ABSTRACT
This chapter offers one brief perspective by commenting on two quotations from the relevant scientific literature. One comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The other comes from research conducted partly at Resources for the Future, a Washington think tank that has advocated market approaches to environmental policy for many decades with the support of corporations. The phrase the science implicitly black-boxes science as a bounded article that can influence and be influenced by politics but is constituted by processes that are distinct. Since the 1970s, new elements have been bricolaged onto the historical nature/society settlement in which most climate science is practised. Ecosystem functions have become subject to protective state regulation, and then transformed into ecosystem services, which have become tradeable assets in transactions. It is central to the intellectual responsibilities of the difficult and engaged political economy of climate science that this chapter has defended to affirm, not obscure, these lively and varied connections.
