Free The Politics of Climate Change by Anthony Giddens Page A

create improvements in fodder of farm animals.
    One should never consider technology in isolation from wider social and economic processes. Government has a major role to play here, alongside private companies and other groups. Advances in technical capacity, for instance, are of little or no use if they do not percolate down to farmers, and if the farmers do not have the knowledge and skills to apply them. Farmers probably quite often tend to be conservative in their outlook, but they can also be agents of change. Communications technology can be deployed to help create activist groups which can in turn communicate their ideas to others.
    These points apply to the spread of biofuels. Most of the biofuels being cultivated at the moment take food out of people’s mouths – in other words, they occupy land that could otherwise be used for agricultural production. Bioengineering will be needed if this situation is to be transformed. A range of strategies are in play in laboratories around the world. The cultivation of algae forms one promising line of approach. Attempts are being made to alter the genetic makeup of algae in order to be able to produce them in a diversity of environments. Some forms of algae can produce up to 60 per cent of their dry weight in the form of oil, which can then be turned into biodiesel. Efforts are under way to drive this percentage higher.
    Genetically modified algae can produce up to 300 times more oil per unit of land than conventional biofuels, such as sugarcane, palms or soybeans. Moreover, such forms of algae can be harvested in a very short time-frame, up to 10 days from planting. Their rate of growth can be as much as 30 times that of orthodox biofuel crops. Algae can also in principle be cultivated on the large scale in the oceans, an idea also being explored around the world. In spite of theseadvantages, because of the time taken on full research and development, and safety testing, none of these approaches seems close to commercial realization. (For more on biofuels, see below, pp. 127–8.)
The politics of climate change: concepts
    To summarize the above discussion: we should discard the precautionary principle and the concept of sustainable development. The first should be replaced by more sophisticated modes of risk analysis, as discussed at many points in this book. The second is something of an oxymoron, and it seems most sensible to disentangle the two component terms again. In the case of ‘development’, we should focus on the contrast between the developed and developing societies. Insofar as the rich countries are concerned, the problems created by affluence have to be put alongside the benefits of economic growth. I shall argue that dealing with these problems proves to be of direct relevance to the politics of climate change.
    Below, I propose a list of concepts that I shall deploy in the remaining chapters. They mostly concern how to analyse and promote climate change policy in the context of political institutions. From the preceding discussion, I take the notions of ‘sustainability’ and ‘the polluter pays’. The other concepts are:
1  The ensuring state . I talk about the state a lot in this book, both in the sense of the institutions of government and in the sense of the nation-state, but I don’t want readers to get the wrong idea. I don’t mean to go back to the old idea of the state as a top-down agency. The state today has to be an ‘enabling state’: its prime role is to help energize a diversity of groups to reach solutions to collective problems, many such groups operating in a bottom-up fashion. However, the concept of the enabling state isn’t strong enough to capture the state’s role, which also has to be to deliver outcomes. Nowhere is this principle clearer thanin the case of responding to climate change. The ensuring state is a stronger notion. It means that the state is responsible for