Climate Politics and the Contested Greening of Economic Reason
Embargo until
2026-05-01
Date
2022-01-24
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
This dissertation tackles a central transformation that has remade European and US climate politics in recent years: the shifting role played by economic ideas, interests, and experts. Starting in the 1980s and continuing well into the 2000s, actors that saw climate change through an economic lens defined it as an overblown problem—or not a problem at all. But in recent years, this has changed. Many powerful economic experts—from academics to investors to central bankers to regulators—discovered climate change as part of their economic concerns over aggregate welfare, returns on investment, or financial stability. At the same time, green groups began to frame their ambitious climate agendas as a means to economic ends. What explains this transformation of the role played by economic ideas, intersts, and experts in climate politics and what are the political consequences of this change? This dissertation answers these questions based on a reconstruction of the political history of the economics of environmental policy as well as two case studies of European and US climate politics centered around two economic ideas of climate change: the social cost of carbon and climate-related financial risks. The dissertation argues that the shifting politics of the economic ideas is neither the product of apolitical rational updating nor is it an insignificant ideological smokescreen. Instead, it is the product of an active and ongoing political struggle. The greener economic visions of climate change had to be politically constructed and weaponized by novel coalitions of experts and interest groups. They remade the economic terms of the climate debate. But the dissertation also shows that this green turn has not been left uncontested. It led to the emergence of counter-coalitions comprised of conservative experts and the opponents of climate policies, leading to an ongoing contest over what it means to act rationally in light of the unprecedented ecological disruption.
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Keywords
political economy, climate politics, comparative politics, politics of ideas