The importance of understanding history, politics and economics to better tackle climate change

Now upon reading this title you may be a bit puzzled, after all what do these social subjects have to do with a hardcore scientific issue like climate change?

How can we say that climate change is occurring if we don't know the history of the planet? We can't! Why do some countries seem to be reluctant to adopt greener practices while their western counterparts are pushing the efforts forward?

The answers to the these questions can be found by gaining further insight into the history of the world, the current (geo)political struggles between nation states and economic growth

This multi-dimensional understanding is not unique to climate change. While reading Brian Cox's Forces of Nature he described a very similar idea of the need for a multi-dimensional understanding in regards to how snowflakes are formed. The fact that time (the 4th dimension) affects how the flakes are formed means that to truly understand why snowflakes are the way that they are we must take it into account. He then goes on to extrapolate this idea to evolutionary biology. So I don't think it would be farfetched to apply this same concept to climate change.

Carry on reading and we’ll get to the nitty gritty details of the need for multi-dimensional understanding of climate change.

Climate change is a scientific phenomenon ...but having background social science knowledge is integral to understand:

-Why it's happening

-Why progress to combat it is slow

-How to slow climate change down.

Politics, history and economics shape our reality so they need to be understood prior to looking at climate change. The same is true for any topic in life.

First let’s take a look at why politics is important.

Politics...

...is the social construct which permeates into all aspects of life. Your country's politics directly affect climate change based on the actions the government takes. Progressive governments tend to look at climate change as an urgent disaster that is currently happening and so frees up funds to fight it.

International organisations like the EU can also affect the trajectory that nations have when fighting climate change and environmental damage by imposing minimum levels of adherence to internally set targets.

If you're unaware of the politics (both foreign and domestic) then you will be wading in the water blindfolded in the fight against climate change. Without knowing why certain decisions were taken you will never find out why some environmentally beneficial policies and funding is not being provided.

How about history, why is it relevant to the discussion of climate change?

History...

...creates the backdrop of today's occurrences. Having a firm understanding of history helps ground your beliefs to reality.

Knowing the history of climate change and the solutions which have been trialed will help you rule out not-so-efficient options.

This lets you find viable solutions to climate change without wasting time assessing solutions which have been previously trialed.

Finally, economics' role in climate change shouldn't be understated.

Economics

Across the world capitalism largely dominates economic systems governing billions of peoples' lives. Capitalism has its benefits but it also has significant drawbacks strongly linked to climate change.

Capitalism generally promotes consumerism which leads to an increase in manufacturing and transportation. This clearly increases the carbon emissions of a society. However, to be fair, in theory with adequate competition, companies would continue improving their efficiencies to be able to provide more competitive prices for their products. In reality however, price reductions are often a direct result of outsourcing the labour to countries with lower work standards and a lower minimum wage (if it even exists).

If a society is geared towards never ending economic growth at the expense of people and the environment, then it would be reasonable to assume that unless green technology and working habits become cheap enough to compete with the existing technologies/habits, the system will never fundamentally adopt the green wave.

This ties in with the politics as some parties believe that economic growth at the cost of the environment will be better for people in the long run (if trickle down economics ends up working, which it hasn’t). Other parties are willing to sacrifice immediate economic growth for a more habitable planet.

If you understand the economic problems you will be better prepared to solve the root causes of climate change.

Do you believe that climate change is a multi-modal issue than needs to be looked at through a variety of lenses in order to be truly understood?