Sheila Jasanoff is reckoned one of the great thinkers about science and technology and her writings therefore tend to command instant interest. Her latest piece is on societal responses to climate change and can be seen here.
It's hugely disappointing, and not simply because of a rather superficial understanding of the state of climate science:
The causal connection between human activity and the warming of the earth's mean surface temperatures has strengthened from quite tentative to "extremely likely" over a quarter century.
Jasanoff sees cause for optimism on three fronts - our understanding of climate science, our ability to make technological responses to it (although I'm not entirely convinced by her examples)...
Energy-related knowledge and know-how have also grown, from the design of efficient wind turbines and solar panels to projects for modifying the earth's surface to reflect radiant heat back into the atmosphere.
...and finally intensification of local initiatives to respond to climate change. On this latter point she really does come across as something of a dinosaur. Seeing people's reducing faith in government action, she says that people are coalescing around the local - food, energy and, erm, recycling - with a focus on the city rather than the state. Jasanoff sees these tendencies as a challenge to international collaboration:
...large resources have to be mustered to weather big needs, as in New Orleans in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina, Fukushima after the 2011 tsunami, or the Philippines after the 2013 typhoon. What would happen if devastation of such enormity became the order of the day in a world of
isolated, ingrown enclaves, with no one prepared to offer relief to distant communities in dire need? And how much solidarity would the international community muster if populations least culpable in contributing to global warming, and least able to mitigate its effects, suffered the harshest consequences?Climate change has put in question humanity's capacity to work together on a problem that strains political will as well as technological ability. Where we will be in a century depends in part on how we read the ethical obligation to confront the planetary future. Will it be seen as a mandate for stewardship and collective responsibility that transcends local particularity-or as an invitation to every place that can mobilize the resources to act for itself on its own steam?
The need for large resources to be mobilised in response to major natural disasters is of course true. What she doesn't explain is why "collective responsibility" - a 1950s idea if ever there was one - is a good approach to dealing with managing causes as well as symptoms.
It's almost as if "collective responsibility" is an end in itself.