Title
“Climate Fault Lines: The New Political Economy of a Warming World”
Authors
“Climate Fault Lines: The New Political Economy of a Warming World”
Publisher
Princeton University Press
From the Author
“Six years ago, we came across a striking paper by a duo of Princeton economists, Esteban Rossi-Hansberg and José-Luis Cruz. They showed that climate change has profoundly unequal effects across the globe. The southern hemisphere — developing and developed countries alike — faced exceptional damage compared to places above the northern 35th parallel. How was this divide, what we call the climate fault line, going to affect politics?
“As political economists, we suspected that climate change’s economic consequences would have political effects. Our book takes the geoscience of climate change, its economic consequences, and marries these models to politics.
“Our predictions contradict the received wisdom about climate politics. Whereas northern nations are thought of as the most climate-ambitious, we predict the opposite. The most climate-vulnerable countries — south of the fault line — have the most to lose in a warmer world and thus will become the most likely to act as climate change’s effects manifest. Our data bear out our predictions in analyses of voters, businesses, cities, and countries.
“The world is not in the same boat. Rather than unify us to solve the problem, climate change is creating new political divides. There are unlikely bedfellows, like China, the U.S., and Russia, which are more aligned in terms of climate vulnerability, whereas Australia finds itself closer to South Africa and Brazil.
“Our last chapters explore how countries below the fault line can incentivize, persuade, or coerce those above the divide to mitigate more. The tragedy is that the climate-vulnerable have little leverage. Many of these rich industrial countries are powerful and are less motivated to adopt costly mitigation policies because they will be less affected. In this conflictual world, geoengineering may become inevitable.
“We hope our predictions are wrong, but our data tell us otherwise. It’s possible that countries will not follow their material interests, but we think this unlikely.
“The world cannot count on climate change to shake politicians awake. Instead, the most likely path forward is for countries to see it in the self-interest of countries above the fault line to transition to renewable energy sources, motivated less by vulnerability than by the drive for energy independence and clean energy technology leadership..”
—Helen V. Milner
Headshot by Egan Jimenez.
Book cover courtesy of Princeton University Press.