Abstract
"In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem". Seems like Reagan's statement should be inverted today, and the notion of Government amplified. In fact, in the last decades, states started realizing that they had to face a much broader issue than their own domestic concerns, a worldwide dilemma simple per se, but much more complex to solve: Climate Change. This matter also introduced the concept of public good and an international logic to protect this good; simply put, no states or human being has more interest than other in protecting the air he breaths - the Ozone layer - and the environment he lives in. However, if theoretically this concept was determined, in practice, no efficient solutions where found. The aim of this essay is not to find international solutions to climate change, but to understand the deeply rooted causes of the problem.
Believing that the "international community" feels extremely concerned about climate change would be a very genuine trust. On the contrary, the optimistic belief of the 70's that a global solution would be found and implemented successfully are being more and more discredited in time. Only by looking at the recent FIFA's decision of organizing the 2022 world cup in Qatar, we realize that no real concerns and priorities has been integrated internationally; FIFA is a private international actor which can possibly imagine the ecological cost of organizing a world cup in such a desert place as Qatar. But here lays one of the major problems: economic interests.
The realist assumption that states economic interests is the main barrier toward a global solution to climate change cannot be dismissed; as we will see in the first part of this essay, economic growth and globalization directly provoked environmental change. Similarly, it is because solutions to climate change are very costly and that there is not international consensus to put them into place that states are reluctant to "invest" into climate change unilaterally.
However one point should be made about states' economic interests: if it is true that economics interests shape international cooperation to climate change, it should be noticed that states, unlike in the past centuries, are not the only international actors anymore. As Levy and Newell put it, "Business plays a key role in international environmental politics. Private firms are engaged directly or indirectly in the lion share of the resource depletion, energy use and hazardous emissions that generate climate change." . Likewise, international organizations should also be considered as active actors in environmental policies.
These things said, should we consider states' economic interests as the only obstacle to the development of an efficient, global response to climate change?
