IS CLIMATE CHANGE UNGOVERNABLE? | Paul N Edwards

WISER and the Pro Vice-Chancellor for Climate, Sustainability and Inequality invite you to a seminar.

Presented by Paul N Edwards

This is a hybrid event.  Please register your attendance in the room or on-line here.

Climate governance today takes place at every level of socio-political organization, from the UN Framework Convention to nations, corporations, and civil society. This talk proposes that the Paris Agreement’s bottom-up, voluntarist framework should be understood as incantatory ungovernance, replacing concrete goals and sanctions with incantations such as ‘net zero’. De-governance through major policy reversals, treaty withdrawal, and clashes among overlapping jurisdictions has already happened and will recur. Anti-governance in the form of climate denialism continues as well. Meanwhile, infrastructural path dependence has created temporal commitments to fossil energy extending far into the future. New sociotechnical imaginaries and built, non-emitting infrastructures might establish new pathways and directions, ‘governing’ climate change in a more permanent way. But if climate sensitivity is on the high end of IPCC projections – or even higher, as some scientists suggest – evidence suggests that existing governance regimes will fail to avoid catastrophic climate change of 3°C or even much more.

Paul N. Edwards is Director of the Program on Science, Technology & Society at Stanford University, Co-Director of the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative, and Professor of Information and History (Emeritus) at the University of Michigan. He writes and teaches about the history, politics, and culture of information infrastructures. Edwards is the author of A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010) and The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (MIT Press, 1996), and co-editor of Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance (MIT Press, 2001), as well as numerous articles. With Janet Vertesi, he co-edits the Infrastructures book series for MIT Press. Edwards recently served as a Lead Author for the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2021).