ABSTRACT
The discovery of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) elicited a number of official responses, including the establishment of a set of institutions to address the dangers it poses. In this chapter, the origins and evolution of the two primary institutions established to deal with climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), are discussed with reference to interactions at the ‘world order’ and ‘forms of state’ levels. The chapter provides a detailed investigation of how powerful interests, working primarily through national state governments, have ensured that these institutions lack the power to make appropriate ‘policy prescriptions’ (or even suggestions) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate additional climate change. Successive United States administrations have been particularly active in presenting obstacles to taking effective action to mitigate anthropogenic climate change, and they have been assisted in these endeavours by allied states. In addition to these official obstacles to an effective global treaty to address the climate crisis, the IPCC and the scientists who volunteer to write the synthesis reports that it produces have been subjected to a series of highly-publicised attacks aimed at discrediting the scientific findings being reported on. This chapter provides an overview of some of the major controversies that were concocted to discredit the IPCC’s work, including the ‘hockey stick graph’ controversy and the ‘climategate’ allegations that scientists conspired to present false climate science data. The analyses presented in this chapter demonstrate the validity of ecosocialist claims that the institutional arrangements making up the official climate change ‘regime’ are incapable of achieving their stated aim of avoiding dangerous climate change.
