The climate crisis is upon us, its impacts already felt. As the crisis progresses, countries and political systems will be destabilized; one report has warned that climate breakdown could create over a billion climate refugees by 2050. What kind of politics is adequate to the present moment?
Given the scale of the crisis, it is tempting to argue that some form of “emergency power” must be used to tackle climate breakdown. Perhaps the struggle against climate breakdown should be seen as a “good war”, in which governments rely on executive power—as opposed to the slow democratic process—to push through necessary reforms. The danger in this is that climate breakdown becomes yet another legitimation of expanded state power.
Indeed, as Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann argue in Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future, in place of the classical liberal or neoliberal aim of creating a limited state, the scale of this crisis could birth a new Hobbesian justification for a more powerful state, in which a government’s legitimacy hinges on its ability to protect its citizens from the fallout of rising global temperatures. Perhaps it is even possible, some might say, that the end of democracy is a price worth paying, and the strong Hobbesian state a welcome alternative to the nasty, brutish war of all against all in the face of climate chaos.
Whatever one may make of this argument, implicit within it is a recognition that the capitalist state—a nexus of institutions dominated by fossil capital—will not save us from climate breakdown. To understand why, there are few better guides than Ellen Meiksins Wood.