Politics and the Environment in the Age of Political Economy

Big promises have been made on climate change in Paris. Yet it seems that economics has had the last word. Photograph: Paris 2015 #COP21 @CMP11 by Ron Mader (License) (Set on white)

The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP 21 (the 21st Conference of the Parties), was the perfect summary of the age of political economics. All of the show and all of the image of action, without much in the way of tangible results.

Seemingly heeding, finally, the repeated warnings about the dire long term effects of failing to address fossil fuel use and climate change, and the deadly outcomes of delay, world leaders have declared an agreement to bring to an end the era of fossil fuels (Goldenberg et al, 2015).

The agreement that comes out of COP 21 makes a lot of promises. It has pledges, long term goals, and regular assessments of progress (Vaughan, 2015). And yet, in true political fashion, these promises come without immediate action and with a number of caveats.

For one, there is some substantial shifting of responsibilities. There is a clause that assures that countries hit by the more extreme weather and rising water levels, produced by global warming, cannot make financial claims against those who have been, and continue to be, users of fossil fuels and big polluters of the environment.

The commitments made are also fairly vague (Monbiot, 2015). A commitment to achieve the global peak use of fossil fuels 'soon', came with not a date in sight. A commitment to a maximum 1.5C of global warming, was without a defined plan and method for achieving it.

And, even as these kinds of agreements are made, they are being made a mockery of by the politics of the day. The reality is that countries like the UK - even as the government welcomes the deal (Whale, 2015) - continue to use fossil fuels, and even to expand their usage (Monbiot, 2014), in pursuit of their economic aims.

In the age of political economy - where the whys and hows have, in all provinces, been subsumed beneath and sacrificed to 'economic efficiency' - attempts to prevent environmental disaster are given a back seat to economics. We must first stabilise the economy, they say, only then can we look to the esoteric concerns of healthcare, welfare and, of course, the environment.

Yet this response is irrational. It excludes facts to create a self-defined box within which political solutions can meet arbitrary targets. A boxed-context, designed to allow an economic solution to be a 'success', on its own terms, to save one party's flagging economic policy and so its political future.

However, none of the problems facing society can be handled piecemeal. All of it is connected and impacts upon the others. If a comprehensive green energy programme is not part of the economic response, that response is no solution. Ignoring or denying facts will not change them.

In the age of political economy, where every decision is hemmed in by a thousand financial interests - each likely to lose out as another gains - comprehensive, holistic programmes are hard to come by. Yet one is needed.

As the French regional elections demonstrated, the old establishment that has held sway in Europe is teetering. Renewing politics means finding a way to break out of the age of political economy where politics has become a world of promises that can be fulfilled only within arbitrary contexts using perceived truths and half-facts.

Without a comprehensive progressive alternative, the discredited system may fall into the hands of extremists with narrow sectarian viewpoints, who will be unlikely to have the breadth of vision necessary to deal with the grave matters, even the climate issues alone, that threaten the future (Lucas, 2015).