An Inconvenient Democracy: Knowledge and Climate Change

Abstract

The dispute about climate change, its repercussions for the world, alternative conceptions of (historical and moral) responsibility and effective ways of responding is of course a profound and highly controversial socio-political issue, not in all but in some countries, in particular. The political controversies linked to the nature and the responses of climate change are of course deeply embedded in contradictory political world views, for example, the clash between conservative and liberal positions that advocate the withdrawal of the state from many of the affairs of society or those who see the solution to the thorny issues of climate change as responses that must comewithmore and deeper interventions of the state into the market and social behavior generally. Throughout modern history, one encounters assertions about a withering away of politics and the replacement of the reign of power of men over men with the authority of scientific knowledge. Without identifying himself with the position in question, the economist Frank H. Knight (1949:271) refers to a naive positivistic conception of the relation between scientific knowledge and societal problems that is repeated many times in the context under discussion: “Science has demonstrated its capacity to solve problems, and we need only understand that those of the social order are of the same kind.”With the emergence of urgent global environmental problems a new or a recall of an old vision for the role of scientific knowledge in political governance is becoming evident. The grand vision for the new political role of scientific knowledge is, in turn, embedded in a broad disenchantment about the practical efficacy of democracy, the conviction that the public is unable to comprehend the nature of the problems faced by humankind but also a misconception about the societal role of knowledge, in particular, scientific knowledge. As a result, convictions expressed about the fundamental deficiency of democratic governance—in light of profound problems humankind faces and must deal with—stand in essential contradiction to another form of alarm and strong doubt expressed about threats to democracy posed by experts, the very experts who warn humankind and policymakers about the immense dangers to modern societies by