greenhouse gases. Another notion typically associated with the envi-
ronmental left is the principle of precaution, which states that “where
there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scien-
tific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-
effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”^59 Finally,
environmentalists strongly believe that the current crisis cannot be
resolved without a massive influx of public funds. They therefore call
for new taxes that could be applied, for example, to the use of non-
renewable energy sources such as petroleum. The right, which mis-
trusts state intervention, systematically opposes such approaches.
Like the politics of identity and the politics of terrorism, the global
environmental debate is, through and through, a conflict between the
left and the right.
Left and right in the study of politics
Political science is, by all accounts, a divided discipline.^60 Political
scientists disagree on the purpose of their endeavor, on the scope of
their domain of inquiry, on their concepts and theories, and on their
methods and scientific norms. Charles Lindblom put it bluntly when
he concluded that political science is “a name given not to a field of
conventional scientific inquiry but to a continuing debate [which] tends
to be endless rather than declining (or terminating in a finding).”^61 In
a similar way, James Farr and Raymond Seidelman argue that it is a
series of “long-standing debates, not some agreement on fundamental
principles, that give the discipline the identity it now has.”^62 Yet it
seems unclear what these endless debates are about. While they all
(^59) United Nations Environment Programme, “Rio Declaration on Environment
and Development,” 1992 (www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.
60 asp?DocumentID=78&ArticleID=116).
Gabriel A. Almond,A Discipline Divided: Schools and Sects in Political
Science, Newbury Park, Sage, 1990, p. 14; Ira Katznelson and Helen V. Milner,
“American Political Science: The Discipline’s State and the State of the
Discipline,” in Ira Katznelson and Helen V. Milner (eds.),Political Science: The
61 State of the Discipline, New York, W. W. Norton, 2002, p. 1.
Charles Lindblom, quoted in Katznelson and Milner, “American Political
Science,” p. 2.
(^62) James Farr and Raymond Seidelman, “General Introduction,” in James Farr
and Raymond Seidelman (eds.),Discipline and History: Political Science in the
United States, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1993, p. 7.
The core currency of political exchange 215