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Peak energy and climate change: the double bind of post‐normal science Jörg Friedrichs, University of Oxford This is the pre‐print version of the following article: Jörg Friedrichs (2011) ‘Peak energy and climate change: the double bind of post‐normal science’, Futures 43 (4): 469‐477. The pre‐print version is identical in wording, and almost identical in layout, to the published version. G Model
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Peak energy and climate change: The double bind of post-normal science
Jörg Friedrichs a,b,*
a
b
University of Oxford, Department of International Development, Queen Elizabeth House, 3 Mansfield Road, Oxford OX1 3TB, United Kingdom
University of Oxford, St Cross College, 61 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LZ, United Kingdom
A B S T R A C T
Insofar as the viability of industrial society is at stake, energy supply and climate change
are not normal scientific issues. Fossil fuel is the ultimate finite resource, and the
atmosphere the ultimate finite sink. There is dispute about the most fundamental issues
and values to be promoted or defended. The concept of post-normal science has been
introduced for precisely this kind of situation, where ‘‘facts are uncertain, values in
dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent (Ravetz [1, p. 349]).’’ Although this applies
equally to energy supply and climate change, the related knowledge regimes offer a
remarkable contrast. Mainstream energy science, on the one hand, has refused to engage
in post-normal science. The accredited experts at the International Energy Agency (IEA)
and elsewhere have left ‘‘peak energy’’ to mavericks at the fringes or outside mainstream
scientific discourse. Consequently, the pressing issue of future energy scarcity has been
kept from the public agenda. Official climate science, on the other hand, has embraced
post-normal science. But even though the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) has been uniquely successful in placing climate change on the public agenda, the
inherent ambiguities of post-normal science have plunged climate science into a deep
legitimacy crisis. Most people prefer denial and self-deception to an unvarnished vision of
the truth when intractable problems such as peak energy and climate change are at stake.
In such cases, scientists are in a double bind: they are damned if they do and doomed if
they do not engage in post-normal science.
ß 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Neo-Malthusians and Cornucopians are never going to agree because they speak incommensurable discourses [2, pp. 26–
71]. Neo-Malthusians believe that there are insurmountable planetary limits – not only to food production and population
growth as Thomas Malthus believed, but also to the sustainability of industrial society. To Neo-Malthusians, these ‘‘Limits to
Growth’’ constitute an inescapable ‘‘human predicament [3].’’ Cornucopians object that human ingenuity has always
propelled us to the next technological level. They do not see any reason why this should be different in the future, and they
often rely on inspirational statements. As Ronald Reagan stated in his second inaugural address, ‘‘there are no limits to
growth when men and women are free to follow their dreams.’’
Neo-Malthusians do not deny the power of technological progress, but they caution that at the end of the day
‘‘technological fixes’’ will only make a bad situation worse. In a world where material resources are finite and environmental
sinks have limited absorptive capacities, the extractive and polluting intensity of industrial society is not sustainable. When
* Correspondence address: University of Oxford, Department of International Development, Queen Elizabeth House, 3 Mansfield Road, Oxford OX1 3TB,
United Kingdom.
E-mail address: [email protected].
0016-3287/$ – see front matter ß 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.futures.2010.12.004
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industrial society has depleted an indispensable resource such as fossil fuel or overstrained the absorptive capacity of the
atmosphere as the ultimate indispensable sink, then the ensuing collapse will only become more abysmal due to a higher
population level and a shrinking planetary carrying capacity. It is impossible for world population to continue endlessly, as it
does today [4], exceeding the ‘‘carrying capacity’’ of the planet, i.e. the number of people that can sustainably live here at a
given level of technological and economic development.
In this article, I do not have the word space to defend further my neo-Malthusian convictions. Therefore, I simply ask the
gentle reader to take the perspective of ‘‘Limits to Growth’’ as a highly plausible hypothesis. The most immediate limit can be
either the depletion of a non-substitutable resource, or the absorptive capacity of an environmental sink. Strictly speaking, it
is impossible to know with ultimate certainty which of many possible bottlenecks will put industrial society over the edge.
Industrial society relies on a variety of sources and sinks, not all of which are substitutable or expendable. However, the two
most commonly recognized challenges to continued industrial growth are the spectres of climate change and energy
scarcity, presumably after a global peak of oil production. The jury is still out if either one will hit first; or if energy scarcity
and climate change are going to bite together [5,6].
‘‘Peak energy’’ is related to the assumption that cheap energy with high calorific value will soon become scarce. For
generations, the backbone resource of industrial society has been oil. Now peak oil theorists predict a rapidly accelerating
decline of world oil production [7]. If they are right, oil will not be able to meet the projected needs of the world economy. Gas
may provide a temporary substitute, but the other available surrogates are not appealing. Coal is abundant and cheap, but it
does not have high calorific value. Uranium has high calorific value, but it is not abundant – and nuclear power is not cheap.
Renewable energy is abundant in theory, but it is not cheap and does not provide high calorific value. None of the surrogates
for oil, either alone or in combination, is compatible with high rates of economic growth [8,9]. Only nuclear fusion would
solve the problem, but the technology is not going to be available. In short, oil and gas can hardly be replaced as the backbone
of industrial society.
If peak energy is the most immediate resource constraint, then the most commonly accepted constraint on a sink is
climate change. After a first wave of global thinking in the 1960s/70s, most environmentalists chose to act locally. As a result
of their laudable efforts, air and water in industrial countries became cleaner and many endangered species have survived.
The strategy was to divert part of the wealth generated by economic growth to repair the worst effects of pollution. Alas, this
did not address the fundamental problem: exponential growth generates emissions that cannot be absorbed by finite
environmental sinks. The chicken is now coming home to roost in the form of climate change. Local gains from
environmentalism are endangered by the effects of anthropogenic climate change: higher temperatures, rising sea levels,
extreme weather events, desertification, famines, etc. As a result, industrial society may become unviable even before the
exhaustion of its resource base [10].
Peak energy and climate change are only the most likely candidates for plunging industrial society into agony, and various
assumptions can be made on their sequencing. The worst-case scenario is a pincer movement with peak oil causing a shift to
more carbon-intensive technologies, thus accelerating anthropogenic climate change and reducing further the carrying
capacity of the planet. The ensuing crisis would be accompanied not only by the demise of industrial capitalism, but also by
other social and political calamities [11].
2. Knowledge regimes
If peak energy and climate change are the two most immediate challenges to industrial society, then the related
knowledge regimes are of crucial importance. Is there sufficient awareness of the human predicament as reflected in future
energy scarcity and climatic disruptions, or are the knowledge regimes around energy supply and climate change inadequate
to face the existential issues at stake?
As one might expect with such inherently complex issues, both knowledge regimes are heavily dependent on scientific
expertise. Energy supply is dealt with by energy science, with a strong focus on economics. Climate change is in the bailiwick
of climate science, which mostly belongs to the natural sciences. In either case, scientific expertise is embodied in an
authoritative international institution. Epistemic authority on energy supply is concentrated at the International Energy
Agency (IEA), while expertise on climate change is embodied in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Analysing the way in which scientific and popular discourse has been structured in line with, and in opposition to, the
relevant scientific disciplines and related authoritative international institutions will help us understand how the
knowledge regimes around energy supply and climate change are, or are not, able to adequately address the underlying
problems. Insofar as both regimes are dealing with fundamental post-normal issues, the comparison will also give us a clue
what difference (if any) it makes if scientists engage in post-normal science.
As a matter of fact, it is easy to see that energy supply and climate change are not normal scientific issues. There is
considerable dispute around the most fundamental issues and values to be promoted or defended. As with other incalculable
risks inherent to late modernity [12,13], it is not difficult to agree in principle that important issues are at stake and that the
precautionary principle mandates action in the face of ‘‘low probability high impact’’ events. But everything else is hotly
contested, as the following examination reveals.
The concept of post-normal science has been introduced for precisely this kind of situation, where ‘‘facts are uncertain,
values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent [1, p. 349].’’ In such post-normal situations, the issues at stake are too
existential and too political to be left to scientific experts. The scientific peer community is therefore extended to include
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decision makers, interested citizens, media pundits, and others [14]. In addition, debates over uncertainty go beyond
technicalities and include radical doubt and ethical contestation [15].
2.1. Energy supply and the IEA: a tale of normal science
Epistemic authority on energy supply is concentrated in the Paris-based International Energy Agency. Since its
foundation in 1974, the IEA has slowly morphed into the ‘‘global energy policy advisor’’ [16, p. 314] par excellence. It has
become ‘‘an agency for compiling data and making forecasts on energy markets [17, p. 48],’’ the hallmark of which is the
collection of statistical data and the yearly publication of the authoritative World Energy Outlook.
None of this was preordained. The original raison d’être of the IEA was to serve as an insurance regime against major oil
supply disruptions [18, pp. 217–240]. Its mandate was to make rich oil consuming countries less vulnerable to supply
disruptions such as the crisis of 1973–74, and to prepare them for the expected risk of chronic undersupply [16,19,20].
US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger stated this clearly in a 1973 address to the Pilgrim Society in London. ‘‘[W]e must
bear in mind the deeper causes of the energy crisis: it is not simply a product of the Arab-Israeli war; it is the inevitable
consequence of the explosive growth of world-wide demand outrunning the incentives for supply. The Middle East war
made a chronic crisis acute, but a crisis was coming in any event. Even when pre-war production levels are resumed, the
problem of matching the level of oil that the world produces to the level which it consumes will remain [21].’’
On Kissinger’s initiative, the International Energy Agency was established in 1974 as a counter-cartel to the club of oil
exporting countries, OPEC. According to the bylaws of the IEA, the most immediate task was to establish and manage a crisis
response mechanism. Member states were obliged to hold the equivalent of a few months of net oil imports as an emergency
stockpile. In case of a major oil supply disruption, defined as a shortfall of oil supply of 7% or more, the IEA Secretariat would
have the authority to declare an emergency. Member states would then be obliged to share their supplies and implement
demand-restraint measures. (Since the 1980s, the original requirement of physically transferring oil stockpiles to
undersupplied member states has practically been replaced by an obligation to release the same stockpiles on the open
market in order to keep prices from skyrocketing.)
Since its creation, the IEA has been largely dormant as an insurance regime. There has not been a single event that would
have met the Agency’s formal definition of a major oil supply disruption: shortfall of oil supply of 7% or more (the largest
disruption was the 1979 Iranian revolution, with a 5.6% shortfall; the next largest ones were the 1973 oil crisis and the 1991
Gulf War, with a 4.3% shortfall each [22]). The IEA has acted only twice, on a voluntary basis, to inject additional oil from
stockpiles into the market through coordinated action: in 1991, as a response to the Gulf War, and in 2005, as a response to
Hurricane Katrina.
Like a fire department, the IEA must always be on standby in case there is an emergency. Although it has never been tested
as an insurance regime, it is a sizeable international bureaucracy. According to its website, the Agency has ‘‘a staff of 200
enthusiastic professionals [23].’’ Precisely because the IEA has been inactive as a fire fighter, these people had to be employed
in some other useful way. For that purpose, the statutes of the IEA mention a few other goals in addition to the emergency
response mechanism. The most important ones are monitoring the oil market and reducing the dependency on imported oil
[24,16,19]. Thus, the IEA was meant originally to evolve in two complementary ways: first, to keep track of international
markets and thus provide an early warning mechanism; and second, to work on ways to reduce the unsustainable oil
dependency of industrial countries.
Unfortunately, things turned out differently. The Agency has eagerly embraced the former task, while neglecting the
latter. If we consider the big picture, this is a regrettable failure of policy foresight. Insofar as the IEA’s core mission is the
strategic governance of energy scarcity as a long-term risk, it would have been mandatory for the Agency to develop into an
expert watchdog to comprehensively monitor the availability of oil and prepare for a soft-landing after peak energy.
However, this did not happen for a number of reasons.
First, the IEA was never really meant to question the presumption that oil is abundant. By placing its faith in markets, the
Agency followed the preferences of its member states. It is true that, since the 1990s, some members have been busy
‘‘greening’’ the IEA [20]. But no country has urged the IEA to seriously investigate the risks inherent in peak energy.
Second, the IEA is formally attached to the Paris-based club of industrialized countries, the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD). In 1973, most net-importers of oil, including the USA after the 1970 peak of its domestic
oil production, were industrialized countries. Therefore, the OECD was appealing as an institutional hub to accommodate the
IEA. The institutional culture of the OECD has always been characterized by a firm belief in the capacity of markets to safeguard
economic development. It is easy to see that the ideological commitment of the OECD has rubbed off on the IEA.
Third (and closely related), the IEA has been dominated by economists. As in the OECD, most staff members are
economists and/or public servants, usually with a background in economics. There are also a few lawyers. But engineers,
geologists and other energy experts are a slowly increasing minority. The longstanding ascendancy of economists has been
consequential [25]. For most economists it is axiomatic that, in an effectively functioning market, supply will always meet
demand. Accordingly the IEA has mostly extrapolated trends in energy demand, assuming that future demand will be met via
the market-mechanism.
The result is paradoxical. Originally, the whole point of setting up the IEA was that oil supply cannot be taken for granted.
Oil markets can be disrupted, not only for political reasons but also by physical scarcity. Logically, it would have been a small
step from trying to manage geopolitical risks (such as the 1973 oil crisis) to considering the geological limits to the future
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supply of oil and other vital energy resources (peak energy). Paradoxically, however, the idea of limited resources became
anathema to the very watchdog of oil supply disruptions.
In the 1998 World Energy Outlook (WEO), and then again in the 2008 WEO, the IEA looked more carefully into the
physical availability of energy resources. In both cases, it appears that in subsequent years there was backlash from member
state principals and particularly the US [26,27]. Even in the ‘‘alarmist’’ 2008 WEO, the IEA made geologically unsubstantiated
assumptions about supply following demand [7; cf. also the 2009 and 2010 WEOs].
In principle, the issue of energy scarcity would have been a good candidate for post-normal science. Energy supply is a
field where ‘‘facts are uncertain; values in dispute; stakes high; and decisions urgent [1, p. 349].’’ Data on energy reserves are
notoriously uncertain. Insofar as the industrial way of life is at stake, energy is intertwined deeply with fundamental values.
Concomitant to peak energy, people all over the world are bound to face ineluctable choices.
Nevertheless, what we observe in the case of energy supply is a bifurcation between official normal science and unofficial
abnormal science. On one hand, the economists at the IEA and its national counterparts such as the US Energy Information
Administration (EIA), in unison with engineers and geologists working for the industry, maintain the trappings of objectivity
and value-neutrality. On the other hand, whistleblowers and dissidents fill a parallel world in the ‘‘blogosphere’’ where
polemics and eschatological thinking loom large. The wider public tends to avoid the topic altogether. The moment of truth is
thus postponed further.
2.2. Climate change and the IPCC: a tale of post-normal science
The case of climate change is strikingly different from energy supply. Here, we can observe post-normal science in action
[28, pp. 72–108]. Climate scientists have colluded ever since the 1980s with the United Nations to translate their scientific
expert views into political action (for a concise history of climate science see [28, pp. 35–108]). The Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change, which was established in 1988, has been especially instrumental to this end [29,30]. Ever since the runup to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), which was concluded at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de
Janeiro, the IPCC has acted as a strategic link between the science and the politics of climate change [31,32].
Based on scientific expertise, the IPCC has collated four assessment reports (1990, 1995, 2001, 2007) that have
significantly shaped public debates and international negotiations. With increasing levels of confidence (or alarmism), the
assessment reports have suggested that current levels of emissions are unsustainable. From this, decision makers have
derived prescriptions on what ought to be done to get emissions back on track to a sustainable level.
After the First Report of 1990, which set the stage for the Earth Summit in Rio, the Second Assessment of 1995 found that
‘‘the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on climate change [33, p. 22].’’ This emboldened the
European Union to push for quantified emission targets in the negotiations leading up to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Other key
international players such as the United States and Japan were mildly sympathetic at the time, but showed themselves less
convinced by the scientific expertise.
The Third Report of 2001 concluded more boldly that ‘‘most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to
have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations [34, p. 61].’’ While this did not prevent the US administration
of George W. Bush from boycotting the Kyoto Protocol, it played an important role in galvanizing international collaboration
to address climate change. The EU ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2002. After the accession of Russia and Japan, the Protocol
entered into force in 2005.
The Fourth Report of 2007 concluded on an even more alarmist note: ‘‘Most of the observed increase in global average
temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations
[35, p. 5].’’ Nevertheless, the path from scientific expertise to political action has not been straightforward, as shown by the
abject failure of the Copenhagen Climate Summit in December 2009. Despite some hopeful declarations of intent reached in
December 2010, at the international conference in Cancun, the situation has not changed much and in fact is unlikely to
change any time soon.
A perusal of the history of official climate science from the late 1980s to December 2010 suggests that climate scientists
have eagerly embraced post-normal science. First, the peer community has been extended [14]. It includes decision makers,
e.g. when the IPCC’s summaries for policymakers are ‘‘approved’’ line-by-line at plenary sessions of national delegates
[29,36]. To the extent that climate change has become an issue of mass politics, media pundits and civil society have also
become enmeshed in the extended peer community [37]. Second, the reporting of uncertainty has become far more than a
mere technicality. For its assessment reports, the IPCC has been relying on expert consensus not only to create but also to
estimate the levels of confidence by which its findings are stated to be true.
Climate scientists find themselves in a double bind between post-normal science and standard scientific values, which
has painted them into a difficult corner. On the one hand, extending the peer community has intensified debate and
galvanized part of the public for action. On the other hand, important sectors of the public do not forgive any dilution of
scientific rigor – especially with regard to ‘‘inconvenient truths.’’ This imposes upon scientists a difficult balancing act in
which they must invoke scientific objectivity to maintain authority, while being forced by the circumstances to engage in
‘‘stealth issue advocacy’’ to be relevant [38]. Thus, they are torn between the need to keep a posture of scientific objectivity
and the practical push to make political interventions in the style of post-normal science.
Presumably to compensate for this bent to post-normal science, the IPCC is eager to maintain the veneer of standard
science in three different ways. First, the Panel relies on a painstaking procedure of scientific peer review. Second, although
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the adopted procedure combines ‘‘hard science’’ with a considerable dose of ‘‘fuzzy logic,’’ the IPCC attributes percentage
values to its confidence levels. For example, the expression ‘‘very likely’’ in the above citation from the 2007 report
corresponds to a confidence level of at least 90% [35, p. 27]. The practice is reminiscent of statistical techniques and conveys
scientific objectivity [36,39]. Third, the IPCC is demonstratively committed to the fact-value distinction. Science
conventionally prides itself on factual knowledge, which is assumed to have objective validity regardless of political values.
To protect their reputation as scientists in a conventional sense, the experts gathered at the IPCC tend to insist on their value
neutrality and are reluctant to translate their findings into policy prescriptions. They claim to be able to reconstruct and, to
some extent, predict climate change; but they hasten to submit that they are unable to answer the question of how much
climate change is tolerable to human society, or what exactly ought to be done.
Such posturing may have temporarily shielded off climate scientists from the allegation of stealth issue advocacy, but not
in the long run. After all, the whole point of post-normal climate science is to influence political decisions. However much
climate scientists may insist on their value neutrality, political decision makers need prescriptions to bolster their policy
choices. Somewhat hypocritically, climate scientists have obliged by offering specific focal points. For example, discussions
became much simpler after consensus had been reached on 2 8C as the highest tolerable increase of global temperature.
Climate scientists did not actively promote this arbitrary target, but they put a good face on the matter when it was
attributed falsely to their expertise. Now they are paying the price, because association with the arbitrary 2 8C target
undermines their credibility [40].
Whether or not there is a greenhouse effect, mainstream climate scientists are sitting in a glass house where throwing
stones becomes exceedingly dangerous to their expert authority. A few isolated cases of compromised integrity (emails
leaked from the University of East Anglia) and one or two cases of overconfidence slipped into the 2007 Assessment Report
(such as the melting of Himalayan glaciers) have been enough to discredit their science. At the end of the day, the collusion of
climate scientists with political decision makers has created a serious problem to their scientific reputation. The problem is
that the public sphere is an echo chamber of sorts. In periods of ‘‘climate panic,’’ such as 2008 and 2009, alarmist climate
science gets a lot of attention from civil society and political decision makers. However, such attention cycles last for no more
than a few years. After that, the public turns back to its cognitive and emotional biases against ‘‘negative’’ worldviews.
The case of climate change thus shows the limitations of post-normal science. Even where expert knowledge is available
and shared by an extended peer community, it does not necessarily translate into action. From a political viewpoint, this is
not surprising. First, there are serious distributional issues and multiple paths of action that might be compatible with
various strands of scientific expertise. Second, to some extent it has always been an illusion that climate science is driving
climate policy. From the start, government and civil society in different countries have drawn selectively on science to
legitimize contrasting viewpoints and policies. Thus, Germany and other European countries have embraced the ‘‘climate
consensus’’ while the USA under George W. Bush was nearly impermeable [41].
In short, mainstream climate science has clearly moved towards post-normal science. But ultimately, post-normal
science can hardly tackle a problem of epic proportions such as climate change. On the contrary, post-normal science about
such planetary risks carries the seeds of its own destruction. Public authority continues to be ascribed to conventional,
specialist science. Extending the peer community and thus diluting rigorous standards does not guarantee either more
democratic processes or more desirable outcomes, but it does undermine scientific authority. The reputation of mainstream
climate science is seriously endangered because populist ‘‘climate sceptics’’ have been able to expose the contamination of
climate science with political motives, and particularly the political nature of the alliance between climate experts and
promoters of vigorous action to control climate change.
3. Denial and self-deception
As we have seen, there is an interesting contrast between energy science and climate science. Mainstream energy science
has refused to engage in post-normal science. The accredited experts at the IEA and elsewhere have left peak energy to
mavericks at the fringes or outside mainstream scientific discourse. Consequently, the pressing issue of future energy
scarcity has been kept from the public agenda. Official climate science, by contrast, has embraced post-normal science. But
even though the IPCC has been uniquely successful in placing climate change on the public agenda, the inherent ambiguities
of post-normal science have plunged climate science into a deep legitimacy crisis.
Why is it that post-normal science, which can contribute to the management of complex problems such as BSE and GMOs
[42], has such a poor record with regard to climate change and peak energy? It seems that the main reason lies in the socialpsychological coping mechanism of denial and self-deception [43; cf. 44–48]. It further seems that there are two reasons why
issues such as climate change and peak energy are the perfect breeding ground for this mechanism. First, they are existential
predicaments rather than tractable problems. Second, they have an inherent tendency to escalate and spiral out of control.
When compared to the predicaments of climate change and peak energy, bovine spongiform encephalopathy and
genetically modified organisms look like tractable problems. A problem is something in search of a solution, while a
predicament cannot be solved but at best be honestly acknowledged and perhaps somewhat mitigated [49]. While most
people are ready to support attempts to tackle challenging problems such as BSE and GMOs, their patience is shorter for
predicaments. When something is seen as a tractable problem, disavowal is seen as pointless. But the situation changes
when the same thing is seen as a predicament. In such cases even the best efforts of scientists, whether normal or postnormal, are doomed because the psychological mechanism of denial and self-deception kicks in.
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Climate science is a case in point. The IPCC has seen a heroic effort of scientists to engage in post-normal science and
address anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have worked for decades to convince decision makers and the
public that the problem of climate change needs to be acknowledged and acted upon. They have developed scenarios
projecting climate change several decades into the future, thus extending people’s time horizons. They have used whatever
propaganda available, including the infamous ‘‘hockey stick’’ diagram, to convince people that climate change is escalating
[50]. They have contributed to specific policy prescriptions such as carbon reduction targets. They have cautioned that in the
absence of an adequate response there will be a point of no return. In short, climate scientists have done everything in their
power to promote vigorous action against climate change.
Yet there has been fierce backlash. Especially after the fiasco of the 2009 Copenhagen conference, decision makers and the
wider public lost confidence that climate change is a tractable problem. As long as climate change looked remotely like a
problem in search of a solution, and as long as there was a remote possibility for an international deal to be reached, there
seemed to be a critical mass of people ready to support vigorous action. After the breakdown of the Copenhagen summit,
however, decision makers and the public have lost confidence that climate change is a tractable problem. A further increase
in the concentration of atmospheric carbon is now seen as inevitable. Since people tend to operate under the implicit
assumption that lamenting intractable problems is pointless, ‘‘climate sceptics’’ have become emboldened and climate
change denial is back with a vengeance [51,52, pp. 95–133].
Since Copenhagen, most people know ‘‘in their bones’’ that climate change is an existential predicament and cannot be
solved. Whenever people face such an intractable problem, denial is in conformity with popular philosophy. ‘‘If we can do
something to solve the problem, we will perhaps do it. If there is nothing we can do, we should try to forget about the
problem.’’
To make things worse, climate change and peak energy are not just intractable – they are escalating problems. Escalating
problems are problems that have an inherent tendency to spiral out of control. Since there is a limit to how much can be
tolerated, any strategy to deal with such problems within the framework of the status quo is bound to break down at some
point. When an intractable problem escalates, breakdown must happen regardless of whether people acknowledge the
problem because, eventually, the tolerance limit will be reached.
As mentioned, such situations are the perfect breeding ground for denial and self-deception. When an intractable
problem escalates, the best thing myopic individuals and groups feel they can do is to reduce their suffering at any given
point in time. While the escalation itself is beyond their control, they feel that they can avoid the social and psychological
cost of acknowledging their predicament by deceiving themselves and pretending that the escalation did not occur.
Acknowledging a predicament leads to negative emotions such as fear and helplessness, or social conflict about the
attribution of blame and responsibility. Both individually and as groups, people have a predisposition to minimize such
intolerable costs by engaging in denial and self-deception. Thus understood, denial and self-deception are socialpsychological coping mechanisms to minimize pain in desperate situations.
To make this more tangible, let us assume that a couple has a problem of escalating debts. They both agree that their
prodigal lifestyle is not negotiable. Consequently, there is no practical solution to their problem. As long as they acknowledge
the problem, they incur the social and psychological cost of avowal on top of the cost of the problem itself. Not only do they
have to service their debt, but they also must acknowledge the uncomfortable fact that they are living beyond their means. At
some point (t1), they silently agree to stop talking about their escalating debts. They then feel much better. Their debts keep
rising, but instead of lamenting their predicament they have now swept it under the carpet. Initially, this seems to work very
well indeed. But over time there is more and more fallout from their skyrocketing debts, and at some point (t3) the entire
situation is doomed to break down.
Fig. 1 expresses this pattern of ‘‘fatalist denial’’ [43] in formal terms. There is an escalating problem bound to break down
when the total cost resulting from the situation at any given moment hits the tolerance limit. Because acknowledging the
problem comes with painful social and psychological cost, the total cost resulting from the situation at any given moment is
lower when people are in denial than when they acknowledge the problem [costdenial (t) < costavowal (t)]. It is therefore
attractive for people to enter denial at an early stage of the escalation (t1). Without denial, the tolerance limit would be
reached at t2. With denial, the tolerance limit is reached only at t3. Thus, denial reduces cost and buys time.
This is exactly what is happening in the case of climate change. In a way, it is a déjà vu from the 1970s. The debate about
limits to growth started in the early 1970s [3,53] and culminated during the Carter Administration, when there was public
enquiry into the issue [54]. By the mid-1980s, when it had become clear that radically altering the industrial way of life was
beyond human control, the debate ushered into denial with President Reagan solemnly declaring: ‘‘There are no limits to
growth when men and women are free to follow their dreams.’’ Faithful to this lunatic maxim, the real limits to growth are
kept unacknowledged.
Alas, denial and deception have unintended long-term disadvantages. Fig. 1 suggests that, despite the short-term benefit
of reducing discomfort, there are three long-term risks associated with fatalist denial. First, the model suggests that the
cumulative cost of denial may turn out higher than the cumulative cost of avowal. Or, to put it in formal mathematical terms:
R t3
R t2
t1 costdenial ðtÞ > t1 costavowal ðtÞ. Second, fatalist denial leaves people in a greater mess. When the situation breaks down the
cost of avowal/denial disappears, but the fallout from the problem is even higher: costproblem (t3) > costproblem (t2). Third,
even intractable problems can be mitigated. But when people are in denial, they conceal from themselves essential
information such as their cost functions and tolerance limit. Having removed the problem from their consciousness, they are
unable to exploit the potential for mitigation.
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Fig. 1. Fatalist denial.
Despite these negative long-term effects, there is a twisted kind of rationality to denial and self-deception. When in
denial, people follow what they see as their best interest by trying to minimize harm and maximize subjective well-being at
least in the short term. They are particularly likely to do this when escalating, intractable problems are at stake. Such
behaviour may be short-sighted and morally dubious, but it is by no means irrational.
Nevertheless, the long-term consequences can be catastrophic. This becomes clear when we apply the above
considerations to climate change and peak oil. Denial can perhaps increase the life-span of global industrial society by a few
decades. But the later the limits to growth become salient and the later the breakdown of global industrial society occurs, the
worse climate change is going to be and the fewer extractable energy reserves will be left. Maybe the world has already
passed the point of no return (t2). If this is the case, then there is no rational alternative to collective denial and selfdeception. (How would markets and investors react to public acknowledgement that the availability of energy is declining
for good [55]?)
4. Summary
Insofar as the viability of industrial society is at stake, energy supply and climate change are not normal scientific
issues. Fossil fuel is the ultimate finite resource, and the atmosphere the ultimate finite sink. There is dispute about the
most fundamental issues and values to be promoted or defended. The concept of post-normal science has been introduced
for precisely this kind of situation, where ‘‘facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent
(Ravetz [1, p. 349]).’’ Although this applies equally to energy supply and climate change, the related knowledge regimes offer
a remarkable contrast. Mainstream energy science, on the one hand, has refused to engage in post-normal science. The
accredited experts at the International Energy Agency (IEA) and elsewhere have left ‘‘peak energy’’ to mavericks at the fringes
or outside mainstream scientific discourse. Consequently, the pressing issue of future energy scarcity has been kept from the
public agenda. Official climate science, on the other hand, has embraced post-normal science. But even though the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been uniquely successful in placing climate change on the public
agenda, the inherent ambiguities of post-normal science have plunged climate science into a deep legitimacy crisis. Most
people prefer denial and self-deception to an unvarnished vision of the truth when intractable problems such as peak energy
and climate change are at stake. In such cases, scientists are in a double bind: they are damned if they do and doomed if they
do not engage in post-normal science.
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Appendix A. Postscript on post-normal science
One reviewer of this article cautions in his otherwise sympathetic review that post-normal science (PNS) was originally
introduced with a radical agenda in mind. He notes that the original meaning of the term ‘‘extended peer community’’ was ‘‘all
those who are normally excluded from decision processes.’’ Accordingly, he calls the original version ‘‘outsider PNS’’ and
differentiates it from my modified version of ‘‘insider PNS.’’ For the sake of conceptual clarity, he invites me to specify how and
why I differ from ‘‘outsider PNS.’’ While I feel that integrating this reflection into the main body of the article would have
distracted attention from my substantive argument, let me briefly state my views on the issue.
With due respect for the agenda of Funtovicz and Ravetz, I do not see any principled reason why extended peer communities
should be posited in fundamental (or permanent) opposition to scientific insiders. The original proponents of PNS implicitly
recognize this by their own terminology. After all, they did not term the social milieu supporting PNS as ‘‘alternative’’ or
‘‘oppositional’’ peer communities, but as ‘‘extended peer communities’’.
It seems to me that the cycle whereby PNS becomes politically salient typically starts with competent outsiders challenging
the scientific mainstream. The next, decisive step is co-optation by the mainstream. Many, if not all, radical movements are about
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getting themselves co-opted by precisely the establishments they originally oppose. The ultimate aim is of course to shape, or at
least significantly influence, these very establishments. From this perspective, the transition from ‘‘outsider PNS’’ to ‘‘insider PNS’’
is a measure of success.
This can be exemplified by a specific post-normal issue such as genetically modified maize. In a 1999 article [1], Ravetz and De
Marchi have shown how establishment science had been irritated over the 1990s by competent outsiders criticizing ‘‘gene
maize’’. Over the 2000s, establishment figures at the EU and elsewhere have seen themselves forced to extend the peer
community and admit previous outsiders to their decision making. The result is the successful co-optation of these outsiders into
what might rightfully be called ‘‘insider PNS.’’
Something similar has happened with climate science, which was a matter of ‘‘outsider PNS’’ in the 1980s but became the
exemplar of ‘‘insider PNS’’ over the 1990s and 2000s (but see [2] for an alternative interpretation). By contrast, co-optation has not
happened to the same degree in the case of energy science, where PNS continues to be done by outsiders. Because climate and
energy science are otherwise comparable, I was able to use them to answer the question of what difference, if any, it makes
whether or not scientists engage in PNS.
To be sure, there will be outsiders even to ‘‘insider PNS.’’ No matter how many previous outsiders have been co-opted, there
will always be others, whether in the blogosphere or elsewhere, raging against the (new) establishment. The co-optation of
previous outsiders to the establishment can easily make others, whether extreme outsiders or previous insiders disaffected by the
new establishment, feel enormously marginalized and resentful. This seems to be precisely what is motivating many climate
sceptics (the situation is of course different in energy science, where there is still a mainstream opposed by ‘‘outsider PNS’’).
In sum, there is ‘‘outsider PNS’’ and there is ‘‘insider PNS.’’ It seems natural that the former strives to become the latter. Only
then is there an extended peer community in the true sense of the word, i.e. a community encompassing former outsiders
alongside establishment scientists. It would be neither analytically productive nor politically progressive to seal off the notion of
PNS by restricting it to the initial stages of ‘‘outsider PNS.’’
[1] B. De Marchi, J.R. Ravetz, Risk management and governance: a post-normal science approach, Futures 31 (1999) 743–757.
[2] J. Ravetz, Climategate: plausibility and the blogosphere in the post-normal age, 2010, downloaded from http://wattsupwiththat.com on 24 November 2010.
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