Litigation in Drahos’ Survival Governance
Over the holiday break I finally got around to reading Peter Drahos’ 2021 book 'Survival Governance: Energy and Climate in the Chinese Century. The Constitutionalizing in the Anthropocene research community at Tilburg Law School had invited Peter to present the book last year at a faculty seminar. After an engaging discussion about its opening chapters, I was intrigued to read the rest of the book.
In Survival Governance, Drahos puts forward a controversial thesis: China - not the European Union, or the United States, or India - is the state best positioned to lead an energy transition that will keep global warming under 2 degrees Celsius. In this political economy and international relations analysis, Drahos focuses on how states are likely to respond to the ‘geo-energy trilemma’ - the trio of pressures states face “to improve competitiveness in the global economy, to increase their climate mitigation efforts, and to maintain energy security for their military and industries” (p 8). Furthermore, he describes the impending energy transition as an emergent ‘bio-digital energy paradigm’ which will rely on scientific innovations in both biology and digital technology fronts (Chapter 3). Importantly, those technologies will need to offer substantial ruptures from ‘business as usual’ practices, rather than incremental developments. They will also need to be quickly standardized and globally distributed at a cost that is affordable for developing countries.
From these perspectives, Drahos emphases the importance of China’s 5 year planning cycles (Chapter 7) - which have been driving national policy developments since 1953 - along with the opportunities of experimental urban governance in China’s rapidly growing cities (Chapter 8). China’s Hydrogen Cities, Smart Cities, and Circular Economy Cities, among many other experimental urban prototypes, offer the incentives and opportunities for climate neutral energy technologies and infrastructures to be developed, tested and replicated for further use. China’s Belt and Road Initiative could then be used to transfer these technologies around the world.
“A large state capable of creating new circuits of capital accumulation is a less improbable source of the required scale of exogenous shock than globally orchestrated civil disobedience.”
Drahos’ account is compelling and nuanced, offering a sober prospect of how an ambitious global energy transition may occur, but no guarantees that it will. However, I kept returning to a considerable shortcoming in the analysis - the monolithic depiction of states as entities distinct from their respective civil societies. In the opening pages, Drahos dismisses the potential role of litigation - comparing climate litigation to its precursor in tobacco litigation - in creating the ‘exogenous shock’ necessary for a rapid energy transition.
“Courts collectively around the world will likely take many decades to sort out issues of liability. We do not have decades. In any case, it is not as if litigation has put the tobacco industry out of business. We need to extinguish the fossil fuel industry, rather than obtaining a settlement from its rich members” (p 6).
Likewise, he argues that ‘a large state’ is the more likely initiator of profound change rather than global social movements. My qualm here is with the juxtaposition of the two rather than Drahos’ conclusion. In my view national civil societies, transnational social movements, and their legal mobilizations against public and powerful private actors are essential factors for understanding when and how states take mitigation measures, including in China. While the author’s analysis that China will lead the energy transition may be correct, I would contend that a complete explanation of that process would have to include the important legal actions taken up by environmentalist groups and climate activists in China and elsewhere that applied pressure against public authorities and private actors.
Despite this shortcoming, I would certainly recommend Survival Governance to anyone who is interested in the politics, technologies and markets of the impending energy transition.
- Phillip Paiement