Hot planet, cold wars: climate change and ideological conflict
Kane, T
Energy and Environment 18(5): 533-547
2007
ISSN/ISBN: 0958-305X DOI: 10.1260/0958-305x.18.5.533Document Number: 330187
Shared challenges can bring out the best in people, but they can also do the opposite. Global climate change is an archetypal shared challenge for humanity, and although the threat has inspired a substantial amount of international co-operation, efforts to moderate it have already proven divisive. These divisions go beyond economically-driven haggling over who must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by what amount. Attempts to mitigate human civilisation's effects on the climate raise questions of political principle. Moreover, these questions have the specific potential to mobilise certain states and quasi-states against certain other ones, and this has implications for the field of security studies.