Abstract

The dynamics of climate change politics have thrown up two fundamental, and entirely contradictory, challenges for political economy in the last 10 years. On the one hand, the new science of ‘net zero emissions’ has produced a growing recognition that a world without fossil fuels is both absolutely necessary and utterly transformative. On the other hand, civilizational collapse (absolute declines in human populations, collapse of food production systems, collapse of social institutions) is now much more widely recognized as an entirely plausible trajectory for the world within living lifetimes. The stakes in climate politics have thus become radically sharper. This paper argues that IPE has some key theoretical arguments and substantive knowledge that it can contribute to understanding the crucial challenge of pursuing the transformative pathway and that the key challenge for IPE scholars is to deploy their knowledge accordingly.

摘要

在过去10年中，气候变化政治的动态给政治经济带来了两个根本性且完全矛盾的挑战 年。一方面，新的“净零排放”科学越来越使人们认识到，没有化石燃料的世界既是绝对必要的，也是彻底变革的。另一方面，文明崩溃（人口的绝对减少，粮食生产系统的崩溃，社会制度的崩溃）现在被广泛认为是一生中世界的完全合理的轨迹。因此，在气候政治中的利害关系变得更加尖锐。本文认为IPE具有一些关键的理论论据和实质性知识，可以帮助理解追求变革路径的关键挑战，而IPE学者面临的关键挑战是相应地运用他们的知识。