Peadar Kirby (UL) 'Climate change and peak oil: chalenging the social science', 2pm, MC2003, all welcome.

Peadar Kirby is Professor Emeritus of International Politics and Public Policy, Department of Politics and Public Administration, UL

Abstract:

While scientists raise their voices with ever greater alarm about the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on our climate and evidence mounts that we are fast approaching a potentially catastrophic tipping point with unforeseeable consequences, it is clear that we are facing what scientists last week were reported to be calling a ‘planetary emergency’. Meanwhile, warnings by experts over recent years that we appear to be approaching or have passed peak oil take on greater substance as oil prices rise to levels that even a few years ago would have been unthinkable. Expert evidence points to the fact that demand is outstripping supply at a swift place and that supply is based more and more on deposits that are difficult to access and exploit. These twin but interrelated problems are now posing fundamental question marks for our economic and social future. As the UNDP Human Development Report 2011 put it ‘our development model is bumping up against concrete limits’, both our dependence on fossil fuels and the ever intensifying emission of greenhouse gases while such bodies as the OECD are advocating the move to a carbon-neutral society as being urgently necessary. Yet, as the OECD’s Environmental Outlook to 2050 report of November 2011 stated, ‘the world is locking itself into high-carbon systems more strongly every year’.

It is becoming every clearer therefore that we are facing a wrenching transition to a society that emits far less greenhouse gas emissions and largely depends for its energy supply on renewables and yet we are finding it extremely difficult to begin to make that transition. Despite the fact that this is the greatest problem faced by humankind, the main disciplines within the social sciences examining theoretically and empirically processes of social organisation and change (economics, sociology, politics, development studies) by and large treat these issues as quite marginal if they treat them at all. My paper interrogates this neglect, identifies the essential role that the social sciences need to play, and argues that until the social sciences begin centrally to theorise the transition to a post-carbon society that it is difficult to see how society can begin to make this transition. The paper ends with some reflections on the role of political science in this endeavour.