The writing of the first edition of this book took several years, so it was with some relief when I began to prepare this second edition that I found the basic structure of the book still seemed to work.
I have added one chapter effectively a second on international environmental politics in which I analyze the relationship between globalization, trade and the environment, with a specific focus on the World Trade Organization, the North American Free Trade Agreement and the European Union (EU).
The discussion of the EU also serves as an introduction to a supranational organization that frequently reappears in the two following chapters. Otherwise, all the chapters have been thoroughly updated, with substantially new or revised discussions of many topics, including Bjørn Lomborg, the ecological state, ecological citizenship, the experience of green parties in government, party politicization, environmental policy integration and the use of market-based instruments.
I would like to thank Elizabeth Bomberg, Meg Huby and Chris Rootes for reading various chapters.
I also received excellent advice on various revisions from Andy Dobson, Katarina Eckerberg, Arthur Mol, John Parkinson and Wolfgang Rudig. Thanks are owed again to my students for ¨ sharpening my thoughts and to John Haslam for encouraging me to write this second edition.
I would like to thank Susan Baker, and Taylor and Francis, for permission to reproduce her ‘Ladder of Sustainable Development’ in Table 8.1.
Finally, thanks to Charlie, again, for her love and support, and to Tom, just for being my wee man.
The environment has been on the political agenda since the late 1960s. Much has happened in that time, but is the planet better off? According to one popular heuristic measure of the state of the environment the ecological footprint things are bad and getting steadily worse.
The global ecological footprint of humanity is a measure of the amount of nature it takes to sustain a given population over the course of a year.
This global footprint first exceeded the Earth’s biological capacity in the late 1970s, since when it has risen steadily, overshooting by almost 40 per cent in 2005 (Venetoulis and Talberth 2006: 12).
Moreover, this alarming figure disguises huge disparities among the nations; for example, the per capita footprint (in global hectares) of the USA (108.95) is about seventy times that of Ethiopia (1.56) (Table 1.1).
It would be wrong, however, to draw the conclusion that nothing has changed over the last forty years; in practice, the picture is much more complicated, as is illustrated by the following examples.
In April 1986 the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded, with catastrophic human and environmental consequences stretching from the Ukraine across much of the Northern Hemisphere.
Chernobyl appeared to be the death knell for the nuclear industry, as most governments stopped commissioning any new nuclear power-stations.
Remarkably, twenty years later the nuclear industry is back in favour, with the first new nuclear reactor in the EU for over a decade being built in Finland, the French and British governments planning a new generation of nuclear reactors, and President Bush offering financial incentives to anyone willing to build the first nuclear power stations in the USA in a generation.
Ironically, the contemporary justification for nuclear power is the ‘green’ claim that it is a carbon-free solution to climate change
