“Our accounts of each potential path for climate politics are not detailed forecasts of the empirical form they might take in any particular geography, but descriptions of the principal features we argue are likely to determine their general dynamics, and the political implications of those dynamics for attempts to construct a world of climate justice” (Mann and Wainwright 2018, 82).
“If capitalist Climate Leviathan stands ready to embrace carbon governance in an evolving Euro-American liberal hegemony, Climate Mao expresses the necessity of a just terror in the interests of the future of the collective, which is to say that it represents the necessity of a planetary sovereign but wields this power against capital” (Mann and Wainwright 2018, 106).
“Climate Behemoth, represented by the upper right of Figure 2.1. Behemoth opposes Leviathan’s drive for planetary sovereignty, which is itself not a bad thing in our view” (Mann and Wainwright 2018, 118).
“In the capitalist core—particularly where the fossil energy sector is large (the United States, Canada, Australia)—they have found their most willing allies among those segments of the proletariat that perceive climate change not only as a threat to their jobs and cheap energy, but also as a sophisticated means to empower elite experts and hinder the exercise of national(ist) sovereignty” (Mann and Wainwright 2018, 120).
“To put it in our terms, Behemoth hates Mao for its faith in secular revolution, Leviathan for its liberal pretension to rational world government, and both for their willingness to sacrifice “liberty” for lower carbon emissions” (Mann and Wainwright 2018, 123).
“To the extent that US hegemony will continue to require affordable fossil fuels, the emergence of Leviathan poses threat enough to energize Behemoth and thus to check Leviathan’s planetary potential—for now. But barring an act of coordinated political imagination of which it seems incapable, this situation is unlikely to last. Indeed, notwithstanding the Trump presidency, the United States could yet become the heart of Leviathan” (Mann and Wainwright 2018, 125).
“The situation changes dramatically when we shift to Working Group III, on mitigation. The future of mitigation is fundamentally a question of political economy, but the IPCC does not, or perhaps cannot, draw upon work that presents a critical model of capitalism. This causes a fundamental analytical problem. It would be like trying to model hurricanes without a theory of thermodynamics or an understanding of the effects of changing ocean temperatures on cyclone dynamics” (Mann and Wainwright 2018, 124).
“If Timothy Mitchell is right that “the political machinery that emerged to govern the age of fossil fuels may be incapable of addressing the events that will end it,” what will follow? This is a question—the question of the political—to which the prevailing conception of adaptation is wholly inadequate. We must, therefore, look elsewhere” (Mann and Wainwright 2018, 146).