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

40 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingthe political process that guided and constituted the research. Correspondingly,insofar as the bad science that came out of WorkingGroup III was challenged at all, it was countered most effectivelyby a political movement that put that narrow process in perspective,not a demand from within the profession of orthodox economics forgreater ‘objectivity’.How was the challenge made?In 1995, economists in Working Group III, using data on how muchmoney different groups spent to avoid risk of death, calculated thevalue of a statistical life of a US citizen at usd 1.5 million and thatof a statistical life of a ‘developing country’ citizen at usd 100,000.The economists used these calculations to suggest that climate changewould cause twice as much ‘socio-economic’ damage to the industrialisedcountries as to the rest of the world. The figures touched off afurore among Southern delegations to the UNFCCC, who contestedthis interpretation of their countries’ citizens’ appreciation for safety.The calculations were sent back to their authors. 27Despite such setbacks, much of the IPCC’s work had the effect ofmaking climate change seem potentially manageable by private andpublic sector institutions including oil companies and the WorldBank, and by means of neoliberal approaches generally. It became‘politically incorrect’ to enquire whether radical social change mightbe necessary to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations to a safer level.What was needed, it was implied, was to unleash the productivepowers of private sector companies in the service of climatic stability.For corporations, this was the positive, opportunity-creating aspectof the ‘knowledge fix’.But the story is far from one-sided. Viewed from another angle, theestablishment of the IPCC was itself an admission of the difficultyof reconciling the climate problem with business as usual. And thevery constraints inherent in having to pursue a highly centralised,self-censoring, compromise science meant that results indicating thereality of climate change – when they did come in from bodies suchas the IPCC – were hard for the US and many large corporations tohandle.So this particular US attempt to block or shape public awareness of climatechange was double-edged.Very much so. It backfired so badly, in fact, that in the end variousruling factions in the US became dissatisfied with the very body – theIPCC – that the US had been so influential in setting up in order to