Introduction to Part 3: Climate Change and Culture

This chapter explores critique of the current rational decision making' approach to climate policy as it is conducted within the contours of the UN climate treaty. Climate change science as voiced by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is clear on this: a further increase of CO₂ in the earth's atmosphere leads to catastrophic environmental and human consequences and in order to avoid these the growth in worldwide CO₂-emissions needs to be halted in the next 10 years. The chapter explains that the fact that the Copenhagen climate summit has indeed been cast as a political failure to find a sustainable way of interaction between nature and culture is symptomatic of the key cause of the climate change impasse. Climate change, while from the perspective of natural science is primarily a matter of CO₂-concentrations are also, and arguably as much, a matter of the machinations of the automobile industry, the politics of the Kyoto Protocol.