Climate Mitigation and the European Union: A Lacanian Exploration of Desire and Enjoyment

This book focuses on the European Union’s (EU) climate change mitigation actions, developing a critical framework for the 2030 Clean energy for all Europeans package and the 2050 long-term decarbonisation strategy, which informed the European Green Deal.

Reflecting on the possibility of real change and transition, the author develops
a Lacanian-based discourse analysis which reflects on agentic capacities and assesses both the status quo and changes in the discourse. Informed by extensive fieldwork in Brussels and at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Conferences of the Parties, this interdisciplinary book spans global environmental politics, international relations, EU studies, and discourse theories/analysis.

It will be of particular interest to those working in critical theory, subjectivity, language, and materiality and intersects with a wide range of disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, anthropology, geography, linguistics, and psychology.

Valeria Tolis is Lecturer in Climate Change Governance at the University of Leeds, UK. As a scholar of critical environmental politics, her research contributes to investigating the mechanisms that govern status quo and change in the production of environmental knowledge and in the formulation of environmental policies.