Academic

Purdy on Political Possibility & Climate Chage

By Lawrence Solum

Jedediah S. Purdy (Duke University - School of Law) has posted Climate Change and the Limits of the Possible on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Climate change looks to be more than just another environmental problem. It threatens to test the limits of our dominant ways of understanding and solving, not just environmental problems, but problems of political economy generally. Climate change has distinctive temporal and spatial features - how long it takes to unfold and the ways in which its effects are distributed across the globe - which may outstrip the capacity of our basic principles of economic and political decision-making. If so, then understanding the issue in a static way may ensure that we expect to fail in addressing it and are inarticulate about our prospects for success. That is, if we assume that economic and political decisions reflect the present distribution of self-interest within the existing structure of rules and institutions, we may be unable to see our way beyond the problem, because it so neatly frustrates the problem-solving power of our current arrangements. We may need, instead, to adopt a dynamic view of political economy.

And from the conclusion:

Sometimes, impossibility really is impossibility. At other times, it is potential that has not yet become real. A short list of things thought impossible by the best minds of previous centuries includes some of the axioms of present life: racial and sexual equality, orderly democracy, and economies based on individual choice and self-interest. These were the wild-eyed utopian dreams of other times, set against widely shared assumptions about human nature and institutional limits.70 Two of those onetime utopian dreams, markets and democracy, are now sources of our own sense of limitation, our reasons for suspecting that climate change may be insurmountable. At the same time, viewed dynamically, they are among the places where we may develop new ideas about our preferences, values, and commitments, which could anchor a response to climate change.

Climate change demands as much technical expertise, and as broad a range of it, as any problem in history. Natural science, engineering, economics, the fine points of institutional design, are all front-and-center and will remain there. Nonetheless, the problem is more than technical. Technical solutions will interact with developing ideas about what is right, fair, and dignified. Success will mean moving outward the limits of the possible.

Very interesting paper--highly recommended.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on August 29, 2008 (boomark / email).