What kinds of politics are likely to evolve after the promise of growth recedes? A whole pantheon of possibilities floats before us, including that new trade deals are built on the moral infrastructure of climate change, with commerce contingent on emissions cuts and sanctions a punishment for squirrelly carbon behavior; or that a new global legal regime emerges, supplementing or perhaps even supplanting the central principle of human rights that has presided globally, at least in theory, since the end of World War II. But neoliberalism was sold on the proposition of positive-sum cooperation of all kinds, and the term itself suggests its natural successor regime: zero-sum politics. Today, we don’t even have to gaze into the future, or trust that it will be deformed by climate change, to see what that would look like. In the form of tribalism at home and nationalism abroad and terrorism flaming out from the tinder of failed states, that future is here, at least in preview, already. Now we just wait for the storms.
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If neoliberalism is the god that failed on climate change, what juvenile gods will it spawn? This is the question taken up by Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright in Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future, in which they repurpose Thomas Hobbes to sketch out what they see as the likeliest political form to evolve from the crisis of warming and the pummeling of its impacts.
In his Leviathan, Hobbes narrated a false history of political consent to illustrate what he saw as the fundamental bargain of state power: the people giving up their liberty for the protection offered by a king. Global warming suggests the same bargain to would-be authoritarians: in a newly dangerous world, citizens will trade liberties for security and stability and some insurance against climate deprivation, ushering into being, Mann and Wainwright say, a new form of sovereignty to do battle against the new threat from the natural world. This new sovereignty will be not national but planetary—the only power that could plausibly answer a planetary threat.
Mann and Wainwright are leftists, and their book is in part a call-to-arms, but the planetary sovereign the world is likeliest to turn to, they say with regret, is the one that sold us climate change in the first place—that is, neoliberalism. In fact, a neoliberalism beyond neoliberalism, a true world-state concerned close-to-exclusively with the flow of capital—a preoccupation that may poorly equip it to deal with the damages and degradations of climate change, but at no real cost to its authority. This is the “Climate Leviathan” of the title, though the authors do not believe its success is inevitable. In fact, they see three variations as also possible. Altogether, the four categories make up a climate-future matrix, plotted along the axes of relative faith in capitalism (on the one hand) and degree of support for nation-state sovereignty (on the other).
“Climate Leviathan” is the quadrant defined by a positive relationship to capitalism and a negative perspective on national sovereignty. Something like our current situation they call the “Climate Behemoth” outcome, defined by mutual support for capitalism and for the nation-state: capitalism overruns the world’s borders to address the planetary crisis while protecting its own interests.
The next they call “Climate Mao,” a system defined by putatively benevolent but authoritarian and anti-capitalist leaders, exercising their authority within the borders of nations as they exist today.
The last quadrant: capitalistic nations conduct haphazard climate diplomacy—an international system negatively disposed toward both capitalism and the sovereignty of nation-states. This system would define itself as a guarantor of stability and security—ensuring at least a subsistence-level distribution of resources, protecting against the ravages of extreme climate events, and policing the inevitable outbreaks of conflict over the now-more-precious commodities of food, water, land. It would also wipe out entirely the borders between nations, recognizing only its own sovereignty and power. They call this possibility “Climate X,” and express great hope for it: a global alliance operating in the name of a common humanity, rather than in the interests of capital or nations. But there is a dark version as well—it is how you might get a planetary dictator in the shape of a mafia boss, and global governance not on the do-gooder model but as a straight-up protection racket.
In theory, at least. Already, it’s fair to say, we have at least two Climate Mao leaders out there, and both are imperfect avatars of the archetype: Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, neither of whom is anti-capitalist so much as state capitalist. They also hold very different perspectives on the climate future and how to reckon with it, which suggests another variable, beyond form of government: climate ideology. This is how Angela Merkel and Donald Trump, both operating within the “Climate Behemoth” system, can nevertheless seem so many worlds apart—though Germany’s slow walk on coal suggests there may not be full solar systems between them.
With China and Russia, the ideological contrast is clearer. Putin, the commandant of a petro-state that also happens to be, given its geography, one of the few nations on Earth likely to benefit from continued warming, sees basically no benefit to constraining carbon emissions or greening the economy—Russia’s or the world’s. Xi, now the leader-for-life of the planet’s rising superpower, seems to feel mutual obligations to the country’s growing prosperity and to the health and security of its people—of whom, it’s worth remembering, it has so many.
In the wake of Trump, China has become a much more emphatic—or at least louder—green energy leader. But the incentives do not necessarily suggest it will make good on that rhetoric. In 2018, an illuminating study was published comparing how much a country was likely to be burdened by the economic impacts of climate change to its responsibility for global warming, measured by carbon emissions. The fate of India showcased the moral logic of climate change at its most grotesque: expected to be, by far, the world’s most hard-hit country, shouldering nearly twice as much of the burden as the next nation, India’s share of climate burden was four times as high as its share of climate guilt. China is in the opposite situation, its share of guilt four times as high as its share of the burden. Which, unfortunately, means it may be tempted to slow-walk its green energy revolution. The United States, the study found, presented a case of eerie karmic balance: its expected climate damages matching almost precisely its share of global carbon emissions. Not to say either share is small; in fact, of all the nations in the world, the U.S. was predicted to be hit second hardest.
For decades, the rise of China has been an anxious prophecy invoked so regularly, and so prematurely, that Westerners, Americans especially, could be forgiven for thinking it was a case of the empire who cried wolf—an expression of Western self-doubt, more a premonition of collapse than a well-founded prediction of what new power might arise, and when. But on the matter of climate change, China does hold nearly all the cards. To the extent the world as a whole needs a stable climate to endure or thrive, its fate will be determined much more by the carbon trajectories of the developing world than by the course of the United States and Europe, where emissions have already flattened out and will likely begin their decline soon—though how dramatic a decline, and how soon, is very much up in the air. And although what’s called “carbon outsourcing” means that a large slice of China’s emissions is produced manufacturing goods to be consumed by Americans and Europeans. Whose responsibility are those gigatons of carbon? It may not much longer be merely a rhetorical question, if the Paris accords yield to a more rigorous global carbon governance structure, as they were intended to, and add, along the way, a proper enforcement mechanism, military or otherwise.