NEWS Man made emissions of climate threatening greenhouse gases are changing our living conditions around the globe. Martin Hultman, Technology and Environmental Historian, Umeå University and Jonas Anshelm researcher at the Department of Technology and Social Change, Linköping University, are the author’s behind a new book: Discourses of Global Climate Change.
Martin Hultman says that they wrote the book because we live in a time when man made emissions of climate threatening greenhouse gases are changing our living conditions around the globe. How this insight should be understood and how it should be handled is undergoing profound and necessary political discussion throughout society.
– The debate may seem chaotic and unstructured for someone who is in the middle of it. We saw a need to understand the climate debate when it was at its peak and different stakeholder positions within the debate, says Martin Hultman.
– In the climate debate there are mainly four different positions with a whole package of values associated with those positions. The Industrial-fatalistic position dominates and the Green Keynesian consists a group of players who also have a great influence.
– These clusters of ideologies and opinions share a common perception that green growth is necessary. Criticism of these ideas comes from an eco-socialist discourse, that takes climate scientific results seriously and argue for the need for a shift in the form of resource location, decentralization and small scale renewable energy.
– Criticism also comes from a climate skeptic group of stakeholders, almost always older men only, who believe that human induced climate change is not happening.
– Two important results are that the apocalyptic description of climate change contributes positively to enable citizens and politicians, and that the environmental movement's commitment raised the issue in aspects of environmental justice, in the climate debate, especially around the Copenhagen meeting in 2009.
– Both of these results are the opposite of how many other researchers have described climate policies in recent years.
– Awareness that climate change, as a critical issue of our time, was shared by all political parties and all organizations in Sweden around 2008. To identify and preserve a discussion, as we have done, provides an opportunity to go back, and remind about the accountability of all people in leadership positions who actually have had knowledge but not been acting in line with it.
– I wish that both the environmental movement's role, in highlighting these issues, will be noticed and that the book activate our memories of how the climate issues should be discussed as a pervasive social issue.
Martin Hultman, martin.hultman@umu.se, tel. +46 73-639 46 96
Editor: Per Melander
