“In the technocratic version of environmental politics,” writes Ulrich Beck in a critical passage of The Metamorphosis of the World, “carbon emissions become the measure of all things.” But for Beck this is inadequate. “Climate change risk is far more than a problem of measures of carbon dioxide and production of pollution”:

Nor does it signal only a crisis of human self understanding. More than that, global climate risk signals new ways of being, looking, hearing and acting in the world — highly ambivalent, open-ended, without any foreseeable outcome.

…the past is reproblematized through the imagination of a threatening future. Norms and imperatives that guided decisions in the past are re-evaluated through the imagination of a threatening future. From that follow alternative ideas for capitalism, law, consumerism, science…etc.

Alternative ideas, or at least a new set of expectations and beliefs. Global climate risk

creates the expectation (sometimes even the conviction) that a reformation of institutions (law, politics, economy, technological practices, consumption and lifestyles) is now urgent, morally imperative and politically possible, even if it fails at conferences and in politics.

“The global risk of climate change”, he concludes, provides a “compass for the twenty-first century. Yet…it is an open question where this compass leads us. There is an enormous discrepancy between normative expectations and political action.”

The enormous discrepancy between expectation and action also describes an enormous field of political possibility. This is where our responsibility comes into play.