Arresting dangerous climate change, stemming species extinctions, decarbonising our civilisation: this must be a common political project if life on this planet is to survive. However, such a project will necessarily involve agonism and conflict; it will be achieved through both new forms of cooperation and ongoing contestation, through a ‘cosmopolitics’ that admits (many different) humans, nonhumans and things, present, absent, living, inorganic, powerful and less powerful, by making politics receptive to the disturbances they create. It will involve amplifying marginalised voices and creating new forms of solidarity and governance to confront the dystopian power of big energy, big farming, big finance, and fossil fuel capitalism. Planet Politics must be simultaneously a practice of governance and of subversion, of regulation and resistance, at multiple scales and locales. Indeed as resistance it is already underway, but as governance it is struggling to be born. Planet Politics must be very different from the elitist and state-centric global governance that is today’s handmaiden of extinction. 3. Diplomacy, as an institution, is failing Long ago, Hedley Bull argued that Diplomacy was one of the five key ‘institutions’ of international society, alongside International Law, Great Powers, the Balance of Power, and War.29 Diplomacy is carried out by official representatives of states and transnational institutions also created by states. Corporations have lobbied, bought, and bribed themselves into the game. Everyone else is an NGO, or worse, a person, a nothing. And non-human species, oceans, ecosystems – the very living complexity of the planet – have no status at all. Bull’s ‘institutions’ are the action-actor-artifacts of contemporary international society, the subjects and objects that we abjectly depend on to solve the planet’s problems. Below we speak of what must change in international law; how is diplomacy contributing to acknowledging and addressing the gravity of the imminent ecological collapse? Diplomacy has provided the United Nations Framework Convention (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. These are international society’s sole treaty bulwark against the sixth extinction and a potential future of unchecked climate change that the International Institute of Strategic Studies asserted would be ‘catastrophic – on the level of nuclear war’.30 Negotiated in 1997 but not in force until 2005, Kyoto was originally a modest commitment by a small group of countries to cut emissions over four years; it has since been extended to the end of 2020 – just five years away – and has achieved cuts of 29% below business as usual. Yet global emissions as a whole soared by 40% to 2009 and have risen to historically unprecedented levels since. Current emissions trends are tracking towards an average warming of 3.7-5.5°C over pre-industrial levels. If the earth warms 3 degrees, the Arctic ice sheet will melt, triggering a rise in sea levels of 7 metres.31 Leading climate scientists are also warning that international society’s assumed ceiling for emissions and ‘dangerous’ climate change (~1000 gigatonnes of carbon (GtC) or 2°C) will, in fact, ‘spur “slow” feedbacks and eventual warming of 3–4°C with disastrous consequences’. Instead we must limit atmospheric greenhouse gases to ~500 GtC or 350 ppm of CO2 – which means dramatically reducing existing concentrations rather than continuing to emit more, given that measurements of over 400 ppm were recorded in 2015.32 The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is reviewing the 2 degree target, but this process remains bogged down in political maneuvering.33 Indeed the miraculous appearance of the ‘safe space’ target of 1-1.5 degrees in the preamble to the 2015 Paris agreement – albeit in a way that is nonbinding and subject to further investigation by the IPCC – exemplifies the profound tensions between the needs of the planet and our global diplomatic mechanisms.34 The 1.5 degree target appeared in the agreement due to the combined pressure of scientists, global civil society, and climate-vulnerable states. Yet it is still not a formal goal, and we fear it may never become one. Furthermore, even the text of the Paris agreement notes that the ‘nationally determined contributions’ volunteered by states will fail to keep global warming within 2 degrees let alone 1.5.35 In short, nearly two decades after Kyoto, states have yet to agree to binding emissions reductions that will prevent dangerous climatic change according to the best contemporary advice of earth system scientists. Objects in this mirror are closer than they appear. We can acknowledge the diplomatic achievement of France, the United States and China in preventing the Paris meeting from being a complete failure, and for opening a door to more stringent action in the future.36 At the same time, the UN-based system has presided over an alarming increase in emissions in the three decades since the gravity of the climate crisis was comprehensively identified; emissions that may lock in devastating changes to the biosphere that will be difficult to avoid. This system is still based on consensus and delay, allowing spoilers enormous influence; it still keeps the voices of scientists, civil society and indigenous peoples on the margins; it fails to integrate environmental, security and economic governance, or harmonise them in normative terms; and it has no effective mechanisms to admit the claims of the nonhuman. And beyond the problem of climate, a coordinated, accountable, and democratic global machinery to protect crucial ecosystems, restore oceans, end deforestation, and ensure breathable air remains far off – fractured between states, corporate lobbies, and weak and fragmented international organisations kept separate from the ‘real business’ of global economic and security governance.37 Policy elites still talk and think as if their agency matters and is morally unproblematic; as if, clad in the armature of the state and striding purposefully though his own institutions, Cartesian ‘Man’ can continue to dictate to the planet. This attitude was exemplified by comments by the Indian environment minister after the 2014 Lima Accord,38 who argued for the Paris agreement to provide developing countries ‘equitable carbon space to achieve sustainable development’39 – as if the atmosphere can be divided up according to the principles of state sovereignty, as if there is any atmospheric space left. The biosphere cannot be traded, divided or bargained away. It is not a product, nor a monetary or diplomatic artifact, amenable to state compromises and quantification. When earth system scientists are warning that the safe limit for atmospheric carbon concentrations is 50 ppm less than current levels, the continued commitment of the UNFCCC to market mechanisms is fetishistic and bizarre. When there can be no emissions to trade, there can be no global emissions trading system. While it is possible to count tonnes of emissions and parts per million of CO2, it is not possible to count non-linear events and unpredictable feedbacks, and the cascading ecosystem and social damage that will ensue. The true moral disaster of extinction cannot be measured in numbers of species lost and billions of animal dead, but in the irreversible devastation to worlds that it represents. In the near term, we will have to work with flawed institutions, but the gravity of this crisis means that it is right to demand more profound and systemic change, and to explore, in politics and in scholarship, what that change should be. Diplomacy will remain in some form a part of global solutions, but as an established institution it is failing us because the crisis we face demands fundamental change in the underlying system and its commitments, of which diplomacy is an epiphenomenon. Diplomacy is the visible hands of a watch running down, when what must be done is not merely expose its interior workings, but to re-imagine our entire structure of social-political time. This time is both much longer than our contemporary horizons, taking in hundreds and thousands of years, and much shorter, requiring ameliorative action that should have begun yesterday. The planet’s watch is ticking ever louder, and too many diplomats and statesmen seem deaf to it; deaf to the running down of the world and the voices of those most affected by melting glaciers, rising waters, and drying continents.
Arresting dangerous climate change, stemming species extinctions, decarbonising our civilisation: this must be a common political project if life on this planet is to survive it will be achieved through both new forms of cooperation and ongoing contestation, through a ‘cosmopolitics’ that admits humans, nonhumans by making politics receptive to the disturbances they create amplifying marginalised voices and creating new forms of solidarity and governance to confront the dystopian powe Planet Politics must be very different from the elitist and state-centric global governance that is today’s handmaiden of extinction Diplomacy as an institution is failing how is diplomacy contributing to acknowledging and addressing the gravity of the imminent ecological collapse? The 1.5 degree target appeared in the agreement due to the combined pressure of scientists, global civil society, and climate-vulnerable states. Yet it is still not a formal goal, and we fear it may never become one the UN-based system has presided over an alarming increase in emissions in the three decades since the gravity of the climate crisis was comprehensively identified; emissions that may lock in devastating changes to the biosphere that will be difficult to avoid. This system is still based on consensus and delay, allowing spoilers enormous influence it still keeps the voices of scientists, civil society and indigenous peoples on the margin fails to integrate environmental, security and economic governance, or harmonise them in normative terms; and it has no effective mechanisms to admit the claims of the nonhuman. a coordinated, accountable, and democratic global machinery to protect crucial ecosystems, restore oceans, end deforestation, and ensure breathable air remains far off – fractured between states, corporate lobbies, and weak and fragmented international organisations kept separate from the ‘real business’ of global economic and security governance Policy elites still talk and think as if their agency matters and is morally unproblematic as if clad in the armature of the state and striding purposefully though his own institutions, Cartesian ‘Man’ can continue to dictate to the planet. The biosphere cannot be traded, divided or bargained away. It is not a product, nor a monetary or diplomatic artifact, amenable to state compromises and quantification When there can be no emissions to trade, there can be no global emissions trading system. While it is possible to count tonnes of emissions and parts per million of CO2, it is not possible to count non-linear events and unpredictable feedbacks, and the cascading ecosystem and social damage that will ensue. The true moral disaster of extinction cannot be measured in numbers of species lost and billions of animal dead, but in the irreversible devastation to worlds that it represents. demand more profound and systemic change, and explore in politics and in scholarship, what that change should be Diplomacy is failing us because the crisis we face demands fundamental change in the underlying system and its commitments, of which diplomacy is an epiphenomenon The planet’s watch is ticking ever louder, and too many diplomats and statesmen seem deaf to it; deaf to the running down of the world and the voices of those most affected by melting glaciers, rising waters, and drying continent