A Critical Conversation on Climate Change ... - Green Choices

‘made in the usa’ – a short history of carbon trading 39Why would that be helpful?Acknowledging and examining these lines of influence – rather thanclaiming that ‘good science’ is somehow immune from them – wouldgive all sides incentives to be more aware of what kind of politicsis involved in any particular research scheme, and what the consequencesare. It could help refocus public attention on the importanceof working to create an environment in which there can be scientificcommunities that ask interesting and varied questions of concern toa wide range of interests in a democratic society, and are not pushedtoo hard into trying to provide impossible escape routes for narrowelites or inveigled into dead-end research programmes, damagingmistakes and acts of self-deception. Such communities would be ableto work among a group of peers who would allow and encouragethem to question received wisdom, to make trouble for neoliberaldoctrine when the scientific need arises, and to have the choice notto answer every policy maker’s or journalist’s demand with an oversimplification.Claiming to be ableto conjure up an‘objective’ scienceoutside any socialcontext isn’t anoption.But what would make that possible?Probably the only way to make a space for a science less restrained byneoliberalism is to work against the dominance of neoliberalism in thewider society. Finessing the problem by claiming to be able to conjureup an ‘objective’ science outside any social context isn’t an option. Asscience scholar Simon Shackley and colleagues observe, scientists mayas well accept politicisation of climate science ‘as a given and find waysto cope constructively with such a political reality’. 23In another example of the interpenetration of politics and climateinquiry, prodding from the US and ‘well-organized social scienceresearch interests’ resulted in orthodox economists capturing muchof the agenda of the IPCC’s Working Group III, charged with definingpossible responses to global warming. 24 The historical and socialroots of climate change were ignored, as were grassroots resourcesfor tackling climate change. Instead, technocrats forecast energy use,modelled the future global economy, collected socioeconomic dataneeded for management ‘solutions’ and toyed with the idea of usingcost-benefit analysis to help make decisions about climate change.On the whole, the tendency was to try to fuse ‘formal mechanisticmodels across the various distinct natural and social science disciplines’25 and to ‘treat society as a single species’. 26The bad (social) science that resulted should not be blamed on bias– even the best-researched and best-defended results would have beenbiased – but on the narrowness and less than democratic nature of