Historic Overview of Climate Framing

This text was written for a workshop on « Risk and Climate Change: The Shaping of a Cosmopolitan Future », held in Paris on 10-11 December 2012, in the frame of the Chaire of Ulrich Beck entitled « Cosmopolitan Risk Communities » at the Collège d’études mondiales.

In this paper, I propose an overview of the framing of the climate change regime which developed from 1992 up to nowadays. First, I deconstruct some features of this framing: the definition of climate change as a pollution problem, the evidence of its global character of the problem, the strategy of burden-sharing. Second, I put the focus on the main tools of the governmentality of the problem (carbon market, flexible mechanisms), on the specific relation between science and politics starting with the 2° C threshold, and finally on the rise of adaptation stakes. Today, the geopolitics of climate are profoundly affected by the convergence of the diverse crises currently sweeping the world and this current framing is in total failure. The last section is devoted to the question: what can be done particularly in Europe ?