuels, although they recommitted to phasing out the use of coal which had been introduced as part of Cop 26 in Glasgow.
There was a commitment to scale up the use of low emission energy, although gas might be redefined as low emission because it’s less toxic than goal and oil.

There was a recommitment by developed countries to provide $100 billion in funding to developing countries to help them adapt to climate change by funding projects such as sea defences and reforestation. However only $20 billion in funding has been provided since this was first agreed in 2021 and this year some countries tried to remove this commitment.
There are plans in place to restructure the World Bank so that it can provide funding to developing countries to help them adapt to climate change.
Copy 27 recognised that there might be ‘tipping point’s as the climate warms – once we get above a certain temperature things might get rapidly worse as climate change doesn’t happen in a smooth and linear fashion. They also recognised that climate change has a negative impact on people’s health which is a basic human right.

Criticisms of COP 27

Great Thunberg didn’t attend COP 27 because she accused the attendees of Greenwashing which is where governments use the international conference to make it appear like they are doing something about Climate Change but in reality they are not.

If you look back at the ‘achievements’ above you can clearly see that while these commitments are dressed up as ‘progress’ in reality very little has been achieved since Paris in 2015.

More radical climate activists such as Great Thunberg and organisations such as 350.0rg believe that we need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels much ore rapidly and that it is possible to transition to fully renewable energy supplies such as solar and wind much sooner than 2030, but there just isn’t the political will to do so.

Sociology applied to COP 27

COP 27 is an example of globalisation in action as this is one of the largest international meetings in history, attended by representatives of nearly every country on earth.

There is very little substance to any of the actions agreed upon at COP 27 and specific progress towards reducing our reliance on fossil fuels remains extremely limited. This suggests that if there is any kind of consensus at the level of national governments (or nation states) then that consensus is to do relatively little about getting global warming under control by 2030.

Nation States seem more committed on prioritising economic growth and poverty alleviation and setting up resilience funds to help poor countries deal with the negative effects of climate change, rather than a radical shift away from fossil fuels, suggesting support for the Marxist view that nation states are in alliance with the polluting fossil fuel companies.

There is a considerable portion of civil society (i.e. ordinary people) who think governments aren’t doing enough fast enough to combat global warming and climate change. For example Just Stop Oil have been active recently shutting down motorways, mainly representing the young rather than the old, and another organisation is 350.0rg who believe that a much faster transition to renewable energy is possible!

Anthony Giddens has said that Nation States are too small to deal with global problems – maybe we are seeing that here – while some nation states have committed to reducing emissions, most have not, and there’s not very much the committed states can do to force the others into following suit!

Signposting

The environment and development is one of the topics within the Global Development option on the AQA’s A-level sociology specification.

Sources

UK Parliament: House of Lords Library: COP 27 Progress and Outcomes

The Guardian: What are they key outcomes of COP 27 climate agreement?

United Nations: COP 27

Is the Environmental Crisis Built on Systemic Racism..?

You’re more likely to live next to a waste incinerator in the UK if you’re black compared to if you’re white, and thus more likely to be breathing in toxic fumes.

The same trend is also true globally: ‘people of colour’ living in the global south are more likely to suffer environmental harms associated with climate changed compared to the majority white populations of the global north.

This is according to a recent report: Confronting Injustice: Racism and the Environmental Emergency jointly published in 2022 by Greenpeace and The RunnyMede Trust.

This report makes the very dramatic claim the current environmental crisis is based on a history of systemic racism rooted in Colonialism and in this post I summarise this report and suggest some limitations of it.

The Environmental Crisis is Built on Systemic Racism…

(Quite a claim!)

The report notes that it is mainly countries in the global south – mainly Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Africa – which have to bear the costs of global warming. It is these poorer countries which suffer economic setbacks because of increased sea level rises flooding land and destructive ‘extreme weather events’ such as cyclones. The report estimates that Mozambique, in Southern Africa suffered more than $3 Billion of environmental damages in 2019, for example.

Another dimension of ‘environmental racism’ is how the mainstream media under-reports man-made environmental humanitarian disasters in the global south compared to ‘white victories’ such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos space flight programmes….

And one further example lies in how Indigenous activists lives are put in danger.

Colonialism, Extractivism and Racism

The report also highlights three case studies of how colonial powers set up in developing countries (then simply their colonies) and systematically went about displacing indigenous peoples in order to extract resources for profit.

The three examples provided are Shell extracting Oil in Nigeria, and the displacement of the Ogoni people; the destruction of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and the establishment of meat and soy production and also the establishment of industrial scale fishing in Western Africa which has ruined local communities which used to rely on small scale fishing.

The report also covers the waste aspect of Environmental Racism – countries such as the UK tend to ship their toxic waste to poorer countries who often have lower pollution standards – so poor people end up recycling metal from plastic by burning the plastic for example….

Find out More…

There is more in the report such as how environmental racism works in the UK and how we can tackle climate change by simultaneously tackling racism in society, and I recommend you give it read: Confronting Injustice: Racism and the Environmental Emergency.

Relevance to A-Level Sociology

This contemporary report is clearly relevant to the Environment topic within the Global Development module, and you will also find lots of supporting case studies which support Dependency Theory.

In terms of social theory, this is a great contemporary example of ‘grand theorising’ – there’s nothing postmodern about this, and in fact reports leading to theorising such as this implicitly criticise the concept of postmodernity.

Global Warming and the threat to Human Development

This post explores the extent to which Global Warming poses a threat to continued social and economic development.

According to the latest data from Climate.gov global warming is currently causing sea levels to rise by 0.3 centimetres a year, which means that sea levels may have risen by up to 2.5 metres by 2100.

A recent report by Climate Central (2019) suggests that 300 million people live in areas that will be subject to severe flooding due to climate change, China and Bangladesh have the most people living in at-risk areas.

The Polynesian Island of Tuvalu, population 11 000, is on the frontline of Sea Level Rise – located in the Pacific Ocean this is a thin slip of an Island where the residents are now struggling to survive because of rising sea levels. This Guardian article (2019) takes an in-depth look the problems the residents face. There is a very real chance all of these people could end up being climate change refugees within the next decade. NB the United Nations is aware of their plight, but it’s difficult to see what we can do that is practical.

This documentary from 60 Minutes Australia (2019) explores the rapid disappearance of parts of the Solomon Islands, where sea levels have increased by up to 15 centimetres in the last 20 years:

From a research methods perspective this is interesting as one researcher used old photos to compare where some of the islands used to be compared to their reduced sizes today; and there are also interviews with people who grew up on the islands – some of the places they used to picnic as kids are now gone forever, completely under water!

The Global Climate Risk Index is a useful broader source than the above – it focuses more on all extreme weather events, so not just flooding (also droughts and extreme weather events).

NB – just to reiterate that the latest modelling suggests that if anything sea levels are rising FASTER than previously projected, so these problems are set to get worse!