Environmental regulation, shifting conditions and the strange movement of reason
Last week, the Irish Times carried a range of stories and opinions about climate impacts, infrastructure delays and environmental regulation. It raises questions about what common sense is, where it comes from, and what makes one version of common sense more authoritative than another.
On Tuesday, Fintan O’Toole wondered how we could be experiencing climate breakdown and still fail to believe it. On Wednesday, the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council translated climate inaction into a potential €13 billion annual bill. By Friday, a senior Government adviser was warning that “gold-plated” environmental regulation was obstructing critical infrastructure. That evening, the editorial team called for “common sense”. The following morning, Mark O’Connell described a climate conference cancelled because the building hosting it could not cope with extreme heat. And by Tuesday this week, Sadhbh O’Neill was arguing that the real failure lies in strategic planning and State capacity rather than environmental regulation.
Seven days across one newspaper and several apparently contradictory versions of reality. Where does common sense come from?
The Problem – Solution Relationship
For O’Toole, even direct physical experience of climatic breakdown is failing to create adequate political recognition. His response is to call for stronger political activism to “protest and survive” the “well-funded backlash against net zero policies”.
Burke-Kennedy outlines the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council’s argument that climate action is fiscally prudent because inaction is ruinously expensive, as long-term compliance penalties will be significantly higher than short-term compliance costs. It is about being sensible with the national purse.
For both Beasley’s piece about the opinions of a top government adviser and the editorial opinion piece, environmental protection is legitimate, but procedures must be proportionate and efficient. The shared concern is that procedural excess creates delay, cost and opportunities for obstruction. But, we can get necessary things done and “a lot of this is just common sense”.
O’Connell builds on his experience of a cancelled panel discussion on climate-related extreme heat to make the broader argument that much of our physical infrastructure is built around assumptions about a climate that no longer exists. The message is one of adaptation urgency to chase a reality that is now much different to that which our existing infrastructure was built for.
O’Neill contests the top government advisor’s diagnosis as reported by Beasley to argue that poor strategic planning, reactive administration and loss of State capacity cause infrastructure delay and that robust environmental assessment provides quality assurance, investor certainty, and avoidance of legal chaos that fuels delay. The regulations are solid; we need to be better at working with them.
How do problems get translated into common sense?
The articles from O’Toole and O’Connell seem to highlight the tension between the material intensity of ecological signals and their translatability to an institutional or politically authoritative language, as considered in the other articles. In other words, reality does not become governable merely by becoming real. It must be translated into the language of money, law, administration and critical infrastructure to gain intelligibility and authority, thereby becoming accessible to the state’s financial advisory council and other top government advisors.
While everyone claims the mantle of realism, evidence and the public interest, the translation process seems to be the site of contestation, for the right to be the winning form of realism. They battle with each other for the authority to legitimise collective action. So despite fierce disagreement about what should be done, the “contestants” remain enclosed within a shared ontology of useful, governable action.
The problems differ, but each must ultimately become something that can be measured, funded, regulated, administered, or delivered. They disagree over the score while leaving the scoreboard largely intact.
If the game is the problem, can we change the game?
Taking O’Toole’s argument, say we could eliminate climate deniers, fossil-fuel lobbyists and corrupt politicians and suppose that everyone with policy-making and implementing authority accepted the science about climate, would the problems with mitigation, adaptation and infrastructure remain? It is difficult to see how they wouldn’t.
It is entirely understandable that an infrastructure developer would want proportionate environmental regulation, that a fiscal economist would want prudent expenditure, that a civil servant would want an administrable policy and that a climate activist would want measurable emissions reductions.
Everyone may be sincere. Everyone may be competent. Everyone may be well-informed on climate science. Everyone has a view from somewhere. And whatever formula was found to integrate these perspectives, the underlying test of what counts as serious, useful and actionable would remain largely intact.
What can be done?
Using this selection of articles as a microcosm of a mainstream range of perspectives on the tension between ecology and economy, it can be argued that no one can escape the game and remain legible. Any alternative way of seeing the problem still would have to become intelligible to existing institutions if it is to gain traction. In the process, it risks being translated back into the very language and rules it was seeking to challenge
Therefore, the task might be to develop a capacity to notice the game while still acting within it, whether that action is contributing to debate, drafting policy, or simply pondering the game. And while in the act of noticing, it might be possible to catch the game in the act of producing one’s own version of common sense.
And then you are left with the question of what to do next when you know that your very sense of responsible action has partly been produced by the game, by its character and its rules that you are challenging. The implication is that we are not just players in a game, but the game produces a particular type of player that may emerge as more or less prominent or relevant depending on where the game is at. So the first invitation is to become really curious about our own professional instincts.
And the second invitation might be to become very attentive to the translations between signal and institutional grammar (the language of governance). How do we protect what disappears or becomes obscured by each act of translation while retaining a sense of our own entanglement?
The task is not to stop making common sense. We cannot. It is to become more attentive to the conditions through which common sense takes form in and through us. Perhaps the responsibility is to let the world interrupt our common sense a little more often, and spend a little less time forcing the world to fit it.
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