Disciplinary Defense and the Climate Change Discourse
Disciplinary Defense and the Climate Change Discourse
In which I admit on my substack that I wrote for another one, and it was glorious.
Political Science always appealed to me. I liked politics after all. Sociology felt too caught up in its own history, which is literally what History is, and Economics was too sure of itself and its sense of what mattered.
Which is just to say that I value the systematic study of the political, and think that political scientists by and large do a pretty good job. The discipline’s top journals though have not given as much attention to what to me seems like the most obvious and important political reality of the 21st century: climate change. APSR recently published a paper that checked off almost all of the boxes for me, legitimacy, authoritarianism, and climate change. It engendered a massive pushback on twitter, and I wrote about both the original paper and the pushback for the Strong Paw of Reason.
Ben McKean kindly called it “wide-ranging,” but sprawling would probably work too. Legitimation, politics under authoritarianism, conceptualizing the nature of climate change, digital debate, etc. There’s also a farmer trying to cancel pears, technocracy, thoughts about the movie Don’t Look Up, NIMBYism, meta-thoughts about social science, and more. Writing on my substack feels liberating, and while I imagine that I’ll try to put these thoughts into more formal (read: journal) piece down the line, I wanted to follow through on the argument and try to do this in “public” first.
As for the future of this humble substack, I’m planning on weekly posts focusing on the political economy of China’s decarbonization. Thanks for reading and good luck.