Green Statehood and Environmental Crisis

Abstract

The Green State is an important book, not least because it appreciates that the state, in one form or another, is still the focus of loyalties and political authority and that this will continue to be the case within any time frame likely to be relevant to human survival. The specifics are debatable, but if we take seriously predictions on climate change and fresh water scarcity, we are speaking of a period within the span of the current century. The International Energy Agency has calculated that world energy-related CO emissions will rise by 62% between the present and 2030 and at some point in the early 2020s developing country emissions will surpass those of the OECD states (IEA, 2004). Finding a way of restricting total emissions to a level that does not entail dangerous mean temperature increases in excess of 2 C, through the involvement of both developing and developed states, provides the agenda for current international discussion of the post-2012 evolution of the Kyoto Protocol and for the wider consideration of the future of the UN climate regime. Clearly the existing interpretation of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’between developed and developing states cannot persist and some means will have to be found to direct their growth along a sustainable path. It is difficult to envisage this in terms other than those of inter-governmental cooperation and Eckersley is surely correct in asserting that action by states is essential. With the relatively extended time horizon of political change and the ever-diminishing one of environmental crisis, we simply do not have the luxury of anticipating fundamental institutional change. The state is ‘the only game in town’ and it is therefore vital to investigate the ways in which it might plausibly become greener. At the heart of Eckersley’s work is a sensitivity to the possibilities of such a change and to the accumulating evidence of the reconstruction of the character of at least some of the more developed states in the contemporary global system. It thus proceeds without sliding into the anti-statism and green idealism that has characterized much of the debate in which state authority is, either transformed