On 24 May 2010, what was then thought to be the last Hummer ever to be produced rolled off the assembly line at the General Motors plant in Shreveport, Louisiana.Footnote 1 Weighing in at over six tons, with a six-liter V8 engine, the full-size sport utility vehicle was modeled after the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, or HUMVEE, widely used by the US military since the mid-1980s. As an obvious consumer homage to American military might and supremacy in the age of unipolarity, the Hummer H2 became an instantly recognized and sought-after status symbolFootnote 2 when it was introduced on the eve of the 2003 Iraq war.Footnote 3 Within a decade, however, sales of the vehicle had plummeted, and the brand became a casualty of GM’s bankruptcy and subsequent financial restructuring in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.Footnote 4
If the Hummer’s allure as a status symbol aided its popularity, then the erosion of that status must also be implicated in its demise. The rise and fall of the Hummer brand, for example, coincided with the material disincentive of rising fuel costs,Footnote 5 but also with a perceived increase in the public’s awareness of the looming threat of climate change.Footnote 6 Auto manufacturers have responded to both, pivoting in the last decade or so toward a decarbonized future of hybrid and electric vehicles (EVs).Footnote 7 These vehicles revealed status in their own way, not only as symbols of conspicuous consumption—reflected in their higher prices—but also by linking their driver to a set of normative and ethical practices that serve as cultural signifiers for a new “aspirational class.”Footnote 8 For this expanding class of environmentally conscious consumers, the Hummer became an obvious target of stigma and scorn, rather than status. In 2020, these two conflicting narratives fused when GM announced that the polarizing Hummer would be coming back, but this time as a fully electric vehicle.Footnote 9
The Hummer’s arc illustrates what we already know: that status symbols are more often fluid, not fixed. As social norms evolve, societal understandings of status and standing evolve with them, disrupting social hierarchies. Individuals and groups reliant on antiquated practices and symbols may see their own standing decline, as new rules of status recognition, more suited to others, take their place.Footnote 10 This is no less true for the social system of international politics, where territorial conquest and colonialism once reigned as ways to assert status, only to give way to a post-1945 order ostensibly defined by norms of self-determination, sovereign equality, and territorial integrity.Footnote 11 “What made for great-power status in the past may not do so in the future,” Larson, Paul, and Wohlforth write,Footnote 12 while Renshon acknowledged that just as there is no natural status hierarchy, there are also no “immutable characteristics that confer status.”Footnote 13 For this reason, Murray stressed how contingent recognitive practices are on “the norms, practices, and institutions that define major power identity in particular historical moments.”Footnote 14 The symbolic utility for status of any given pursuit or good, Røren explained, is forever “contingent on the efforts made within various clubs and groups to establish them as such.”Footnote 15
Status orders, in sum, can and do change, and these changes are significant precisely because of the lengths states appear willing to go to preserve, acquire, or regain their rank by appealing to the symbolic terms and rules of this order.Footnote 16 Accordingly, whether international politics progresses toward a normative ideal, or pulls further away, may very well depend on the status order at its foundation, and the behavior and practices this order incentivizes. As Ward summarized well, “status-seeking only entails violence to the extent that violence is necessary to achieve status markers.”Footnote 17 While much of our modern international political history has been defined by this tenet, it need not be, and as the perceived decline in territorial aggression, annexation, and interstate war over the last half-century suggests, it may no longer be.Footnote 18 Indeed, while violence and status are historically linked, nonviolent modes of status-seeking in world politics clearly exist, from the emblematic case of the US–Soviet space race,Footnote 19 to the prestige politics of the Olympic Games.Footnote 20
Following both of these premises, this paper is concerned with two questions: one general and one specific. First, how do international status orders—defined as the characteristics that merit status and the rules that govern its recognition—change? Second, in view of the ever more urgent threat posed by climate change, can conceptions of status evolve to incentivize and encourage a race toward decarbonization among the great powers?Footnote 21 These questions are partly driven by a normative agenda. The climate crisis ranks among the greatest existential threats facing humanity this century. Climate change will implicate everything from migration patterns and refugee flows,Footnote 22 to food security,Footnote 23 development, and rates of conflictFootnote 24 as entire states and regions become increasingly unlivable. Yet major emitters have failed to cooperate around a binding international agreement limiting carbon emissions, while individual states’ climate pledges and policies have mostly fallen short of the ambition necessary to stall global temperature increases.Footnote 25 As Beaumont put it, “Unlike the dinosaurs then, humans can see the apocalypse coming but have thus far decided not to prioritize it.”Footnote 26 What are we prioritizing instead?
An incredible body of work across economics, sociology, psychology, and political science emphasizes the degree to which status, and its pursuit, monopolizes our mind, emotions, and behavior.Footnote 27 IR scholars have spent two decades making the same case for states in anarchy, stressing how the pursuit of status so often pushes states to the extreme ends of violence, destruction,Footnote 28 and financial wastefulness.Footnote 29 If these powerful motives can instead be put in the service of prosocial behavior that is no less competitive but considerably less destructive, then a real normative case exists for redefining the climate space as an arena of status competition. In response to this normative prompt, this paper excavates the ways in which this transition is not only desirable but also possible given climate action’s ability to graft onto the underlying characteristics that currently define what is, and what is not, a symbol of great power status.
The article proceeds through five sections. The first section acknowledges the diversity of status orders in world politics, while justifying my empirical focus on the great power order in particular, whose members wield disproportionate influence over the climate. Different status orders are often defined by different “rules of the game,” and this delimitation is necessary to advance a generalized theory of change, while also specifying the conditions and mechanisms for change at the very top of the global hierarchy.
The second section builds out this argument by importing a theory of grafting from norms scholarship to argue that status orders change not only through explicit normative transformation but also when new status attributes and symbols can be coherently and legitimately grafted onto existing attributes and symbols. This is not a change that reflects some underlying shift in the moral or normative terrain of international politics. Instead, ascendent ideas are smuggled into a social order because of their perceived link to the hegemonic ideas at its foundation, concealing but also producing change. In such instances, the status order’s core features remain unchanged, but the behavior it incentivizes is now redirected toward other pursuits.
The third section applies this grafting theory to the climate crisis in arguing that the basket of policies and actions needed to effect the green-energy revolution can already be legibly grafted onto the great power status order. Because the path to net zero will be incredibly costly and technologically intensive, symbols of decarbonization are well positioned to exploit the incentive structure of a status order heavily deferential to traditional measures of observable material power. For this reason, while many paths to decarbonization exist, the most legible policies for grafting onto status will be those which aim to invest and innovate in the replacement of fossil fuels, rather than simply the reduction of fossil fuel emissions.
Where the first three sections argued that grafting climate action onto the great power status order is possible, the fourth section details how this transformation might already be happening through a discourse analysis of the Biden administration’s landmark speeches on the climate. Over the first two years of his administration, when the US re-entered the Paris Agreement and passed major climate legislation, Biden repeatedly used his lectern to legitimize aggressive climate action, often by invoking the status implications and urgency of the looming great power competition with China. The US needed to decouple its economy from fossil fuels, Biden so often argued, not only to avoid climate catastrophe but also to win what was increasingly becoming a green-energy race that would define the twenty-first century. He warned that whether the US maintained its leadership position in the world or slipped precipitously would be determined, in part, by whether it led or trailed other nations in the climate arena.
The last section deals with the normative stakes of this argument by weighing the case for status competition against a set of associated risks and dangers: that it might undermine the chance for durable cooperation, accelerate the US–China rivalry, produce climate-degrading outcomes, or lead mainly to performative gestures at the expense of real action.
Status Orders in World Politics
Status matters in world politics, but it matters in very different ways for different states. As a “positional, perceptual, and social” attribute,Footnote 30 an actor’s status will depend fundamentally on who they, and others, think their peer competitors are.Footnote 31 While we can acknowledge the existence of a thin international order, with its common-denominator rule for membership, it is not altogether helpful to think of the world community—with its nearly 200 member states—as operating within a singular status order. Instead, status is most relevant as a “local” phenomenon that stratifies our global hierarchy into different groupings of states, where competition happens at the point of entry into these groups, and then again within the particular hierarchy that further stratifies in-group members from one another.Footnote 32
Canada and Italy may care about their status, for example, but as non-nuclear-armed non-great powers that enjoy coveted positions in the G7 and NATO, each likely cares far more about how it compares to the other than how it compares to states like Belarus, Colombia, the United States, or China.Footnote 33 Moreover, it is not simply that the world is made up of different communities of states grouped into different status orders, but also that these different orders may be governed by fundamentally different rules of the game.Footnote 34 Professors and students may share jointly in the campus community, for instance, but they are unlikely to ever compare themselves to each other, in part because the rules that govern how each might climb the campus pecking order are fundamentally different.Footnote 35
However, while acknowledging that the world is made up of multiple status orders, in this paper I consider status competition between the great powers only. Efforts by current and aspiring great powers to join, retain, or dominate this order have received the lion’s share of attention from status scholars, producing a clear “great power bias” in the literature.Footnote 36 There are important reasons that bias must continue here. The climate crisis is a crisis of great power politics: it was caused by the great powers of the past;Footnote 37 it is largely perpetuated by the great powers of the present;Footnote 38 and therefore it can be meaningfully addressed only through great power intervention.Footnote 39 It is these states alone whose policies will tip the balance toward, or away from, a decarbonized future.
The pertinent question for the climate, then, is not so much whether the pursuit of status can motivate all states to aim for serious and sustained decarbonization, but whether it can motivate the great powers to do so. Likewise, because different status orders will prioritize and be governed by different rules of esteem, membership, and recognition, order-specific theorization is in order.Footnote 40 Accordingly, while I will propose a generalized theory of how status orders change through grafting, I also provide a more specific illustration of how green-energy policies that aim to replace rather than simply reduce sources of greenhouse gases can be legibly grafted onto the order that governs and stratifies social life at the very top of the global hierarchy.
How Do Status Orders Change?
While scholars frequently allude to the fact that status symbols, and the orders they help constitute, can change—as I summarized earlier—the manner and causes of these changes are rarely deeply theorized. Instead, scholarly interest is generally paid to explaining and illustrating how status-seeking manifests in particular historical moments, which necessarily means studying status orders and symbols when they are fixed. This kind of approach has obvious limits for answering our normative and analytical questions on the climate as an arena of status competition. If the climate is not presently an arena of status competition, I am normatively interested in how such a change could be brought about. And if the climate is becoming an arena of status competition, the question of how this happened has both theoretical and analytical significance. Both questions are about how the “ought” becomes the “is,” as a matter of normative interest and empirical exposition.Footnote 41
This paper answers both questions by setting the issue of status aside, for a moment, to consider what we know about political change in general, and processes of normative change, norm diffusion, and rhetorical persuasion in particular. While theories of norm change abound, much of this work revolves around a set of synonymous conceptsFootnote 42 that highlight the incrementalism of norm change as it moves through and modifies, rather than radically eliminates, existing social structures.Footnote 43 Why is it so incremental? Put simply, because norm diffusion is most likely to succeed where new norms are able to fit, match, and therefore graft onto existing norms.Footnote 44 This fact of social life is both constraining and enabling. On one hand, it suggests that social structures powerfully limit what kind of change is possible, foreclosing that which would more radically, and obviously, subvert the social order.Footnote 45 On the other hand, it suggests that when norm entrepreneursFootnote 46 have the creativity and ingenuity to draw on a community’s “rhetorical commonplaces,”Footnote 47 engaging mass publics and policymakers “on grounds they already agree with,”Footnote 48 they can legitimately challenge and change a social order from within.
The social movement to ban antipersonnel land mines, for example, was successful in part because norm entrepreneurs were able to clearly communicate how land mines failed to pass the basic test of distinction and thus ran afoul of laws and norms governing armed conflict.Footnote 49 Rather than engage in moral persuasion, from scratch, norm entrepreneurs using “a grafting discourse” effectively piggybacked on an established social framework to make their own normative innovation intelligible.Footnote 50 Similar grafting techniques have been identified in Latin American jurists’ successful delegitimization of military force to recoup debts, by grafting it onto an existing norm of sovereign equality,Footnote 51 and in postcolonial states’ reformulation of a right of self-determination after World War II, by grafting it onto the emergent regime for civil and political rights.Footnote 52 Successful grafting shouldn’t surprise us, as Price summarized well, because “ideas are more likely to be influential if they fit well with existing discourses in a particular historical setting.”Footnote 53 Checkel defined this as a norm’s “cultural match,” stressing that international norm diffusion will be more rapid when “the prescriptions embodied in an international norm are convergent with domestic norms.”Footnote 54
What this discussion of fit, match, rhetorical commonplaces, and grafting offers, however, is not just theories and mechanisms of norm diffusion but theories and mechanisms for social and political change in general. For this reason, it also offers an explanation of how new status symbols might emerge, by first stressing a symbol or practice’s ability to be made intelligible within the status order, and second, supporters’ ability to see this fit and advocate for it. A successful transition may leave the underlying tenets of the status order roughly in place, but it will also change how actors compete within this order, as the elevation of new symbols and practices creates new arenas for competition and new paths to status in world politics.
While paths to great power status have certainly evolved, and shifted, material power consistently holds as a major—though not always necessary nor sufficient—metric for its pursuit and recognition. In a thorough summary of IR’s status literature, Duque finds that scholars overwhelmingly “list material resources—economic, military, or technological capabilities, and nuclear weapons—as status attributes.”Footnote 55 Mukherjee likewise notes that “the attributes most commonly listed in the [status] literature are material, that is, components of a state’s economic and military power.”Footnote 56 Just as Veblen argued a century ago that conspicuous goods allow “successful men to put their prowess in evidence by exhibiting some durable results of their exploits,”Footnote 57 so too, adds Murray, will states launch bids for status recognition by “anchor[ing] their aspirant identities in symbolic material practices.”Footnote 58
Whether or not status is consistently granted based on material superiority, there is abundant evidence that practices and goods capable of communicating this superiority are so often sought because of their perceived link to status. So central is materialism to the status order that conflicts often arise when actors who otherwise cross established thresholds of material power are nevertheless denied entry into the status club for failing to meet other discriminatory standards of exclusion.Footnote 59 Rules of material rank may be violated in these instances, but at great cost to the stability of world order, as wronged parties make ever more desperate and often violent and threatening bids to display and perform the power and capabilities driving their social ambition. And so, while the status hierarchy in world politics is obviously not just a mirror reflection of the distribution of power, the distribution of status often follows—and is deeply informed by—the distribution of material power. States across a range of periods and regions certainly act like status is something they can acquire through displays of material prowess, and where great controversies and ruptures arise it is often because the unwritten material rules of this game are not respected.
The consistency of this underlying materialism can both constrain and enable changes in the status order. While it is difficult to imagine a world where claims to great power status become entirely divorced from material factors (radical change), this entrenchment also provides the conditions for alternative claims to status to be smuggled into the social order if they can, in Price’s words, be made “intelligible” within this material paradigm (incremental change).Footnote 60 Dreadnoughts, aircraft carriers, and nuclear weapons once provided a clear and observable signal of status because they served as symbols of material power, technological ingenuity, and conspicuous consumption.Footnote 61 What other symbols and practices can legibly take their place?
This is the opportunity climate action offers, precisely because of two core characteristics often lamented by its critics: transitioning fully to a decarbonized green economy will be technologically intensive and incredibly costly. Both qualities render climate action a natural status-seeking practice well suited for the current order because the ability to make this transition, and to do so first, will inevitably separate the states that can from those that cannot. This renders climate action a mark of underlying material, technological, and scientific asymmetries between states, no different from war outcomes, weapons systems, and other vanity projects.
Linking climate to status in this way is expressly rooted in the great power status order’s deference to material superiority, and not any kind of ethical or moral value system. Some may want to argue that the ethical imperative to respond to climate change should also confer moral superiority, esteem, and status on those states that lead the charge.Footnote 62 While some individuals certainly inhabit social circles and communities where status is linked to public displays of altruism,Footnote 63 most of the evidence from IR linking the pursuit of status to prosocial domestic and foreign policies has to do with small and middle powers.Footnote 64 There is considerably less evidence that being a “good” or “moral” state is something decision makers think will pay status dividends at the very top of the hierarchy, among established and aspiring great powers. Were this the case, altruistic foreign and national policies—refugee resettlement, unconditional foreign aid, humanitarian intervention, and unilateral nuclear disarmamentFootnote 65 —would be readily embraced by status-seeking great powers. Thus, while there is certainly evidence of prosocial status-seeking in world politics, some of which is even linked to and advances climate action,Footnote 66 the inability of these pursuits to pierce the great power order where they are most needed limits the analytical reach of these cases.
The absence of this normative link does not prevent our reimagining the climate space as an arena of status competition, however. As the following section details, the climate is already an arena where great powers can compete for and assert their status, precisely because climate action can readily graft onto core and traditional proxies for great power status: economic power and technological development.Footnote 67 In this way, competing for status in the climate space would not require some radical rethinking of the norms, values, and principles that serve as the engine of social differentiation at the top of the global hierarchy; it merely requires reimagining how to pursue these things.
Grafting Climate Action
Finding out whether climate action is, or can become, a status-signaling practice therefore necessitates establishing whether the full range of policies, actions, and practices states have at their disposal to respond to the climate crisis can be made intelligible within the status order’s existing material paradigm. There are effectively two paths to decarbonization: reducing and replacing greenhouse gas emissions. To reduce such emissions governments can leverage their regulatory, taxation, and social powers. On the regulatory side, they can impose ever more stringent energy efficiency standards; with the power of the purse they can impose a carbon tax on consumers and industry alike; and through both mechanisms and a basket of other policies, they can encourage lower consumption, higher public transit use, and other low-carbon lifestyle changes. This last set of policies is commonly associated with the degrowth paradigm, in which the woes of climate change are blamed not only on two centuries of fossil fuel use but also on capitalist systems, consumption habits, and a fealty toward economic growth at the cost of environmental degradation.Footnote 68
Without a large-scale normative shift in favor of degrowth and deindustrialization, however, there are clear limits on what such energy-reduction policies might accomplish in a world that still has an insatiable hunger for energy.Footnote 69 Accordingly, this first path to decarbonization is not actually a suitable model for grafting climate action onto the great power status order. This is not only because of the known political obstacles to degrowth, but more importantly because its core demand to reduce consumption and sacrifice growth is directly at odds with the prevailing rules of the great power status game. Grafting aims to produce stealth normative change, but it can only be successful where it can reconstitute, rather than outwardly confront, the structures of social order. And degrowth poses a revolutionary challenge for how current and aspiring great powers presently understand, conceptualize, and attain status.Footnote 70
The alternative paradigm—and the one much more suitable for grafting—argues that states need to replace, rather than simply reduce, their greenhouse-gas emissions to decouple GDP growth and energy use from carbon. To do so they will need to invest heavily in green-energy alternatives, from cheaper and ever more efficient battery storage,Footnote 71 to solarFootnote 72 and wind farms whose cost and energy generation can rival fossil fuels. Essentially, states must entirely re-engineer their fossil-fuel-dependent infrastructure to electrify their economies and eliminate fossil fuel use in everything from transportation to heating.Footnote 73 Doing this effectively and efficiently will demand an industrial policy that can mobilize the scientific and education sectors around resource and development (R&D) in green technologies;Footnote 74 expand supply chain access to the critical minerals for these technologies;Footnote 75 couple these advances and access with a revitalized manufacturing sector that can mass-produce everything from solar cells and EV batteries to wind turbines; and provide the levels of infrastructure spending that can bring all of this to fruition.
Beyond these actionable but costly and ambitious steps are also the unicorn options: areas of potential scientific and technological innovation that do not currently exist, or cannot yet be scaled and executed, but could have a major impact on climate mitigation and decarbonization in the future.Footnote 76 “Negative emissions” can be created through the development of carbon capture and storage technologies,Footnote 77 while solar geoengineering research has been proposed as a way of forestalling the actual effect of climate change, while not actually dealing with its cause.Footnote 78 Nuclear fusion, meanwhile, has the prospect of generating “limitless energy,” though despite recent breakthroughs, the science and technology remain in their infancy.Footnote 79 These proposals are not without their critics. For some, they amount to an unfeasible and utopian distraction from the hard work of decarbonization; others fear the dangers, risks, and ethical dilemmas of untested and experimental scientific interventions for the ecosystem, climate, and vulnerable populations.Footnote 80 Yet at their core, these proposals emerge from a common belief that the climate crisis can be addressed not by “slowing down” but by “speeding up”: accelerating and embracing technological innovation.
What will all of this cost? On the global scale, Jacobson and colleagues estimate that 145 states could fully transition to a “clean, renewable wind-water-solar (WWS) electricity, heat, storage, transmission, and equipment system” at the cost of USD 61.5 trillion.Footnote 81 Other estimates range from 6 to 9 trillion dollars per year, with a high-end estimate of around USD 275 trillion to reduce global emissions to net zero by 2050.Footnote 82 These are global estimates. Within the United States, many estimates cluster around the projected cost of the Green New Deal, an ambitious climate program spearheaded by progressive democrats in 2019. Those who pushed for the Green New Deal or offered their own climate action blueprints in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election variously placed the costs of transitioning away from fossil fuels at USD 5 trillion, 10 trillion, and 16.3 trillion.Footnote 83 These projections were repeatedly challenged, attacked, and inflated by Republicans and right-wing-aligned think tanks, who charged that the Green New Deal would be financially ruinous for the United States, at anywhere between USD 93 trillion and 100 trillion.Footnote 84 In a 2019 speech, President Trump referred to the “Democrats’ plan to completely takeover [sic] American energy and completely destroy America’s economy through their new $100 trillion Green New Deal.”Footnote 85
Rather than needing to resolve this economic debate, however, status politics is well suited to exploit it. Aircraft carriers and Birkin bags became status symbols for aspiring great powers and the nouveau riche (respectively), not in spite of but because of their exorbitant costs. “Waste can make sense,” Zahavi and Zahavi explained, “because by wasting one proves conclusively that one has enough assets to waste and more.”Footnote 86 Few states can afford an aircraft carrier, and even fewer have the technological and scientific industries needed to build one.Footnote 87 The green-energy transition is no less revealing of inequalities at the very top of the hierarchy because it depends on both the ability and the will of governments to invest huge sums of money in industries, processes, and people capable of efficiently realizing this future.Footnote 88 Thus the twenty-first-century green-energy transition is poised to differentiate established from aspiring great powers in ways few other practices and goods can, because of how all-encompassing it will be across a range of sectors. And not only is it poised to differentiate the states that can afford it from those that cannot, but it will also differentiate those that can get there first—fully decoupling GDP growth from energy use—from those whose transitions are slower, messier, and thus more destabilizing for their economies.
What all of this means, I argue, is that to fit climate action in we do not need to fundamentally change our idea of how actors get status in world politics. All we need to do is to redefine climate action to emphasize those elements of it that already fit naturally within the existing great power order. In particular, this means emphasizing that climate action is (1) incredibly costly and (2) dependent on—and thus a reflection of—scientific and technological innovation, rendering dominance in this area logically constitutive of great power identity.
There is, however, one anticipated complication with this grafting move. The basket of green-growth policies and unicorn innovations described earlier cannot be reduced to a single and observable material achievement as easily as many other signifiers of status in world politics appear to be.Footnote 89 When a country tests a nuclear weapon, for example, it is immediately elevated into the rarefied nuclear power club—whether the detonation is seen as legitimate or not—which separates them socially from the non-nuclear world they were once part of.Footnote 90 In contrast to nuclear weapons, satellites, aircraft carriers, or any other common status symbol, there is no parallel “climate act” which can instantiate, perform, or effect a similar temporal and social break in a country’s standing, because there is no silver bullet for the climate crisis.
This may give the impression that grafting climate onto status competition will face more resistance because, even under the best conditions, decarbonization will be a gradual and multi-pronged process. On closer examination, however, we can see that many of the status symbols outlined earlier in this paper were merely nodes within a longer and continually contested process of scientific and technological innovation. So the status game is not a binary that actors win or lose if they possess or lack specific symbols, but is more akin to an ongoing race between actors as they work to hit an ever-growing set of observable benchmarks before their peer-competitors do.Footnote 91 When old benchmarks are hit, new targets emerge, propelling the status game forward.Footnote 92 To follow this logic further, rather than climate action and nuclear weapons, a more appropriate comparison might be between climate action and the long period of scientific discovery and innovation that preceded and eventually produced a nuclear bomb.
The discovery of nuclear fission in the 1930s, then, might be analogous to the news that of the USD 235 billion invested globally in 2023 in the manufacturing of the six key clean technology supply chains,Footnote 93 China accounted for nearly three-quarters, while the United States and the EU combined for only one-fifth.Footnote 94 Neither event amounted to full and certain victory in the status game, but each was an important step that accelerated the centrifugal process of status competition, continually pushing it forward and outward. Indeed, eight decades later the nuclear race shows no sign of slowing.Footnote 95
Stressing that this grafting is possible, and arguing that it is desirable, still leaves unanswered the question of whether political elites who actually seek and recognize status are presently starting to see and define the climate space in these terms.Footnote 96 Here there is an obvious methodological hurdle. Scholars attributing status motives to the decisions of political elites in historical case studies have partly built their arguments around “smoking guns” found in the private papers of political leaders and in the meeting transcripts of pivotal state decisions.Footnote 97 This kind of empirical and archival interrogation is much less feasible for contemporary cases, making it hard to see whether political leaders are now increasingly seeing the climate in competitive status terms. But, while I cannot know what American and Chinese elites truly think, I can know what they say to national and global audiences, and in many ways the content of this discourse is far more important than the private beliefs running behind it.
I am interested in how status orders change, which is invariably a social and relational process. To evaluate what counts for status, political actors naturally look to their social environment and their peers, because status depends on recognition, and recognition follows societal values, norms, and expectations.Footnote 98 In this way, when political actors publicly link some pursuit or good to status, whether or not they personally believe the link is real, they are publicly reifying the rules of the status game. Status discourse is thus powerfully constitutive of the social order, in ways made clear by scholars who have studied the productive power of discourse and rhetoric in world politics generally,Footnote 99 and with respect to status in particular.Footnote 100 How, then, are political leaders talking about and framing the climate crisis? What themes do they draw on? What politics do they mobilize? How do they legitimate proposed actions?Footnote 101 Finally, when political leaders talk about climate, are they increasingly also talking about status? Preliminary data suggest they are.
“We’re Leading the World Again”
In the first twenty-two months of his presidency Joe Biden brought the United States back into the Paris Agreement,Footnote 102 while under his leadership Congress passed major climate legislation in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021), the CHIPS and Science Act (2022), and the Inflation Reduction Act (2022).Footnote 103 These legislative victories on the climate were also bracketed by ever more extreme climate disasters: unprecedented droughts and forest fires in the American West,Footnote 104 winter storms in Texas,Footnote 105 hurricanes on the Gulf Coast,Footnote 106 and major floods across the Northeast,Footnote 107 all of which made the devastating effects of unchecked climate change real for millions of Americans. In this period the world also transitioned uneasily out of the COVID pandemic; the US hastily withdrew from Afghanistan on the heels of a surprising Taliban takeover; and relations between the US and China continued to deteriorate. And in March 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine, inaugurating the largest war in Europe in decades, which destabilized energy markets.Footnote 108
The first half of Biden’s presidency thus exhibited a high level of political, diplomatic, and legislative activity on the climate crisis—by some measures, the most successful in historyFootnote 109 —while the White House also navigated a range of domestic and foreign policy shocks that continually threatened to derail these efforts.Footnote 110 The frequency and tone of Biden’s climate speeches naturally varied in response to this evolving political environment, but the themes he used to justify and legitimize action on the climate were fairly consistent. Again and again Biden grafted status and great power competition onto the climate arena, using the theme of technological innovation as a bridge between two historically walled-off policy domains: on the one hand a perennial concern over America’s status and influence in the world and the durability of US hegemony; and on the other, the looming but historically deprioritized and desecuritized threat of climate change.Footnote 111
Between 20 January 2021 and 20 November 2022 Biden delivered forty-seven speeches and remarks that either partially or entirely addressed the climate crisis—from major diplomatic addresses delivered on the Conference of Parties stage, to domestic speeches promoting a range of funding and policy initiatives on everything from EVs and offshore wind installations to climate disaster preparedness. The climate issue also repeatedly surfaced in a broader set of political speeches, from the State of the Union, addresses on landmark legislation, and remarks at international summits with foreign leaders, to speeches in front of autoworkers, democratic fundraisers, and other audiences within the tapestry of American politics. I coded each speech for how frequently four distinct themes were referenced: status; great power competition with China; great power cooperation with China; and American technological innovation and superiority. Table 1 provides a summary of these results.
Table 1. Biden climate speech themes, January 2021 to November 2022 (n = 47)
Thirty-six percent of these speeches linked climate action to America’s leadership and status in the world, with references to “American workers racing to lead the global market” in renewable energy and “America leading the world in a clean energy future.”Footnote 112 Nineteen percent placed the climate crisis in the context of great power competition with China, as the president repeatedly warned that America needed to secure “supply chains for the critical materials that go into batteries for electric vehicles and the storage of renewable energy,” to “end our long-term reliance on China and other countries for inputs that will power the future.”Footnote 113
Most of these speeches also made clear references to American innovation and technological superiority. At COP26 in Glasgow, Biden promoted a net-zero initiative “to help share the technical expertise of the United States [and] its world-class national laboratories.”Footnote 114 At the UN, Biden claimed that investments through the Inflation Reduction Act would help “reduce the cost of developing clean energy technologies worldwide.”Footnote 115 At a reception for the DNC a week earlier, Biden claimed that the act would “triple wind and solar power” and “unleash American manufacturing to own the global market in electric vehicles,” creating “a future that’s made in America.”Footnote 116 In remarks on the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Biden categorized the “shift to a net-zero sum carbon world” as “one of the most significant economic transitions since the Industrial Revolution,” and then announced that the United States was “confronting it head on with American ingenuity and American jobs.” America’s “national labs, our research universities, our automakers led the development of this [battery] technology,” Biden reminded listeners, while pledging “to bring America back” by making it a global manufacturing hub for the “industries of the future: semiconductors and clean energy.”Footnote 117
These descriptive statistics tell only part of the story, however. In most of these speeches, evocations of status, great power competition, and technology were mentioned in isolation and bracketed by a broader set of claims justifying aggressive climate action.Footnote 118 For example, Biden might refer to the climate space as an arena for the United States to assert its status, but omit mentioning China or other peer competitors. In other speeches Biden might cite major climate investments in R&D, without explicitly connecting this innovation to America’s position and standing in the world. The grafting in these speeches is necessarily incomplete and understated. In a smaller subset of speeches, however, all of these themes were evoked and linked together, framing the climate crisis as both a technological problem that America needed to solve, and a race for technological supremacy (against China) that America needed to win.
Status is inherently positional, and in this subset of speeches (15 percent of the total), Biden presents the climate as an arena where the looming great power competition with China would be judged and won, necessitating historic levels of investment and priority. This discourse reflects a change in what it means to have status in the world in the twenty-first century—by elevating innovations for decarbonization as status symbols—and it also advances a pragmatic and self-interested case for solving the climate crisis in place of moral and ethical pleas for action. In these speeches not only do we see that grafting status onto climate is discursively possible, but we get a clear schematic of how it’s done: linking and marrying the symbols, phrases, and rhetoric of environmentalism and decarbonization with grand strategy and status.
Four months into his presidency, Biden visited a Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan, to preview an electric prototype of Ford’s iconic F-150 pickup truck, and he delivered a speech that seamlessly framed the climate as a core arena for asserting and maintaining America’s place in the status order. With an array of historic and newer pickup trucks displayed behind him, Biden opened his remarks by thanking Ford and UAW workers for unveiling “the next generation of America’s bestselling vehicle to the entire world.” “Thank you,” he continued, “for showing how we win the competition of the twenty-first century. You know, how the future is going to be made—it’s [going] to be made here in America. Made in America.”Footnote 119
Through all of this patriotic bluster, however, Biden also came to Michigan with a warning, as he continually directed his audience’s gaze to China. While he stressed that the twenty-first century would see a climate race over EVs and batteries, he also acknowledged that “right now, China is leading in this race. Make no bones about it; it’s a fact.” On R&D, Biden reminded his audience that the US used to invest more “than any country in the world and China was number…nine.” “We now are number eight and China is number one,” he added, while stressing that this kind of investment gap cannot be sustained because “the future is going to be determined by the best minds in the world, by those who break through new barriers.” China, Biden continued, has “the largest, fastest-growing electrical vehicle market in the world,” while also accounting for “80 percent of the [global] manufacturing capacity of [EV] batteries.”
In moving between the politics of cynicism, declinism, and American exceptionalism Biden elevates the threat of China’s green-energy strengths precisely to present the Ford F-150, with its Georgia-made battery, as a symbol of America’s resurgence as both a great power and a climate power. The speech ends with Biden putting “the world on notice [that] America is back.” “In the competition for the twenty-first century,” which Biden explicitly defined in these remarks as a climate and green-energy competition, “the future will be built right here in America.” “Look at this plant,” Biden concludes. “We’re moving. We’re working again. We’re dreaming again. We’re discovering again. We’re leading the world again.” This rhetoric is quite telling. Biden is not announcing that America is back and leading the world again from the deck of an aircraft carrier. He is doing it from an American automotive plant, and one that is building not the next generation of tanks or armored personal carriers, but electric pickup trucks for the American and global consumer. This is either a pragmatic acknowledgement that great power status will be increasingly judged by how actors lead in the climate space, or a concerted attempt to construct the tools of decarbonization as the preeminent symbols of a new and greener status order.
Biden returned to Michigan, and these themes, a year and half later, warning another audience that “for most of the last century, we led the world,” but “something went wrong. We risk losing the edge as a nation, and China and the rest of the world are catching up.”Footnote 120 As in so many previous speeches, Biden declares that America’s future will hinge on the strength of its manufacturing and on its commitment to R&D, and then presents the climate crisis as the nation’s opportunity to confront and shore up both of these growing deficits with China.
We used to invest almost 2 percent of our entire GDP in research and development; now 0.7 percent. And the rest of the world is catching up. But not anymore. Now we’re choosing to build a better America—[applause]—an America that’s confronting the climate crisis, with America’s workers leading the way.
Throughout these remarks the climate is redefined not only as an arena of great power competition but also as an arena where the United States can actually compete and win, if only it mobilizes the resources it already has toward these efforts. Thus Biden refers to the mobilization of “American ingenuity, American engineers, American autoworkers” through major legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act, which will develop the “tools to fight against climate change: building cars with zero tailpipe pollution, running on a cleaner grid, making and inventing the technologies that are going to power the future.”
A month later, in a speech in Washington on the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Biden again linked America’s status and technological ingenuity with China’s green-energy ascendance to stress the imperative for climate action. As in the first Michigan speech, he argues that “the future of vehicles is electric,” while lamenting that currently “75 percent of that battery manufacturing is done in China,” while “China controls nearly half the global production” of the critical minerals for certain battery components.Footnote 121 Rather than springboard into a more ambitious future of American resurgence, however, Biden turns to the past. China might currently dominate the EV and battery space, he argues, but its “technology is not more innovative than anyone else’s.” In fact, “our national labs, our research universities, our automakers led the development of this technology here in America.” A year earlier, he had delivered a similar message from the White House lawn in remarks on American leadership in clean cars and trucks:
Think about the battery technology. Most of that research and development occurred with United States taxpayers’ dollars from the Department of Energy, the DOD, here in the United States. And we didn’t take advantage of it. We didn’t move on it. China moved, and China now owns the market. So we just got to get back in the game.Footnote 122
Thus in both speeches Biden not only raised the specter of China eclipsing America in one of “the most significant economic transitions since the Industrial Revolution” but raised the emotive stakes even further by conjuring up the image of status loss and decline.Footnote 123 America was once technologically ascendant, and China’s inroads into the climate space illustrate just how far Washington has fallen, not only relative to others, but relative to its own past.Footnote 124
Biden is doing a lot in these speeches. First, he is warning America about the place of the nation in the world under the business-as-usual policies of stagnating R&D spending and the continued hollowing-out of America’s manufacturing capacity. Second, he reminds Americans again and again just how assertive China has been in producing the technologies, developing the manufacturing base, and capturing the supply chains that will be so critical to winning the green-energy race for the twenty-first century. Third, the climate space is presented as both cause and antidote. Biden uses the climate to conjure up an image of American decline but also resurgence, because—he claims—America is uniquely capable of winning the climate race, but only if it directs its considerable power, ingenuity, and efforts toward this goal. Much of this rhetoric invokes competitive comparisons, positional identity constructions, and sports racing metaphors. In doing so, these speeches have all the hallmarks of what Beaumont calls “the grammatical units of status competition,” which can “legitimize and delegitimize particular courses of action.”Footnote 125 Thus, by infusing status insecurity into the climate space, Biden hopes to motivate the kind of interest and investment fostered elsewhere by positional concerns of pride, competition, and recognition.
Of course, Biden was not alone in this framing, with his rhetoric closely paralleling the growing attention to China’s green-energy dominance in the US media.Footnote 126 Nearly a year before the 2020 election, former secretary of state John Kerry co-authored an op-ed in the New York Times, alongside Representative Ro Khanna, which ran under the headline “Don’t Let China Win the Green Race.”Footnote 127 If the United States is truly concerned about China’s rise, they wrote, then “we should pledge that by the end of the next decade, America will surpass China and win the clean energy race.”Footnote 128 Over the subsequent four years the New York Times frequently reported on China’s growing solarFootnote 129 and EV dominance,Footnote 130 under headlines such as “China’s Electric Vehicles Are Going to Hit Detroit Like a Wrecking Ball,”Footnote 131 “China Rules the Green Economy,”Footnote 132 and in a bookend to Kerry and Khanna (five years later) lamented that “America Is Losing the Green Tech Race to China.”Footnote 133
Status is a zero-sum good, and yet with climate we can readily think about the ways in which this zero-sum competition might actually produce positive-sum rewards for the planet. Just as great powers once raced to acquire colonies and nuclear weapons, under the much more detrimental status terms of earlier historical moments,Footnote 134 might we soon see a status race toward decarbonization? Recent trends in US politics suggest that grafting status competition onto climate change is possible, and indeed may already be happening. The final section grapples with the normative implications of this change for both the status order and the future of climate governance.
Normative Implications and Counter-Arguments
This paper is biased by a particular set of assumptions on the relationship between self-interest, cooperation, status, and meaningful climate action in international politics. In asking whether the climate arena can be (or is becoming) an arena of status competition, I have argued that this linkage is both possible and (in normative terms) desirable, given the power of status to drive behavior and the failure of alternative motives to take hold in the global decarbonization and climate governance space. But the consequences of this normative-pragmatic argument, and competing arguments, need to be seriously considered.Footnote 135
If status competition really takes hold, it will make a global cooperative solution to the climate crisis even less likely. A solution to the climate crisis which seeks to exploit great power tensions also risks reifying them further, turning the contingent into the inevitable. At the extreme end, these outcomes might degrade the climate even more, as states prioritize short-term wins in the status game over the long-term goal of decarbonization. More conservatively, status dynamics might simply incentivize states toward performative gestures over concrete action. I address these normative concerns in separate subsections. I end this section by addressing the counter-argument that social identity theory and social creativity already offer a theory of change suitable for the climate case.
Cooperative Futures, the New Cold War, and EV Tariffs
Environmental governance is traditionally framed in the IR literature as an arena where multilateral cooperation, especially among the great powers, is paramount. For decades, political, diplomatic, scholarly, and activist attention has almost singularly focused on how to get major emitters to cooperate and commit to a set of binding emissions targets, funding and market mechanisms, and technological exchange initiatives, in pursuit of global decarbonization. As Sabel and Victor summarized well, these efforts hinged on the premise that the climate crisis was a global problem in need of a global, cooperative, solution.Footnote 136 Against the backdrop of a global tragedy of the commons defined by high costs to act and strong incentives to cheat, the dominant thinking stressed that effective climate action would be possible only if major emitters agreed to cooperate and bind themselves to robust legal mechanisms. While status competition need not foreclose all cooperation, the two premises are fundamentally at odds, raising the important question as to whether reframing the climate space as an arena of status competition might irreparably harm these efforts.
Evaluating these trade-offs therefore necessitates weighing the disappointing record of climate cooperation against an untested path of status competition and the equally unknowable prospect for a more successful and cooperative climate future. On the first point, the failure of top-down robust cooperation is evident and is well reflected in IR’s own literature, as scholars have increasingly moved past the question of how to get to a large and binding multilateral agreement on climate.Footnote 137 Their focus has shifted to a range of other political and economic arrangements and factors seen as better embodying actionable climate politics and policies.Footnote 138 To this point, status competition cannot risk undermining durable cooperation if there is not much durable cooperation between the two largest emitters to begin with.Footnote 139 Nevertheless, at a critical juncture where American and Chinese leaders are actively debating the onset of a new cold war,Footnote 140 reasonable fears can also be raised about whether injecting status competition into the climate space will not only undermine a more cooperative climate regime but also help further reify an otherwise avoidable great power conflict.Footnote 141 These are serious and well-warranted concerns, and yet deploying these fears against the case for status requires contending with the tragedy that great power competition is already happening across a range of economic and military sectors.Footnote 142
There is a roadmap for thinking through these issues. Securitization scholars have long debated whether “harnessing the old horse of national security to pull the heavy new environmental wagon” could help solve the climate crisis or pose its own unique risks.Footnote 143 The case for securitization rests on a belief that reframing the climate crisis as a security issue would give environmental concerns new urgency and priority, helping legitimize and mobilize action.Footnote 144 With its pragmatic logic and its deference to the power of rhetoric, the normative impulse of this approach to securitization clearly complements this paper’s status argument.Footnote 145 So too, then, does it share both the types of critiques it is liable to receive, and the counter-responses it can offer.
Deudney was an early critic of the securitization move, cautioning that putting climate appeals in national security terms risked “undercutting both the globalist and common fate understanding of the situation and the sense of world community that may be necessary to solve the problem.”Footnote 146 This warning was also issued in 1990, however, before the dream of “great, even unprecedented, types of international cooperation”—to use his aspirational words—foundered at Kyoto, Copenhagen, and Paris.Footnote 147 Thus the case for securitization, like the case for status competition, appears stronger today precisely because the altruistic and cooperative path has become more fraught, and as McDonald acknowledged, “attempt[s] to draw linkages between security and climate change are becoming more prominent and consequential.”Footnote 148 Precisely for this reason, the more pertinent question is probably not whether to securitize the climate but, according to McDonald, “which associations of climate change and security are most progressive in terms of their ethical defensibility and in particular the nature of the practices that they encourage.”Footnote 149 This framing is designed to move past a monolithic discourse of what security is and does,Footnote 150 and it provides important guidance for thinking about what precisely status is and does at a more granular level of analysis: specifically, when status competition hurts and when it helps the cause of decarbonization.Footnote 151 The case of EV tariffs provides one such targeted window for analysis.
In May 2024 the Biden administration announced that the United States would impose a 100 percent tariff on Chinese EVs.Footnote 152 The fight against climate change is best positioned when global consumers and industry have access to the widest possible market of EVs, solar, heat pumps, and other critical technologies, materials, and components needed to accelerate electrification and the green revolution.Footnote 153 Biden’s tariffs foreclosed this possibility for American consumers by prioritizing America’s long-term green industry competitiveness over the short- and medium-term adoption of EVs in the United States, very likely buoyed by the kind of status concerns that animated much of Biden’s rhetoric on the climate cited earlier.Footnote 154
This example, and others like it in Europe, present a strong case against status competition,Footnote 155 but to really evaluate the case for status we need a more robust theoretical model than these anecdotes alone provide. Evaluating the case for status requires thinking of the status game holistically with respect to the cumulative behavior of all relevant actors. Thus, US tariffs must also be weighed against the possibility that China’s early and aggressive investment in its EV industry was driven by a competitive instinct no less premised on a link between the country’s status and its hold over the green industries of the future.Footnote 156 Analyses of China’s EV dominance often refer back to Xi Jinping’s 2014 visit to one of China’s largest automakers, where he announced China’s ambition to transform “from a big automobile country to an automobile power,” with “new energy cars” at the very center of this transformation.Footnote 157
In essence, it is possible that status competition is simultaneously driving climate action according to one set of measures (such as China’s investment in its EV industry), while slowing it down on others (such as US obstacles to adoption of Chinese EVs). If one problem with status competition is that it undermines processes which it also accelerates, that complicates a view of status as particularly pernicious. It appears, instead, that status both “gives” and “takes,” and therefore truly assessing the case for status requires us to weigh the investment and action it produces within competing countries against the competitive roadblocks it erects between them.Footnote 158 Thus if parochial status concerns gave rise to US tariffs, we must weigh this against the fact that in 2023 China produced 65 percent of all EVs worldwide, many of which went to satisfy domestic demand, and is therefore unhindered by US trade barriers.Footnote 159 That same year, China overtook Japan as the world’s largest auto exporter, with hybrids and EVs accounting for 37 percent of Chinese vehicles sold abroad.Footnote 160 It is self-evident that status competition in the climate space would hinder greater cooperation, but the case for status rests on the failure of durable cooperation to take hold. Moreover, the competitive barriers status competition might erect do not appear to outweigh the investment, innovation, and dynamism it might likewise produce within countries.
Empty Performative Action
A second critique might be that the intrusion of status politics into the climate arena would merely incentivize empty, symbolic, or pseudo-action designed to maximize the performance of status, while minimizing actual investment in serious and sustained decarbonization. There is some plausibility to this because status is inherently performative in the double meaning of the term. Whether actors gain status depends on the believability of their status performance for particular audiences, and because the performance itself is the most important element, there is always a possibility that actors will try to cheat and fake their way through this social exchange.
The role and market trajectory of luxury goods in the status game illustrate this well. As mentioned, luxury goods are commonly seen as status symbols because of their ability to perform and signal conspicuous consumption. For this reason, however, an entire industry of knockoffs, forgeries, and diffusion brands has also emerged to satiate the masses’ wish to perform a status position that was mostly out of reach for them.Footnote 161 Deference to the performance serves to elevate theatrics and forgeries over substance, which if carried over to international politics suggests that status might corrupt and undermine the cause of climate action by incentivizing performative shortcuts. This concern should not be dismissed out of hand, but nor should it be seen as an incontrovertible argument against a prosocial status politics. First, states often misrepresent who they are in international politics, so the problem of cheating and bluffing is not unique to status. Second, while states may cheat in the status game, as with other areas prone to bluffing, the risks of doing so are high, presenting strong disincentives to such behavior.
On the first point, states frequently misrepresent their capabilities and their intentions, which is precisely why uncertainty is seen as such an indelible feature of world politics, and why bluffing and cheating should not be seen as a problem unique to status politics.Footnote 162 States, for instance, might exaggerate and “bluff” regarding their military capabilities in hopes that a mere image of strength is enough to deter adversaries and make up for an unwillingness or inability to spend more on their military. This kind of misrepresentation is also incredibly risky, however. Saddam Hussein “bluffed” regarding Iraq’s weapons capabilities, which may have deterred regional and domestic opponents, but it also exaggerated Iraq’s threat to global security and invited foreign military aggression.Footnote 163
In essence, while actors might have an incentive to cheat in the status game, there is no reason to think that cheating is more likely to happen around status than in any other area of competition in world politics. Indeed, fear of cheating (or “free riding”) has long hindered cooperative climate agreements, suggesting status politics does not pose unique problems of defection.Footnote 164 What the deterrence example also usefully reveals is that cheating carries exceptional risks, and just as in the security space (where a weakened actor can be caught off guard), the more one cheats, the greater the risk of eventually being unmasked as an imposter. This is no small outcome: any actor who cares enough about status to try to cheat in the status game would also deeply feel—in Goffman’s words—the “immediate humiliation and sometimes permanent loss of reputation” that comes with being exposed as a fraud.Footnote 165 Moreover, for status politics to have absolutely no benefit due to cheating it would have to be because everyone was cheating all at once, but one actor’s decision to cheat can just as easily motivate another to take advantage of that misstep.
Finally, it is worth thinking more seriously about why an actor might cheat in the status game. A claim running through the status literature is that when actors care deeply about status and are anxious about their position, they will make very costly and at times risky or suboptimal investments to improve their standing or avoid continued decline. But if an actor were to cheat in the status game, all that probably tells us is that their desire to cheat exceeded the risks and dangers of being caught, which means they valued other goals and interests far ahead of status. This doesn’t negate concerns that the intrusion of status politics into the climate space might incentivize empty and symbolic gestures, but it counterintuitively suggests that the real problem here is not too much status, but not enough status.
Social Creativity
How status orders change is the defining question of this paper. Most status scholars have avoided this question, but social identity theory’s discussion of “social creativity” is a major exception, prompting the question of why a theory of grafting is needed and valuable if another theory of status change already exists. It is needed, I argue, because social creativity on its own is limited in the kind of change it describes, necessitating a broader theoretical apparatus that can both complement and move beyond its claims. Social identity theory explains how groups strive for positive distinction, while charting the various strategies they can pursue when their status declines.Footnote 166 Two strategies—mobility and competition—reaffirm the status order by either socializing groups to seek entry into elite clubs, or pushing them to compete in the areas on which existing claims to superior status already rest. But in a third strategy, “social creativity,” groups can also try to reframe “a negative attribute as positive” or stress “achievement in a different domain,” in effect changing our understanding of what status is and entails for their specific benefit.Footnote 167
This would appear to offer a theory of change, but it is mostly discussed as a strategy that states pursue unilaterally and without the effect of motivating other actors to now also compete along these new dimensions.Footnote 168 In fact, social creativity is optimistically presented as an antidote to the ills of status competition, precisely because it allows actors to “be superior but in different areas.”Footnote 169 Through social creativity, actors promote values and dimensions where they already excel, seeking “shortcuts to greatness.”Footnote 170 Much of Biden’s status rhetoric around the climate, however, was preventative rather than boastful, as he repeatedly warned that the United States was at risk of losing the green-energy race to China. Social creativity might help explain why China decided to invest heavily in green energy over the previous decade,Footnote 171 but the theory on its own cannot explain what might have happened next. Why was this successful? And as evidence of this success, why did the United States under Biden appear quite willing to accept, rather than challenge, a reframing of the status order that harmed its own position? Thus, social creativity leaves a big question about change unanswered: not only how actors might redefine status for themselves,Footnote 172 but how their doing so leads to the emergence and diffusion of new modes of competition throughout the status order.
Conclusion
In 1958, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into space, NASA’s budget accounted for just 0.1 percent of US federal spending.Footnote 173 By most accounts, Sputnik shattered America’s confidence and perceived status,Footnote 174 but the sting of this humiliation also motivated a drastic expansion of NASA’s budget, which had ballooned to 4.4 percent of all federal spending just seven years later.Footnote 175 A decade after Sputnik, the US Apollo program successfully landed astronauts on the moon, and would do so five more times between 1969 and 1972, bookending the space race with the Soviet Union.Footnote 176 The incredible financial investment directed toward technological and scientific innovation on both sides of the Cold War during the space race clearly illustrates the motivating power of status insecurity during times of great power rivalry. With this history as our guide, let us think about what it would look like if 4 percent of all US federal spending in the next decade were devoted toward the scientific and technological goal of decarbonization.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, federal spending in 2022 topped out at USD 6.3 trillion,Footnote 177 putting the 4 percent slice of the budget pie at around USD 252 billion. Compare this annual spending to the Biden administration’s landmark climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, which should have spent roughly USD 374 billion on decarbonization and climate resilience, but spread out over the next ten years.Footnote 178 The Inflation Reduction Act is the greatest financial commitment by any US president to fighting the climate crisis, and yet it is proportionally well below what was invested in the US space program during an earlier era of status insecurity and competition. This gap in funding is the motivating premise for asking whether great powers might one day compete, with the vigor and intensity once reserved for space, to win a green climate race. Such a question necessitates thinking seriously about how status orders change in general, and whether these mechanisms for change provide a pathway for climate action. Rather than argue that change will come when the great power order is refashioned to privilege and praise moral and ethical action, I’ve offered a much more conservative thesis. Climate action is most likely to gain traction as a source of status when international society begins seeing such acts for what they materially signal and symbolize: power, wealth, conspicuous consumption, and technological advancement.
Insofar as this argument leans heavily on scholars of norms and norm change, however, a major cautionary tale lurks: the very fact that norms can change implies that they can also regress.Footnote 179 As early as 2016, Barnhart warned that “while concerns about status have not generated similar competition for territory over the last century, recent territorial claims by Russia and China suggest that the potential for status-driven conquest remains.”Footnote 180 The last decade has vindicated this warning, as illustrated by Russia’s war for conquest in UkraineFootnote 181 and by the greater deference to the notion of “spheres of influence” in the early days of the second Trump administration.Footnote 182 Whether we will see the full return of status-driven conquest in this century is an open question, but that we can ask this question with some relevance speaks to the fluidity and thus the precariousness of social order. This precariousness is also relevant when considering the Trump administration’s open hostility to the Biden climate agenda, despite Biden’s attempt to insulate these policies through appeals to status and great power competition.Footnote 183 Thus, while I am presenting both a theory of change and a case of climate grafting in action, the sharp turn in US priorities raises important questions for future research around whether, and why, status appeals may have ultimately failed in this case. These questions remain as open as the unfolding and contingent case they seek to explain.
While it’s abundantly clear that most socially situated individuals and groups care about their status, and the status of their state,Footnote 184 we tend to shame and deride these positional wants alongside other antisocial desires and emotions like greed, vanity, and jealousy. Thus much research in the social sciences has studied status to explain the worst of human behavior, from the intersocial to the interstate.Footnote 185 In this paper I’ve asked whether this powerful motivator might instead by redirected toward the more prosocial end of sustainable climate action. I’ve made three arguments: that such a change is logically possible through grafting, based on the material terms that currently govern the great power status order and the material logic of the green-energy revolution; that such a change would be desirable, considering the failure of other more cooperative global governance approaches; and that some actors—whether through initiative or by reaction—are already starting to redefine the climate as an arena of great power competition. It would be far better if industrialized states accepted their moral responsibility for climate change, and engaged in deep cooperation toward a shared future of decarbonization and climate justice. If, however, the most competitive impulses of international politics under hierarchy cannot be bridged, perhaps they can at least be surreptitiously harnessed toward our collective betterment.
Acknowledgments
This paper benefited immensely from discussant and audience comments at ISA, ISA-NE, EWIS, and from the exceptional research assistance of Anna Silverman, Nathan Englehart, and Sophia Cartsonis. Thanks in particular to Paul Beaumont and Pål Røren for organizing an insightful EWIS conference on status symbols at just the right moment, and to Elif Kalaycioglu, Michael Giesen, Ronnie Lipschutz, Carsten-Andreas Schulz, Joslyn Barnhart, Khaoula Bengezi, Miriam Prys-Hansen, Kristina Mani, and Sidra Hamidi for helpful and incisive comments along the way. Finally, thank you to the reviewers and editors at IO, who engaged deeply and thoughtfully with the manuscript, and whose questions and critiques made this a much stronger article.
Funding
This research was funded through a generous grant from Oberlin College’s Research and Development Committee.
Open access
