The Governmental Discourse: Introducing Risk Management and ‘Black Swans’

Overall, the governmental discourse at first sight seems to be the least common. While it was fairly widespread in the debates in the 1990s and early 2000s, it lost in importance as standalone discourse when the sovereign discourse gained traction from the mid-2000s on. Nevertheless, it often complimented the other two discourses and infused them with probabilistic risk conceptions. Especially during the 2010s, risk and insurance based argumentations that were linked to human and national security conceptions became more common again.

Early Traces of the Governmental Discourse

In the 1990s, traces of the governmental discourse appeared on a regular basis, often in connection to the planet as a whole, the environment and to human security. The key

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argumentation was that climate change slowly but constantly increases the risks for adverse agricultural changes and humanitarian disasters around the world and in the US itself. One important reason for the reliance on more diffuse and long-term risk conceptions at that time was that the magnitude and specific temporal impact of climate change were still a matter of debate, at least in the political discussion (US Senate 1990a: S4345). Thus, Members of Congress frequently constructed climate change as a long-term risk that in the future could bring the earth’s ecosystem out of balance and increase the risk for various negative impacts, yet without linking the problem to definitive referent objects. In connection to this argumentation, they regularly highlighted the benefits of investing in mitigation now to avoid higher costs in the future: ‘The OTA estimates that a 35-percent reduction in emissions could save us $20 billion per year or could cost us up to $150 billion per year’ (US Senate 1991a:

S1756). While the focus of the debates in the early and mid-1990s was on the international level (US Senate 1991a: S1756), it increasingly shifted towards a US centred perspective at the end of the decade (US Senate 1999: S18461). The governmental discourse also appeared quite frequently during the first Bush administration throughout the early and mid-2000s. In accordance with governmental power, Members of Congress often pointed to scientific debates and findings of the IPCC and the National Academy of Sciences to highlight the potential risks of climate change (US Senate 2001a: S2301; US House of Representatives 2005: H4291).

The Governmental Discourse in Think Tank Reports: Uncertainty and Black Swans

When the think tank driven sovereign discourse gained momentum from 2007 on, the governmental discourse and more cautions and long-term threat constructions lost in importance. Instead of relying on scientific risk assessments that often construct climate change as a serious though long-term risk without identifying specific threats and referent objects (see for example IPCC 2007a: 8), traditional security actors and knowledge became the main reference point of climate security argumentations. However, like the disciplinary discourse, governmental argumentations did not disappear entirely. Thus, most think tank reports did contain governmental articulations and often connected them to the other two discourses to highlight the uncertainty of all climate predictions and the associated risks of socio-political consequences. One report quite openly stressed that the uncertainty of climate risks makes it difficult to sell it as a serious threat:

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It seems true, if inconvenient, that X millions of acres of seashore, Y hundreds of millions of climate refugees, and Z billions of malaria mosquitoes will result if we don’t act. […].

Those wide ranges, coupled with the long delay time, the intangible nature of the risks, and the complexity, make this global threat a hard sell (Rogers and Gulledge 2010: 21).

Interestingly, think tank reports particularly mentioned probabilistic, future-oriented risk conceptions in connection to military planning because they believed that the security community and the military were most competent concerning long-term risk management and anticipating unknown and dangerous futures (McGrady et al. 2010: 23; CNA and Oxfam 2011:

13; CNA Military Advisory Board 2014: 1):

The security community is also accustomed to long-term planning and preparing for a range of uncertain outcomes. These attributes are essential for managing the risks of climate change, but are lacking in most other policy communities’ (C2ES 2009: 2).

In contrast, many proponents of the climate security debate believed that political actors were too caught up in short election cycles to really plan ahead for future climate risks (Interview 2014v). Thus, most think tank reports linked a risk-focused argumentation to the dominant sovereign discourse that privileges defence actors and solutions. Climate change was thus constructed as a ‘black swan event’ (CNA and Oxfam 2011: 13), meaning a risk with a ‘low probability’ to materialise, though with possibly ‘high consequences’ (CNA 2007: 41).

A further central diagnosis of the risk based thinking in the think tank reports was that complex threats such as climate change cannot be adequately tackled by extrapolating from the past in a linear fashion: ‘In a world where the past is no longer prologue, decision makers need new methods and analytical support to accommodate uncertainty about how climate changes could affect the future security environment’ (Rogers and Gulledge 2010: 20). Thus, the discourse shifted from a focus on largely calculable or traditional risks, towards new, even more uncertain and non-linear forms or risk. The aim became to be able to cope with upcoming climate effects and to anticipate these uncertain, yet dangerous future events in the present by relying on probabilistic risk assessments and resilience schemes (CNA 2007: 46; McGrady et al. 2010: 77; Campbell et al. 2007: 6; CNA Military Advisory Board 2014: 9). Ultimately, many reports saw the need for a transformation of traditional security thinking to cope with these new and uncertain threats: ‘The multi-faceted nature of 21st Century security threats requires a ‘fresh take on security,’ which allows the U.S. to be better prepared for contingencies related to climate change’ (Foley and Holland 2012a: 7). Consequently, the recommendations

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to tackle climate risks focused on concepts such as ‘contingency planning’ (McGrady et al.

2010: 77), ‘risk-assessment’ (Campbell et al. 2007: 36), ‘vulnerability-assessments’ (McGrady et al. 2010: 38–39), ‘scenario-planning’ (Campbell et al. 2007: 36), and ‘resilience building’

(Rogers and Gulledge 2010: 3; Busby 2007: 14–15; Foley and Holland 2012b: 6–8). The increasing focus on climate change effects on the US homeland and parts of its population also led to calls to integrate climate risks into the National Infrastructure Protection Plan and the Strategic National Risk Assessment (CNA Military Advisory Board 2014: 21).

Based on the logic of normalisation and in the context of probabilistic and complex threat calculations, the referent objects and adequate behaviour in the face of climate-induced risks are not fixed a priori. Thus, many reports focused on statistically identifying certain risk groups – e.g. poor people, women and children (CNA Military Advisory Board 2014: 27; CNA and Oxfam 2011: 7) – and areas – e.g. developing countries, already fragile or failed states, areas near the sea, arid-areas (Busby 2007: 8; Werz and Manlove 2009: 4; McGrady et al. 2010:

36) – that are particularly endangered by first and second order climatic effects in contrast to the general population (Busby 2007: 17):

Rather than assessing a range of estimates as proof of disagreement that can be used to justify inaction, military leaders view such evidence through the lens of varying degrees of risk the estimates could represent. As military leaders, we evaluate the probability and possible consequences of events in determining overall risk (CNA Military Advisory Board 2014: 9).

Within this argumentation, climate change was constructed as a problem of circulation with the aim to ensure good circulation, e.g. global trade, the acquisition of natural resources, business travel (CNA 2007: 20; CNA Military Advisory Board 2014: 4) and prevent the bad one, e.g.

excessive GHG emissions, the spread of instability and climate refugees (Werz and Conley 2012: 6–7; Werz and Manlove 2009; Busby 2007: 18). Furthermore, report recommended to closely monitor and contain the risk before its gets out of control, reaches tipping points and self-reinforcing dynamics (CNA 2007: 15; Campbell et al. 2007: 6). The recurring connection of climate change to the spread of dangerous viruses and the ‘risk of pandemic explosions of disease’ exemplify this point (Campbell et al. 2007: 77; see also Elbe 2011). Eventually, the objective of governmental power is to bring the average risk of climate change down to a tolerable level by intervening as indirectly as possible in the natural dynamics of the population.

In this vein, reports suggested measures such as birth control and ‘demographic management’

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or gradual changes in patterns of consumption (Campbell et al. 2007: 78). The objective of these governmental articulations was not to stop climate change entirely by prohibiting all GHG emissions but to keep the risk at a tolerable level – at least for the developed world – by pre-emptively influencing core underlying variables or by tackling some of its worst security implications (Foley and Holland 2012a: 8). The latter strategy was epitomised in ‘no-regrets’

policies that prioritise actions ‘that it [the US] would not regret having pursued even if the consequences of climate change prove less severe than feared.’ (Busby 2007: 11). In most cases these policies were not aimed at mitigation but focused on military preparedness, adaptation, resilience building and disaster aid measures (Busby 2007: 11).

Attempting to calculate the complex future threats and ways to anticipate them, many reports highlighted the need for social-scientific knowledge and closer cooperation between science and military actors (Rogers and Gulledge 2010: 9). Furthermore, as already pointed out in relation to the sovereign discourse, they called for more fine-grained ‘actionable data’

concerning the future climate risks (Rogers and Gulledge 2010: 14; Parthermore and Rogers 2010: 9; Burke and Parthermore 2008: 7). Climate predictions and social scientific knowledge alone were not enough but had to be ‘translated’ (Rogers and Gulledge 2010: 8) to the security community and to actors in government to become useful – a task, for which many reports saw the think tanks best equipped (Rogers and Gulledge 2010).

Parliamentary Articulations: Broad Risks and Economic Considerations

In Congressional debates from 2007 on the linkages to the sovereign discourse and defence actors were not as pronounced as in the think tank reports but did appear occasionally. For instance, the above-mentioned quote of CNA co-author General Gordon R. Sullivan about acting without having 100 percent certainty found its way into a Senate debate (US Senate 2008d: S5191) and Democratic Senator Cory Booker pointed to the fact that military leaders were familiar with dealing with uncertain risks:

You see, Admiral Locklear focuses on risk management and preparedness for our Nation.

He does not have time for philosophy. He does not have time for politics. He is focusing on a concrete risk analysis when it comes to the safety, security, and preparedness of our Nation (US Senate 2014a: S1427).

In general, the focus of the articulations of the governmental discourse in the Congressional debates was broader than in the think tank reports. They constructed climate change as a

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problem that would gradually increase the risk for all kinds of referent objects ranging from humans all over the world and increasingly also in the US (US House of Representatives 2014:

H5346), the environment (US Senate 2013: S2825), and the entire planet (US Senate 2012a).

Thus, there was no fixed referent object and no definite timespan, but climate change was represented as a system-wide problem that would gradually affect the entire ecosystem of the earth and all human activities.

A further argumentation pointed to the fact that even the ‘hard calculating’ insurance industry considers climate change as serious risk and incorporates it into their risk assessment schemes:

But it is not just scientists around the world, not just government agencies in the United States; you have a business whose life and death, whose profit margin depends upon understanding this issue and that is the insurance industry. If the insurance industry ends up paying out a whole lot of money when there are disasters, they are going to lose money (US Senate 2011a: S8501).

In relation to this discussion, the economic risks of doing too little now to mitigate climate change played an increasingly important role in Congressional debates. Proponents of this argumentation feared exorbitant economic costs due to increased insurance premiums (US Senate 2014a: S1450) and thus emphasised that climate risks would become one of the major economic risks for the US in the future (US House of Representatives 2013: H1893).