IPPR Progressive Review最新文献

Within a week of assuming office, President Biden signed an executive order which declared that climate change is an “essential element of United States … national security”.³ In recognising that climate change had “become a climate crisis” and that “the scale and speed of necessary action is greater than previously believed”, the order directed the federal government to place climate change at the “forefront of … national security planning”.⁴

Biden's executive order mobilised the highest levels of the US intelligence and security communities to assess and prepare for the threats posed by the climate crisis. Risk assessments were commissioned, including the first national intelligence estimate on climate change⁵ – the highest level of assessment undertaken by the US intelligence community. Changes were made to the machinery of government, such as the creation of the Climate Security Advisory Council in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.⁶ A renewed focus was given to global leadership, including rejoining the Paris Agreement and appointing John Kerry as special presidential envoy for climate with a seat on the US National Security Council.⁷ This was a reordering of priorities, a deliberate strategy to insert the causes and consequences of the climate crisis into the key strategic decision-making structures of America's federal government.

The carrot approach also provides a natural home for the climate security agenda. ‘Bidenomics’ has been variously framed as a programme to rebuild the economy after the Covid-19 pandemic, to capitalise on the economic opportunity of green industry and as a moral imperative to tackle the effects of climate change. Yet at its heart, Bidenomics is also a strategic economic and geopolitical programme, which aims to secure American hegemony in response to the shifting realities of the 21st century.

Biden's instruction to treat climate change as an “essential element of United States … national security”¹⁴ has succeeded in yoking together his administration's more interventionist economic approach with the concerns of America's intelligence and security communities. This fusion of productivist economics, decarbonisation and geopolitical strategy was laid out by Biden's national security advisor, Jake Sullivan: “Clean-energy supply chains are at risk of being weaponized in the same way as oil in the 1970s, or natural gas in Europe in 2022. So through the investments in the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, we're taking action.”¹⁵ This was a speech about ‘renewing American economic leadership’ being delivered by a ranking national security official at the Brookings Institution, a pillar of the US strategic establishment.

These arguments have had some success across party lines. Biden's legislative agenda has three main Acts: the CHIPS and Science Act, the Infrastructure Invest

I want to compare what I take to be a standard industrial strategy approach to meeting the challenges of improving the lives of people and decarbonisation to a foundational economy approach. There is a profound difference between them, not just in focus but also in theory, in ways of knowing and acting.1 Any overlap or alignment is thus difficult.

Industrial policy, or strategy, is back in fashion. At the core of the claim in its favour is that globalisation is over, that dealing with climate change requires direct industrial action, and so does the challenge of China, and perhaps possible pandemics too. It is a policy imaginatively focussed on part of manufacturing industry, and ‘tech’ and international competition, with the aim of being world leading or even world beating.

The chosen focus of policy is also inappropriate. It is focussed on the idea that the UK is (or ought to be and could be) a science superpower, and that new industries will flow from this if things are finally arranged properly. This view is doubly doubtful: not only is the strength of UK innovation overestimated, but the whole model of national transformation through innovation is dubious. Actually, this policy has been followed in the UK for 40 years with very little success. What, realistically, can a country with 2 per cent of world R&D and manufacturing output, which is not world leading in the level of productivity, hope to control?

Take the case of Britishvolt, a start-up supposed to take British battery technology and triumph over the very strongly established largely Asian battery industry. This was the pure politics of hype, of fake it till you make it, or in this case don't: the whole project collapsed unbuilt in 2022.2

This is not to say that there is nothing to the spin-out start-up model. The British AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine came out of the University of Oxford. But it was mainly produced, on a vast scale, in India, for the poor world. That was a very good thing. But the UK was a net importer of Covid-19 vaccines, mostly from the US and the EU (and some from India). AstraZeneca turned out not to be the vaccine of choice even in the UK, let alone the US or the EU. The British success was in buying early, from around the world, of many different types of vaccine, thus managing risk and uncertainty, and making use of global expertise. The UK bought from start-ups and from established pharma giants. In both batteries and the Covid-19 vaccine, the UK has in fact relied on the rest of the world.

It is important to note that, away from the hype, some of the key expenditures on decarbonisation have involved supporting foreign firms and foreign technology. There has since been a decisive switch to subsidising an Indian car firm (Tata) to make batteries using Chinese technology. There are huge subsidies (in effect) to Électricité de France (EDF) to build a large nuclear power station to a French design, and subsidies to an Indian-o