The prize of peace (is eternal vigilance): a cautionary editorial essay on climate geopolitics

Abstract

Climate change researchers now influence thinking about world politics. There isno clearer recognition of this than the award of the 2007 Noble Peace Prize to theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and to Al Gore J. for “their efforts tobuild up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, andto lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”.Yet power in world politics is an uncomfortable thing, and requires some criticalreflection.It will be asked, sooner or later, if the IPCC and Al Gore Jr, deserved the NobelPrize, since it suggests most strongly that climate change research has advanced thecommon good. Likening them to past winners such as Medecins Sans Frontieres,Amnesty International, and Martin Luther King is apposite: all have raised aware-ness of critical problems, all have advocated peaceful solutions, all can be said tohave done much good, and little if any harm. There is no doubt that without thework of the climate researchers involved with the IPCC—their research and theiradvocacy—society would be blind to the danger that it faces.However, the resulting growth in the awareness of the public and decisionmakers about the problem of climate change poses challenges to the guardiansof the modern institutions that give rise to the problem and are threatened byits solutions. The strategy of OPEC and many energy intensive industries andoil companies in the United States, for example, has been to deny the need forchange by questioning the science and highlighting the risks of responses. Butthere are other institutions at risk too, and principal among these are the securityinstitutions whose ecological footprint makes them a key cause of climate change,and whose dependence on the discourse of an anarchic world without cooperationhas always been a bulwark against the theory and praxis of a world where States