The Ethics of Climate Change: An Introduction [2 ed.] 1032257660, 9781032257662

Table of contents :
Cover
Endorsements
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Introduction: Code red
Notes
1. The basic science
1.1 Introduction
1.2 The greenhouse effect
1.3 Climate projections
1.3.1 Heat waves
1.3.2 Drought
1.3.3 Wildfires
1.3.4 Sea-level rise
1.3.5 Extreme precipitation events
1.4 Risks and vulnerabilities
1.4.1 Human systems
1.4.1.1 Direct health impacts
1.4.1.2 Loss of agricultural productivity
1.4.1.3 Coastal flooding
1.4.1.4 Security
1.4.2 Non-human systems
1.4.2.1 Terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems
1.4.2.2 Ocean ecosystems
1.5 Ethical communication of science
Chapter summary
Questions for discussion
Suggested reading
Notes
2. What is climate change ethics?
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Ideal and non-ideal theory
2.3 Climate economics
2.3.1 CBA is monistic about value
2.3.2 CBA cannot support aggressive climate measures
2.3.3 CBA misunderstands our duties to future generations
2.4 Why ethics is necessary
2.5 Is ethics adequate?
Chapter summary
Questions for discussion
Suggested reading
Notes
3. Precautionary policy
3.1 Introduction
3.2 The precautionary principle
3.3 Adaptation and mitigation
3.4 Three drivers of climate change
3.4.1 Population
3.4.2 Economic growth
3.4.3 Efficiency
3.5 From Rio to Paris
3.5.1 COP 1: Berlin, 1995
3.5.2 COP 17: Durban, 2011
3.5.3 COP 21: Paris, 2015
Chapter summary
Questions for discussion
Suggested reading
Notes
4. International justice
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Climate change and human rights
4.3 The ideology of business as usual
4.4 The tragedy of the commons
4.5 Three principles of climate justice
4.6 The right to development
Chapter summary
Questions for discussion
Suggested reading
Notes
5. Intergenerational justice
5.1 Introduction
5.2 An "intergenerational arms race"
5.3 The non-identity problem
5.3.1 Person-affecting morality
5.3.2 The comparative notion of harm
5.3.3 Lives worth living?
5.4 The contractarian gambit
5.5 Just savings
5.5.1 The principle is too demanding
5.5.2 The principle is not demanding enough
5.6 Beyond the contract?
Questions for discussion
Suggested reading
Notes
6. Jurisprudential issues
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Realism, idealism, and climate litigation
6.3 Causality and attribution
6.4 Climate change and tort law
6.5 Legitimacy and the Paris agreement
6.6 Civil disobedience
Chapter summary
Questions for discussion
Suggested reading
Notes
7. Nature in the Anthropocene
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Why species matter
7.2.1 Objective value
7.2.2 Economic value
7.2.3 Aesthetic value
7.3 The Anthropocene
7.4 Activist preservationism
7.5 Two moral doctrines
7.5.1 The doctrine of double effect (DDE)
7.5.2 The doctrine of doing and allowing (DDA)
7.6 Ecomodernism
7.7 The end of nature
Chapter summary
Questions for discussion
Suggested reading
Notes
8. Individual duties
8.1 Introduction
8.2 The prisoner's dilemma
8.3 The negligibility thesis
8.4 Turning to the virtues
8.5 Virtues for the climate crisis
8.5.1 Human-human relations
8.5.1.1 Courage
8.5.1.2 Benevolence
8.5.1.3 Hope
8.5.2 Human-nature relations
8.5.2.1 Frugality
8.5.2.2 Humility
8.5.2.3 Respect
8.6 Building just institutions
8.6.1 Deny that any duties of justice are binding on us
8.6.2 Individuals must pick up all the slack of the missing institutions
8.6.3 Work to build just institutions
8.7 Carbon offsetting
Chapter summary
Questions for discussion
Suggested reading
Notes
9. Climate change denial
9.1 Introduction
9.2 Virtue epistemology
9.3 How to believe in climate change
9.4 Climate change bullshit
9.5 Dealing with bullshit: producers and consumers
9.6 The problem of integrity
Chapter summary
Questions for discussion
Suggested reading
Notes
10. Geoengineering
10.1 Introduction
10.2 The turn to geoengineering
10.3 Moral hazard and moral corruption
10.3.1 Moral hazard
10.3.2 Moral corruption
10.4 Just governance
10.4.1 Distributive justice
10.4.2 Intergenerational justice
10.4.3 Procedural justice
10.4.4 Corrective justice
10.5 Two final points
Chapter summary
Questions for discussion
Suggested reading
Notes
11. Capitalism and the climate crisis
11.1 Introduction
11.2 Social ecology and system change
11.3 Two iterations of the capitalist self
11.4 "There is no alternative" (TINA)
11.5 People's capitalism
11.6 A general will
Chapter summary
Questions for discussion
Suggested reading
Notes
Glossary
Index

Citation preview

Praise for the first edition: “Williston’s The Ethics of Climate Change persuasively shows how analytic philosophy can break free from the contemporary American Disenlightenment and contribute to the values and virtues of a sustainable future.” – Martin Schönfeld, University of South Florida, USA “Williston has provided an admirably clear, concise, and well-informed introduction to climate ethics that does not shy away from taking positions. This is an excellent introduction to the subject, both for students and for anyone concerned with one of the most profound challenges of our time.” – Dale Jamieson, New York University, USA “An exceptionally comprehensive and judicious exploration of an ominously important cluster of issues, embedding rigorous but lucid philosophical argu­ ments in the non-ideal political realities of the fraught international negotia­ tions. Williston probes insightfully and in a delightfully lively style – I know of nothing else this engaging for introductory or intermediate students.” – Henry Shue, University of Oxford, UK

The Ethics of Climate Change

The Ethics of Climate Change: An Introduction systematically and comprehensively examines the ethical issues surrounding arguably the greatest threat now facing humanity. This second edition has been updated and includes two new chapters on climate change and capitalism and climate change and law. Williston addresses important questions such as: • • • • • • • •

Has humanity entered the Anthropocene epoch? Is climate change primarily an ethical or an economic issue? Can capitalism be reformed to prevent climate catastrophe? What are the moral failings of international climate diplomacy? What are the main causes of political inaction and climate denial? Should tort law be used to sue those responsible for climate change? What are intragenerational and intergenerational justice? Is geoengineering an ethically justifiable response to climate change?

Featuring case studies throughout, this textbook provides a philosophical introduction to an immensely topical issue studied by students within the fields of applied ethics, global justice, sustainability, geography, and politics. Byron Williston is professor of Philosophy at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. He is the author of Philosophy and the Climate Crisis: How the Past Can Save the Present (2020), also available from Routledge.

The Ethics of …

When is it right to go to war? What are the causes of poverty? Are human intelligence and machine intelligence the same? What is cyber-terrorism? Do races exist? What makes a person a refugee? Each engaging textbook from The Ethics of … series focuses on a signifi­ cant ethical issue and provides a clear and stimulating explanation of the surrounding philosophical discussions. Focusing on moral debates at the forefront of contemporary society they have been designed for use by students studying philosophy, applied ethics, global ethics and related subjects such as politics, international relations and sociology. Features to aid study include chapter summaries, study questions, annotated further reading and glossaries. The Ethics of Development An Introduction David Ingram and Thomas Derdak The Ethics of Migration An Introduction Adam Hosein The Ethics of Sex An Introduction Neil McArthur The Ethics of War and Peace An Introduction Third Edition Helen Frowe The Ethics of Pandemics An Introduction Iwao Hirose The Ethics of Climate Change An Introduction Second Edition Byron Williston For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/The-Ethics-of-/book-series/ETHICSOF

The Ethics of Climate Change An Introduction Second Edition

Byron Williston

Cover image: © acilo/Getty Images Second edition published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Byron Williston The right of Byron Williston to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge, 2018 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-25767-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-25766-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-28492-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003284925 Typeset in Times New Roman by MPS Limited, Dehradun

Contents

1

Introduction: Code red

1

The basic science

7

1.1 Introduction 7 1.2 The greenhouse effect 7 1.3 Climate projections 12 1.4 Risks and vulnerabilities 18 1.5 Ethical communication of science 23 Chapter summary 24 Questions for discussion 25 Suggested reading 25

2

What is climate change ethics?

28

2.1 Introduction 28 2.2 Ideal and non-ideal theory 28 2.3 Climate economics 33 2.4 Why ethics is necessary 39 2.5 Is ethics adequate? 41 Chapter summary 45 Questions for discussion 45 Suggested reading 46

3

Precautionary policy 3.1 Introduction 48 3.2 The precautionary principle 48 3.3 Adaptation and mitigation 52 3.4 Three drivers of climate change 56 3.5 From Rio to Paris 61 Chapter summary 65

48

viii

Contents Questions for discussion 66 Suggested reading 66

4

International justice

68

4.1 Introduction 68 4.2 Climate change and human rights 68 4.3 The ideology of business as usual 71 4.4 The tragedy of the commons 76 4.5 Three principles of climate justice 79 4.6 The right to development 83 Chapter summary 84 Questions for discussion 85 Suggested reading 85

5

Intergenerational justice

87

5.1 Introduction 87 5.2 An “intergenerational arms race” 87 5.3 The non-identity problem 90 5.4 The contractarian gambit 97 5.5 Just savings 99 5.6 Beyond the contract? 102 Questions for discussion 104 Suggested reading 104

6

Jurisprudential issues

107

6.1 Introduction 107 6.2 Realism, idealism, and climate litigation 107 6.3 Causality and attribution 110 6.4 Climate change and tort law 114 6.5 Legitimacy and the Paris agreement 117 6.6 Civil disobedience 120 Chapter summary 124 Questions for discussion 124 Suggested reading 125

7

Nature in the Anthropocene 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4

Introduction 128 Why species matter 128 The Anthropocene 132 Activist preservationism 134

128

Contents

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7.5 Two moral doctrines 136 7.6 Ecomodernism 139 7.7 The end of nature 142 Chapter summary 145 Questions for discussion 146 Suggested reading 146

8

Individual duties

148

8.1 Introduction 148 8.2 The prisoner’s dilemma 148 8.3 The negligibility thesis 152 8.4 Turning to the virtues 157 8.5 Virtues for the climate crisis 158 8.6 Building just institutions 162 8.7 Carbon offsetting 164 Chapter summary 166 Questions for discussion 166 Suggested reading 167

9

Climate change denial

169

9.1 Introduction 169 9.2 Virtue epistemology 169 9.3 How to believe in climate change 173 9.4 Climate change bullshit 176 9.5 Dealing with bullshit: producers and consumers 179 9.6 The problem of integrity 183 Chapter summary 186 Questions for discussion 186 Suggested reading 187

10

Geoengineering 10.1 Introduction 189 10.2 The turn to geoengineering 189 10.3 Moral hazard and moral corruption 192 10.4 Just governance 196 10.5 Two final points 204 Chapter summary 206 Questions for discussion 207 Suggested reading 207

189

x

11

Contents

Capitalism and the climate crisis

209

11.1 Introduction 209 11.2 Social ecology and system change 209 11.3 Two iterations of the capitalist self 213 11.4 “There is no alternative” (TINA) 216 11.5 People’s capitalism 219 11.6 A general will 223 Chapter summary 227 Questions for discussion 227 Suggested reading 227

Glossary Index

230 236

Introduction: Code red

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its sixth assessment report (AR6) in 2021. It continues a trend seen in the previous five reports: that the science of climate change has become increasingly firm, the consensus among scientists about the effects of climate change more robust and the sense that we are in dire straits more pronounced. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called the report “a code red for humanity.” It is difficult to know what more we can say about this, and what other language we can muster to express the urgency of the issue. The warnings have been coming for a very long time now, well before we started using language like “code red.” In 1992, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a “Warning to Humanity.” The letter was signed by some 1,500 scientists and warned of an impending biospherical crisis if rampant industrialization were not curbed. In November 2017, 25 years after that warning appeared, more than 15,000 scientists signed an updated version of it. Apart from the number of signatories, the biggest difference between the two warnings is that the second one identifies climate change as one of the principal threats we now face: Especially troubling is the current trajectory of potentially catastrophic climate change due to rising GHGs from burning fossil fuels … deforestation … and agricultural production –particularly from farming ruminants for meat production … Moreover, we have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be annihilated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century.1 And yet, according to a recent report on global energy use from the International Energy Agency (IEA), demand for energy is expected to rise by 30% by 2030, with the bulk of this demand being met by fossil fuels.2 The IEA is a notoriously conservative organization, so these projections cannot easily be dismissed. The picture these recent documents leave us with is not pretty. Together, they testify to the seemingly growing gap between our understanding of the DOI: 10.4324/9781003284925-1

2

Introduction

accelerating damage being done to the biosphere by human activity and the creeping pace of our institutional response to this reality. Clearly, we require a shift in our thinking about our place in the Earth system if we are to minimize the impact of, or even just survive, the crises we are bringing upon ourselves through our profligate carbon emissions. This book is an attempt to help us come to grips with this task. It shows that our chief failing so far is an ethical one, and that the solution to the problem—if there is one—must also be ethical. What does this mean? Well, the book as a whole supplies a comprehensive answer to this question, but here’s a thumbnail version of it. As I understand it, we have compelling reasons to act aggressively toward the goal of reducing our carbon footprint dramatically. We must have a carbon-neutral global economy within two or three decades, a requirement entirely contrary to the IEA’s prediction about the shape of our near future global energy regime. The reason for the requirement is straightforward. The impact anthropogenic climate change is having on the planet’s most vulnerable groups—the global poor, future generations, and non-human species—is both profound and ethically outrageous. When I say “we” or “our” here, and throughout the book, I am referring principally to currently existing citizens of the rich, developed countries of the global north. These people have strong duties to constrain themselves so as to protect the vital interests of the groups just mentioned. “Constraint,” for its part, is a catch-all for the diverse things that must be done, from curbing carbon-intensive consumption to building just global and national institutions. Before getting to a summary of each chapter, let me make two methodological points. The first is that this book is written from the standpoint of what has come to be known as Anglo-American philosophy. The approach taken here does not consider at any length the manner in which the climate crisis has been explored by philosophers working in non-Western traditions. Climate change is a quintessentially global problem, and it is being subjected to rigorous analysis by, among others, Indian, African, Chinese, and Japanese philosophers, not to mention all those scholars and thinkers representing the world’s diverse Indigenous peoples. I am not an expert in any of these traditions and it would be both disrespectful and disingenuous of me to pose as one. So I have not considered them. This is a genuine pity. But even if I were equipped to write intelligently about these philosophical traditions and positions, doing so here would have made this book impossibly long and unfit for its primary function: a textbook introducing the main contours of philosophical debate in this area. It is an attempt to synthesize the large body of existing literature known as Climate Change Ethics in Anglo-American philosophy. This brings me to the second point. The other broad philosophical approach not represented here is “continental” philosophy (hermeneutics, phenomenology, existentialism, and their offshoots). The body of literature just mentioned is, by contrast, largely “analytic” in orientation. Again, there

Introduction

3

is excellent work being done on the phenomenon of climate change generally in continental philosophy, but including it here would have increased the size of the volume substantially. These two points do indicate the need for a larger climate change ethics project, one that brings together Western and nonWestern work on the one hand and continental and analytic work on the other. But that would be a different kind of book than this one. Neither of these points should be taken to imply that there is something objectionably parochial about the methodology adopted here. The book is meant to be both comprehensive in scope and accessible to anyone who gives it serious consideration. Were the book to open up a dialogue with nonWestern or non-analytic sources about the ethical challenges of climate change that would be a happy by-product of its primary aim. The more people representing a diversity of philosophical traditions and perspectives we can get talking about these issues the better. With that apology out of the way, here’s a brief summary of each chapter. Chapter 1 lays out the basic science of climate change. The goal of the chapter as a whole is to provide the reader with an up-to-date account of where things stand regarding the physical science of anthropogenic climate change. We start with an explanation of the greenhouse effect, moving next to projections of the effects of climate change in four areas of concern: heat waves, droughts, wildfires, sea-level rise, and extreme precipitation events. Following this, we will see what impacts these effects will have on human and non-human systems. We close with some brief reflections on the nature of ethical scientific communication. Chapter 2 examines the philosophical discipline of climate change ethics. We begin with an analysis of the distinction between ideal and non-ideal ethical theory. As we will see, the distinction is especially illuminating in the effort to find rationally justifiable climate policy. We will ask how climate change ethics fits into the larger field of environmental ethics, how economics provides a challenge to it, whether it is required to make sense of the threats of climate change, and, finally, whether it is adequate to that task. In chapter 3, we take a look at international climate change policy. We examine the ethical foundations of international climate policy, as well as the history of climate diplomacy. We begin with an analysis of the precautionary principle, moving next to the main objectives of international climate policy (namely, to help get a grip on the challenges of adaptation and mitigation), three key drivers of climate change, and some of the most important developments in climate diplomacy over roughly the last 25 years. In chapter 4, we begin the work of climate change ethics proper by looking at international justice. We begin with an analysis of the connection between climate change and human rights, before moving to a consideration of the nature of climate justice and why so many in the developed world have resisted justice talk in this area. Next, we examine climate change as an example of the tragedy of the commons. This brings us to a detailed analysis of

4

Introduction

some important principles of climate justice, with a focus on the polluter pays principle. We close with an examination of the right to development and its problematic connection to the imperative to curb global carbon emissions radically. Chapter 5 extends the analysis of justice to the intergenerational sphere. How should we think about the interests of future people in our policy deliberations? Why should they count and how much? This chapter examines those questions. We begin with Stephen Gardiner’s analysis of how bad things might get for future people under business as usual. Next, focusing on Derek Parfit’s non-identity problem, we examine why it is so problematic to say we wrong them by continuing down this path. This brings us to a sustained engagement with a broadly contractarian approach to intergenerational obligations, rooted in the philosophy of John Rawls. We close with some skeptical reflections on this approach to the problem. Chapter 6 is new to this edition. It takes up the legal issues that have begun to emerge as a key component of the climate change landscape. The focus on human rights is central to these debates and so we begin by making some conceptual connections among human rights, climate litigation, and the realism/idealism distinction. Next, because establishing causal connections between the wrongdoer and the wronged is so central to successful litigation, we examine the new science of extreme weather event attribution. In the final three sections we analyze, in turn, three areas in which legal instruments are being used to redress or bring wider attention to some of the harms of climate disruption: tort law, international law, and civil disobedience. Everything so far has been about humans. What about the rest of the biosphere? Chapter 7 takes up this issue. The chapter begins by asking why species and ecosystems matter morally. Why are they valuable? The discussion brings us to an analysis of what our duties of species preservation look like in the age of climate change. This is a difficult task because we are now in the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch defined by pervasive human influence in the earth system. Next, applying some traditional moral doctrines, we ask whether or not it is permissible for us to engage in the sort of ‘activist preservationist’ projects the new epoch seems to demand of us. This is followed by a critical analysis of the claims (a) that the Anthropocene is a welcome moment in human history and (b) that nature is at an end. The chapters on justice had to do mainly with the duties of collectives, or individuals just to the extent that they belong to collectives. Chapter 8 extends the analysis by looking directly at the question of individual duties. We begin by locating it in the inescapable context of collective action problems. In an effort to understand the psychological dynamics that make those situations go awry so often, we look at the idea any individual might have that his or her contributions to the problem are “negligible.” We will attempt to find a way around this very compelling thought, first by showing how to moralize the small consumption choices we make all the time; and second, by turning to a

Introduction

5

virtue-ethical analysis of the problem. This will bring us to a direct consideration of what individuals should do in our non-ideal situation. We examine two options: (a) working for meaningful political change and (b) carbon offsetting. Why have we done virtually nothing about climate change? A large part of the answer to this question is that we have denied the existence or severity of the problem. Climate change denial is therefore the focus of chapter 9. We begin with a sketch of virtue epistemology, moving next to a description of what the ideal epistemic agent believes about climate change. This brings us to climate change denial, which we examine in the subsequent three sections. The first two deal with a familiar form of denial—here, following Harry Frankfurt, analyzed as climate change “bullshit”—the third with a less familiar form that can show up among otherwise progressive people. Chapter 10 considers the ethics of geoengineering—the suite of technologies designed to cool the planet as a response to dangerous heating. As we will see, proposals to research and deploy geoengineering technologies raise profound ethical questions. Our focus is on the many challenges of responding to geoengineering proposals in accordance with the principles of justice examined in earlier chapters. We thus look at this phenomenon through the lenses of distributive, intergenerational, procedural, and corrective justice. We conclude with some brief reflections on what the very idea of geoengineering tells us about our ethically precarious position. Chapter 11, our final chapter is also new to this edition. It is important to include it here for two simple reasons. First, capitalism is the economic system that is responsible for the climate crisis; and second, philosophers (among others) have pondered the ethical dimensions of capitalism since its inception some 250 years ago. The chapter begins by analyzing capitalism as the economic system that dominates the world. Next, we examine the conception of the self that underpins the capitalist world order, tracing this conception back to the social contract theories of the early-modern period. The next two sections tackle the notion that there is no alternative to capitalism as we find it today, first by diagnosing the claim critically and then by undermining it by sketching an alternative. Finally, we look at how the alternative can be given a foundation in a form of social contract theory not explored so far: the idea of a general will first articulated by Rousseau. Two final points. First, I want to reiterate that this is an introduction to climate change ethics. As I have said, it seeks to gather together the most important developments in the existing literature, not develop new positions. Over the course of the following 11 chapters we will assess the soundness of numerous arguments, but these assessments should not be mistaken for final pronouncements on the topic at hand. They are better viewed as invitations to take philosophical reflection even further than I have done here. Second, no reader will fail to notice that I think the climate predicament into which we have stumbled is quite dire, even tragic. As I see it, that view is an inescapable reaction to the facts staring us in the face. But this book is not

6

Introduction

a requiem for our species. Climate change ethics makes sense as a discipline only if the assumption that we can still change things is warranted. The book in your hands or on your screen is evidence of my opinion that it is. This book would not have been possible without the hundreds of conversations about climate change I have had over the last 15 years or so with friends, colleagues, family members, and students. I derive a lot of energy from the profound commitment so many people evidently still have to figuring this thing out rationally and humanely, and I thank all of them for this. I am also grateful to Dale Jamieson, William Throop, Philip Cafaro, Jennifer Welchman, Tyler DesRoches, Stephen Gardiner, Frank Jankunis, Jason Kawall, and Henry Shue for general philosophical encouragement on this topic. Special thanks to Shohini Ghose, Joel daSilva, Shanna Braden, Simon Dalby, and anonymous reviewers for their perceptive comments on earlier drafts. Finally, abundant thanks are due to the editorial team at Routledge. For the first edition of the book, Rebecca Shillabeer and Gabrielle Coakeley were enthusiastic supporters of the project from its inception and guided me expertly through the publication process. And I am immensely grateful to Tony Bruce for suggesting that the book go into a second edition.

Notes 1 William J. Ripple, Christopher Wolf, et. al., “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice,” Bioscience, 2017. DOI: 10.1093/biosci/bix125 2 Madeline Cuff, “10 Things You Need to Know About the World Energy Outlook 2017,” Greenbiz, November 15, 2017. https://www.greenbiz.com/article/10-things-you-need-know-world-energyoutlook-2017. Accessed: November 17, 2017.

1

The basic science

1.1 Introduction At or around the time of writing, things are not looking good for the global climate. Consider the costs, in money and lives, associated with the following 2021 weather-related mega-disasters. Hurricane Ida in the United States caused $74 billion in damages and caused 96 deaths; flooding in China caused $30 billion in damages and caused 347 deaths; severe winter weather in the United States caused $24 billion in damages and claimed 226 lives; and flooding in Germany and Belgium caused $22 billion in damages and claimed 240 lives. That’s nearly 1,000 deaths and $150 billion of damage in a single nonanomalous year, and it counts only the biggest events. Though the causal chains can sometimes be difficult to specify these are all likely effects of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. To understand them, and related phenomena, we begin this book with a look at the basic science of climate change. We start with an explanation of the greenhouse effect, moving next to projections of the effects of climate change in four areas of concern: heat waves, droughts, wildfires, sea-level rise, and extreme precipitation events. Following this, we will see what impacts these effects will have on human and non-human systems. We close with some brief reflections on the nature of ethical scientific communication.

1.2 The greenhouse effect Since the advent of the agricultural revolution some 12,000 years ago, and then much more intensively from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (circa 1750), humans have been altering the global climate through such processes as deforestation, livestock cultivation, and the burning of fossil fuels. At the time of industrialization the concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere was about 280 parts per million (ppm). It is now over 414 ppm and climbing 2–3 ppm/year. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) makes a clear and confident statement about the reality of climate change that this increase has produced:

DOI: 10.4324/9781003284925-2

8

The basic science Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.1

Although climate change deniers sometimes speak as though scientists invented the concept of climate change or global warming out of the blue a few decades ago, in fact we have known about the phenomenon for well over a century. The first articulation of it as a “greenhouse effect” came in the early decades of the 19th century from the French scientist Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier. Fourier wondered how the earth could retain its heat and speculated that the atmosphere must have a role to play in this. He thought of the earth as something like a glass-covered box—a greenhouse—and thus became known as the inventor of this (somewhat misleading but nevertheless useful) analogy.2 Although GHGs can pack a big warming punch, they comprise only a tiny fraction of atmospheric gases. Nitrogen and oxygen together make up 99% of the gases in the atmosphere. The remaining 1% is taken up by relatively small concentrations of neon, helium, methane, carbon dioxide, water vapor, and other gases. Only a few of these gases—methane, water vapor, carbon dioxide, ozone, and nitrous oxide—have heat-trapping properties. As the earth absorbs solar radiation and heats up, it radiates heat back out. GHGs absorb and reradiate infrared energy from incoming sunlight, but incoming sunlight is not just infrared radiation. It also includes visible light which is not blocked by the atmosphere. This incident light is also reradiated by the earth mostly as infrared radiation that can be absorbed by the atmosphere. For purposes of understanding the human role in all of this, it makes sense to concentrate on the role of carbon dioxide (CO2) in this process. Carbon moves through the earth’s system in a cycle, passing in different forms through various “reservoirs”—oceans, rock strata, ice formations, the atmosphere, the bodies of living things, etc.—in the process. Consider a hyper-simplified illustration. Atmospheric carbon is drawn down by plants through the process of photosynthesis—which converts CO2 to sugar, used by plants to build biomass—and passed along to other organisms through the food chain. Dead plants and animals transfer their carbon to the soil, where bacterial decomposers get to work on it, releasing the carbon back to the atmosphere as they do so. Barring major climatic upheavals, such as volcanic eruptions, this process can stay in rough equilibrium for many millennia, meaning that the amount of heat-trapping CO2 in the atmosphere remains relatively fixed over such periods. But the climate system can also be “forced”—thrown out of equilibrium—by natural or human causes. Fossil fuels are stores of carbon built up over hundreds of millions of years. They are the remains of ancient plants and animals sequestered in oxygenstarved geological strata, so that they could not decompose. When we extract

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and burn them we introduce this carbon into the carbon cycle. This is an anthropogenic (human-caused) climate forcing. On a small scale it would make no appreciable difference to the earth system, but since industrialization humans have been doing it at such a furious rate that we have upset the carbon cycle’s balance. Because there is a correlation between the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the amount of thermal energy trapped in the lower atmosphere, introducing more GHGs into the earth system will, other things being equal, lead to an increase in surface temperatures. And this is just what we have seen. But not quite at the rate we might have expected because the climate system includes the oceans and 90% of the solar energy absorbed by the earth since 1971 has gone into heating these vast liquid bodies.3 There are two distinct time frames of relevance here, though each tells much the same story about the unprecedented warming humans have caused. The first is the change in global surface temperatures since about 1880. This is when the “instrumental temperature record” begins. Scientists are most confident about these results, simply because they have direct access to temperatures through thermometer records in this period. The instrumental record shows clearly that temperatures across the oceans and land have risen steadily since 1880. We have seen a global temperature rise of almost 1.0°C (1.8°F) since this time, from 13.5°C (56.3°F) to 14.5°C (58.1°F). Moreover, although the average increase over the 20th century as a whole is 0.10°C (0.18°F) per decade, the rate of warming has increased substantially since about 1980, to 0.15°C (0.27°F) per decade.4 This is correlated with dramatically enhanced consumption of fossil fuel products, as well as deforestation, by humans in this period. It is much more difficult to reconstruct temperatures before the instrumental record, but scientists have devised ingenious ways of doing so. These methods provide indirect or proxy data of past temperatures, meaning that temperature is inferred from other data that bear a consistent relation to them. For example, over millions of years layers of snow build up and are compressed on the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. Scientists extract long, tubular cores of this ice. These layers of ice trap bubbles of air, so they can be analyzed to determine the air’s gaseous makeup at specific years. Because each layer represents a year, the whole ice mass can be considered a coded record of the past. Using similar methods on tree rings, corals, and lake sediments, scientists have been able to reconstruct temperatures going back millions of years. Coming a little closer to our time, from proxy data we now know, for example, that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 were not far off 280 ppm—the pre-industrial baseline—for at least 10,000 years before the 20th century.5 On any timescale that is relevant to us what we are now witnessing is therefore unprecedented. This is worrisome enough, but there is yet another feature of the climate system we need to mention. Earlier, we noticed that “other things being

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equal” increasing the atmospheric stock of GHGs will raise temperatures a corresponding amount. The assumption behind this statement is that there is a stable or linear relation between the two phenomena, that with, say, every extra 50 ppm of CO2 we can expect a temperature rise of 1.0°C (these are arbitrarily chosen numbers). The problem with this idea is that the climate system is full of feedbacks, which can make the assumption of a linear correlation between GHGs and temperatures difficult to sustain. It can be very difficult to understand the relation between these two phenomena accurately, because the complexity of feedbacks makes them difficult to model on computers. Feedbacks are effects of causal processes that turn back to affect those causal processes themselves. They come in two varieties, negative and positive. A negative feedback diminishes the force of the causal process, while a positive feedback enhances it. Here’s an example of a climatic phenomenon that exhibits both kinds of feedback. Because warmer air causes more evaporation of water, global warming increases the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. One effect of this is a tendency to enhance the warming process since water vapor is a greenhouse gas. This amplifies the force of the causal process and is thus a positive feedback. A second effect, however, is to create more cloud cover over the earth’s surface. Because low clouds reflect incoming sunlight, this effect can slow or dampen the causal process. This is a negative feedback. So in this case we have two effects of a global warming-induced increase in evaporation, one of which enhances the warming while the other diminishes it. But before rushing to the conclusion that climate change is no problem because these effects are likely to balance each other out in the climate system as a whole, it is crucial to note two points. First, there is strong evidence that positive feedbacks outweigh negative feedbacks in the climate system as a whole.6 In other words, processes that accelerate warming dominate those that accelerate cooling. Second, the climate system contains some positive feedbacks that have the potential to accelerate climate change dramatically if they are tripped. One example is the permafrost in the Siberian tundra. Permafrost is frozen organic material, lying just below the top layer of soil. It is now melting because of elevated temperatures. Permafrost is loaded with methane (CH4), a super-powerful greenhouse gas. The problem is that when it melts, this gas is released into the atmosphere, where it can act as a super-accelerant of heat increase. Methane is 86 times more potent than CO2 at trapping heat over a 20-year period, though this potency diminishes to 34 times the effect of CO2 over 100 years.7 So even though it does not remain in the atmosphere for as long as CO2, it can enhance warming significantly while it is active in the climate system. Depending on what measures we take to address climate change, between 37% and 81% of permafrost will be lost this century, which could release up to 250 billion metric tons of methane into the atmosphere.8 Again, the key is that this will accelerate the warming process, not simply increase warming in a

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linear fashion. Scientists are also worried about positive feedbacks in Artic sea ice melt, land ice melt, potential for wildfires, and more. Positive feedbacks like these are especially alarming because the paleoclimatic record reveals that the climate can switch “abruptly” from one regime to another once they kick in. Abrupt climate change can happen within centuries or even decades. It’s as though a switch or tipping point is reached, after which nothing much can stop the momentum of the system. In our case, even if we realized this was happening and ceased our GHG emissions immediately in a desperate attempt to reverse it, our efforts would be in vain. This is “runaway” climate change and we may be closer to it than we suppose. Here is what climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf says about this prospect: What climate scientists have feared for decades is now beginning to come true: we are pushing the climate system across dangerous tipping points. Beyond such points, things like ice sheet collapse become self-sustaining and unstoppable, committing our children and children’s children to massive problems. The new studies strongly suggest the first of these tipping points has already been crossed. More tipping points lie ahead of us. I think we should try hard to avoid crossing them.9 The “first” tipping point to which Rahmstorf alludes here are some ice sheets in Western Antarctica whose collapse, according to the latest research, may now be inevitable. All by itself, this will raise sea levels by 1.2 meters (4 feet). But even if we accept the IPCC’s claim that the late-20th- and 21st-century warming trend is unequivocal, how can we be sure that we are the cause of it, that the current forcing of the climate system is truly anthropogenic? The planet has gone through wild climatic swings over its 4.5 billion-year history. For the past 2 million years we have been in the Pleistocene glacial age, characterized by the pendulum swing of glacial and interglacial periods (we are currently in an interglacial known as the Holocene). But prior to the Pleistocene, the planet was generally much warmer than it is now, with correspondingly higher concentrations of atmospheric CO2. Sixty-five million years ago, alligators were roaming above the Artic circle.10 Since we were not around yet, significant climate change can obviously happen without us. There are a number of natural forces that can cause climate change. Minute shifts in the planet’s orbital route, sunspots, and explosive volcanic activity have all been identified as important natural causes of climate change. To find out whether or not 20th-century warming can be attributed to these kinds of phenomena, scientists use computer models to determine what effect known natural causes alone would have had on temperatures, then compare the results with what has actually been observed. The models consistently show a large discrepancy between the two data sets. Natural causes alone cannot explain what the instrumental temperature record reveals, but when the

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models add in anthropogenic sources, the two sets fit together nicely. This is observable at both global and regional levels, and for terrestrial as well as ocean temperatures.11 What’s more, since industrialization human sources begin to swamp natural ones. The data now show clearly that our activities are the dominant forcing mechanism in the global climate. Could there be other natural variables of which we are simply ignorant? Why convict humanity before all the facts are in? There’s a chance of this but only because it’s impossible to prove a negative. This is as true of the claim that “there is no other natural cause that could explain the observed climate data” as it is of the claim that “there is no God.” Surely, however, the argumentative burden lies with the skeptic at this point. This person should be able to show that the purely natural variables we know about are sufficient to explain the observed data. But, again, they are clearly not sufficient. In a telling analogy, the climate scientist David Archer argues that we know the identity of the real “culprit” here so the search for an alternate one seems bizarre: Shifting the blame to something else would require an explanation of why the CO2 would not be trapping the heat as we expect it would be doing. Think of it like a murder mystery. The butler (CO2) was caught with a smoking gun in his hand in the room with the dead guy … . Yes, the bullets came from the gun … . Yes, the gun was purchased by the butler. Everything checks out. But now your partner, Bob … argues that it was really the chauffeur [who] did it. Actually you find out that the chauffeur was at his sister’s wedding on the other side of town for the whole time and lots of people saw him … . [I]f Bob is going to convict the chauffeur, he has to think of a way to unconvict the butler. He would have to come up with an innocent explanation for the butler’s smoking gun and the bullets, and all that.12 We should therefore have no compunction about pointing to the anthropogenic sources of the current problem. In chapter 6 we will expand on this point in the context of certain jurisprudential issues that have arisen with climate change, focusing there on the latest “extreme event attribution science.” But even if we accept that current climate change is largely anthropogenic, why should we worry about it? So far, we have been looking at the past and the present. What does the future have in store for us?

1.3 Climate projections These questions bring us to the IPCC’s construction of climate change scenarios. Obviously, the climate future we get will in part be a function of the policies we adopt in the coming years, especially with regard to our use of fossil fuels. In the most recent IPCC report, the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) released in 2021, the IPCC has developed a scenario framework known

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as Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). SSPs are “narratives.” There are five such narratives, all of which incorporate much richer social, economic, and political detail than earlier scenarios—such as the Representative Concentration Pathways of AR5—did. These scenarios are also far more nuanced than earlier iterations, which had tended to present the possibilities as an implausibly pure spectrum from very good to very bad. SSPs correct this feature of the earlier frameworks. To take just one example, SSP4 includes very unequal investments in human capital, leading to intense stratification between elites and the rest of the global population. There is an absence of social cohesion and significant potential for social unrest. Little effort is made to combat climate change because broad-based social trust is minimal. But there is also significant investment in and development of low-carbon energy sources globally. SSP3, by contrast, describes a world in which “resurgent nationalism” is a major factor in the effort to tackle climate change, but this comes with an enhancement of national and regional security.13 And so on. Taken as a whole, SSPs give us a range of possible future temperature increases: they predict a “very likely range” of between 1.4°C and 4.4°C by 2100.14 Unlike previous scenario frameworks, and precisely because of their complexity, the SSPs make it very difficult to say exactly which path we are currently on. Even the one that is worst from the standpoint of emissions (SSP5) also specifies that efforts have been made globally to invest in education, health, and geoengineering. This could make many societies more resilient in the face of climate change-related challenges. Two points are worth emphasizing about these new scenarios. First, even if a version of SSP5 came to pass (i.e., a scenario in which there is widespread resiliency among human societies), virtually everyone agrees that 4.4°C of warming will be extremely difficult to manage. Second, there is of course no guarantee that increased use of fossil fuels will be accompanied by the sort of attention to social and economic development laid out in SSP5. We should be cautious in our assumptions on this point, but that stance is compatible with doing everything we can to avoid the upper end of the SSPs warming scenarios. In what follows in this chapter we will adopt this as a methodological guide, focusing on the grave harms that are in store for humanity with anything near 4°C of warming. At this point it is crucial to emphasize the basic distinction between weather and climate. Confronted with the possibility of a +4°C increase in temperature, many people, especially those living in cold regions, are apt to shrug their shoulders. After all, the temperature can rise that much within a few hours on any Spring day, and some might welcome the prospect of slightly less frigid Winter temperatures. The mistake here is to take claims about climate, which measures long-term statistical averages with weather, which describes what it is happening with temperature, precipitation, etc. in a relatively small time frame. It is a very serious error to make because temperature changes of little

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significance from a weather standpoint can be very significant from a climate standpoint. For example, it is often pointed out that in the midst of the last period of glaciation, when much of North America was covered by a thick sheet of ice, average global temperatures were just 5°C colder than they are now. The difference between that world and ours with respect to human habitability is obviously profound, so it makes sense to wonder what a similar change in the opposite temperature direction might portend for us. Indeed, there is some reason to think that 4°C of warming would be a much more significant challenge for us than 5°C of cooling would be. Of course, there is obviously a connection between weather and climate because weather events depend on local climate. Residents of Vancouver, Canada, won’t be surprised to wake up to cold rain some November morning precisely because they live in a temperate climate on the edge of a mid-latitude coastal rainforest. Does this mean we can attribute specific weather events, like hurricanes, to climate change? An analogy originating with Dale Jamieson shows what is potentially misleading about this question. Suppose a baseball player has a 0.333 batting average and that on his third and final time to the plate in a particular game, he hits a homerun. It would not make much sense to ask whether or not his batting average caused that hit. Statistics do not intervene in the material world in this fashion. What we can say is that it is more likely that he was going to get the hit at that point in the game than he would have been had his average been lower. This leaves open the possibility that the homerun might also be attributable to factors other than the player’s batting prowess: a bad pitch, a sudden up-swelling of wind, and so on. Even so, a less accomplished hitter might not have been able to exploit these factors to his advantage. Like homeruns, weather events are the product of tangled causal chains, some of whose elements have nothing to do with us. The baseball analogy nevertheless makes it plausible to say that by loading the atmosphere with GHGs we are making extreme weather events more likely. This both (a) avoids the direct attribution of any particular event directly to climate change, while (b) making that event—a category 5 hurricane, say—less surprising than it would otherwise have been. Our thinking in this area has been enhanced significantly by “extreme event attribution science,” explored more in chapter 6. In thinking about the impacts of climate change on the physical world we all inhabit, there are five key phenomena to watch. This list is not meant to be exhaustive, but though incomplete it does convey the gravity of the threats we are creating.

1.3.1 Heat waves A heat wave occurs when five consecutive days are at least 5°C (9°F) hotter than the historical average in a particular place.15 In 2003, a heat wave killed

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about 35,000 people in Europe. In the United States, 7,000 temperature records were broken in the summer of 2022. These events were caused by an expansion of high-pressure subtropical weather patterns into higher latitudes, like North America and Europe. This is a predicted effect of global warming. In fact, heat waves are expected to become more intense and longer-lasting under business and usual (i.e., not making significant changes to our use of fossil fuels). For example, in St. Louis Missouri, which experienced massive heat-related problems in 2012 and beyond, there are currently fewer than three days per year above 38°C (100°F), but this number is projected to rise as high as 40 per year by 2100.16 A similar pattern is expected in the southwest U.S., western Europe, and parts of Australia. And in the Middle East and North Africa the end of the century could see temperatures regularly reach 50°C (122°F), with ten times the number of heat waves currently seen. This would render this vast region literally uninhabitable for parts of the year.17

1.3.2 Drought The hot, dry air of the subtropics that global warming is pushing to higher latitudes is having a drying effect in large parts of North America, the American tropics, Africa, Asia, Indonesia, and Australia. This has led to often severe drought conditions in these areas.18 Two other phenomena can enhance this effect. The first is that climate change appears to induce “blocking patterns” in weather systems, one effect of which is that highpressure systems that cause drought can get stuck in place for relatively long periods of time. The second is that because warming causes increased evaporation, the sun bakes the desiccated earth. This raises air temperatures still further, another good example of a positive feedback.19 At this point, even if rain begins to fall again, the water tends to run off the surface of the soil rather than penetrating it. The problem is projected to be worst in Mexico and West Africa, which could lead to dramatic reductions in crop yields as well as mass migrations out of those regions. Indeed, the U.S. southwest, western and southern Africa, much of South America, and the Mediterranean region must brace for “multidecadal megadroughts” on a scale that “in the past destroyed entire civilizations.”20 It is expected that with moderate warming (no more than 3°C), some regions could see their agricultural productivity increase because there will be more frost-free days. But even in those places—parts of Canada, for example—anything above 3°C is likely to lead to declines in agricultural productivity.

1.3.3 Wildfires In May–June 2017, wildfires swept through a region northwest of Lisbon, Portugal, killing more than 60 people (many of them trapped in their cars) and

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destroying 14,971 hectares of forest. In an area prone to wildfires, this decade has seen a 16% increase of them over the previous decade. In Australia, another fire-prone country, there was a bushfire in 2019–2020 that caused more than 30 deaths, killed around a billion of animals and spewed vast quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, affecting weather patterns globally.21 Here again, we have a clear and powerful positive feedback. Global warming increases drying through enhanced evaporation, higher temperatures and earlier snowmelt, providing extra fuel for fires. Fire releases the CO2 sequestered in that fuel (trees, etc.), which causes even more warming, leading to more drying out of forested regions, hence more potential for fires, and so on.22 So it makes intuitive sense to say that wildfires will likely increase in frequency and intensity in years and decades to come. According to one report, 20 million acres a year in the United States (especially California and the Pacific Northwest) will burn by 2050.23 Large increases in fire frequency will also hit southern Africa, southern Australia, New Zealand, Central Europe, northern India, and central South America.24

1.3.4 Sea-level rise Sea-level rise occurs as a result of global warming for two principal reasons: thermal expansion of the water (known as “thermosteric” expansion) and melting of land-based ice sheets. According to the IPCC, under business as usual these factors will cause mean global sea levels to rise 0.7 meters by 2100, and somewhere between 1.5 and 6.6 meters (4.9–21.8 feet) by 2500.25 However, scientists are now beginning to think that the 2100 number may be unrealistically low. The reason for this is that the IPCC does not feel confident about including the effects of a collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), which many scientists now consider likely. Moreover, recent observations have revealed that there is a large glacier in the East Antarctic Ice Sheet that looks as unstable as the one in the West. Climate scientist Joseph Romm concludes: “We are likely headed toward what used to be the high end of projected global sea-level rise this century (i.e., 4 to 5 feet [1.2 to 1.5 meters]) and the worst-case scenarios where humanity fails to take aggressive action to cut greenhouse gas emissions are considerably higher than that.”26 In other words, we are “likely” to hit the low end of the IPCC projections for 2500 fully 400 years before that date.

1.3.5 Extreme precipitation events Finally, let’s consider the effects of climate change on severe storms. Warmer temperatures can increase the intensity of storms by providing more fuel for them in the form of warmer ocean surface temperatures. While there is little confidence that global warming will increase the frequency of hurricanes and typhoons, there is general agreement that it will increase the number of severe

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storms, especially in the tropical Atlantic Ocean basin (although less so for the Pacific and Indian Ocean basins).27 For example, events like Hurricane Ida that struck Louisiana in August 2021 with a 14-foot storm surge, could become much more frequent. With a 1°C rise in temperatures, the frequency of high-magnitude storms like this would likely increase 3–4 times, while a 2°C increase would increase them 10 times (roughly one every other year). One recent study predicts that under business as usual, category 4 (wind speeds of 209–251 km/h (130–156 mph)) and 5 (wind speeds of 252 km/h (157 mph) or higher) storms will eventually represent up to half of all hurricanes.28 Four final points about all of these phenomena. First, they will not necessarily happen in isolation from one another in any particular region. This will make adapting to them even more difficult than it would otherwise be. For example, the United States is likely to experience severe flooding and salt water intrusion along its eastern coastline from sea-level rise and storm surges, even as it battles prolonged drought conditions in the southwest and more frequent and intense wildfires in the northwest. Second, although we have been talking quite a bit in terms of average increases in this or that event or phenomenon, the real danger might be “the variations around [the] average.” That is, we should focus not just on the “constant effects” of climate change but also on its “episodic effects.” For example, if average temperatures in some regions reach 45°C (113°F), 49°C (120°F) highs will likely become much more frequent.29 The same point applies to storm surges. Third, most of the conclusions we have been considering in this section are derived from climate models, which are by definition forward-looking. This method must however be supplemented with a comparative analysis between the projected futures and the deeper past (the field of paleoclimatology). This allows us to appreciate the extent to which the future we are creating is historically anomalous, unprecedented for our species. Paleoclimatologist Jeffrey Kiehl summarizes the issue this way: Earth’s CO2 concentration is rapidly rising to a level not seen in 30 to100 million years, and Earth’s climate was extremely warm at these levels of CO2. If the world reaches such concentrations of atmospheric CO2, positive feedback processes can amplify global warming beyond current modeling estimates. The human species and global ecosystems will be placed in a climate state never before experienced in their evolutionary history and at an unprecedented rate. Note that these conclusions arise from observations from earth’s past and not specifically from climate models. Will we, as a species, listen to these messages from the past in order to avoid repeating history?30 Finally, it is crucial to emphasize that none of the SSPs is inevitable, and this includes the one that will bring us 4.4°C of warming. Given our general lack

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of progress on this issue, the latter is a genuine possibility for us, but it is also important to say that we can still avoid it. The futures we are contemplating here are not like the proverbial asteroid rushing towards the planet and destined to kill us all. It is important to emphasize this because the asteroid scenario leaves no scope for ethics (or does so only in some specialized or attenuated sense: depending on how much time we had left there might be genuine ethical questions about our procreative choices, for example), whereas climate change does. Ethics depends on the possibility of a way out, even when things look very bad. These points bring us to an assessment of the key risks and vulnerabilities of a climate-changed world.

1.4 Risks and vulnerabilities We will consider climate change risks and vulnerabilities under two headings: those facing human systems, and those facing ecosystems and the living things that make them up. This distinction is not meant to indicate a fundamental split between humans and the rest of the biosphere. Human activities have profound effects on non-human systems, and humans are themselves fully embedded in such systems. The distinction is nevertheless analytically useful.

1.4.1 Human systems The IPCC lists six main threats to human systems from climate change. First, storm surges, coastal flooding, and sea-level rise in small island states increase the risk of death, ill health, displacement, and injury to people living there. Second, many regions will see inland flooding on a massive scale, due to rising seas and storm surges, which threaten human health and livelihoods. Third, extreme weather events can threaten water supply and electricity services to vulnerable populations. Fourth, there is a risk of morbidity during heat waves and a general loss of labor productivity for those working outside (like construction workers and seasonally employed agricultural workers). Fifth, there is a risk of profound food shortages resulting from more frequent and intense droughts. And sixth, there is a risk of an increase in global and regional insecurity.31 These risks are not evenly spread across the global population, of course, nor is the capacity to deal with disaster as it arises. Very generally, the biggest threats are faced by those nations of the global south—especially in east and south Asia and Africa—who (a) have historically contributed the least to the problem of carbon pollution and (b) are least equipped economically to adapt to the coming changes. These points are pivotal to grasping the nature of international justice, to be explored in a later chapter. For now, because of the potential they have to affect the lives of billions of people, we will focus more closely on four of the six key threats: health impacts, loss of agricultural productivity, coastal flooding, and security.

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1.4.1.1 Direct health impacts What are the likely health impacts of climate change and which populations will experience them most dramatically? According to a study commissioned by the Lancet, “climate change will have devastating consequences for human health.” These will come from changing patterns of vector-borne diseases like malaria, a rise in malnutrition and diarrhoeal diseases resulting from food and water insecurity, direct injury from more intense storms, increased morbidity due to warming-enhanced urban smog (higher temperatures trap ground-level ozone), and direct death from wildfires and heat waves.32 These effects will be experienced globally, though countries in the developing world will have a much more difficult time than developed countries coping with them because of less well-funded and responsive health care systems in those parts of the world. For example, much of West Africa and the Sahel will see large changes in the incidence and geographic range of vector- and water-borne diseases. Avoiding large-scale disaster from this source will require resolute attention to development goals in this region, with a focus on improvements in sanitation and water access as well as public health infrastructure.33 1.4.1.2 Loss of agricultural productivity The problem here is brutally simple: most of the places hit hardest hit by drought will also be experiencing population increase. By 2050, the world population is expected to rise to approximately 10 billion. This rise will happen very disproportionally across the globe, being concentrated in developing countries (especially those in Africa). The reason for this is that most of these countries have not passed through the demographic transition already experienced in much of the developed world. Population is a function of two factors: death rates and birth rates. In the developed world, birth rates have generally fallen in concert with a fall in death rates. People live longer but also have fewer babies, the result of which is a rough balance in population or even—in countries like Russia and Italy—negative fertility rates. Many developing countries are now experiencing a fall in death rates due to advances in the quality of medical care, but in some of them this has not been matched by a decline in birth rates. The result is a net increase in population in these countries. In fact, it is predicted that half of the population growth this century will occur in just eight countries, all of which fit this broad pattern: Nigeria, India, the United Republic of Tanzania, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Niger, Uganda, Ethiopia, and the United States.34 With the exception of the United States, these are all countries whose agricultural systems are going to be stressed to the breaking point by climate change-induced drought in the near term.

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1.4.1.3 Coastal flooding Coastal flooding poses two broad threats. The first is the intrusion of salt water into inland freshwater systems that are essential for irrigation and human consumption. The second is displacement due to inundation. The most dramatic effects of inundation will occur in small island states like Tuvalu and the Solomon Islands, which are literally disappearing under the waves. But the problem goes well beyond the fate of island nations. Recent research suggests that by 2060 there could be 1.4 billion climate refugees because of sea-level rise, a number that increases to 2 billion by 2100. That is approximately 20% of the total human population that will be affected by this phenomenon in a significant way at some point this century.35 The points to an important factor: the difficulty many people who are fleeing inundated coasts will have in resettling inland. They will not likely be moving into empty spaces, and the people already living there may be facing resource scarcity of their own or be members of a hostile ethnic or religious group. This point brings us to our final area of concern. 1.4.1.4 Security Because climate change places enormous stresses on a country’s or region’s environment it can lead to scarcity of essential resources which, in turn, is an important potential driver of conflict among groups of humans. The IPCC is careful to avoid making direct links between climate change and violent conflict, noting that it is an important causal factor among many others.36 The American military establishment is far less circumspect about the connection, however. They have identified climate change as a key “threat multiplier” in many regions of the world, a threat that could topple governments, lead to large-scale crimes of atrocity, and perhaps even to nuclear war. John Beddington, a scientific advisor to the UK government, argues that we could begin to see significant global security challenges by 2030: A ‘perfect storm’ of food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources threaten to unleash public unrest, cross-border conflicts and mass migration as people flee from the worst-affected regions.37 Although we should be wary of such pronouncements from the military establishment, since it clearly has an interest in characterizing security threats in a way that will enhance its own power, it would be foolish to ignore these warnings altogether. Finally, as was the case with the physical impacts of climate change on the earth system, it is important to emphasize that the four main areas of concern just considered will not appear in isolation from one another. For example, in Bangladesh, most of which is perilously close to sea level, rising waters in the

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south will force millions of people north. There, they will likely confront a security nightmare because India lies directly in their path and the Indian government has already made it clear that it does not want them entering the country en masse. If the Bangladeshi government cannot cope with the displacement, what will happen to these people? Similar problems will confront southern Europe, facing a refugee influx from North Africa as well as the United States facing the same phenomenon from Mexico and Central America. This massive global movement of people all looking to escape drought, rising seas, hostile neighbors, and so on will place enormous pressure on our capacity to coexist peaceably in the coming decades.

1.4.2 Non-human systems Although it is much less talked about in the larger culture, climate change is going to have a profound effect on ecosystems. We cannot hope to do justice to the full scope of this threat here, but let’s take a brief look at it under two headings: terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems on the one hand, and ocean ecosystems on the other. 1.4.2.1 Terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems The IPCC predicts that “climate change will be a powerful stressor on freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems.” This will have negative repercussions for the species that make up these ecosystems: A large fraction of both terrestrial and freshwater species faces increased extinction risk under projected climate change during and beyond the 21st-century, especially as climate change interacts with other stressors, such as habitat modification, overexploitation, pollution, and invasive species.38 As temperatures warm, both plant and animal species will migrate in search of a climate like the one they are used to. In general, this means two broad patterns of movement: to higher latitudes (horizontal migration) and into alpine regions (vertical migration). The problem here is much like it is for humans on the move because of climate change. First, there may simply not be any space into which species can move. If, for example, there are no mountains or hills around, they cannot migrate vertically. As for horizontal migration, species like the polar bear might simply run out of planetary real estate. Second, many species may simply not be able to move quickly enough to escape the heat. Freshwater mollusks, plant-feeding insects carnivorous and split-hoofed mammals can generally move across landscapes quite quickly (measured in kilometers per decade); but trees, herbaceous plants, rodents, and primates move much more slowly.39

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Finally, even if they can migrate—vertically or horizontally—species may not be able to compete with indigenous species for scarce resources, or, if they are especially aggressive, they may drive indigenous species out. Either way extinctions will rise. 1.4.2.2 Ocean ecosystems One of the major dangers for ocean ecosystems is acidification of the seas. Burning fossil fuels releases carbon into the atmosphere, as we know. Eventually some of this is transferred to the oceans, where it reacts with the chemicals in the water to increase the concentration of hydrogen ions and reduce the concentration of carbonate ions. This is acidification. The problem with it is that many ocean organisms require carbonate ions to build their shells and skeletons. Some of these organisms are important links in marine food chains, so if they cannot reproduce at sufficient levels, entire food webs may be undermined. This could cause a crash in ocean biodiversity. The most vulnerable marine ecosystems are coral reefs, richly biodiverse lowlying ecosystems. Although they occupy less than 0.1% of the ocean floor they support a disproportionate quantity of marine biodiversity. There are multiple threats here. Acidification and overfishing are prominent. But the main threat is that corals are very sensitive to temperature. As oceans warm, the corals expel the colorful algae that live symbiotically on them. This leads to bleaching, and the death of coral reef ecosystems. It is already happening on an alarming scale and is projected to become much worse throughout this century. Although our ignorance of the total number of species in existence makes it hard to say what percentage of that total is under threat of extinction, scientists have noticed that current rates of extinction are almost 1,000 times the background or natural rate. Climate change is not the only cause of this, but it is a major one. Five times in its nearly 4 billion-year history of life this planet has come close to losing all its species. Some of these extinction events have been associated with a CO2 spike. We are now in the midst of The Sixth Mass Extinction, also associated with a sharp rise in atmospheric CO2. The potential consequences of this are momentous, as Elizabeth Kolbert notes: Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy. The Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted has been ground into dust and giant rats have—or have not—inherited the earth.40 Think again of the billion or so non-human animals that perished in the 2019–2020 Australian bushfires. But the threat pointed to here is even more

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worrisome because even the loss of such a huge number of animal individuals does not necessarily entail the devastation of whole species (though it could in some cases). The new extinction event points to precisely this outcome as the ecosystems on which species depend become so altered by climate change that the species can no longer survive in place. Chapter 7 explores the ethical dimensions of this massive loss of non-human living diversity. For now it is sufficient simply to note that the destruction being wrought by anthropogenic climate change is not confined to human systems. Let’s switch gears at this point and begin the task of climate change ethics proper. There’s much groundwork to be done in the next two chapters before we can get at the key issues in a comprehensive fashion. But we can begin, more modestly, by exploring an issue of relevance to this chapter: how climate science should be communicated from experts to non-experts. Specifically, we will explore the idea that such communication might be more effective if it is informed and constrained by ethical considerations.

1.5 Ethical communication of science Most people accept that in a democratic polity it is not acceptable to get people to do the right thing through manipulation and deceit. A large literature in social psychology has emerged to address the issue of proper “climate change communication,” but philosophical ethicists have not accorded the issue the attention it clearly deserves. This is unfortunate because, although the social psychological research is important it cannot by itself address the normative dimensions of the problem. Social psychologists have shown that scientific communication must go beyond the delivery of dry facts to audiences. It must, in addition, engage the affects of the audience because facts alone are insufficiently motivational. But does this characterization of the issue exhaust what we mean by appropriate communication? Is communicating the facts and engaging the affects all there is to it? This seems like an oversimplification. We might also wonder about what Michael Lamb and Melissa Lane refer to as the “moral values that define legitimate communication.”41 These philosophers show that Aristotle’s concept of rhetoric can do illuminating work here. For Aristotle, rhetorical communication has an intrinsically ethical component to it. It seeks to engage not only the reason and the affects of the audience members but also their conception of themselves as citizens. So expert speakers are enjoined by Aristotle to communicate in a way that recognized the “civic equality between speaker and auditor.”42 From this standpoint, expert communication lacking this element is inadequate even if it is otherwise effective in rousing people to action. But there is good reason to believe that it would in this case simply not be effective at moving people to appropriate action. Facts alone don’t motivate at all, and purely emotional arousal is often seen by its target audience as a form of manipulation.

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No-nonsense delivery of the facts and affect-arousal are important, but audiences are much more likely to be mobilized by these forces if they perceive that they are being treated as genuine deliberators in the social and political articulation and dissemination of information. Lamb and Lane summarize the specifically ethical focus on the relationship between speaker and audience this way: Such relationships can facilitate ongoing acts of successful communication, even when factual uncertainty and expert disagreement threaten to incite division. Ultimately, by alerting climate change communicators to the importance of these ethical and political relationships, an Aristotelian approach highlights how rhetoric can be an art of earning trust. Contemporary climate change communicators can learn much from Aristotle’s ancient advice.43 Otherwise put, it is crucial to convey to a broad swath of the public that climate change is a choice for which we are all responsible (albeit in different ways and to differing degrees). Fundamentally, we are, as Dale Moellendorf puts it, “coauthors of the rules of our common life,” and the way the science of climate change is disseminated from experts to non-experts must reflect this fact.44 Fortunately, we have science communicators who seem to understand this, however implicitly. For example, in the quote just above from Kolbert we find a reference to “what we are deciding” with respect to the Sixth Extinction Event. This implies a refusal to shift blame to someone else. It brings the reader into a conversation about this tragic event, asking her—again implicitly—to reflect on the ways in which she might be able to address the crisis as a morally engaged citizen. The same goes for the accounts of climate change in the books by Romm and Mann on which this chapter has relied extensively. Both are scientists, and both understand that the facts about climate change must be communicated in a way that also engages the affects. But these books are also addressed to their readers as co-deliberators in a democratic polity. In his preface, Romm, for instance, notes that his book is aimed at “those interested in joining the growing public debate and discussion” about climate change.45 It’s a simple message but it has the power to make all the difference.

Chapter summary In this chapter we have examined the basic, and latest, science of climate change. This is obviously not philosophy, but since our approach to the ethical challenges of climate change depends so heavily on the precise nature and scope of the physical phenomenon of climate change it is necessary to ground our analysis this way. We began with a look at the greenhouse effect, noting in

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particular the extent to which the climate system is prone to surprises because of positive feedbacks. Next, we examined the IPCC’s projections of future climate change, focusing on heat waves, droughts, wildfires, sea-level rise and extreme precipitation events. The path we are on could result in GHG concentrations the planet has not seen on any timescale that is relevant to human concerns. Following this analysis, we looked at the potential for these disturbances to affect both human and non-human systems (ecosystems). We concluded with some thoughts about the ethical communication of scientific results from experts to non-experts.

Questions for discussion 1

2 3

4 5

In this chapter, we separated human and non-human systems for analytic purposes. This, as noted, is highly artificial. What are the ways in which these systems interact in the real world? What is the greenhouse effect and how does it affect the regulation of the climate system? What are the likely effects of climate change in the area or region in which you live? Have the risks been adequately laid out and addressed by your governmental officials or prominent civil society groups? What is your reaction—intellectually and emotionally—to Kolbert’s description, quoted in this chapter, of the Sixth Extinction? How do you think the international community should respond to the security threats of climate change? Is the military to be trusted here? Do we have global institutions that are capable of responding to these threats in way that does not exacerbate them?

Suggested reading IPCC 2021. Summary for Policymakers. Available at: https://www.ipcc.ch/ report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM.pdf •

An accessible summary of the latest report from the most authoritative source.

Elizabeth Kolbert. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014). •

A masterful and stirring description of the effects of anthropogenic climate change on biodiversity loss. It’s journalism of the highest caliber.

Michael E. Mann and Lee R. Kump. Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change; The Visual Guide to the Findings of the IPCC, second edition. (New York: DK Publishing, 2015).

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•

Mann is one of the world’s leading climate scientists (as is Kump) and communicators. He has been at the forefront of the battle against industry-funded climate change denial. This is a vivid, pictorial guide to the latest IPCC report.

Joseph Romm. Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). •

Romm, like Mann and Kump, is a brilliant science communicator. This book not only summarizes IPCC findings but goes beyond them to include more updated information.

Notes 1 IPCC, “Summary for Policymakers.” In Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, edited by Stocker, T.F., D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S.K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex and P.M. Midgley (Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 4. 2 Dale Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed and What it Means for our Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 13. 3 IPCC 2013, 4. 4 Michael E. Mann and Lee R. Kump, Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change; The Visual Guide to the Findings of the IPCC, second edition (New York: DK Publishing, 2015), 34. 5 Mann and Kump, Dire Predictions …, 31. 6 Mann and Kump, Dire Predictions …, 25. 7 Joseph Romm. 2016. Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 81. 8 Mann and Kump, Dire Predictions …, 148. 9 Quoted in Romm, Climate Change …, 30. 10 Mann and Kum, Dire Predictions …, 41. 11 Mann and Kump, Dire Predictions …, 72–74. 12 David Archer, The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Chaniging the Next 1000,000 Years of Earth’s Climate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 3–4. 13 Zeke Hausfather, “How SSPs Explore Future Climate Change.” Carbon Brief https://www. carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-shared-socioeconomic-pathways-explore-future-climate-change/ 14 IPCC, “Summary for Policymakers.” In Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, edited by Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S.L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M.I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J.B.R. Matthews, T.K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu, and B. Zhou (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, 2021), pp. 3−32 (14), doi: 10.1017/9781009157896.001. 15 Mann and Kump, Dire Predictions …, 113. 16 Mann and Kump, Dire Predictions …, 57. 17 J. Lelieveld, Y Proestos, P. Hadjinicolaou, M. Tanarhte, E. Tyrlis and G. Zittis, “Strongly Increasing Heat Extremes in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in the 21st-Century.” Climatic Change, 2016, 137(July), 245–260. 18 Mann and Kump, Dire Predictions …, 55. 19 Romm, Climate Change …, 43. 20 Romm, Climate Change …, 98–99.

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21 ‘Australian Fires in 2019–2020 Had Even More Global Reach than Previously Thought.’ Science News. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/australia-wildfires-climate-change-carbon-dioxide-ocean-algae 22 Romm, Climate Change …, 45 23 Romm, Climate Change …, 46. 24 IPCC 2013(a), 1400. 25 IPCC 2013(a), 369. 26 Romm, Climate Change …, 94. 27 Mann and Kump, Dire Predictions …, 62–63. 28 Romm, Climate Change …, 97. 29 Philip Kitcher and Evelyn Fox Keller, The Seasons Alter: How to Save our Planet in Six Acts (New York: WW Norton, 2017), 47–48. 30 Quoted in Romm, Climate Change …, 139–140. 31 IPCC 2013(a), 13. 32 Romm, Climate Change …, 103–105. 33 IPCC 2013(a), 21. 34 Anthony D. Barnosky and Elizabeth A. Hadley, Tipping Point for Planet Earth (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015), 40–41. 35 Charles Geishert and Ben Currens, “Impediments to Inland Resettlement Under Conditions of Accelerated Sea-level Rise.” Land Use Policy, 2017, 66 (July), 233–330. 36 IPCC 2013(a), 772. 37 Quoted in Romm, Climate Change …, 131. 38 IPCC 2013(a), 67. 39 IPCC 2013(a), 67. 40 Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014), 268–269. 41 Michael Lamb and Melissa Lane, “Aristotle on the Ethics of Communicating Climate Change.” In Climate Justice in a Non-ideal World, edited by Clare Heyward and Dominic Roser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 229–254 (233). 42 Lamb and Lane, “Aristotle …,” 237. 43 Lamb and Lane, “Aristotle …,” 250. 44 Dale Moellendorf, The Moral Challenge of Dangerous Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 30. 45 Romm, Climate Change …, xix–xx.

2

What is climate change ethics?

2.1 Introduction So far we have examined the basic science of climate change. This sets us up nicely to begin the work of climate ethics proper, though there’s still some preparatory work to be done before we get fully into that. Although it had more or less ignored the ethical dimensions of climate change since its inception, since AR5 the IPCC recognizes that climate change “raises difficult issues of justice, fairness, and rights, all of which lie within the sphere of ethics.”1 That is a salutary insight and also a challenge to us to come to grips with this aspect of the problem. In this chapter we will therefore look closely at the discipline of climate ethics. We begin with an examination of the distinction between ideal and non-ideal ethical theory. As we will see, the distinction is especially illuminating in the effort to find rationally justifiable climate policy. We will ask how climate change ethics fits into the larger field of environmental ethics, how economics provides a challenge to it, whether it is required to make sense of the threats of climate change, and, finally, whether it is adequate to that task.

2.2 Ideal and non-ideal theory Climate change ethics is usually considered a branch of environmental ethics. The larger field came into its own beginning in the 1960s and began to flourish as a discipline in the 1970s. At that time, climate change was not a significant worry for the culture at large nor, therefore, for philosophical ethicists either. The big environmental issues of the day had to do, among other things, with nuclear waste disposal (this in an age of profound angst about nuclear weapons proliferation), clear-cut logging and relatively localized, though often still severe, problems of pollution. And there was an abiding attempt to think through the larger questions about the human place in the natural order. By 2004, this situation had not changed dramatically. There were now a handful of philosophers—many of whose views will be explored in upcoming chapters of this book—writing about climate change, but the paucity of attention devoted by philosophers to this issue was seriously out of step with DOI: 10.4324/9781003284925-3

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what the scientific community was saying about the threat posed by climate change. Things have now altered significantly in the philosophical community. There is a large and growing literature on the ethics of climate change, with many philosophers now recognizing that the climate crisis has effectively eclipsed all other environmental problems in scope and potential severity. It’s easy to understand this assessment of the situation. In one of the earliest treatments by a philosopher of the ethics of climate change, James Garvey said this: We can expect a future with hundreds of millions, even billions of displaced, hungry, thirsty people in it, escaping not just sea-level rises but on the move away from scorched croplands and empty wells … There is going to be a lot of death in the future, a lot of death which wouldn’t have happened had we and those before us acted otherwise.2 This is exactly the kind of blunt talk the climate crisis requires, and not just from philosophers. It also seems to invite specifically ethical analysis of the problem, but with what principles should such analysis begin? The most natural place to start is with the harm principle. First espoused in the 19th-century by John Stuart Mill, the principle states that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”3 This is a doctrine about the moral limits of state power in a liberal democracy, but it applies more generally as well. The broader claim is that, other things being equal, we have moral reasons to refrain from performing actions which bring harm to others. This means that we have duties of constraint with respect to those actions. Ethical analysis can show us both what these duties are and why we have reason to constrain ourselves in the appropriate way whether or not this is optimal from the standpoint of self-interest. Avoiding or reducing prospective harms as well as compensating for past ones is not all there is to ethics but focusing on it takes us very far, especially in our understanding of climate change. Still, the harm principle is too general to provide policy guidance all by itself. Deciding in particular cases what constitutes harm requires more fine-tuned theoretical and empirical work. To take a simple example, we can argue about whether it is more important to protect people’s rights or their welfare. And in any particular case, it may not be easy to determine which actions will give us the results we are looking for. Violation of either of these values can be construed as a harm, but sometimes a policy-maker might have to choose between them in a situation of conflicting interpretations of where the potential harms lie. A policy designed to maximize net welfare in a group of people might conflict with the rights of some members of that group or a different group. For instance, a majority in some collective might have a preference for the military security provided by low-level jet fighter test-flights over their

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territory, even though the flights arguably violate the rights of a minority group within the territory because they disrupt the migratory path of a species this group hunts for subsistence. Members of the majority group might deny that members of the minority group are being genuinely harmed by the test flights, while members of the minority group might deny that members of the majority group would be harmed by the flights’ cessation. But even if neither group engages in this sort of denial the disagreement can be protracted. They might in this case simply say that the harms to their group outweigh the harms to the other. In cases like this we can’t have it both ways, so how do we decide? Whatever we decide, we must justify our decisions by appeal to reasons that are in principle acceptable to others. Here are four standard ways of doing this. The first is consequentialism, the notion that we ought to evaluate actions on the basis of their outcomes. Utilitarianism—the most widely employed form of consequentialism among philosophers—holds that what counts in terms of outcomes is welfare, broadly construed. So, if I have a choice between two courses of action I should assess whose welfare will be affected by each course, then choose that course which maximizes total welfare for this group. The second theory is deontology, which assesses actions on the basis of whether or not they treat other moral agents respectfully. Deontology has become the theoretical basis of moral and political ‘rights’ in our culture. The third theory is contractarianism. Here, actions are morally permissible just insofar as they are the product of an agreement among well-informed moral agents. The final theory is virtue ethics. On this theory actions are permissible to the extent that they are the product of ideal character traits in agents. For example, we can praise an agent for an action she performed if we judge that she acted bravely, where bravery is, let’s suppose, a character trait admired in our group. Each of these theories is designed to provide a general description of our duties. They help us organize the latter at a relatively abstract conceptual level. They provide ‘rules’ that we can apply to the assessment of particular actions, defining the boundary between the permissible and the impermissible. They are all examples of ‘ideal theory.’ That is, they specify ideals towards which society and individuals should be moving and on the basis of which they can be criticized for failing to do so. Ideal theory is to be contrasted with ‘non-ideal theory.’ The ideal/non-ideal distinction originates in John Rawls’s political philosophy and is important for two reasons. The first is that more and more moral and political philosophers are being drawn to non-ideal theory in light of the evident failures of ideal theory; the second is that this trend has spread to climate ethicists in particular. Rawls’ philosophy deals for the most part with “the principles of justice that would regulate a well-ordered society.” This is a society in which people are “presumed to act justly and to do [their] part in upholding just institutions.” In sum, for Rawls “the nature and aims of a perfectly just society is the fundamental part of the theory of justice.”4 In constructing the theory of justice,

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Rawls is operating with two assumptions. The first is that of “strict compliance,” i.e., a situation in which everyone does her part in maintaining the institutions of justice; the second is “favorable circumstances”, e.g., merely moderate material scarcity as well as a generally well educated and suitably skilled citizenry. Non-ideal theory, then, concerns situations in which these assumptions do not hold. Rawls recognizes that a full understanding of such philosophical topics as punishment, just and unjust wars, and how to oppose tyrannical regimes may be best approached by means of non-ideal theory.5 It is tempting to add climate change to this list of topics, as some philosophers are now realizing: In its broadest sense, non-ideal theory asks how to respond to an imperfect world. Some advocates of non-ideal theory emphasize a different approach to theorizing, others call for more practical actionguidance. The challenges of responding to climate change are further evidence, if any were needed, that we do not live in an ideal world.6 Given the repeated failures of international climate policy over the years (we’ll look into this in chapter 3), this is certainly an understandable position to adopt. Non-compliance with the terms of the various treaties that have been adopted has, if anything, been the international norm. Global carbon emissions have accelerated alarmingly in the past two decades or so. ‘Favorable circumstances,’ on the other hand, exist in some places but not everywhere. Absolute poverty, economic inequality, global institutional failure, a generalized distrust of democratic politicians and technocrats, and organized climate change denial are just a few of the forces which challenge the notion that we can reason as though the circumstances of climate justice were unproblematically ideal. Bearing these points in mind will pay dividends as we examine the nature of climate justice in chapters 4 and 5. But we need to be more specific about what non-ideal theory is aimed at elucidating. Laura Valentini mentions three areas. Non-ideal theory must (a) pay attention to the fact of only partial compliance among relevant parties; (b) be realistic, rather than utopian, especially about global politics; and (c) be concerned not just with the end-state we want to achieve but also the transition to that state from where we are now.7 Many climate ethicists have now embraced these recommendations. As we have just seen, one cannot, for example, construct ideal theories of justice as though full compliance were either an achieved reality or in the offing. For instance, the Trump administration’s decision to exit the Paris Agreement in 2016 changed the game for everyone else, and even though the Biden administration put the US back in there is no guarantee that things will stay this way given the volatile nature of US politics. It may be that the best we can do right now is provide a transitional ethics, a way to understand how to get through the climate crisis with our moral integrity not too badly damaged. That is one way

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to understand what we are up to in this book, though it should not be taken to endorse a passive or non-political approach to the issue. Another general reason for endorsing non-ideal theory in climate ethics is that it embraces a broader pragmatic turn in ethical theory. Some critics of ideal ethics have argued that theories like utilitarianism, rights-theory, contractarianism and virtue ethics can actually make our policy disagreements more protracted. How? Well, think of the metaphors typically employed in this area. For example, justification by way of theory-construction is meant to ‘fortify’ one’s stance, provide it with more secure ‘foundations,’ and so on. The point of fortification and foundation-building, of course, is to make it more difficult to dislodge you from your position. It fixes you in place, impervious to onslaughts from would-be theoretical raiders. So the effort to provide theoretical justifications for our policy choices can make us less openminded to the views of others. This is, we might think, contrary to the broadly pragmatic goal of getting things done. But there are dangers lurking here. Ideals remain important because they both tell us what our deepest aspirations are and provide an ultimate goal towards which we can work. In spite of the potential pitfalls of the search for foundations, justification is probably indispensable if we are to avoid brute force as the final court of appeal in our deliberations. The danger with the insistence on purely non-ideal theory in climate ethics is that it might degenerate into an apology for the status-quo. The call to pay attention to non-compliance, to be realistic and worry less about the end-state than the transition to it can be summarized in the advice to make climate policy feasible. But as Gardiner has noted, the focus on the ‘feasible’ excludes… …whole categories of concern from climate policy (e.g., distributive and corrective justice), even despite their importance to the large emitting economies whose cooperation is essential (e.g., I doubt the political wisdom of saying to India ‘feasibility’ means accepting our world view – where you are the problem and your concerns about justice are irrelevant). Notably, it underestimates the extent to which the feasible is political.8 That last line is key: “the feasible is political.” Talk of sticking to what is ‘feasible’ can be music to the ears of those who benefit the most from dramatically skewed social and economic relations. We need to take care that we are not using considerations of pragmatism, realism, feasibility, etc. to prop up unjust power relations. Keeping an eye on ideals can aid us in this task. The trick for a sound climate ethics, then, appears to be to cleave to the middle ground between two extremes. We want to avoid both (a) the sort of moral idealism that takes no account of the constraints imposed by current social, political and economic reality; and (b) a hard-nosed realism that is likely to leave entrenched inequities untouched. One thing to say about both

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(a) and (b) is that neither is likely to work. To embrace either dogmatically is to alienate too many people to expect one’s proposals to gain real political traction. Politics unfolds in the space between the ideal and the real. Let’s bring this back to the harm principle. The actions leading to climate change—for example, profligate use of fossil fuels—look to be paradigm examples of harm causation. Other things being equal, it should therefore be easy to justify constraining people from doing these things. Things are, alas, not so straightforward. Much of the rest of this book is aimed at laying bare just how complex all of this can get. For instance, if there are duties of constraint in this case, who has them? Towards whom? What specific actions do they do they prescribe or proscribe? And finally, what is the force of that sneaky clause just above that we have reason to refrain from acting in harmcausing ways, ‘other things being equal’? It seems to imply that the moral reasons which apply for the most part might not apply in the real world of messy politics, clashing interests, competing rights claims, and so on. We’ll get to all of these questions, but there’s a more pressing task right now, for there are two broad challenges to the enterprise of climate change ethics. The first comes from those who deny that ethical analysis is relevant to climate change; the second from those who claim that ethics is relevant but that it is conceptually inadequate to help us address the issue. The first claim has been made by economists who embrace cost-benefit analysis (CBA), the second by some prominent climate ethicists. We’ll address these in order in the next two sections.

2.3 Climate economics Making decisions about climate policy in one way rather than some alternative expresses a commitment to a specific conception of value. Most economists think that value is determined by individual preferences, that these can be ‘revealed’ in markets, and that the job of policy makers is to tailor public policy so as to allow for the smooth expression of such preferences. This can be done through the application of CBA to competing policy options. CBA attempts to monetize a more general pros and cons approach to problems. For any proposal it translates preferences into monetary terms, then simply compares the costs against the benefits. The most ‘rational’ course of action is the one that is least costly. Although the approach has the virtue of clarity, it has been subjected to withering critique as an instrument of public policy. Let’s focus on three criticisms of it, chosen for their importance to climate ethics.

2.3.1 CBA is monistic about value Value-monism is the idea that there is just one kind of value, or that if there are different kinds they can all be translated into the one master-value. Of

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course, for the economist that master-value is economic value. But this leaves out of account spiritual, aesthetic and political values, among others. It cannot account for environmental values, for example the value a person might place on the mere existence of an economically useless species. Economists have responded to this worry by invoking the idea of ‘willingness to pay.’ Briefly, the claim is that the value of these things can be fully accounted for by our willingness to pay to have them protected. If we care about a tree species threatened by the development plans of the logging industry, for example, then we can express this concern through financial support of environmental groups devoted to preserving the forests containing this tree species. If such support outweighs the financial benefits of cutting down the trees, then governments have a duty to prevent or restrict the logging. As this example makes clear, the approach assumes a rough equality of economic power in society that may not exist. The logging company’s financial power, and that of its supporters, might vastly outstrip the financial power of concerned environmentalists. The alternative to value monism is value pluralism. Value pluralists take it for granted that there are sources or kinds of value not reducible to money. If you are a pluralist in this sense, and also a policy-maker, you will emphasize dialogue with and consultation among the various groups affected by a proposed policy. It is important to say this, because CBA is often characterized by its supporters as the democratic approach to policy making. After all, it takes everyone’s preferences seriously, throwing them all into the great melting pot of monetization to see which ones come out victorious. But if the approach favors the economically powerful, it is not democratic at all. Moreover, we might question the assumption behind CBA that democracy is essentially about finding a way to satisfy people’s preferences. This may in fact be a category mistake. That is, values might be more like mathematical truths than tastes. When it comes to preferences for ice-cream flavors, there’s no problem reducing ‘value’ to the intensity with which the preference is held. But we would not judge mathematical claims this way: their truth has nothing to do with what we want to be the case.9 Again, imagine someone wanting to preserve a beautiful tree species because she thinks it is important that future generations have access to it in its relatively untouched forest ecosystem. She might be outraged if it were suggested to her that her preference for preservation over destruction is not qualitatively different than her preference for maple walnut over chocolate ice-cream. CBA is constitutionally incapable of comprehending this outrage, but value pluralism is not. At the end of the day, there are two dangers to avoid here. Pluralism can lead to policy paralysis, whereas monism can lead to misguided policy. It’s likely best to insist on pluralism, so long as all parties to policy disputes agree on the necessity of compromise. That way, we can get things done while not running roughshod over the concerns of minority groups or the economically disadvantaged. This is essential to bear in mind in climate policy. Climate

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change is such a wide-ranging phenomenon, creating potential harms for such a diversity of entities—the poor, nature, future people, Indigenous groups—that to think we can capture its challenges solely in the language of money is unhelpfully dogmatic. CBA is admirably clear but it badly misrepresents how we think, and ought to think, about value. It is the perfect example of the person looking for his keys at night under a bright lamp, not because that’s where he lost them but simply because the light is better there.

2.3.2 CBA cannot support aggressive climate measures Some economists believe that (a) we require aggressive action to combat climate change; but (b) we can ground this policy in economics. Ethics has no bearing on this issue.10 The reason for this is that ethics is about transcending individual self-interest whereas climate change is a problem, if it is at all, only because individuals—and therefore also the societies they make up—have misunderstood their genuine self-interest. For instance, most people love their children and grandchildren, but because climate change is going to harm these people, it is in the interest of loving parents and grandparents to do something about the problem now. To fail in this task is to neglect one’s genuine selfinterest. David Weisbach, an economist, claims that we need to make aggressive emissions cuts but only because doing so is a way of “saving our own necks.”11 In other words, there’s simply no significant work for ethics in this domain. Here’s the challenge laid out more formally: 1 2 3 4

Ethics demands that we sometimes look beyond self-interest for solutions to our problems Climate change is happening because we have misunderstand our genuine self-interest Determining our genuine self-interest is the task of CBA Therefore climate change is an economic problem, not an ethical one

What can we say about this argument? It looks valid, but is it sound? There’s little reason to dispute premise (1). Though it requires some elaboration, it expresses a commonsense understanding of morality that is good enough for our purposes here. We can let premise (3) stand as well, since it expresses the self-understanding of the discipline of economics. The real problem is premise (2). As we have noted, the argument for it depends on what we might call the three-generation gaze: parents and grandparents living now have entirely selfinterested reasons to get serious about fighting climate change because the interests of those they love—hence their own interests too—will be adversely affected if they fail to do so. Weisbach himself thinks this argument justifies very strong emissions reduction measures. He thinks we must move the global economy to zero or

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near-zero carbon emissions within a few decades. He needs premise (2) to ground this policy prescription. Unfortunately, premise (2) appears dubious, for two reasons. First, there are plenty of people who are not parents or grandparents. On Weisbach’s analysis, such people have no duties of constraint in this area. If it suits them, they may as well live in the most carbonintensive way they can, and they should actively oppose governmental efforts to regulate industry. This is counter-intuitive, especially if everyone else—those parents and grandparents—ends up having fairly stringent duties of constraint. But how can we justify skewing things so that the (alleged) interests of the procreators in protecting their progeny automatically outweigh the interests of the non-procreators? This looks unfair and morally arbitrary. Now, most economists are also utilitarians. So the economist could respond to this question by saying that the preferences of the non-procreators are taken account of in the formation of policy, it’s just that they get outweighed by the interests of the procreators. There are, after all, many more procreators than non-procreators. Have the rights of the non-procreators been violated because their hypothesized preferences have become illegal or prohibitively costly? Have they been harmed? Maybe, maybe not. So the utilitarian justification for stringent policy recommendations is available to the economist here. The question then becomes whether or not it really is in the interests of the procreators to constrain their carbon emissions dramatically. This brings us to the second point. The claim that it is in the interest of the procreators to act with constraint looks to be empirically false for parents and grandparents in relatively wealthy countries. For example, in the short to medium term the U.S. is, as Robert Paalberg has shown, among the world’s least vulnerable countries with respect to severe climate disruption. This is because it is rich enough to cope with most of the damages it will see. More generally, William Nordhaus has argued that even if we cannot keep temperatures below 2° C by 2070 about 90% of the economy of the U.S. will be “only lightly or negligibly impacted” by the effects of climate change.12 That means that with little or no aggressive action on climate change, the children and grandchildren of present citizens of the U.S. will be just fine, at least relative to the not-so-lucky elsewhere on the planet. So while (2) might be true of some people, in some places in the world, it does not generalize and cannot therefore support the conclusion (4). This last point reveals the perversity of the economist’s claims. Transferred to the international arena, what Weisbach has argued, effectively, is that those who are most wealthy, and who have therefore benefited the most from carbon-intensive economic activity, have the least stringent duties to change their lifestyles. This is because wealth brings the ability to protect one’s progeny from environmental harms, thereby erasing the duty to avoid imposing those harms on others. The poor, on the other hand, are required to forgo economic development to the extent that this requires burning fossil fuels because their children

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and grand-children really will be adversely affected by climate change. Some might suspect that this conclusion turns our moral intuitions on their heads. In short, even if the economist agrees that strong measures are required in order to meet the climate challenge, the claim cannot be grounded in economic assumption that self-interest is ultimate justification for policy. This brings us to the final criticism of CBA.

2.3.3 CBA misunderstands our duties to future generations A major component of environmental policy generally and climate policy in particular has to do with the value we place on the future. One question that arises is how much money we should set aside in the present so that people of the future can cope adequately with the environmental challenges we have left for them. One possible answer is: nothing at all, but that notion has few adherents. Almost everyone agrees that we are morally required to set aside something for the future. But how much? There is a major dispute between (most) economists and just about everyone else, regardless of disciplinary background, on this issue. Of course, economists are the experts in rational approaches to saving, so we should at least give them our ear on this question. The approach taken by economists is an application of CBA to the future, known as discounting. The idea is simple. If you desire a certain consumer good sometime in the future, then in order to calculate how much money you should set aside for it now you should (a) determine how much money your investment can make in interest if you tuck it away someplace; and (b) calculate how long you are willing to wait to receive the good. For example, if I want to buy a $15,000 pony for my daughter in 10 years and I can get 5% interest every year between now and then, I should invest $10,000 right now (in order to simplify the point ignore the fact that in the real world interest would be compounded over the 10-year period). If I do so, then I can say that the present value of that pony is $10,000 given a 5% discount rate. Three features of this simple example jump out. First, the discount rate is key. The higher it is, the less is the present value of the good. Second, how far in the future we are investing affects the present value of the good in the same way. The farther out we are looking, the less we must invest now. Third, this way of reasoning makes perfect sense applied to the purchase of consumer goods like ponies and computers. The question is how applicable is it to climate policy? Remember that we are talking about the state of the world in, say, 2100 (this is how far out the IPCC’s projection scenarios go, for example). The question then becomes, what is the present value of a world that is not ravaged by climate change in 2100? The British economist Sir Nicholas Stern uses a very low discount rate, thus generating the claim that our current investment in avoiding climate disaster ought to be correspondingly high. Most mainstream economists disagree with Stern about this. There are usually two

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reasons given for this disagreement, and thus for adopting a relatively high discount rate. The first reason is that future generations will likely be wealthier than us. If this is true, then it may be that we owe them relatively little. But as Stern notes, it cannot simply be assumed that they will be wealthier than us, since this will depend on our policy choices: What we do now on climate change will transform the circumstances and income of future generations and this will determine discount rates. It is therefore a serious mistake to see decisions in this context as being determined by a discount rate.13 For example, if we continue with business as usual we invite catastrophic climate change. World GDP may drop substantially in these circumstances. It is a measure of the blinders we wear that this type of consideration is so easily dismissed in our culture. Those of us in the developed world are culturally and psychologically wedded to the notion that things must always get better, that short of causing a nuclear war we in the present are literally incapable of making people of the future worse off than we are. This is an unfounded article of faith, one born of the material progress of the developed world over the last half-century or so. It does not generalize to human history as a whole and should not therefore obscure the possibility that there are choices we might make in the present that can cause the prosperity of future people to decline sharply. A refusal to act meaningfully to curb our carbon emissions could be one of those fateful decisions. However, even if climate change does not diminish global GDP in the future, it may exacerbate global inequities in a manner that will be abetted by our choice of a high discount rate. This might happen, for instance, because in a climate ravaged world resources for adaptation will be hoarded by the rich. A high discount rate makes fewer of these vital resources available, making hoarding both more likely and more devastating in its impacts on the poor. The second reason for adopting a high discount rate is known as the ‘pure time preference’ approach to the issue. The idea is that people of the future matter less to us, and ought to do so, simply because they are people of the future and not the present. This difference in concern can be translated into investment decisions. To non-economists, this ‘justification’ for discounting can look bizarre. Stern, however, notes that indirect support for it can be drawn from a philosopher, David Hume. Hume argued that the interests of members of one’s family or other in-group have, quite rightly, more weight than the interests of outsiders. Our allegiances move outward in concentric circles: we should ‘invest’ in those closest to us to a greater extent than those further away.14 Of course, if we go far out enough along these circles the people we encounter might not count at all to us. This made some sense in Hume’s day—the 18th-century—because the decisions taken in one part of the world

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had a relatively small impact, or no impact at all, in most other places. However, in a highly economically interconnected world it makes less sense. If the products I buy in one place affect social relations and environmental conditions halfway across the globe, then there’s an ethically meaningful sense in which those people ought to matter to me. More to the point, if my consumption choices can affect the life prospects of future people, then, ethically speaking, they have become a part of my time. Their interests cannot be discounted simply because they are relatively temporally far-flung. There is a more general point to make about both attempts to justify high discount rates. It is that while discounting is a rational approach to organizing financial affairs at the level of individual decision-making, it is much more difficult to justify when present decisions will affect other people. As Gardiner puts the point: [I]t is one thing to prefer larger damages in the future over smaller costs now when these are both costs to oneself, but quite another to prefer larger damages in the future over present costs when this means that the damages will come to someone else … Furthermore, it would be one thing for individuals to value deferring damages to the future, and quite another for governments to make it a central driver of national policy.15 Discounting the future, in other words, looks like unjustified bias towards our own interests to the clear detriment of the interests of others. From the three problems considered in this section—value monism, the foundational appeal to self-interest, and the choice of high discount rates—we can conclude that economics, especially the tool of CBA, is a theoretically impoverished approach to the challenges of climate change. But two final points are worth emphasizing. First, from this analysis it does not follow that economics is useless. On the one hand, it is probably the best—i.e., fairest—approach we have to making decisions in a situation of deadlock among policy options. On the other hand, even where there is no such deadlock, economics can specify the best way to implement a chosen policy option (though even here ethical considerations are also relevant). But options themselves must be selected in other ways. In other words, economics is instrumentally useful but it is not a fit tool for setting our ends. The second point is that from our analysis it also does not follow that ethics should set our ends for us. The failure of economics here does not entail a victory for ethics. To see why and how ethics is essential requires more argument, a task to which we turn next.

2.4 Why ethics is necessary Gardiner has argued that here are at least two reasons for believing that ethics is essential in this area. First, it is difficult to say why climate change is a

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problem without invoking value judgments. For as soon as we begin to analyze what is problematic about climate change we will necessarily be drawn to the language of what matters to people, whose interests count, or ought to count, and so on.16 Second, we cannot make sense of climate change policy decisions without invoking ethical considerations. Let’s focus on this second point. The example Gardiner considers in support of it is one that has been at the front of public discussion on this issue for the last 20 years or so, namely CO2 emissions reduction targets. This is sometimes referred to as the ‘trajectory issue.’ As we will see in greater detail in later chapters, the issue is ethically loaded on two distinct dimensions. The first dimension is international. If we decide that cuts to greenhouse gases must be made, there is bound to be, and has been, heated debate about which countries should make the biggest cuts and whether the very poorest countries should make any cuts at all, at least in the short term. It should be obvious that we can’t begin to answer these questions without invoking ethical considerations, in particular those surrounding the issue of who is most to blame for the climate crisis. The second dimension is intergenerational. On the plausible assumption that the more aggressive our cuts are the less threatened by climate disaster people of the future will be, whatever level we decide on tells us something about how much we value the lives of future people. More to the point, since emissions are tied to the economic prosperity of the present generation, it tells us how much we believe their interests matter compared to our own.17 We can think of this in terms of allocating costs. If we adopt very low reduction targets we are implicitly claiming that people of the future ought to be allocated a greater share of the costs of climate change than we are allocated. For them, these costs will be almost entirely in the form of adaptation to the effects of climate change whereas in our own case we are talking mainly of mitigation costs. In spite of this difference the moral asymmetry of the allocation is clear: the low target implies the belief that it is more important for people of the present to avoid modest costs than it is for people of the future to avoid heavy costs. Of course, the point here is that it is always possible to question any such allocation. But we cannot do so effectively without using moral language, as Gardiner points out: Any allocation must (explicitly or implicitly) take a position on the importance of factors such as the historical responsibility for the problem, the current needs and future aspirations of particular societies, and the appropriate role of energy consumption in people’s lives.18 This passage is loaded with normative language (which can be present even when words like ‘ought’ or ‘should’ are not explicitly invoked). Unpacking terms like ‘importance,’ ‘responsibility,’ ‘needs,’ ‘aspirations,’ and the ‘appropriate role’ of energy in our lives puts us squarely in the territory of ethical deliberation.

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For example, the concept of ‘needs’ can sound merely descriptive, as when we assert that a healthy adult human male needs to consume about 2500 calories/day. But what do we say about the person who asserts that he needs to drive a Hummer because he finds smaller vehicles much less comfortable? Unfortunately, many of the ‘needs’ that are defended as part of the refusal to cut CO2 emissions on the part of people in the developed world are more like the Hummer case rather than the healthy calorie intake case. Again, to say why this is the case, and what is wrong with it, would appear to require specifically ethical analysis. The Hummer owner needs to justify his actions to the rest of us in the context of a global situation that clearly demands constraint from individual consumers with respect to fossil-fuel use. So climate change looks like an ethical issue if anything is. More specifically, it looks to be a question of justice in a fairly straightforward way. John Broome argues that harms related to emitting GHGs are injustices in virtue of seven features: • • • • • • •

The harms are something the emitters do The harms are serious The harms are not accidental We do not compensate the victims of the harms Emissions are made for our own benefit The harms are not reciprocated (the victims do not harm us in an equivalent way) Our emissions could easily be reduced19

We will have a chance to expand on all these claims in coming chapters. The point here is just to show that there is a strong prima facie case for climate change being a quintessentially moral problem, with a concern about justice at its core. However, some prominent climate ethicists themselves have argued that climate change defeats our efforts to understand it in terms of the standard categories and concepts of moral philosophy, at least as this is currently practiced in the analytic tradition.

2.5 Is ethics adequate? For instance, Dale Jamieson has provided powerful reasons for thinking that climate change is not like a “paradigm moral problem.” To appreciate the claim, let’s clarify the structure of a paradigm moral problem. It consists in one person intentionally causing harm to another, for example Jack intentionally stealing Jill’s bicycle.20 But climate change is not like this, for a number of reasons. First, the example is concerned solely with the present (and immediate past) whereas with climate change we are also concerned with future harms. Second, no individual intends to cause these harms. Our Hummer driver intends to have a comfortable ride, not to deprive future

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people of access to fresh water. Finally, the example is too individualistic. Jack causes the relevant harm all alone whereas our Hummer driver will be a harm-causer only if a significant enough number of other people engage in similarly carbon-intensive behaviors. Jamieson concludes that the paradigm example would have to be amended to fit the case of climate change. Here’s the amended version: Acting independently, Jack and a large number of unacquainted people set in motion a chain of events that causes a large number of future people who will live in another part of the world from ever having bikes.21 Let’s isolate three features of this kind of case. First, the action is causally dispersed, in the sense that a large number of people whose actions are not formally coordinated are required to bring it about. Second, the harm caused by the action is dispersed among a number of people, both spatially (in the present) and temporally (in the future). Finally, unlike the paradigm moral case we have here no institutional framework allowing us to understand who owes what to whom by way of rectification for the harm caused. Put this way, we might find it very difficult to find Jack (or our Hummer driver) responsible for what transpires, in which case we can wonder whether or not there is a specifically moral problem here at all. There’s likely more we could add to distinguish this sort of case from the paradigm model, but this should be enough to get us worrying about the ability of our moral theories to capture the problem of climate change. Gardiner, for one, doubts they can in their current form. He characterizes ethical theories—including the big four we have noted above: utilitarian consequentialism, deontology, contractarianism and virtue ethics—as “research programs.” They evolve historically and must evolve a good deal more to meet the challenge of climate change: Whatever their other merits, in their current forms these research programs appear to lack the resources needed to deal with problems like climate change. Moreover, it seems likely that in evolving to meet them they will be substantially, and perhaps radically, transformed.22 Jamieson makes much the same point, but appears to take it a step further. As he puts it, climate change is “world-constituting” because what we do, or fail to do, about our GHG emissions will alter radically the material conditions of the planet inherited by our descendants. It will also alter the identities of those people, an issue we look at in detail in chapter 5. Commonsense morality is not equipped to grasp problems on this scale.23 To help assess this claim, notice that most of our morally important decisions are not world-making in this sense. We make decisions about whether or not to lie to someone on a particular occasion, whether we should

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become vegetarians, send our kids to public or private school, how much of our salary to give to charity, what portion of our time to devote to the abolition of the local puppy mill or to the promotion of our favorite political candidate, and so on. None of this appears to have anything to do with remaking a world, only tidying up our little corner of it, morally speaking. What we generally say as we go about making these decisions is that we are trying to improve things in some small way, and that if we fail to act as we think we should the world will be a bit worse for it. But Jamieson is suggesting that with respect to our decisions about climate change it may not even make sense to ask whether or not the world we are making is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than some alternative. Two analogies are mobilized to support his case. First, does it make sense to ask whether or not it is ‘better’ that Christianity arose when it did and transformed the world in its image? We live in a world in which this transformation happened, so how we think about evaluative terms like ‘better’ or ‘worse’ takes place within this social and moral horizon. Climate change, we are told, is like this, making it impossible to even ask the question about the value or disvalue of a climatechanged world. Here’s the second analogy: Asking these questions can seem like asking whether it is a good thing that there is an oscillation between glacial and inter-glacial periods. Jamieson summarizes the point of the two analogies this way: These are questions about the value of features that form the very structure of the world within which we make evaluations. Moral evaluations, at least those of the sort we are generally prepared to make, arise within these structures rather than being about these structures. Commonsense morality operates within a horizon of possibility. It is not well-equipped to make judgments about the conditions that fix these possibilities.24 Has Jamieson overstated the challenge morality faces? To see why we should probably be skeptical here, let’s look at these two analogies in order. First, it seems as though it is, and always was, possible to ask meaningful questions about the Christian horizon of moral meaning. With respect to questions about right and wrong, salvation, and the nature of divine creation, for example, Christianity always had competitors (including atheism). It therefore does not, and never did, define the horizon of possible meaning in the totalizing way Jamieson’s analogy apparently requires. Of course, living within Christendom in, say, the 14th-century made it difficult, indeed perilous, for anyone to seek out alternative sources of moral meaning. But, again, there have always been atheists, apostates and heretics, people who challenged the evaluative terms of the system they inhabited from within it. In any case, in

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invoking Christianity in this context, Jamieson is talking not about people like this but about us. The claim is that we cannot evaluate the Christian worldview from our position inside of it. Since many of us do this all the time the claim seems false. This brings us to the second analogy. Jamieson is surely correct to assert that the question about whether the oscillation between glacial and interglacial periods is a good or a bad thing is nonsensical. It is simply a fact. But this is surely not a good analogy to climate change, precisely because we are in this case choosing to bring about a specific future world, a world that will contain much avoidable suffering and harm. If we are able to refrain from bringing this world into being, it surely makes sense to ask whether it is a good thing, morally speaking, for us to try and do so. Indeed, if they believed their decision mattered morally, these considerations would also have applied to a hypothetical group of past people who were capable of doing something about the oscillation between glacial and interglacial periods, before the whole thing got started. It is important to reiterate that Jamieson is speaking explicitly here of the inadequacies of commonsense morality, whose pronouncements he does not himself always endorse. So the specific question to ask is whether the person equipped with only the tools of commonsense morality can be critical of his horizon of moral meaning. The problem with this question is that commonsense morality is a vague notion. In their moral decisions most people likely operate with some shifting mixture of intuitions derived from various religious, political and scientific authorities, introspection, their peers, family traditions, the Internet, and maybe even a smattering of moral theory picked up in college. It’s an open question whether a bag of moral sources as motley as this can furnish material for criticizing the foundations or horizon of a moral culture. Maybe it can’t, which is all the more reason to look beyond commonsense morality. In any case, like Gardiner, Jamieson does not conclude from these reflections that moral theory is entirely inept when it comes to climate change, only that it needs to be radically revised or even revolutionized to meet this challenge. This sounds right. For one thing, it would probably not be possible even to recognize climate change as the profound moral problem it is if both our theories and commonsense morality could not make any sense of it. It shows up as a problem from within our moral horizon. It does not follow that it can be solved entirely from this perspective but many climate ethicists—John Broome, for instance—seem relatively unfazed by the sort of worries about moral theory’s deep structure expressed by Gardiner and Jamieson. A final point to make in this context is that nearly all the big moral issues we face can look as though they stretch our moral theories to the breaking point. This applies to abortion, euthanasia, the ethics of war and peace, the ethics of surveillance, the problem of global poverty, and much more. It is easy to become frustrated with the capacity of any single moral theory to

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make full sense of these issues. Trying to grasp the ethics of terrorism from a utilitarian perspective or the ethics of abortion from the perspective of virtue theory can be illuminating but these approaches almost always leave gaps—sometimes significant ones—in our understanding of the issues. If we try to fill these gaps with some other theory, the results can look displeasingly ad hoc. We nevertheless rightly think it worthwhile to continue ‘applying’ our moral theories to these kinds of problems.

Chapter summary Perhaps it’s best to be agnostic here, at least provisionally. Keeping in mind the points made in this chapter both about the need to theorize (sometimes) in a non-ideal manner about climate change and about the unique challenges of this phenomenon as a moral problem, let’s just do climate change ethics and let the philosophical chips fall where they may. This chapter has considered the nature, scope and limitations of climate ethics as a discipline. Such work is preparatory to doing climate ethics proper, but cannot be dispensed with. We began by looking at the distinction between ideal and non-ideal ethical theory, noting that we should be skeptical of overly idealistic theory but that non-ideal theory threatens to be a simple apology for the status-quo. Some middle ground between the two approaches was therefore recommended. Next, we examined cost-benefit analysis, the favorite policy making tool of the economist. It was necessary to do this because economics enjoys a good deal of power and prestige in our cultures. However, we found that it is not sufficient for making ethically sound policy choices. One of the chief areas of concern has to do with the theory of discounting the future employed by many economists. We saw that this is an inadequate way to make policy in the age of climate change. The failure of economics in this area seems to point to the need for ethics, but it is not clear that philosophical ethics is itself up to the job. Although we looked at some reasons for thinking this, and responded to the worries, the question remains open.

Questions for discussion 1

2 3 4

Explain the distinction between value monism and value pluralism. Is there a way to be a pluralist and a pragmatist? That is, can we be open to multiple value- perspectives without inviting policy paralysis? Explain the theory of discounting. What are the justifications for adopting a high discount rate? Are they acceptable? Why or why not? Do you agree with Weisbach that climate change is not an ethical problem at all? Does climate change stretch the boundaries of our traditional moral categories to the breaking point (as the bike example illustrates) or is this claim an overstatement?

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5

Explain the relation between ideal and non-ideal theory as applied to climate ethics? Can we retain our focus on an ideal while being attentive to messy realities?

Suggested reading Nicholas Stern, The Global Deal: Climate Change and a new Era of Progress and Prosperity (New York: Public Affairs, 2009). •

A clear and accessible account of the economics of climate change, from a economics maverick. Builds on and summarizes The Stern Review.

Clare Heyward and Dominic Roser, “Introduction.” In Clare Heyward and Dominic Roser (eds.), Climate Justice in a Non-ideal World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). •

Great collection of essays examining the link between non-ideal theory and climate justice. Cutting-edge philosophy.

Dale Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed and What it Means For Our Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), chapter 5. •

A thorough analysis of the enterprise of climate ethics. Jamieson was the first philosopher to think seriously about this problem, and this chapter represents the culmination of his work on it.

Notes 1 IPCC 2014 (b): Kolstad C., K. Urama, J. Broome, A. Bruvoll, M. Cariño Olvera, D. Fullerton, C. Gollier, W. M. Hanemann, R. Hassan, F. Jotzo, M.R. Khan, L. Meyer, and L. Mundaca, Social, Economic and Ethical Concepts and Methods. In: Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovern mental Panel on Climate Change [Edenhofer, O., R. Pichs-Madruga, Y. Sokona, E. Farahani, S. Kadner, K. Seyboth, A. Adler, I. Baum, S. Brunner, P. Eickemeier, B. Kriemann, J. Savolainen, S. Schlömer, C. von Stechow, T. Zwickel and J.C. Minx (eds.)], (Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 214. 2 James Garvey, The Ethics of Climate Change: Right and Wrong in a Warming World (New York: Continuum, 20018), 28. 3 John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty.” In Andrew Bailey (ed.), First Philosophy (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2011), 200–240 (200). 4 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 7–8. 5 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 8. 6 Clare Heyward and Dominic Roser, “Introduction,” in Heyward and Roser (eds.), Climate Justice …, 1–18 (9). 7 Laura Valentini, “Ideal vs. Non-Ideal Theory: A Conceptual Map.” Philosophy Compass, 2012, 7(9), 654–664.

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8 Gardiner and Weisbach, Debating Climate Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 252–253 (emphasis in original). 9 Gardiner and Weisbach, Debating Climate Ethics …, 78. 10 For example, David Weisbach. See Stephen Gardiner and David Weisbach, Debating Climate Ethics. 11 Gardiner and Weisbach, Debating Climate Ethics …, 156. 12 Quoted in Robert Paarlberg, The United States of Excess: Gluttony and the Dark Side of American Exceptionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 152–154. This paragraph draws on Byron Williston, review of Gardiner and Weisbach, Debating Climate Ethics, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. At: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/debating-climate-ethics/ 13 Nicholas Stern, The Global Deal: Climate Change and a new Era of Progress and Prosperity (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 81. 14 Stern, The Global Deal …, 83. 15 Stephen Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 276–277. 16 Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm …, 20. 17 Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm …, 21. 18 Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm …, 21–22. 19 John Broome, Climate Matters (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012), 55–58. 20 Dale Jamieson, “Climate Change, Responsibility, and Justice.” Science and Engineering Ethics, 2010, 16, 431–445 (436). 21 Jamieson, “Climate Change, Responsibility …”, 436. 22 Gardiner and Weisbach, Debating Climate Ethics, 38. 23 Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time …, 166. 24 Jamieson, Reason in Dark Time …, 167.

3

Precautionary policy

3.1 Introduction So far we have seen why climate change poses a grave threat to human and non-human systems and why it is, for this reason, an ethical issue at its core. Before we can appreciate the details and substance of the problem’s ethical dimension, however, we need to describe what has been going on in the climate policy sphere in the recent past. What precise problems have we been trying to solve in our ‘official’ deliberations about climate change? This is a large question since the tasks and challenges alter depending on the size and character of the political collective under analysis, and there is a vast range of these. To get a handle on the complexity, this chapter focuses on the ethical foundations of international climate policy, as well as the history of climate diplomacy. We will examine the precautionary principle, the main objectives of international climate policy (namely, to address the challenges of adaptation and mitigation), three key policy-relevant drivers of climate change, and some of the more ethically salient developments in climate diplomacy over roughly the last 25 years.

3.2 The precautionary principle Given the threats that await us under climate business as usual it seems wise for us to change course quickly. This, at least, is the conclusion that the international community has ‘officially’ embraced. The founding document for understanding the normative dimensions of climate change is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC). It was negotiated in the late 1980s and early 1990s, made available for signatures at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and entered into force in 1994. It currently has 197 Parties. The FCCC is steeped in ethical language and concepts. Perhaps the most important ethical concept it draws on is the precautionary principle (PP), described this way: The Parties should take precautionary measures to anticipate, prevent or minimize the causes of climate change and mitigate its adverse effects. DOI: 10.4324/9781003284925-4

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Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used a reason for postponing such measures, taking into account that policies and measures to deal with climate change should be cost-effective so as to ensure global benefits at the lowest possible cost.1 The FCCC sets the terms for the official international response to the problem of climate change. It therefore guides—provides the framework for—climate diplomacy. So if the PP is the ethical heart of the FCCC, which it is, then examining the principle with some care can help us understand what is going on at all those UN-sponsored climate change gatherings, the so-called Conference of Parties (COP) meetings. At the risk of oversimplification, we might say that these meetings are centrally about the meaning of the PP and the implications of taking it seriously in policy decisions. The PP seems like an eminently reasonable principle to adopt with respect to serious environmental issues like climate change, but it has come in for a good deal of criticism over the years. Cass Sunstein thinks the principle fails because any attempt to understand its scope of application lands us in a dilemma. It is either so weak that it is simply banal or it is so strong that it is self-defeating. Either way it fails to be genuinely action-guiding in tough cases. Consider the first horn of the dilemma. The PP is too weak if it is tells us only that we should be careful in an environment of risk and uncertainty. Risk is generally understood as the product of the probability of a threat coming to pass and the magnitude of the damages that would be caused if it did. Other things being equal, the higher a threat scores on these two metrics, the riskier the situation is. Understood this way, we are almost always in an environment where there is some risk. After all, “full scientific certainty” on any issue is rarely if ever achieved. And yet we must often act, so the best option is to proceed with care. That is indeed pretty banal advice. Imagine a pedestrian crossing a busy intersection. Her view is good and it looks like there is no traffic around, so she thinks it is probably safe to cross without waiting for the light to change. Applying the PP here would have the pedestrian nevertheless wait for the light to change since she can’t be sure the intersection is clear. Cars drive very fast around here, so perhaps there is one just out of sight approaching at great speed. Better to wait. There’s nothing objectionable about our pedestrian’s reasoning here, and it does look like an accurate application of the PP, but it is difficult to see in what sense it provides an example to the policymaker, which is what we are really interested in here. But the real thrust of the principle is that it enjoins us to act decisively, and perhaps even aggressively, to combat threats we may understand only dimly, provided they are serious enough. So the best response to the first part of the criticism is that while it is true that the PP can look banal it also permits

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action that is anything but. For example, policymakers might decide that, even though we lack certainty about the larger ecosystemic effects of using genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture, we should refrain from widespread development of these technologies, since we believe that these wider effects could be catastrophic. So the policymakers advise legislators to make them illegal. That’s a bold policy decision, arrived at by application of the PP. However, this example throws us onto the other horn of the dilemma. Making illegal the widespread agricultural use of GMOs is itself not without risks. One of the main reasons for developing these organisms is to make crops more resistant to pests or extreme weather conditions like drought. Some believe that the only way we have a chance of feeding the roughly 10 billion of us who will inhabit the planet by mid-century—especially given the likely ravages of climate change on agricultural systems—is through the widespread adoption of GMOs. If this is correct, then making GMOs illegal is itself a deeply risky policy choice because it will lead to a lot of premature death, especially in the developing world. Shouldn’t a consistent application of the PP forbid this option? According to Sunstein, this would be incoherent because it would induce policy paralysis: The real problem with the PP in its strongest form is that it is incoherent; it purports to give guidance, but it fails to do so, because it condemns the very steps that it requires. The regulation that the principle requires always gives rise to risks of its own –and hence the principle bans what it simultaneously mandates.2 How should we respond to this challenge? It’s worth noting that Sunstein eventually seems to back away from this dismissal of the PP. He argues that in the messy world of public policy, risk is ubiquitous and so we inevitably respond to those risks that are “especially salient or insistent.” This will be different from one country (or city, state, region, etc.) to another. The real problem with the PP is that, in situations like this, it “wrongly suggests that nations can and should adopt a general form of risk aversion.”3 We can agree that it makes little sense to adopt a general form of risk aversion, for we live in a sea of risks and if we did so we would indeed get next to nothing done. But there is nothing about the PP per se that forbids us from comparing the threats we face, recognizing that one of them, say, is an especially salient or insistent threat, and that our first task as policymakers is therefore to address it. Our analysis of the science of climate change in chapter 1 shows clearly that it is just such a threat, if anything is. It is especially ‘salient and insistent,’ but addressing it robustly is itself risky. In a world that is still heavily dependent on fossil fuels for the provision of basic energy security, cutting carbon emissions aggressively risks lives and livelihoods.

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The same point applies to diverting scarce resources to adaptation, which comes with opportunity costs (funding health care, for example), or responding to an alarming upswing in global temperatures by implementing a geoengineering scheme (examined in chapter 10), which risks interfering with the climate system in potentially dangerous ways. And so on. The point is that deciding to act in one, or all, of these ways can be an expression of our commitment to the PP. In other words, we can interpret the PP so that it allows for risk-comparison among policy options. We might say that it bids us to choose the least risky option precisely because this is, in the circumstances, the safest thing to do. This interpretation of the principle allows us to sidestep Sunstein’s claim that the PP is undermined by incoherence. Here is another way to make the point. Though he is only tangentially concerned with the PP, Henry Shue has argued that the climate change case fulfills three jointly necessary and sufficient conditions for strong policy action in this area. First, we are talking about potentially massive losses from climatic disruption. Second, we understand the physical mechanisms that will bring about these losses and we can see their conditions emerging. Finally, the costs of action are not prohibitively high. Chapter 1 has provided reasons for taking the first two conditions to have been met. As for costs, Shue draws on the work of the British economist Sir Nicholas Stern, who has calculated that we could meet the challenge of climate change with an expenditure of 2–4% of global GDP per annum.4 This is not pocket change, but for a global GDP that was USD $96 trillion in 2020, and moving steadily upward, it is surely manageable. In short, in the case of climate change we have (a) a robust grasp of potential damages; (b) a knowledge of relevant causal mechanisms; and (c) a feasible remedy.5 The PP recommends strong action to meet this threat, so it is a helpful and probably indispensable moral principle in this context. But we must note that it is not foundational. This is an especially pertinent observation in the context of multiple risks and the policy trade-offs they sometimes demand. For even if everyone agrees that it would be a good thing for us to act cautiously, there might be a good deal of disagreement about what to do because competing voices might weigh the various threats and risks we face differently. One set of stakeholders might view geoengineering as an especially dire threat to ecosystems, and therefore something to be avoided at all costs, while another sees it as the only viable response to the humanitarian crises that are likely in the event of runaway climate change. Because each group can invoke the PP in defence of its position, we need a deeper appeal to principles. Here, it is possible to draw on any of the four normative theories we looked at in the previous chapter. We could say, for instance, that we should act with precaution with respect to climate change because if we do not our actions or omissions will (a) lead to the widespread violation of rights (deontology); or (b) violate the terms of an implicit contract between us and other members of the human community (contractarianism); or (c) display objectionable character

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traits like greed or selfishness (virtue ethics); or (d) fail to maximize utility or welfare (utilitarianism) among all those sentient beings likely to be affected by the choice. This is not the place to investigate these options in detail, only to underline the point that no appeal to the PP is theoretically complete in the absence of this kind of grounding. In this respect the PP is much like the harm principle. In fact, though it is something of an oversimplification we might say that the PP simply is the harm principle expressed as a normative constraint on public policy deliberation and choice. It’s helpful to put the point this way because the harm principle, recall, has mainly to do with what restrictions governments are permitted to impose on individual liberties. Mill’s point is that the only time this is justified is when an individual’s exercise of liberty threatens to harm other members of the community. Now, since citizens will never agree unanimously about every policy choice, the liberty of some will always be restricted in the implementation and enforcement of any policy. It follows that employing the PP in public policy choice is a way of justifying the restriction of individual liberty to some degree. We want to avoid constructing an ungainly conceptual structure here, so let’s put the point about how all these theories and principles relate to one another as follows. The PP is the harm principle pressed into the service of making sound public policy, in our case climate policy. But whether we talk about the policies we ultimately choose as expressing the harm principle or the PP we must always be prepared to provide foundations for them in the manner suggested in the previous paragraph. The result, hopefully, is an internally consistent set of principles and theories that can provide publically defensible reasons for action to the policy-maker. One final point. The PP is sometimes taken as a principle of prudence—we should act cautiously because it is basically in our interest to do so—but this is potentially misleading. These deeper theoretical positions just canvassed are all, in one way or another, impersonalist. They all ask us to consider what any rational agent would do in the circumstances that obtain. Because of this, they all take a stance on what is of ultimate value. The PP, in other words, is applicable in situations in which something of value—some good—is at stake and these theories attempt to specify what that thing most fundamentally is. The PP therefore encompasses self-interest—for this is undoubtedly a good—but is not confined to it. Indeed, the threatened good might be something incomprehensible from the standpoint of the self-interest of someone living comfortably in the developed world: the vital interests of people of the far future or the global poor, the survival of economically ‘worthless’ species, the traditional cultural practices of Indigenous peoples, and so on.

3.3 Adaptation and mitigation Given the importance of precaution, what exactly should we should do in order to avoid climate catastrophe? Well, it is obvious that we are going to

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have to adapt, and in many ways already are adapting, to the myriad changes climate change is bringing about. ‘Adaptation’ is the general term for any scheme aimed at helping us cope with the anticipated effects of climate change on society. Here is the IPCC’s slightly more technical definition of the term: Adaptation is the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects. In human systems, adaptation seeks to moderate or avoid harm or exploit beneficial opportunities. In some natural systems, human intervention may facilitate adjustment to expected climate and its effects.6 Building sea-walls to hold back the rising tide or loosening immigration policy to allow the absorption of climate refugees are examples of adaptation. As these examples indicate, the concept is quite broad, applying to human development, livelihood security, disaster-risk management, ecosystem management, institutional reform, land-use planning, urban infrastructural development, and more. The means by which these factors are managed range from laws to engineering practices, from policy changes to technological advances and behavioral nudges.7 Moreover, it is difficult to make general statements about the challenges of adaptation because adaptation measures are a response to risk assessment and risk is not evenly distributed over the global population (not to mention across generations). Nevertheless, we can say that the main goal of adaptation measures is to build resilience in communities so that they are able to cope better with inevitable climatic changes. Accordingly, the IPCC has identified principles for effective adaptation. Here are just a few of them: •

•

•

Adaptation is place- and context-sensitive, with no specific approach that is applicable to all regions or communities. For example, because of drought-stress in many of its rural regions, sustainable urban development is a primary concern for many African nations. By contrast, innovative work practices to reduce outdoor work will be essential in many parts of Asia in order to cope with the increased risk of heat-related mortality. All such measures respond to assessment and vulnerability to change among members of a population. Successful adaptation depends on values, objectives and risk assessments. The IPCC points to the diversity of values across societies as a source of knowledge about how to manage adaptation. In particular, it highlights the importance of indigenous, local and traditional ways of managing land and resources. There are many constraints to successful adaptation. These include, but are not limited to, financial constraints, competing values, absence of leaders and advocates, and limited tools for implementation of adaptation measures. Maladaptation can also occur through poor planning. This often involves overly short-term thinking.8

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Let’s note three key points here. First, it is striking that, according to the IPCC, values-diversity can be a source of either poor or effective adaptation. This is surely correct. It is important to highlight it so that we don’t make the mistake of either overvaluing or undervaluing diversity and disagreement. We overvalue it insofar as it leads to policy paralysis, and we undervalue it when we exclude or downplay voices that ought to be heard in policy deliberation (for example, Indigenous voices). Second, we must always be wary of maladaptive practices masquerading as adaptive ones. A lack of such awareness might allow our choices to be captured by vested interests. For example, the fossil fuel industry might argue for ‘adaptation measures’—for example, off-shore oil rigs able to withstand more intense hurricanes—that may have the effect of locking in our dependency on oil and gas for generations to come. Finally, adaptation can be very costly, which raises the important question of who should pay for it in countries that bear minimal or no responsibility for climate change. We will return to this issue in chapter 4. Intelligent adaptation to climate change will be crucial, but it is an incomplete response. For one thing, the idea of adaptation tends to be interpreted in narrow technological terms. The former U.S. Secretary of State (and also former CEO of Exxon-Mobil) Rex Tillerson once said that the climate change is “just an engineering problem.”9 Such technological optimism is probably unwarranted in this context. Of course we are an ‘innovative’ species, but nothing we have accomplished in our history provides evidence that we are capable of responding in a purely technological manner to the challenges of feeding 10 billion people in a world with atmospheric CO2 concentrations of, say, 500 ppm or more. To whatever extent it is possible, avoidance of this outcome is therefore a better option. This is known as ‘mitigation.’ It effectively means reducing our CO2 emissions drastically in the short- to medium-term, by for example adopting the now popular goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. In the language of the IPCC, ‘mitigation’ refers to any “human intervention to reduce the sources or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases.”10 Sink-enhancement includes afforestation, sustainable forest management, reduction of deforestation, cropland management, grazing-land management, and enhancement of organic soils.11 As important as sink-enhancement is, by itself it has limited potential to meet the challenges we face. In general, the problem with it has to do with scalability or with the conflicts it introduces in land-use priorities. This can be seen most clearly with afforestation. Afforestation on a scale large enough to be an appreciable CO2 sink would necessarily encroach on land currently used for agriculture. But then how would we feed a rising population? Or take enhancement of organic soils. One version of this is a technique of soil management originating with ancient Amazonian cultures. It involves the creation of biochar through pyrolysis. Instead of allowing the carbon stored in agricultural waste to rot in the open air and be released to the atmosphere,

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it is burned in an oxygen-free oven and ultimately returned to the soil. This can lock the carbon contained in the biomass into the soil for thousands of years. The soil this produces is rich and lovely and there’s no release of CO2 into the atmosphere from decaying biomass. This process is currently being researched as a way of sequestering carbon, and we can certainly hope that in the future it becomes a staple of agricultural practice. But it is unlikely to be available to us at the proper scale for decades or more, and even if it were it would address only a small percentage of emissions. This brings us to reducing the sources of greenhouse gases, the second broad mitigation strategy. There are two principal means of doing this. The first is through the reformation of agriculture, aimed especially at regulating the production of methane from cattle. Ruminating animals like cows create methane in the process of digestion, which is then released to the atmosphere when the animals fart or belch. Methane, as we saw in chapter 1, is an especially powerful greenhouse gas. According the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, there are now around 1.5 billion cows in the world. Indeed, the U.N. estimates that our livestock are responsible for as much climate change as the entire global transport industry. Moreover, ranchland does not come cheap in ecological terms. Usually it is created through deforestation, meaning that even more greenhouse gases are produced when the carbon stored in trees is suddenly released into the atmosphere as the trees are cut down. With respect to freshwater use, land use, grain-feed use and greenhouse gas emissions, cattle ranching is one of the most inefficient methods of food production humans have ever devised. And people in the developed world eat enormous amounts of beef: the average American consumes nearly 170 pounds of it every year. Unfortunately, as the global middle class expands, overconsumption of beef appears to be intensifying. As people get richer, they seem to want more burgers and steaks (among other things, like cars and phones). The second means of reducing greenhouse gases targets fossil fuel combustion directly. About 78% of the total GHG emission increase from 1970–2010 came from fossil fuel combustion.12 This combines emissions from transportation, industry, electricity and heat production, and buildings. This total must be reduced rapidly. How rapidly? To have a 50% chance of keeping temperatures below 2°C by 2100—the stated goal of the Paris climate agreement in 2015—we must cut GHG emissions by more than 50% by 2050 and eliminate them altogether by 2100. Otherwise put, the goal is to have the total stock of atmospheric CO2 peak at 450 ppm and then bring it down closer to 350 ppm (recall that it is currently past 414 ppm). If we are going to achieve this, emissions must peak very soon—probably by 2025 or 2030—and decline quickly thereafter.13 However, as aggressive as these targets are they describe only the ‘coin-flip’ scenario. Given the threats of climate change we might understandably want better odds than that. If we do, our cuts to GHG emissions must be even

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more aggressive than the ones just mentioned, on the order of 80% by 2050, with total elimination—a carbon-neutral global economy—by 2070. Now, if we are going to be non-idealists here, we must recognize that changes on this scale will come about only through deliberate manipulation of the global market. There’s too much carbon left to burn to permit unchecked market forces to run down the supply until fossil fuels price themselves out of the energy market. The reserves of fossil fuels on the balance sheets of the world’s biggest publically and privately owned oil and gas companies, if extracted and burned, would tip the planet into climate chaos. The only rational option therefore is for governments to force fossil fuels out of the energy market by taxing them heavily while investing robustly in renewables. No economist should object to this, since it is at bottom nothing more than internalizing the currently externalized costs of burning fossil fuels. It is an attempt to align the price of these commodities with their real social and environmental costs, something the market by itself has clearly failed to do. However, there are ways to resist this conclusion. One might suggest that in order to combat climate change effectively we should instead (a) get a better grip on population control; (b) overthrow the growth imperative of modern capitalist economies; or (c) increase the efficiency of the technologies of carbon capitalism. Were any of these proposals sufficient to meet the climate challenge, there may be no need to focus obsessively on cutting greenhouse gas emissions through taxes or regulations. Let’s look at these challenges next.

3.4 Three drivers of climate change Economists have attempted to quantify the primary drivers of environmental impact generally and greenhouse gas emissions in particular. The most general approach is the I=PAT formula, according to which our environmental impact (I) is the product of our population (P), affluence (A) and technologies (T). The Kaya formula, named after the Japanese economist Yoichi Kaya, applies this to GHG emissions. The three main drivers here are population, economic growth (GDP per person) and technology (CO2 per dollar of GDP). If we want to reduce emissions we may need to lean on one of these drivers, or some combination of them. The first involves acting aggressively to reduce fertility rates globally, the second to curb economic growth, the third to increase the efficiency of our energy-hungry technologies.14

3.4.1 Population From 1979 to 2015 official state policy in China allowed for only one child per family. By some estimates this resulted in 400 million fewer births than would have occurred without the policy. But even if the policy had some effect on Chinese emissions in this period there are serious reasons to reject adopting a similar policy on a global scale. In China, the one child policy has produced

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unforeseen negative side effects, most notably a huge gender imbalance. In a society that values boys more than girls, the latter were often killed at birth by parents who wanted their only child to be a boy. This result would not necessarily be repeated everywhere the policy was implemented, of course, but it should make social planners extremely wary. More generally, there is a political and cultural feasibility constraint that likely makes this option unworkable. In most places in the world, certainly in democratic countries, having children is considered a fundamental human right. Any attempt by a democratically elected government to curb this right would likely be met with severe resistance. In any case, we should be skeptical of the claim that population per se is the real problem when it comes to drivers of climate change. The bigger worry is overconsumption and this is a much graver problem in the developed than the developing world. Over 95% of the growth in population between now until 2050 will be in Africa and Asia, regions of the world that are very low on the consumption— and therefore also emissions—scale. This is because the rest of the world has already gone through or is in the process of going through the demographic transition (examined in chapter 1). The two major causes of reduced birth rates are the general wealth of the citizens and the education of its women. Greater wealth generally means a more diversified and urbanized economy, providing wider opportunities for decent work and taking pressure off rural households to procreate in order to have more hands to work the land. The education of women, for its part, both provides women with access to the diversifying job market and empowers them to resist patriarchal demands for early marriage. In short, we are not going to force population reductions through heavyhanded governmental regulations. This is in any case a dubious strategy for reducing emissions if we don’t halt overconsumption, which, again, is the real problem. This is a crucial insight. Pointing to population as the main source of our climate woes can have the effect of diverting our attention away from the consumption habits of most people in the developed world, instead blaming climate change’s main victims—Africans and Asians—for the problem. For those people, this adds insult to injury. If we resist this temptation we might forced to ask what kinds of assumptions about our economy are behind those developed world consumption patterns. This brings us to our second driver.

3.4.2 Economic growth Since about 1945, the global economy has grown at an astonishing rate. One of the reasons for endorsing the notion that we are now in the Anthropocene (a concept examined in chapter 7) is that the data show clearly that at this point in our history we really did begin to have an outsized effect on the Earth system. This period is referred to as the Great Acceleration. It is broken down into earth

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system trends and socio-economic trends. The first covers such phenomena as CO2 concentrations, ocean acidification, tropical forest loss and amount of domesticated land; the second covers things like fertilizer consumption, paper consumption, construction of large dams, expanded transportation networks and increased urbanization. Every Great Acceleration graph depicting the development of these phenomena has the same shape: a steady, linear line from 1900 to 1945, followed by a very steep curve from 1945 to the present. Underlying all of these trends is economic growth, measured by GDP per person. Between 1900 and 2008 GDP per person increased by a factor of six, from $1,260 to $7,600. World GDP increased by a factor of twenty-five in this period, from $2 trillion to $51 trillion (adjusted for inflation).15 Of course, the relationship between GDP increases on the one hand and other socioeconomic and earth system trends on the other is complex. Economic growth does not simply cause the construction of large dams, for example, but is also caused or sustained by such construction. Causation among all these phenomena is multi-directional. Nevertheless, in any complex system some things are more causally significant than others. An economy can function robustly in the absence of particular kinds of infrastructural development but any such development on a large enough scale requires a robust economy. For some economists and politicians, this means an ever-growing economy. This is why there is a perceived growth ‘imperative’ in most societies today. And of course economic growth is still powered almost entirely by fossil fuels. Hence the connection between growth and emissions. What are the chances of addressing climate change by challenging the economic growth imperative? Noticing the obvious fact that infinite growth is not possible on a planet of finite resources, some economists have argued in favor of a no-growth or steady-state economy. This concept is not outlandish. But implementing it in the short- to medium-term on a global scale is probably even more daunting than seeking to curb population growth directly. The perceived need for perpetual growth is a cornerstone of capitalism, and capitalism is a deeply entrenched aspect of global culture. The culture critic Frederic Jameson once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. For better or worse, he may be right about that. In the time-frame that matters to us here, we are probably not going to see a move to a steady-state or no-growth global economy. And if the developing world is to find its way out of the poverty in which much of it is mired, this may be undesirable for now. It is one thing for (some) citizens of the North to dream of the end of economic growth, but the billions of people currently without electricity might view things differently. It does not follow that we should not work to reform capitalism in dramatic ways, or that we should abandon efforts to construct an economic system based on a more sustainable principle than that of endless capital accumulation. In fact, climate change forces us to ask fundamental questions about what the economy is for and how it can be manipulated to promote genuine

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flourishing among humans and between humans and other living things. But what does follow from the deeply-entrenched character of capitalism is that for now we are probably confined to harnessing, rather than overturning, market forces. This has already been done in the sorts of creative fusions of socialist and capitalist models found both in Scandinavian countries and, in a different way, in China. The rest of the world would do well to look to these countries as models in this area. Remember, we must confine ourselves to a transitional climate ethics. We need to know what to do in the world as it is right now, even if we also have our eyes on a more idealized world order. This is one more expression of the commitment to non-ideal theorizing. We expand on some of these themes in chapter 11. But having said all this, let’s err on the side of caution on this issue. Let’s say that economic development is a good thing for everyone. It brings people out of poverty and helps protect things we value. The main question is just this: can development happen without perpetual economic growth? If it can, then let’s challenge the growth imperative robustly. If it can’t, then we need to ask harder questions about how much longer the global economy can grow and to whom the benefits of that growth should chiefly go. It’s safe to leave the first question—about whether development can happen without growth—to the economists. But the second one about distributing the benefits of growth is purely philosophical. This brings us to the role of technology as a driver of our problems. If inefficiency drives climate change, then perhaps the whole problem can be addressed through efficiency improvements. Since firms already engage in perpetual efficiency upgrades as a matter of course, it’s been characterized as a solution to the problem that is friendly to capitalism. As we will see, however, it has its own problems.

3.4.3 Efficiency Pursuing efficiency is about getting better at converting the inputs of some process into outputs. A process is more efficient than an alternative if it uses fewer inputs than the alternative to produce the same, or a higher, output. There are a number of ways to think about efficiency, but for our purposes the most important one is the notion that we can ‘decouple’ economic output from CO2 emissions. One way to measure this is in terms of CO2 emissions per dollar of GDP. If GDP is being generated with fewer and fewer CO2 emissions over time, we can say that the economy is becoming decoupled from CO2 emissions. Sometimes this is stated as an ‘intensity’ goal: a process is more efficient than an alternative if it involves a less intense use of resources than the alternative. It’s important to recognize that the global economy has managed to achieve steady decoupling at a more general level of material intensity over the last 40 years or so. We now use a lot less biomass, fossil fuel and minerals per dollar of GDP than we did before. In fact, during this period the material intensity of the global economy dropped by a remarkable 33%.16

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Can we decouple the global economy from CO2 emissions in time to avert climate disaster? Not likely, alas. The economist Tim Jackson has done some calculations to try and determine how much carbon intensity reduction would be required in order to keep atmospheric concentrations of CO2 at 450 ppm by 2050. Granting for the sake of argument that this is an adequate target, we could achieve it through efficiency improvements alone only if the carbon intensity of our economy were reduced by factor of nearly 130. If we extend the projection out to 2100, we would, says Jackson, need to see “a complete decarbonization of every single dollar.” And if we seek to cap atmospheric carbon at 350 ppm, which is what most scientists consider to be a safer target than 450 ppm, we would effectively need to have ‘negative emissions.’ That is, every dollar of GDP would—somehow—need to reduce atmospheric CO2.17 Efficiency improvements are often worth pursuing. But we should underline three skeptical points about this approach to our problem. First, the numbers just cited indicate clearly that, at this point, such purely technological solutions exist mostly in the realm of fantasy. We simply cannot reduce carbon intensity quickly enough to avert climate disaster. Second, even if we were making steady progress on efficiency in some area there is the problem of the ‘rebound effect.’ In short, people often react to these improvements, which can make energy or consumer goods cheaper, by consuming more of the same good than before or by diverting the savings into consumption of other goods which might not be produced as efficiently. The result is a net increase in consumption—anywhere from 10% to 100% more—which can swamp the gains made by the efficiency measures.18 This brings us to the third point. Given these two large problems we should be mindful of the ways in which efficiency arguments are used ideologically by vested interests. For example, defenders of the tar sands in Alberta, Canada often point to the gradual reduction of carbon intensity in the process of extracting the tar—which has happened—as a prop for the claim that this product is ‘clean’ and should be regulated no further by governments. In fact, so goes the argument, tar sands operations should be expanded since they generally deploy the most efficient extraction technologies in the industry. That is climate change business as usual masquerading as environmental conscientiousness through strategic deployment of the language of efficiency. Together, these three points should remind us that finding climate solutions that are ‘friendly to capitalism’ is not an end in itself. Working through market mechanisms is desirable only if it delivers the goods, in this case in the form of steep emissions reductions. Overemphasis on removing inefficient technologies can blind us to the need for more radical measures. It can be a way of deceiving ourselves into believing that we are doing something important for the climate when in fact nothing has changed, or the ‘improvement’ has even worsened the problem (this is exactly what happens with the rebound effect, for example). For this reason we should be extremely wary of efficiency arguments in the area of environmental regulation generally and climate change policy in particular.

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The more general point of this section has been to suggest that we should probably not reduce the complex problem of climate change to the three drivers identified in the Kaya formula. It’s not just about overpopulation, capitalism’s problematic growth imperative or inefficient technologies. Once we appreciate this, we should be able to see that there really is no alternative to rapid reduction of CO2 emissions on the order outlined in the previous section and that this is likely to happen only if governments actively price fossil fuels out of the global market. This does not entail abandoning the pursuit of other measures or ideals—building resilient adaptation, keeping fertility rates in check, improving efficiency, robustly researching and developing renewable energy technologies, building the steady-state economy—but these are all, at best, supplements to the main goal of responsible climate policy: rapid reduction of CO2 emissions. That is, what we mostly need is aggressive mitigation in the form of binding emissions reductions targets. It’s no accident that this has been the main focus of climate diplomacy over the past few decades. Let’s look at a few highlights of this history.

3.5 From Rio to Paris By establishing the FCCC, the Rio Earth Summit set out a grand vision for addressing climate change. As we have seen just above, The FCCC mandates an annual Conference of the Parties (COP) to work out the terms of agreements and protocols—like the Paris Agreement (2015) or the Kyoto Protocol (1997)—for dealing with climate change. The objective of the convention and its supporting institutional structures and legal arrangements is worth quoting at length: The ultimate objective of this Convention and any related legal instruments that the Conference of the Parties may adopt is to achieve, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Convention, stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Such a level should be achieved within a time-frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.19 This statement contains three concepts that have been, in one way or another, at the heart of negotiations since it was made. The first is that GHGs need to be “stabilized” before they can interfere with the climate system in dangerous ways. This means that countries must work together to mitigate the problem of climate change. Indeed, it places mitigation measures at the heart of international climate policy, as we have suggested should be the case. The second is

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that mitigation needs to happen in such a way that adaptation to the inevitable effects of climate change is as painless as possible. The third is that all of this must happen without interfering with the right to economic development of the developing world. To assert that we have arrived at no consensus about how to achieve these three goals after more than twenty COP meetings would be to understate the point. How do we explain the failure? Predictably, there is not much agreement on this question either. Any explanation of the failure is bound to be partial, but it is possible to highlight some of the most important moments in this sorry history. One of the key commitments of the FCCC is that Parties will assume burdens to address climate change on the basis of “common but differentiated responsibilities” (CBDR).20 This seemingly innocent phrase was to become a lightning rod for differing interpretations of what individual countries were required to do under the terms of the FCCC, or any of the protocols, treaties or mandates it might spawn. Broadly, there are two such interpretations. The first is that the rich countries should do all the work, at least in the short term. This places a stress on the concept of ‘differentiation’ in CBDR. The second, which stresses the concept of what is ‘common’ in CBDR, is that everyone should have to do something right from the beginning of the commitment period. To help us appreciate the complexity of the issues here, let’s look in turn at a few significant features of three key COP meetings: Berlin (1995), Durban (2011) and Paris (2015).

3.5.1 COP 1: Berlin, 1995 The first of these was also the very first COP after the FCCC entered into force, and from it emerged the Berlin Mandate. The Berlin Mandate proposes a hard and fast distinction between developed and developing countries, suggesting that the developed countries—so-called Annex I countries—should be the ones to take on the burden of reducing GHGs while the developing countries could continue to emit without limit. This notion was encoded formally in the Kyoto Protocol two years later (1997). There were big differences among Annex I countries in terms of what they were required to do under Kyoto but all of them had to engage in emissions cuts that would inevitably be costly for them. How costly? Kyoto has been portrayed by some of its detractors, like the former Prime Minister of Canada Stephen Harper, as a job-killing, economydestroying, quasi-socialist scheme designed to suck money away from rich countries and transfer it to poor ones. But in fact, the demanded cuts were relatively modest. Annex I countries as a group agreed to cut emissions 5.2% by 2008–2012 from a 1990 baseline. The United States’ share of the cuts was slightly steeper than this at 7%. Opposition to the Protocol among American lawmakers was nevertheless fierce. American President Bill Clinton signed the Kyoto Protocol but declined to submit it to Congress for ratification, realizing that it would never be approved by that body.

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In fact, at roughly the same time the Kyoto Protocol was being hashed out the U.S. Senate adopted the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, which stated the American position on the issue of differentiated responsibilities succinctly. The Resolution, which passed unanimously, says that the U.S. will not adopt any treaty or agreement which would … mandate new commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for the Annex I Parties, unless the protocol or other agreement also mandates new specific scheduled commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for Developing Country Parties within the same compliance period.21 The Senators went on to justify this position by asserting that adopting the proposed emissions cuts would likely result in job losses, trade disadvantages and increased costs of energy and consumer goods in the U.S.

3.5.2 COP 17: Durban, 2011 The battle lines were thus drawn, the ultimate result of which was the spectacular failure of COP 15 in Copenhagen (2009). Much has been written about COP 15 in an effort to determine who was to blame for its failure. But whatever the source of the failure it is important to highlight some if its more disastrous implications for future COP meetings. Let’s focus, for example, on what is arguably the key feature of COP 17 in Durban (2011). Negotiators in Durban, frustrated by the Copenhagen debacle, finally turned their backs on the Berlin Mandate’s interpretation of CBDR (which, again, stressed the notion of differentiation over that of commonality). They urged all Parties to accept responsibility for emissions reductions within the same compliance period, i.e., right from the start. One way to understand the stress on differentiation is that it embodied the developing world’s sense of climate equity: as a matter of basic fairness the developed world should act first because they are largely responsible for the problem. The new stress on commonality rather than differentiation was therefore a rejection of such equity concerns. This was expressed clearly by the chief American negotiator Todd Stern. “If equity’s in,” said Stern in Durban, “we’re out.”22 The rest of the world reluctantly bought into the position. At bottom, global capitulation to the Americans was the product of brute political realism. Given Byrd-Hagel, the world realized that the U.S. was not going to budge on emissions cuts unless the developing world, especially China, joined the effort right away. For its part, the European Union knew that a deal without the U.S. would be ineffectual and also damaging to its own economic interests, since in this case the E.U. would have to pick up the slack from a missing-in-action U.S.23 Durban did not produce agreement among countries on the important issue of emissions reduction targets, but it is nevertheless significant for two reasons. The

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first is that it enshrines the commonality-inflected CBDR interpreted so as to meet the requirements of the Byrd-Hagel Resolution and thus, hopefully, secure the participation of the U.S. in an international agreement on climate change. The second is that it set the policy terms for what many consider to be a radical departure from previous COP meetings, the Paris Agreement at COP 21 (2015).

3.5.3 COP 21: Paris, 2015 There is sharp disagreement among commentators about the merits of the Paris Agreement. Some dismiss it as hopelessly ambitious while others think of it as a genuine game-changer. We cannot settle that dispute here, but because the Agreement does offer an undeniably distinct approach to the issues compared to previous COPs we look briefly at it. There are two main differences to highlight: the first is substantive, the second procedural. The substantive issue is a commitment to “strengthen the global response to climate change” by … [h]olding the increase in the global average temperature to well-below 2°C below pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.24 This is an immensely ambitious goal, by far the most aggressive target ever agreed upon at these meetings. Of course, we know from bitter experience that there is a chasm between commitments like this on the one hand and their ratification and implementation by national and sub-national legislatures on the other. Nevertheless, the Agreement has received the required number of signatures to go into force, so there appears to be some groundswell of support for it. Everything, of course, depends on how the goal is going to be achieved. This brings us to the procedural difference between Paris and all previous agreements. The previous approach had been top-down, i.e., a global emissions reduction level had been set and each country was then assigned a share of the total. Many considered this approach to be unworkable because it was insensitive to the political and economic realities operative in particular countries. By contrast, Paris enshrines a ‘pledge and review’ system. Negotiations leading up to Paris had every country work on a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), constructed from the ground up by each country in the light of its own political and economic realities. The NDC commits each country to reduce its carbon emissions by the specified amount within a specified time-frame. At the end of this time, the pledge is reviewed by other members and ratcheted-up. It’s meant to be a kind of upward emissions reduction spiral, with a new or updated climate plan pledged every few years, then reviewed, then updated again in the light of international scrutiny.

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Does Paris represents a real breakthrough? There are reasons for skepticism. The first has to do with the weak mechanism for promoting compliance among the Parties. The requirement specifies only that a committee will be set up “that shall be expert-based and facilitative in nature and function in a manner that is transparent, non-adversarial and non-punitive.”25 That sounds like pretty much the diametric opposite of a ‘binding treaty with teeth.’ The hope seems to be that the pledge and review system will all by itself promote compliance through the operation of something like an international shame system. Second, it is unclear how all those NDCs will be coordinated so as to reach the 1.5°C target. So far there’s a significant emissions gap between the NDCs and the target, a gap that would result in a temperature increase approaching 3°C by 2100.26 A third reason for skepticism is ongoing American unpredictability. The world plainly needs The U.S. to play along, but the Trump administration’s withdrawal from Paris made this unlikely and thus made the Agreement considerably less forceful. As with Byrd-Hagel, the U.S. in 2016 held the rest of the world hostage on this issue. It is worthwhile reflecting on the audacity of the American position. As we have characterized it here, the U.S. moved the whole world, by force, away from the accepted understanding of CBDR. This was a necessary condition of American participation. Having secured this major concession from virtually everyone else, the U.S. was then unwilling to participate at all. The Biden administration, as noted, has reinserted the US back into the global fold on this issue, but nobody knows what the next federal election will bring (or the ones beyond that). No meaningful deal on climate change is likely to emerge where there is so much unpredictability on the part of one key participant. And indeed, no significant progress on emissions reductions has been made in post-Paris COP meetings, though some interesting developments—for example on sharing the financial burdens of adaptation, bruited at COP 27 in Egypt in 2022—have transpired on other fronts. Dale Jamieson, writing before the Paris Agreement, asserts that “climate diplomacy will increasingly become a zombie exercise,” and that because of this the “Rio dream is over.”27 This may be too harsh, but not by much. By clarifying the 1.5°C target, Paris probably achieves the most we can expect of an international climate agreement. For the first time, we have a target that requires very robust mitigation efforts, especially on the part of developed countries. This alone can be used to expose and shame the world’s climate laggards. That is surely an improvement over the results of previous COPs.

Chapter summary This has been a wide-ranging chapter, aimed at getting a firm sense of what policy measures are required to address the threat of climate change and what principles underlie such policies. We began by examining a principle which has been thought to be at the heart of the global commitment to limit

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environmental degradation so that future generations have a livable planet: the precautionary principle. Next we asked what specific policies we are looking to justify when we do climate ethics at the level of international policy. We focused on adaptation and mitigation. This brought us to an examination of three key drivers of climate change: population, the economic growth imperative and inefficient technologies. The point here was to show that while it is important to address all these issues, we should not thereby abandon the focus on mitigation through carbon reduction. That goal has been the primary focus of climate diplomacy since 1992, so we closed the chapter with a brief look at some of the highlights of this history.

Questions for discussion 1 2

3

4 5

Do you think the precautionary principle escapes the charge of being either banal or incoherent? If so, how? What are some of the dangers of abandoning the effort to mitigate climate change through emissions reductions by focusing instead entirely on adaptation? Is there any chance of addressing climate change exclusively through efficiency improvements in our technologies, perhaps combined with efforts to reduce the global fertility rate? Do we need to challenge capitalism’s growth imperative in order to address climate change? Is this feasible? Is the Paris Agreement likely to result in a substantial change of course in the international effort to combat climate change? Why or why not?

Suggested reading Dale Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed and what it Means for our Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), chapters 2 & 7. •

A bracingly skeptical and detailed survey of the history of climate diplomacy.

Cass Sunstein, The Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). •

A lucid and thorough examination of the precautionary principle.

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC). Available at: http://unfccc.int/files/essential_background/background_publications_htmlpdf/ application/pdf/conveng.pdf •

The foundational document of international climate diplomacy.

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Notes 1 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), article 3.3, p. 9 http://unfccc.int/ files/essential_background/background_publications_htmlpdf/application/pdf/conveng.pdf 2 Cass Sunstein, The Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 14. 3 Sunstein, The Laws of Fear …, 34. 4 Henry Shue, “Deadly Delays, Saving Opportunities: Creating a More Dangerous World?”. In Stephen M. Gardiner, Simon Caney, Dale Jamieson and Henry Shue (eds.) Climate Ethics: Essential Readings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 146–162. 5 Neil A. Manson, “Formulating the Precautionary Principle,” Environmental Ethics 24, 2002, 263–274. 6 IPCC, 2014, Working Group II (WG II): Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects, 5. 7 IPCC 2014, WG II: Adaptation …, 27. 8 IPCC 2014, WG II: Adaptation …, 26–28. 9 Quoted in Matt Daily, “Exxon Chief Calls Climate Change Engineering Problem, Reuters. http:// www.reuters.com/article/us-exxon-climate-idUSBRE85Q1C820120627, (27 June 2012), accessed, June 6, 2017. 10 IPCC, 2014: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Edenhofer, O., R. Pichs-Madruga, Y. Sokona, E. Farahani, S. Kadner, K. Seyboth, A. Adler, I. Baum, S. Brunner, P. Eickemeier, B. Kriemann, J. Savolainen, S. Schlömer, C. von Stechow, T. Zwickel and J.C. Minx (eds.)]. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA), 4. 11 IPCC 2014(b), 24. 12 IPCC 2014(b), 6. 13 Romm, Climate Change …, 154. 14 Andrew Dessler and Edward A. Parson, The Science and Politics of Climate Change: A Guide to the Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 126. 15 Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill, Enough is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2013), 17. 16 Dietz and O’Neill, Enough is Enough …, 37. 17 Dietz and O’Neill, Enough is Enough …, 37–38. 18 Dessler and Parson, The Science and Politics …, 128–129. 19 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 1992, article 2, p.9. 20 UNFCCC, article 3.1, p. 9 21 Quoted in Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time …, 41. 22 Quoted in Chukwumerije Okereke and Philip Coventry, “Climate justice and the international regime: before, during and after Paris.” WIRE’s Climate Change, 2016, 7, 834–851 (838). 23 Okereke and Coventry, “Climate Justice …”, 838. 24 United Nations, Paris Agreement, 2015, article 2(b), p. 2. https://unfccc.int/files/essential_background/ convention/application/pdf/english_paris_agreement.pdf 25 U.N., Paris Agreement, article 15(2), p. 12. 26 United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). Emissions Gap Report 2021. https://www.unep.org/ resources/emissions-gap-report-2021 27 Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time …, 59.

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4.1 Introduction International climate diplomacy, discussed in the previous chapter, has been strongly influenced by our varying conceptions of what a just solution to the climate crisis might look like. It’s now time to look more carefully at the concept of climate justice. In the next chapter we do so from the standpoint of relations between generations. Here we do so from the standpoint of relations among currently existing people and the countries to which they belong. We begin with an analysis of the connection between climate change and human rights, before moving to a consideration of the nature of climate justice and why so many in the developed world have resisted justice-talk in this area. Next, we examine climate change as an example of the tragedy of the commons. This brings us to a detailed analysis of some important principles of climate justice, with a focus on the polluter pays principle. We close with an examination of the right to development and its problematic connection to the imperative to curb global carbon emissions radically.

4.2 Climate change and human rights One of the most powerful conceptual tools we have for countering the sort of unchecked political power that can result in widespread harms to people is that of rights. Michael Freeden defines rights this way: [A] human right is a conceptual device, expressed in linguistic form, that assigns priority to certain human or social attributes regarded as essential to the adequate functioning of a human being; that is intended to serve as a protective capsule for those attributes; and that appeals for deliberate action to ensure such protection.1 What are the human attributes that rights are meant to protect? Those that are required for us to live flourishing lives. Under this heading we might invoke some of the ‘capabilities’ highlighted by Martha Nussbaum: life, bodily health, bodily integrity, affiliation with others, emotions, practical reason, play, control.2 DOI: 10.4324/9781003284925-5

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We need not agree that that all of these items belong on a list of the capabilities whose developments provide the foundation for human flourishing, and which ought therefore to be protected by rights. We may decide to be more parsimonious, perhaps including only life, bodily health and integrity and affiliation with others. Or the list could be longer. Whatever its precise content, the list specifies our ‘vital interests,’ those capacities without which humans cease to live a fully human life. Rights are meant to protect vital interests so construed. They are claims made against other humans as well as political authorities. Characterizing rights as socio-political claims points to their origin in deontological conceptions of human dignity and fundamental equality. People may have positive or negative rights, or both. As Freeden describes rights claims, for x to claim A from y as a matter of positive right, is for y to have a duty to provide x with A. On the other hand, if x has a negative right to be free of interference from others with respect to A, then y has a duty to forbear interfering with x in this area.3 So there’s a whole constellation of moral concepts at work here: duty, dignity, equality, flourishing, and interests. The notion of rights is philosophically rich in this sense. It gets the idea of flourishing and vital interests from Aristotle, that of dignity from Kant, that of protection against the arbitrary exercise of power from Mill and Rawls, and more. Largely because of this richness, the notion has a great deal of rhetorical force in our culture. In one form or another, it has been employed very successfully in the cause of human emancipation for centuries (the civil rights movement, for instance). The doctrine that best encapsulates this conceptual richness is moral cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism itself has a long history in philosophy, with origins in the thinking of the fourth century BCE Cynic, Diogenes. Legend has it that when asked where he was from Diogenes replied, ‘I am a citizen of the world.’ The moral cosmopolitan holds that we are all citizens of the world, and that our connection to all other humans is more basic than our connection to members of smaller groups: family, compatriots, co-religionists, etc. This idea turned morality on its head. In Diogenes’ day, many believed just the opposite: that our moral duties begin—and possibly end—with the relatively small groups to which we belong. There are still many who believe this, though the number of cosmopolitans among us is surely larger than it was in Diogenes’ day. At bottom, this is a dispute about who counts morally, a question that will resurface often in this chapter (and beyond) in one guise or another. The cosmopolitan ideal is universalist and fundamentally egalitarian. Universalism is the idea that everyone counts morally in virtue of being a person, while egalitarianism is the view that every person counts for the same. This doctrine is most clearly expressed, in the modern era, in Kant’s moral philosophy—deontology— which puts the dignity of rational human nature at the center of our conceptions of value. We must treat all other agents with respect because they are all rational centers of agency. They are all capable of setting ends for themselves and finding

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the means to achieve those ends, and our duty is therefore to allow this capacity for autonomy to unfold on its own terms in each individual. Cosmopolitanism is ideally suited to provide a foundation for human rights. We can see this clearly by examing what Simon Caney takes to be the four key features of rights: • • • •

They refer to those protections that humans are owed just in virtue of being human They are thresholds, i.e., they specify a bottom below which people should not be allowed to sink They provide universal protection Their enforcement by governments has priority over such goals as the promotion of efficiency or maximizing welfare4

There’s much more that could be said about this list but to a large extent it speaks for itself. Our immediate focus here is the connection between rights as special protections for the exercise of basic capacities and climate change as a threat to those capacities. Caney goes on to show that climate change poses a clear threat to life, health and subsistence and thus violates the rights of its victims on that score alone. This is quite a slim list of rights-violations, but Caney’s point is to show that even someone who is a minimalist about rights should accept the notion that strong action on climate change is required. That is, Caney invokes only negative rights and no positive rights. Since it threatens to deprive people of life, basic health and subsistence climate change is an interference in people’s lives, the ultimate effect of which may be to make them sink below a certain material level of well-being. Since almost everyone believes that governments should not violate these negative rights (whatever they think about positive rights) the argument has broad appeal. If we want, we can add some of Nussbaum’s capabilities to the list of things threatened by climate change—economic rights and solidarity-based rights are very important in Europe and Asia, for instance—but the point is that we do not require appeal to these capabilities and rights in this case. If nearly everyone agrees that negative rights are morally inviolable, and that climate change is a clear threat to them, then we should be able to achieve broad consensus on strong mitigation measures. Moral cosmopolitanism in the form of a commitment to protect human rights is very far-reaching. It allows us to say that we have a duty to refrain from causing climate change as a corollary of the human right enjoyed by others to be protected from the worst effects of our climate change-causing behavior. The discourse of human rights is also difficult to disavow sincerely. Most of us are already committed to it, to some degree. We believe that people deserve protection from the arbitrary exercise of power over them. Most people endorse the general thrust of documents like the UN Charter of Human Rights,

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which recognizes a broad range of protections for all humans from the threats posed to their vital interests by governments. If this is correct, and given the clear threats posed to such interests by climate change, which is itself caused by governments (mostly in the developed world), it is natural to frame climate change as a rights issue. And if climate change is a rights issue, then it is also preeminently a justice issue, because the protection of human rights has always been seen as a matter of justice. Let’s turn next to this crucial topic.

4.3 The ideology of business as usual Justice is, fundamentally, about the proper distribution of benefits and burdens within a political community. If we take justice seriously, then we are concerned to avoid, as much as we can, the harm that comes from the maldistribution of vital social goods. So to say that we care about justice means that we will seek to (a) establish fair procedures in relevant institutions, such as the judicial system (procedural justice); (b) allocate essential and scarce resources fairly (distributive justice); and (c) compensate those who have been unfairly harmed through some previous mal-distribution (corrective justice). In this section we will be concerned mainly with distributive justice and corrective justice. Distributive justice is forward-looking, while corrective justice is backward-looking. In our case, distributive justice is about how to allocate the costs of climate cleanup among the countries of the world. Another way to put this is in terms of how we allocate the remaining fossil fuel stock if we decide to constrain its use dramatically. Since it is, as things stand in the global economy, expensive to run an economy without the use of fossil fuels, moving away from them swiftly will be costly, at least in the shortterm (i.e., until renewables are able to supply the base-load power we require). Decisions like this about the just distribution of costs and burdens will be made, in large part, by reference to claims about corrective justice. It is because some countries have benefited more than others from carbon-intensive industrialization that they must bear a disproportionately large share of costs and burdens to clean up the mess this development has caused. There is thus an important connection between the two kinds of justice—distributive and corrective—in the case of climate change. But we are jumping ahead just a little. Let’s begin with a more basic question, already alluded to in the discussion of rights. Since justice concerns distributing benefits and burdens within a political community we might ask who counts here. What are the boundaries of a political community? The cosmopolitan answer is: anybody whose vital interests are affected by that community’s actions. The scope of justice therefore obviously depends on what resources or goods we are talking about. If it’s access to a national health care plan, then the group in question comprises citizens of that nation. Things can get tricky when questions are asked about differential contributions to the plan based on levels of wealth among the nation’s citizens or about the access claims of immigrants,

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temporary workers, migrants, and so on. But these are special issues and cases within a relatively well-circumscribed system of collective organization. In other words, in most cases the group that is relevant to concerns about justice will be contained within the boundaries of a specific political territory. Nobody asks whether or not citizens of Lithuania, living in that country, ought to have access to Sweden’s health care plan. This is because the vital interests of Lithuanians are in no way affected by the decisions made by Swedes about how much of their national budget should be allocated to health care provision rather than, say, national park maintenance or the military. The issue is entirely contained within the political boundaries of Sweden. However, there are obviously issues that can cross political boundaries and whose resolution has implications for justice or fairness among territorially dispersed people. Carbon pollution is one of them. It respects no political boundaries. CO2 pouring from a coal-fired power plant in China and making its way into the atmosphere can become a problem for Peruvian farmers coping with drought. But modern economies still require access to fossil fuels: we are not going to switch the carbon economy off tomorrow. In short, we require something whose use we must also constrain dramatically and eventually phase out altogether. That is the nub of our challenge. The most important questions for international climate diplomacy therefore have to do with who should get access to a common resource (and how much of it they should get), in this case the absorptive capacities of the atmosphere and other global carbon sinks. We need an agreement to regulate our sink-filling activities, but as we saw in chapter 3 this has been damnably difficult to achieve. The point to emphasize here, however, is that it is a quintessentially international issue (also, of course, an intergenerational one, but we will come to that in the next chapter). That is, it requires an agreement among all countries of the world in order to be effective. Effectiveness here refers chiefly to avoiding carbon ‘leakage’ from one jurisdiction to another. If there were ten countries in the world and nine of them signed a treaty to reduce carbon emissions dramatically, firms in the first nine countries would likely relocate to the tenth (unless they were forced or paid to refrain from doing so), where they could emit to their heart’s content. Net carbon pollution would not be reduced in this case. What we have said so far implies that the decisions of any single country about its domestic energy policies can draw in people from beyond its borders. In other words, just because the atmosphere is a vital but scarce global public resource, such people count morally in a way that ought to affect the deliberations of those making the policies. How should we understand this philosophically? Some have denied that such claims have any weight because they violate a basic principle of state sovereignty. Ever since the treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years War, the default assumption in international affairs has been that individual nation-states ought not to be interfered with by outside powers in matters of ‘domestic’

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policy (including, let’s suppose, energy policy). This made a great deal of sense at the time, since that war was terribly destructive and was both caused and prolonged, to a significant degree, by the Catholic Church’s meddling in the internal affairs of European countries. Of course, the principle is still relevant. It is enshrined in the U.N. Charter, providing a strong presumption against interference by one country in the internal affairs of another. But climate change looks like an issue that defies the logic of state sovereignty with respect to decisions about energy policy. Sometimes, state policies can cause harms that are morally prohibited. Consider Henry Shue’s description of the four conditions that define a prohibited type of harm to outsiders that may be caused by a state’s policies: • • • •

The policies can harm people outside the territories of the state making the policy decisions The governments of the affected states are powerless to block these decisions The vital interests of people are undermined by the policies There are less harmful alternatives available to the state making the decisions5

Shue goes on to show that all four conditions apply to countries like the U.S. with respect to decisions about energy use. The four conditions are necessary and jointly sufficient to establish that the harm in question is morally prohibited. There’s no need to belabor the first three points. We have ample evidence that the profligate use of fossil fuels causes harms across borders, that the governments of affected countries cannot stop this from happening, and that vital interests are at stake. But let’s spend some time with the fourth condition, because it is more complex than might at first appear to be the case. In the case of the U.S. we saw in chapter 3 that the dogged refusal to move away from fossil fuels has come largely in the form of erecting obstacles to a robust and binding global treaty aimed at reducing emissions. But it is also manifest in the unnecessarily slow pace of research and development of renewable energy sources. This has everything to do with the extent to which the government of the U.S. is captive to the Big Oil lobby. But, again, the point also applies, albeit to a lesser degree, to most other countries in the developed world. Canada, for example, has lurched between talking tough about emissions reductions while doing nothing about curbing them on the one hand and outright denial of the problem on the other. The same pattern, with a few twists, has been evident in Australia over the last few decades. We could say that this is simply another example of the naked exercise of geo-political power. But let’s try to be a bit more charitable and construct a plausible rationale for this behavior. What if a party—a particular nationstate—accepts that the first three of Shue’s conditions apply to it but that the fourth does not? This is a good way to frame a common mode of justification

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for business as usual. That is, the claim is often made, in one form or another, that there are no feasible alternatives to business as usual. The harms are not denied in this case, but they are deemed excusable because it is necessary to behave this way in order to protect goods that are equal to or superior in value to the ones under threat by the harms. Is this appeal to necessity convincing? Not very. As Judith Shklar has argued such appeals are a “staple item of ideological discourse everywhere.”6 Ideology is a tool used by vested interests to maintain power. More specifically, it refers to any set of instruments—from moral arguments or alleged divine commands to the control of media sources—whose function is to ‘justify’ the current arrangement of social, economic and political relations. One strategy for accomplishing this is to claim that the arrangement being defended, although it undoubtedly benefits those at the top, is also good for everybody else. Consider in this context the arguments of fossil fuel companies that what’s great about their products is that we all benefit from them, an argument that conveniently leaves out the fact that those on top benefit far more than anybody else. For example, former U.S. Secretary of State and CEO of Exxon-Mobil Rex Tillerson made close to $130 million in salary between 2012 and 2015, and that does not include the deferred stock to which he is entitled. The somewhat grandiose philosophical way to make the point is that ideology portrays the partial or particular as the universal. Arrangements that are in place chiefly to serve a minority are cast as being universally beneficial. Now of course it is possible for an arrangement—an economic arrangement, for example—to be both unequal and to everyone’s benefit compared to some feasible alternative. For instance John Rawls presents a powerful argument to the effect that some economic inequality can be morally justified.7 On the assumption that some people work hard to get ahead of others, and if an arrangement of enforced equality would dampen this incentive, it may be better to allow for some inequality. This would be the case if those at the bottom of the economic order were better off then they would be under strict equality because the incentive to get ahead had allowed for the generation of greater net wealth in the society as a whole—much of which is then redistributed downward through taxation—than the alternative would have done. Whether Rawls’s argument works is not our concern here. The point is that if it does it is largely because those on the bottom really are better off than they would otherwise be and so can, in principle, consent to the arrangement in full knowledge of the workings of the whole economic structure. The justification is therefore not ideological. But the same cannot be said of the attempt to justify the perpetuation of the global fossil fuel regime. Although the citizens of, say, Saudi Arabia or the U.K. might assert that this regime is good for everyone, this is probably because they are wearing the ideological blinders that are standard issue for those at the top of the economic heap. But we may get a different answer from a citizen of St. Martin. In September,

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2017, Hurricane Irma destroyed 95% of that country’s infrastructure. Would this person likely agree with the claim that the continued use of fossil fuels is ‘necessary’? Some in the developed world might claim that it is simply too costly to address climate change robustly, and that it is therefore unreasonable to expect them to do so. As we saw in the previous chapter, Nicholas Stern’s calculations belie this claim.8 Stern, recall, argues that we can do the job of climate mitigation for a cost of 2–4% of global GDP per annum. To put this in perspective, that figure is close to what is spent on the military every year ($2.24 trillion in 2022). Since climate change is emerging as a significant security threat across the globe, it might make sense to divert as much money to preventing it as we already do to coping with other military threats. This amount of money is seen by powerful countries as too much to spend, but objectively it simply is not. One way to appreciate this fact is to focus on the percentage rather than the total it represents. This is because the total can look very daunting when we are talking about large sums—you want us to spend over two trillion dollars a year on climate change?!—though 2–4% of any sum is relatively easy to mobilize in virtue the financial flexibility supplied by the other 96–98%. If I want to buy a new house whose mortgage costs 2–4% more than my current house, I can probably manage this fairly simply by cutting something else—like my monthly cable bill or my somewhat extravagant grocery bill—that represents about that much of the budget. Indeed, this example makes it clear that adjustments like this can often be made with very little pain at all, at least after a short transition period. But if the point holds for a household budget then it does for a global budget as well. The vast difference in quantity of money in the two cases makes no logical difference at all. In short, the amount of money the rich would have to pay to fix the problem of climate change is not onerous. It is a tiny portion of global GDP and is therefore a reasonable burden to assume. Developed countries should not therefore oppose meaningful measures to address climate change on the grounds that they are too costly. But there is likely a darker truth here. What if our reluctance to incur high costs in order to deal with climate change is, at bottom, simply a refusal to tolerate any downward pressure on our current lifestyle? On the eve of the Rio Summit in 1992, George H.W. Bush responded to critics of American consumption patterns by asserting that the American way of life is not up for negotiation. In saying this Bush may have been expressing the views of many people in the developed world, not just Americans. His comments at least have the virtue of honesty. For when we invoke ‘jobdestroying environmental regulation,’ our ‘need’ for more and more oil as well as the infrastructure to transport it, the way we push for emissions reduction targets that are insufficient or that we have no intention of implementing, aren’t we really agreeing with Bush Sr.? What’s allegedly necessary here is our current lifestyle just as it is.

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Unlike my move to a better house, measures that would result in a genuine cleanup of our climate problems are perceived by many people in the developed world as a pure cost, and are considered intolerable for this reason. It is crucial to recognize the extent to which this basic psychological reality has infected our ability to assess the moral situation in an objective manner. Gardiner has encapsulated this sort of worry in the notion of “moral corruption”: the temptation, as he puts it, to “distort our moral sensibilities in order to facilitate the exploitation of our global and intergenerational position.”9 Moral corruption is a difficult thing to counter because it is largely non-rational in character. Addressing it fully therefore goes beyond what philosophy can do. But philosophy is not impotent here. One of the things it can do is show us how it is that our actions are undermining the vital interests of others, and then hope that this insight motivates people to change their behaviors. That is, philosophy can help clarify the ‘who counts?’ question. One of the benefits of doing this is that it can aid us in reassessing the alleged unquestionability or necessity of some of our behaviors. It can help us see through the fog of ideology created by business as usual. If these behaviors undermine the vital interests of others then maybe they are not so necessary after all, or maybe we should at least entertain the possibility that morality requires some sacrifice from us in this area. Let’s look next at the form this sacrifice might take when it comes to cleaning up the climate change mess.

4.4 The tragedy of the commons Climate change, we have seen, is a massive collective action problem. In chapter 8, we will see how prisoner’s dilemma-type problems work at the level of individual consumption choices, thus making the choice to adopt a high-carbon lifestyle look rational. In the area of international climate diplomacy the tragedy of the commons is probably a better trope. The idea is straightforward. A number of parties share an ecologically sensitive natural resource of some kind, whose exploitation provides something of material value to them (e.g., food or fiber). At various points each commoner must make decisions about whether or not to increase his level of exploitation of the resource at the economic margin. Garret Hardin, the originator of the trope, imagined sheep herders co-managing a grassy commons and wondering at the end of some fiscal period whether or not to add another sheep to the flock. Faced with this choice, each commoner reasons as follows: 1 2

The economic benefits of my continued exploitation of the commons accrue to me alone The degradation of the commons—the cost of my increased exploitation— will be spread among all members of the collective

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So, the benefits to me of my continued exploitation of the commons exceed its costs to me Therefore, I should engage in continued exploitation of the commons

If every member of the collective reasons this way, the result is the ruination of the commons. Two further points about the trope are worth underlining. The first is that it is compelling partly because our commoners need not deny the reality of environmental degradation. They are not irrational in that way. The second is that another motivating force for them is the desire not to be left behind in the race to become wealthy. Wealth is seen by the commoners as a zero-sum game: one party’s gain is always another’s loss. If the others continue to exploit the commons and I refrain from doing so, then they will get ahead of me in the all-important job of wealth creation. If anything these two features of the situation make its resolution even more difficult than it would otherwise be. The first implies that simply showing the commoners the facts about the likely environmental effects of their decisions will not be sufficient to cause a change in behavior. They already understand the facts. The second implies that some non-rational factors—the desire for improved social standing, attraction to the material goods that wealth brings, and so on—are at work in their decisions. In can be very difficult to dislodge or alter such motivational forces. How does the trope apply to our problem? Think of individual countries reasoning about whether or not to continue the practice of fossil-fuel based economic development for one more fixed period of time. Nobody need deny the facts about climate change (though of course many do, as we’ll see in chapter 9), but the urge to get or stay ahead of the rest of the pack means the temptations of continued exploitation are hard to resist. So, the emissions reduction targets are set too low or, even if they are adequate, the measures are never implemented at national or sub-national levels. The result is the ruination of the atmospheric commons. These problems are not in principle irresolvable. Where there is rough equality of power and resources among the commoners the latter will devise means—institutional structures, norms of conduct, policing mechanisms, and so on—for avoiding them or resolving them as they arise. More specifically, as Vanderheiden argues, such problems are easiest to resolve when three conditions are satisfied. The first is that all parties are equally responsible for the harm-causing activities; the second is that all parties are equally affected by the harm; and the third is that all are equally capable of addressing it.10 The fundamental problem with international climate diplomacy is that none of these three conditions apply in this area. There is a pronounced rift among nations of the world—broadly, the developed and developing worlds, or the global North and the global South—with respect to historical responsibility for climate change, vulnerability to its worst effects and the capacity to do something about it.

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These considerations would seem to make the issue of justice unavoidable. To clarify this claim, let’s come back to the Paris Agreement. It might be thought that the pledge and review system enshrined in the Paris Agreement finally puts to rest the notion that there should be any disparity among the nations of the world when it comes to mitigation burdens. But that is obviously not the case. On any scenario that is likely to be both fair and effective, developed countries will have to act more aggressively than developing countries, especially in the short term.11 Recall Todd Stern’s claim in Durban that the U.S. will be no part of an international climate agreement that invokes considerations of equity. What precisely did he mean? That every country should do exactly the same in terms of burden sharing? If generalized beyond the stance of the Americans, that position is clearly unworkable. No Indian official will accept a proposal from her Australian counterpart that the emissions reduction burdens of the two countries should be literally equivalent over, say, the next 20 years. In other words, though it has lost some prestige vis-à-vis the concept of commonality, differentiation must remain a central component of any acceptable agreement about burden sharing in this area. And this means that, whatever Todd Stern and his political masters believe, equity is still very much ‘in.’ It is common to talk about the atmosphere’s absorptive capacity in terms of a sink or bathtub metaphor. The idea is that it is a container with a finite capacity to hold some problematic substance, in this case CO2. The container can be overfilled with the substance, with potentially dire consequences. Another metaphor employed in this area is that of a carbon budget. On this understanding, we are allowed to spend only a certain amount of our emissions capital if we want to avoid blowing the climate budget. Either way we put the point—in terms of a sink or a budget—the key idea is that we need to restrain our emissions. This implies, of course, that we can continue to emit at some level in the short term as we work towards the ultimate goal of a carbon neutral global economy. Here is where the justice question emerges. Suppose we determine exactly how much carbon can be released to the atmosphere over the next few decades so that the sink’s capacity is not breached and the budget is not blown. We could then create a corresponding number of emissions permits. But how do we distribute them among all the people of the world as well as generations to come? We’ll postpone the question of future generations until the next chapter and begin to ask the one about the present generation by noting an important distinction. Whether we talk about sinks or budgets we can always ask whether we should distribute permits on the basis of the total sink (or budget) or what remains of it at the point at which we begin the task of distribution. On the assumption that everyone deserves an equal share of this vital resource, the first approach would mean that the countries bearing historical responsibility for loading the atmosphere with carbon—the developed world—will have used a good deal of their share already. On the second

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approach, by contrast, the remaining budget would be split more or less equally among all countries. The first approach would therefore require very aggressive reductions by countries of the developed world, while the second would be much less onerous for them. These two broad approaches to the distributional problem define the parameters of the justice issue.

4.5 Three principles of climate justice It should come as no surprise that representatives of developed countries have tended to downplay historical responsibility. But are they justified in doing so? The main theoretical prop used to support the idea that historical responsibility matters is a principle of corrective justice known as the polluter pays principle (PPP). The PPP has a great deal of intuitive plausibility. Most people agree with the basic notion that we are responsible for fixing the things we ourselves have broken. Insofar as the breakage imposes unjustified costs on others we owe those people something by way of compensation or correction. Because they industrialized first and industrialization has always correlated strongly with the burning of fossil fuels, nobody disputes the fact that developed countries are responsible for the lion’s share of the current stock of atmospheric CO2. This is especially clear if we count historical emissions on a per capita basis. Using that measurement, the U.S., Belgium, Luxembourg and the U.K. are the top emitting countries from 1850 to the present. The only real dispute is whether or not this fact matters morally. According to the PPP, it not only matters but is decisive. Countries like these ones should therefore take on a disproportionately large share of the burden of climate change cleanup. But this way of putting the point invites two broad objections to the PPP. First, if we are talking about responsibility for emissions going back as far as 1850 and asking the present generation to pay up, then we have in effect abandoned the polluter pays principle. This is because present citizens are not in fact those who caused the pollution in 1850 (and subsequent years). According to Simon Caney, making these people pay for those emissions therefore “violates the PPP.”12 We might respond to this worry by arguing that members of the present generation benefit from those past emissions—since they clearly benefit from their countries’ accumulated wealth—and that they should pay up for this reason.13 As Henry Shue puts it, people can clearly prosper materially by being “participants in enduring economic structures.”14 This may implicate them in the harms those structures have caused historically. But notice that we have introduced a second principle of justice: the beneficiary pays principle (BPP). It is importantly distinct from the PPP. Some might object to the BPP because they believe that inheriting the burdens of their ancestors is unjust. After all, they were not consulted about the evidently fateful decisions of their ancestors.15 But they cannot plausibly

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deny that they benefit from the structures about which Shue is speaking, and this might matter morally if the harms produced by the structure are grave enough. This is the same sort of concern evident in the debate in the U.S. about reparations for slavery. The debate is by no means closed, but surely we can appreciate the force of the claim that African-Americans are entitled to some form of compensation for the harms visited on them by the institution of slavery. And anyone who benefited from that institution is morally obligated to provide the compensation. What form such compensation takes is a difficult question—it can range from cash payments to formal apologies or more amorphous gestures of reconciliation—but some formal acknowledgment of the harm of slavery by current beneficiaries of the system is surely in order. This brings us to the second criticism of the PPP, one that also applies to the BPP. We might want to claim that historical emissions do not matter morally because past generations were excusably ignorant of the effects of fossil fuel based consumption.16 The idea here seems to be that their ignorance of what they were doing gets them off the hook morally and that this innocence then transfers down the generations to present beneficiaries of their activities. This is dubious, to say the least. Of course ignorance can sometimes be an excuse for harm-causing action. If I offer a thirsty stranger a glass of water from my tap, not knowing that a malefactor has poisoned the local water source, my ignorance of the latter’s actions excuses me from any moral blame for whatever harm comes to the stranger as result of accepting my offering. But when it comes to climate change excusable ignorance does not extend indefinitely into the past. Americans, for instance, knew about the possibly deleterious effects of climate change as early as 1965, when President Johnson delivered a Special Message to the Congress on Conservation and Restoration of Natural Beauty warning about it.17 But even if we (generously) overlook 1965, the importance of 1988–1994 looms large. Among other developments on the climate awareness front, that six-year span saw (a) James Hansen’s dramatic Congressional testimony to the effect that we should stop “waffling” about the reality of climate change; and (b) the FCCC’s call to prevent “dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system.”18 Ignorance cannot plausibly be claimed after 1994, and GHG emissions have accelerated appreciably since then.19 But even if people in the developed world could plausibly claim ignorance of climate change right up to the present, this might not be decisive. That is, even in this case it might be correct to say that such people should be asked to shoulder a disproportionate cleanup burden. This, if true, would rescue the PPP (and the BPP) from the criticism we are considering. The key here is that people can be held liable for damages even if they are not at fault for them and liability does not depend on knowledge. Liability is about causal responsibility, while fault has to do with the much more complex notion of moral blame.

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Here is how Vanderheiden understands this crucial distinction: [J]ustice [requires] remedial responsibility or liability to be assigned in proportion to causal responsibility, measured by the degree to which various nations have contributed to the increasing concentration of atmospheric GHGs that cause the harm associated with climate change … [T]he polluter pays principle … is concerned only with liability and not with the finding of fault.20 Causal responsibility is the key to this argument. Come back to my potentially harmful glass of water. If after drinking it, the stranger passes out on my front lawn it is plausible to say that I bear a special responsibility to help him out. Because I gave him the water it is up to me to call an ambulance, bring him to hospital or provide him with a place to lie down, call his family, and so on. I’m liable for the harm that has befallen him even if I’m not at fault for it. If you are inclined to doubt this, compare my situation with that of, say, a neighbor across the street watching the whole thing transpire from her window. Owing to the distinct ways in which each of us is related to the causal story of the stranger’s current predicament my duty to aid him seems more pressing than hers. What does this have to do with climate change? As Vanderheiden goes on to show, China and India have roughly 40% of the world’s population but have together contributed around 10% of the stock of atmospheric GHGs. The U.S., by contrast, is causally responsible for more than 30% of this stock while having a 5% share of global population. Strict liability, with no reference whatsoever to fault, dictates that the U.S. should therefore bear significantly higher mitigation costs than China or India.21 Again, this is a claim only about causal or historical responsibility, not about blame. However, even if we confine ourselves to liability in this fashion, the issue gets muddy. This is because a liability criterion obliges everyone to bear the costs of reduction to the extent that they are responsible for emissions. But even very poor countries are responsible for some emissions. Should a very poor country—one whose emissions are devoted entirely simply to keeping its citizens alive, let’s suppose—really be expected to incur climate cleanup burdens? A further distinction can help us with this problem. We might distinguish between those emissions that are essential to survival and those that are frivolous or at least not essential. Driving a gas guzzling car, flying to Aspen for an annual ski trip, and consuming expensive foods shipped from across the world are the source of ‘luxury emissions.’ Burning the fossil fuels necessary to send a child to school, cook a basic meal, and keep the lights on in the house for at least a few hours a day are basic needs, and the emissions they generate are therefore ‘subsistence emissions.’22 Of course, there is bound to be some gray area here, some patterns of consumption that are not clearly about bare survival but do not quite fit the luxury category either. But that

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difficulty should not prevent us from employing the distinction to make the point that, by any reasonable standard, people should probably not be obliged to pay cleanup costs for subsistence emissions. In this case, the PPP and BPP dictate that a country is responsible for bearing some costs only after crossing the subsistence threshold. There is one final wrinkle to add. Sometimes we can be morally required to provide assistance to people even though we are not at all responsible for the harm that has befallen them. We can see this by returning once more to the example of the tainted glass of water. If seeing the stranger collapse I fall into a feint myself, then that watchful neighbor now has a duty to step in and help any way she can. Why? Simply because a harm is occurring, the person causally responsible for it—me—is incapacitated and the neighbor is, by hypothesis, able to prevent the damage from escalating. Similarly, if a hypothetical country became wealthy without having generated any emissions in the process, it may be morally required to help poor nations struggling to cope with the effects of climate change. Why? Simply because the harm is occurring, those who should help out according to strict liability are not doing so, and it is able to help. To complete our picture of the principles of climate change justice we thus need a third principle: the ability to pay principle (APP). According to the APP, a country may be required to bear harm-reducing costs—in order to prevent the damage from escalating, or to compensate its victims, or both— even though it played no part in producing the harm. The reason for this is just as it was with my neighbor: they are able to help out and the responsible parties have not assumed their rightful burden. The main worry about the APP is that applying it looks like punishing the virtuous. Can it really be just to require disproportionate work from those who have gotten wealthy without damaging the climate?23 Of course, in the real world there are no countries that strictly fit this description. All wealthy countries got that way largely by burning fossil fuels. This means that they are strictly liable in accordance with their degree of responsibility for the current stock of atmospheric GHGs. This observation does not make the concern go away altogether. This is because even in a situation in which those required to help out are, to some extent, strictly liable the APP can be invoked to require them to pay more than strict liability demands. This is an especially pertinent concern where some agreement has been worked out among countries to reduce emissions but some major emitter, or a large enough group of smaller ones, refuses to join the effort. U.S. unreliability on Paris, for example, may oblige other wealthy countries to take on a larger burden than would be the case if the U.S. were doing its part in the international effort. In this case obliging some to do more than they would in a situation of universal compliance may seem like a bad bargain for those countries. This is another manifestation of what it means to do climate ethics in a non-ideal world, and we may simply have to bite the bullet here.

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It would have been better if everyone had done their fair share, but if refusing to pick up the slack left by the laggards comes at the cost of climate catastrophe, the more virtuous countries of the world may be morally required to do just this. There is one more large issue to tackle in this chapter. Justice seems to require us to distribute the lion’s share of whatever space remains in the carbon sink to those most in need of it, namely countries of the developing world. Let’s explore the complexities of this claim.

4.6 The right to development Consider, to begin, two interesting facts about India. First, it has the world’s fourth largest repository of coal, coming in at approximately 350 billion metric tonnes. Second, more than 300 million Indians have no electricity. Clearly, India could engineer its way out of poverty relatively simply by building coalfired power plants at a rate similar to that of China in the 1990s and 2000s. The only problem is that it would wreck the climate in doing so. Everyone therefore has an interest in persuading India not to go down this path, but it can hardly be argued that it ought to tolerate widespread poverty among its citizens either. Of course, the issue extends beyond the case of India to the developing world generally. They have a right to develop but we must also avoid dangerous interference in the climate system. What should be done? There’s a genuine dilemma here. Athanasiou and Baer put it this way: We cannot hope to find justice in a world where the poor come to live as the rich do today, for there is not world enough. There will have to be some other kind of solution. There will, indeed, have to be new dreams on all sides, and the rich, in particular, will have to make those dreams possible by learning to share.24 The atmosphere’s absorptive capacity, we have seen, is finite and the sink is filling fast. Assume for the sake of argument that we are very serious about avoiding climate catastrophe and that this means bringing our emissions down dramatically in the coming decades. If the only way for poor nations to develop in the short term is by burning fossil fuels, then this means either (a) that they cannot develop; or (b) that their increases in emissions must be accompanied by even more dramatic cuts in the developed world. Alternatively, we could push hard on the antecedent of this conditional and deny that the only path to development goes through fossil fuels. But that is probably unrealistic since renewable energy sources are unlikely to be scaled up in time to avert disaster. At the scale required to meet the world’s energy demands these are technologies for the middle and farther futures. We should of course begin switching aggressively to them now (on the model of Germany), but also recognize that the relevant data here do not

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inspire optimism. Almost all of our energy—about 87%—still comes from fossil fuels, the remaining 13% split among nuclear, hydroelectric, solar and wind. This means that we are in the very early stages of the required energy transition. Compare this to previous transitions from one dominant energy source to another. According to David Weisbach, the transition from biomass to coal took approximately 130 years while the transition from coal to oil and gas took about 80 years.25 That leaves us with options (a) and (b), above. Can (a) be justified morally? The arguments against it are daunting. Rawls has argued that people ought not to be deprived of goods necessary to live flourishing lives for reasons stemming from bad luck. Nobody deserves to be deprived of access to adequate health care, for example, because she is born into an impoverished socioeconomic class in a society that has systemic issues of class discrimination. Being born poor is, in this case, morally arbitrary. But option (a) would effectively trap billions of people in poverty forever, with no better justification. They would be denied the right to develop many of the capacities required to live full human lives simply because of the bad luck of being born in an impoverished nation in the age of climate change. That is a blatant injustice to those people. Moreover, as Shue has shown, the original injustice of a world split between the rich and the poor can be “compounded” in two ways by climate change.26 First, climate change will make poor countries even poorer as they scramble to pay for damage cleanup or, if this is too expensive, simply leave basic infrastructure—bridges, schools, electricity plants, houses, highways, etc.—to crumble and rot. Second, the injustice is further compounded by the fact that we in the developed world are causally responsible for the first compounding. It would be bad enough to refuse to assist the poor in coping with disasters that were entirely naturally caused but it is more unfair to refuse when we have brought the disasters to their doors. We are evidently backed into a logical corner here. Option (b) is all that remains, but it will require the developed world to make appreciable material sacrifices in order to mitigate climate change as well as assist those in the developing world in the task of adaptation. To put the point starkly, for every tonne of carbon emissions originating in the developing world, the developed world must cut more than one tonne. It will also require us to share green energy technologies we have developed so that as much of the developing world as possible might leapfrog fossil fuels on the path to development.

Chapter summary In this chapter we have examined one component of what many take to be the central ethical issue of climate change: the problem of justice. We began by showing how some philosophers have tried to couch the justice question in the language of human rights. This is a powerful rhetorical tool. Next, we tried to

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clarify how climate change is an example of a prohibited kind of harm perpetrated by some countries on others, and why people in the developed world might resist this sort of analysis. The next task was to characterize the climate challenge as an example of the tragedy of the commons. The point here was to demonstrate that a collective action problem like climate change is difficult to resolve mainly because of the skewed vulnerabilities of those affected by it. This brought us to the polluter pays principle, which appears to be cogent so long as it is supplemented in an appropriate way by two other principles: the beneficiary pays principle and the ability to pay principle. Finally, we looked at the connection between climate change and the right to development, noting the dilemma we face as we seek to combat the former while promoting the latter.

Questions for discussion 1

2

3 4

5

Explain the sense in which climate change is a human rights issue. Should we focus on positive rights or negative rights (or both) in making this kind of argument? Is the polluter pays principle sufficient to establish strong duties on the part of the developed world to shoulder most of the costs of climate change cleanup? Do the supplementary principles considered here—the BPP and the APP—help make the case or do they undermine the PPP? Explain the tragedy of the commons and how it helps clarify what is at stake in international climate change diplomacy. Is business as usual propped up by the appeal to the ‘necessity’ of the current way of doing things, as suggested in this chapter? How does Gardiner’s notion of ‘moral corruption’ clarify the analysis? Is there a genuine dilemma between addressing climate change properly and promoting the right to develop of the world’s poorest countries? What should be done and how do considerations of justice affect the issue?

Suggested reading Steve Vanderheiden, Atmospheric Justice: A Political Theory of Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), chapters 2 & 3. •

A clear and informed analysis of the central philosophical issues surrounding the international climate justice issue.

Henry Shue, Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. •

A collection of Henry Shue’s essays on climate justice. Shue’s work is foundational in this area.

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Stephen Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical tragedy of Climate Change (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2011), Part B. •

International climate justice is one the three ‘moral storms’ structuring Gardiner’s penetrating analysis of the issue.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26

Michael Freeden, Rights (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 7. Martha Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Freeden, Rights, 4. Simon Caney, “Climate Change, Human Rights, and Moral Thresholds,” in Gardiner et. al., Climate Ethics …, 163–177 (164–165). Henry Shue, “Introduction.” In Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1–26 (12). Judith N. Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Rawls, A Theory of Justice. Nicholas Stern, The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 48. Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm …, 8. Steve Vanderheiden, Atmospheric Justice: A Political Theory of Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 82. Vanderheiden, Atmospheric Justice …, 66. Simon Caney, “Cosmopolitan Justice, Responsibility, and Global Climate Change,” in Gardiner et. al., Climate Ethics …, 122–145 (127). Caney, “Cosmopolitan Justice …,” 128. Henry Shue, “Global Environment and International Inequality,” in Gardiner et. al., Climate Ethics, 101–111 (105). Caney, “Cosmopolitan Justice …,” 130. Caney, “Cosmopolitan Justice …,” 131. Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time …, 20. Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time …, 34. Byron Williston, “Climate Change Ethics.” In Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene, volume 4, edited by Michael Goldstein and Dominick DellaSala (Oxford: Elsevier, 2018), 45–52. Vanderheiden, Atmospheric Justice …, 67. Vanderheiden, Atmospheric Justice …, 71. Henry Shue, “Subsistence Emissions and Luxury Emissions,” in Shue, Climate Justice …, 47–67. Caney, “Cosmopolitan Justice …,” 137. Quoted in Vanderheiden, Atmospheric Justice …, 70. Gardiner and Weisbach, Debating Climate Ethics …, 162–163. See also Byron Williston, “The Question Concerning Geoengineering,” Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, 2017, 21(2–3), 1–23. Henry Shue, “The Unavoidability of Justice,” in Shue, Climate Justice …, 27–46.

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5.1 Introduction Matters of international justice comprise only half of the problem of what we owe to other humans in the age of climate change. The other half concerns what we owe people of the future. The current non-existence of such people adds significant complexity to the issue, but in outline the problems are the same in the two cases: how to distribute climate change costs and benefits across a population, in this case a population spread over several generations. How should we think about the interests of future people in our policy deliberations? Why should they count and how much? This chapter examines those questions. We begin with Gardiner’s analysis of how bad things might get for future people under business as usual. Next, focusing on Parfit’s nonidentity problem, we examine why it is so problematic to say we wrong these people by continuing down this path. This brings us to a sustained engagement with a broadly contractarian approach to intergenerational obligations, rooted in the philosophy of John Rawls. We close with some skeptical reflections on this approach to the problem.

5.2 An “intergenerational arms race” We can imagine a scenario in which the problem of international climate justice has been solved to the satisfaction of all current national governments. All have agreed on the interpretation of common but differentiated responsibilities, with developed countries tasking the lead on emissions cuts while developing countries have been assisted in the task of bringing their citizens out of poverty. As Vanderheiden observes, by itself this outcome might nevertheless fall far short of the goal set in Paris of keeping the global climate to 1.5°C above the pre-industrial baseline. In other words, we might achieve full international consensus on the terms of a climate treaty and still blow the carbon budget.1 To believe otherwise is to suppose, against a good deal of evidence to the contrary, that the current generation is robustly committed to protecting the interests of people of the future as opposed to appeasing present citizens. DOI: 10.4324/9781003284925-6

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To appreciate the truth in this, consider again collective action problems like the prisoner’s dilemma or the tragedy of the commons. A key premise of both of these tropes, applied to the problem of climate change, is that all parties prefer the outcome in which “dangerous interference with the climate system” has been avoided. For reasons that should be obvious, climatic stability is in the interests of everyone involved. It is, we might say, collectively rational for everyone to cooperate, which in this case means crafting and abiding by the terms of an emissions reduction treaty. It is worth re-iterating the point made in the previous chapter that this kind of agreement is what makes such problems surmountable in principle. There will always be a temptation for free riding in collective action problems. But so long as the parties involved agree to a system of enforceable rules governing the use of the relevant resources, disaster can be avoided. For example, a group of fishers harvesting fish stocks in an inland lake can agree to be bound by a system that effectively prevents free riding by any of them. This can allow the stocks to be harvested for the lifetime of the fishers, and perhaps their children’s too.2 In other words, although the central problem with collective action problems is the gap between what is collectively rational and what is perceived to be individually rational, this gap can be overcome in particular cases, as with our fishers. However, all of this applies mainly to any present generation. A more difficult problem arises when we extend the analysis to “interactions” among generations rather than within them. Our fishers may have solved the problem of overfishing for a generation or two but nothing in their arrangement guarantees that the fish stocks will remain healthy for many generations to come. In fact, there may be an inverse relation between the length of time covered by the agreement and the power it has to constrain the relevant actions of individuals. The shorter in time the agreement extends, the more motivation the fishers have to refrain from free riding, because they can harvest at a higher rate over shorter time periods. By contrast, if they were forced to consider the health of the fish stocks over a longer period—several centuries, for example—our fishers would need to constrain present harvesting more aggressively. The motivation to abide by the rules would likely wane in such cases, re-opening the gap between collective and individual rationality. This is the complication that arises when we talk (metaphorically) of “interactions” among generations. Gardiner states the problem crisply: in these cases, [i]t is collectively rational for most generations to cooperate: (almost) every generation prefers the outcome produced by everyone cooperating over the outcome produced by no one cooperating.3 Obviously, the “most” and “almost” in this formulation of the problem have introduced a significant new problem because the generation for whom the collectively rational solution is not the best one is any present generation.

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Consider the possibilities applied to emissions reductions. A present generation—ours, for instance—might be living high on the hog with respect to its emissions and the consumption patterns that produce them. In what sense is it in the interest of this generation to curb its consumption? If it did so, it would be incurring a pure cost, the benefits being passed on entirely to people of the future. The same logic applies to a generation suffering the ravages of climate change. As bad as things are for that generation, they would presumably be made worse by the decision to cut carbon emissions. For this generation too such cuts would constitute a pure cost, with the benefits being enjoyed entirely by people of their future. Sticking solely to the logic of collective action scenarios, where is the motivation to reduce carbon emissions supposed to come from in these cases? The problem might get very bad. For instance, if we were serious about ditching fossil fuels we would need to cease building infrastructure for them immediately, but we are not. To take just one example, the government of Canada is both championing the 1.5°C Paris target and expanding the system of pipelines carrying tar sands oil—among the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel products on the global market—from the country’s interior to tidewater. This kind of decision is explicitly intended to extend the reign of fossil fuels for decades to come. Generalize the phenomenon and it is easy to appreciate the untenable position into which we are putting future generations. Climate disasters are going to become more and more intense, increasing the difficulty of adaptation. Any successful technological form of adaptation requires energy—try desalinating water, building seawalls or cooling apartment buildings without it—but this can only be supplied by fossil fuels if that’s all we leave people of the future. It follows that in coping with disaster future generations will make the situation even worse for those coming after them. The problem is iterated down the generations, intensifying for each one of them. For example, faced with a humanitarian disaster as it citizens die en masse from heat exposure, why should the government of India not turn to its abundant coal reserves in order to supply power for air conditioners in every household? This is what Gardiner calls the “intergenerational arms race.”4 Every generation will have to burn more and more fossil fuels in order to cope with climate change disasters, thereby not just passing on the same problem to the succeeding generation but making it even worse for them. Gardiner concludes that our refusal to adopt the measures that would forestall this outcome means that the relation between us and people of the future is a form of tyranny. Because they have been forced by the tyrannical present—us—to “attack” subsequent generations by burning fossil fuels to stay alive, future people apparently cannot be blamed for their actions. After all, they are only defending themselves, aren’t they? And, although selfdefense does not permit anything it gives agents wide moral latitude for action aimed at self-preservation.

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This is a very harsh assessment of us, but it seems warranted. Tyranny describes the most extreme form of domination of one human by another or one group of humans by another. It is an arrangement that wears its wrongness, its injustice, on its face. But is it so obvious that our refusal to bear the costs of mitigation wrongs people of the future? What if that decision actually determines the identity of those people? In that case, shouldn’t they be grateful to us—or at least not blame us—for our fateful decisions? These questions bring us to Parfit’s famous non-identity problem.

5.3 The non-identity problem The notion that future people might despise us for our actions and omissions has philosophical bite only if they are justified in adopting this attitude. They must be able to say, with warrant, that our current behavior wrongs them. Derek Parfit’s “non-identity problem” (NIP) is often invoked to show that this is exceedingly difficult for them to do. The NIP is a conceptual puzzle that poses profound difficulties for everything from procreative ethics to energy policy. The problem has to do with the way in which some of our decisions in the present affect the identity of people born in the future, and how this, in turn, can change the moral quality of our relation to those people with respect to those decisions. To see the problem, notice a disanalogy between such cases and those in which our actions affect people who are distant in space. For instance, the consumer choices of people in the developed world can clearly affect the lives of those in the developing world. In choosing which brand of coffee to buy we might be either abetting a brutal dictator who exploits coffee farmers or supporting fair and sustainable coffee farming practices half way across the world. To the extent that our actions can have such impacts, the merely spatial separation between us and the farmers is of no moral consequence.5 It follows that we can in principle be criticized by those affected by our actions if the latter harm them. They can say, for example, that they are worse off by our actions than they would have been had we acted otherwise (or perhaps not acted at all). The truth of these claims is an empirical matter, but the possibility of such criticism clearly exists. But now imagine a situation in which our decisions affect the identity of the people whose lives they impact. That is, imagine that those people would not have existed absent these decisions. In this case, it is difficult to see how they can criticize us for our harmful choices. Apparently, they cannot say—as could our harmed coffee farmers—that they are worse off because of our decisions than they would otherwise have been. For our decisions were instrumental in bringing them into existence. The only other option for them is non-existence. Let’s see how the argument applies to energy policy. Parfit himself applies it this way, invoking a distinction between two policy choices, a risky policy (RP) and a safe policy (SP). Here is RP:

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Suppose that, as a community, we have a choice between two energy policies. Both would be completely safe for at least two centuries, but one would have certain risks for the further future. If we choose [RP], the standard of living would be slightly higher over the next two centuries. We do choose this policy. As a result, there is a … catastrophe two centuries later, which kills thousands of people.6 SP, by contrast, is the policy that would not have this outcome. Now, some of the details here do not exactly fit our problem. For example, the time-frame is off for the climate challenge and the idea that our choice is a stark either-or oversimplifies things somewhat (recall that the IPCC offers four scenarios). But the thought experiment nevertheless gets to the heart of the challenges we face in our climate policy. The basic idea is that because such policy has the potential to pervade so many aspects of social life, it will change the procreative decisions many people make. Perhaps a government, choosing RP, decides to enhance coal extraction in some part of its territory. Lured by the promise of making big money in a relatively short period of time, a couple decides to put off starting a family for another year or two, so that the husband can go and work in the mines. The identity of people is the contingent product of the exact sperm and egg coming together at the moment of conception. This means that the child our couple would have conceived had the husband stayed at home will not be born, instead giving way to a different child born one or two years later. RP has altered the personal identity of our couple’s progeny. Decisions like this will be made across the social spectrum and, just as importantly, will ramify down the years. Eventually—perhaps one or two centuries on—RP will result in a population that is entirely different from the one that would have existed under SP. With this in mind, let’s formalize the NIP as follows: 1 2 3 4 5

We have a decision to pursue RP or SP and we choose RP. Because it is large-scale, the choice will ramify pervasively into the social world. This will cause different people to be born than would have been born under SP. The lives of the people born under RP will be worth living, meaning that people of the future have been benefited by being brought into existence. Therefore, they cannot blame us for the quality of the world they have been bequeathed since the only other option for them—for example, the world under SP—is non-existence.

From the standpoint of its challenge to morality, there are two key assumptions of this argument. First, it adopts a person-affecting conception of morality. The attitude of blame that the person of the ruined future presumably wants to take

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up against the present generation depends on the notion that we have harmed her, but this is apparently just what she cannot say. Second, it depends on a comparative notion of harm. It makes sense to say that our future victim is harmed in the first place only if she is worse off than she would have been under some alterative scenario.7 Both assumptions have been challenged, so let’s look at the challenges in order. We will also consider a third challenge, focusing on whether or not we can be sure that people’s lives will be worth living in a climate ravaged world.

5.3.1 Person-affecting morality Parfit himself defuses the NIP by rejecting the claims of person-affecting morality in cases like this. In its place he offers an impersonal principle of beneficence, to the effect that RP is a bad choice simply because it produces a world in which people are worse off than the population of the alternative world would have been.8 We can presumably make this determination by looking at net levels of welfare in the two worlds. If it is lower in the world created by RP than it is in the world created by SP, then our choice of RP can be morally criticized. This world is bad even though it is not worse for anyone. The problem with this response, as Parfit himself notes, is that it flies in the face of our intuitions, which are decidedly person-affecting in cases like this. Again, think of this from the standpoint of those suffering in a climate change-ravaged world. Insofar as they are inclined to criticize our decisions at all, it seems unlikely that the target of their moral anger would be our failure to bring into being people other than them. But that is what form their criticism would have to take if Parfit is right: even as their world was falling to pieces because of our choice, they would be forced to adopt the standpoint of the impersonal moral judge comparing net welfare levels in possible worlds. That seems like a bizarre portrait of how humans actually think. To elaborate, consider Fiona Woollard’s analysis of the NIP. Woollard thinks that Parfit’s “solution” to the problem—the comparison of net welfare levels in the two possible worlds—fails because it “cannot account for our intuitions about our reasons to stop damaging the environment.”9 That is, although Parfit’s solution would have us refrain from doing such damage he misunderstands why we think we should refrain. And once we appreciate this, we will see that we really care about are the harms our actions are bringing to future people. This argument, if successful, would help support our intuition that the person-affecting status of our actions is ineliminable. Woollard’s point is based on an alleged distinction between two kinds of cases. In the first case, we are faced with a choice whether or not to refrain from polluting the planet. This is Parfit’s choice between RP and SP. In the second case a volcano will erupt in 300 years, polluting the atmosphere with CO2 and thereby causing many of the same hardships for humanity as would occur with our choice of RP.

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The question is this: would our failure to seek out a way of averting the volcano disaster be morally equivalent to our choice of RP? For Woollard, the choice of RP would be morally worse than failing to avert the volcano disaster. The argument rests on the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing (DDA), according to which, other things being equal, it is morally worse to perform immoral actions than to allow them to happen. The DDA is undoubtedly an element of common sense morality. For example, in debates about euthanasia, we sometimes make a distinction between killing the patient and allowing her to die, suggesting that the former is impermissible, the latter permissible. How can we use the DDA to show that we probably cannot abandon consideration of the manner in which our actions are likely to affect future individuals? The answer is that, according to the DDA, there is something especially bad about the world created by RP, precisely because we chose it rather than simply allowing it (or something morally equivalent) to happen. But we cannot appreciate what makes the choice of RP especially bad if we abandon the person-affecting consequences of it. Its special badness, we might say, is tied essentially to the effect it will have on persons. To test your intuitions here, consider how you would react to two possible time travelers from the future. One of them is coming from the world ravaged by the volcano, the other from the world ravaged by our choice of RP. They are traveling to the present to attack us, in the one case to prevent our choice of RP, in the other to force us to prevent the volcanic eruption. Woollard claims that only one of the attacks is morally justified: the one from the future consequent on our choice of RP.10 As Woollard herself recognizes, this thought experiment cannot ground the DDA because it presupposes the soundness of that doctrine. If we judge that one time traveler’s enterprise is justified while the other’s is not that is only because we have already decided that the DDA is an apt principle to invoke in this context. The fact that the DDA is an element of commonsense morality gives it prima facie weight in our moral deliberations, but it is surely defeasible. In the euthanasia case, for example, consequentialists simply deny that there is a morally important distinction between killing and letting die. What ultimately matters is that the patient’s suffering is alleviated in as timely a manner as possible. Since Woollard has not shown the DDA itself to be justified she cannot rely on it to undercut Parfit’s solution to the NIP. Again, Woollard is employing the DDA to buttress the notion that we require the person-affecting description of, say, RP because without this description we will not appreciate what is really bad about that policy choice. But we can see why we need not assent to this claim given its shaky grounding in the DDA. In any case, what might get lost in this sort of discussion is the fact that Parfit’s solution is probably strong enough to warrant robust policy measures in this area. So long as his solution clearly indicates that we should reduce carbon emissions rapidly—and it surely does—does it really matter that we may be logically prohibited from employing a person-affecting description of our choice?

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5.3.2 The comparative notion of harm Woollard is correct to add that many philosophers are not satisfied with Parfit’s response to the first assumption, the one about morality being personaffecting. But in their critique of Parfit many of these philosophers instead attack the second assumption, the NIP’s comparative notion of harm. The idea here, recall, is that when we say that someone has been harmed what we mean is that she has been made worse off than she would have been under some alternative scenario, i.e., one in which the specific harm-causing action had not been performed. If we are going to reject this notion, we need to be able to say that people can be harmed without being made worse off in the relevant sense.11 Can we insert a wedge between the concept of harm and that of being made worse off? Here’s another thought experiment to help us find the wedge.12 Suppose we choose RP, thus potentially dooming a good portion of humanity in exactly 200 years time to lives of terrible suffering and deprivation. Suppose also that there is a misanthropic and powerful, though not omniscient, demon. He delights in the prospect of our suffering and would be especially pleased if we brought it on ourselves through the choice of RP. But because he is not omniscient he cannot be sure that RP will do the trick. Just in case it fails to produce the effects he longs for, he has therefore decided to intervene in the climate system to produce effects identical to those he hopes will be caused by RP. As it turns out, RP brings the hoped-for disaster so the demon does not intervene in the climate system, instead delighting in what he takes to be the superior spectacle of humanity destroying itself. In this example, future humans have been harmed by RP, but they have not been made worse off than they would have been had we not chosen this policy. This is because the demon was determined to visit exactly the same suffering and deprivation on humanity as RP would cause. So we have a dilemma. Either we say that harms can happen without the victims being made worse off than they would otherwise have been or that this is impossible and in cases like the one just rehearsed no harm has been produced. The idea that no harms have been produced in such cases seems outlandish. There is a direct causal link between RP and the sufferings and deprivations of people 200 years on. That the demon would have intervened in the climate system had RP not produced this result seems irrelevant. We are therefore apparently forced, or permitted, to reject the comparative notion of harm assumed in the NIP. This is a happy result since it allows us to focus on those harms themselves, which brings us to the third kind of response to the NIP.

5.3.3 Lives worth living? The third response is to deny that the lives of most people in the future will be worth living if we adopt RP, here thought of specifically as a suite of policies

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that produce a temperature increase above 2°C. Of course, this does not solve the NIP, because the premise about people’s lives being worth living is simply part of the original hypothesis. However, the suggestion here has the virtue of bringing back down to earth a discussion that has become very abstract since Parfit first introduced it. In particular, the suggestion forces us to confront the NIP in terms of what our current climate forcing implies about our moral relation to people of the future. One way to approach the issue is to notice that, in choosing RP we may be bringing about a state of affairs in which the future population can be divided roughly into two groups. The first are those who judge their own lives to be not worth living. In a stirring account of climate change in the 17th century, the historian Geoffrey Parker describes a world torn apart by repeated crop failures, flooding, war, disease and famine. This is Parker citing a local account of the suffering in Shandong, China: Many people held their lives to be of no value, for the area was so wasted and barren, the common people were so poor and had suffered so much that essentially they knew none of the joys of being alive … Everyday one would hear that someone had hanged himself from a beam and killed himself. Others, at intervals, cut their throats or threw themselves into the river.13 It is worth remarking that this period—the Little Ice Age, as it is called—saw a climate anomaly of just −0.6°C relative to the period 1000–2000. This puts into perspective our current flirtation with an anomaly approaching +4°C relative to the pre-industrial baseline.14 Many of our societies are more resilient and therefore better able to cope with the challenges of adaptation than were most societies in the 17th century (though Parker notes that the Japanese were able to cope quite well). However, (a) this adaptive capacity is not uniform across contemporary societies and (b) the relatively large temperature anomaly we face will produce challenges for everyone. Let’s be honest: anything over 2°C will produce a world rife with existential despair. Surely, many people will judge that their lives are not worth living in this world, a judgment that might be entirely sincere whether or not they actually take their lives. These people will be able to point directly to our actions and accuse us of wrong-doing. In other words, the person-affecting account of morality fits these people just fine, in spite of the NIP. This brings us to the second group, comprising those whose lives are worth living but who empathize strongly with the plight of those in the first group. To appreciate the difference between the two groups and to see how this relates to the NIP, consider Peter Strawson’s discussion of resentment and indignation. These are both hostile moral attitudes we can take up in response to perceived wrongdoing, but they are importantly distinct. Strawson argues that resentment is a reaction to personal wrongdoing, whereas indignation is

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“vicarious,” directed by third parties at perceived wrongdoers on behalf of those who have been wronged directly by them.15 Let us say that people in the first group can feel justified resentment against members of the present generation for adopting RP, while people in the second group can feel justified indignation towards them for this choice.16 This grounds the hostile attitude of (almost) everyone in the future to members of the generation that chose RP. The only people it leaves out of account are the ones who have been only lightly affected and those who don’t much care about the suffering of others. A minority, surely. Further, it makes sense to say that the place our energy policy choices put us on the spectrum of 1.4°C to 4.4°C (in 2100) will determine the ratio of those in the first group to those in the second and also therefore, the ratio of justified resentment and indignation directed by future people at us. The worse the outcome, the more people will be directly affected, and so the more opportunity for resentment there will likely be. Unfortunately, our current trajectory, will lead to a lot of ruined lives, and therefore plenty of scope for feelings of resentment directed by people who judge that their lives are not worth living towards those who brought this upon them. In this section, we have canvassed three broad strategies for avoiding the conclusion of the NIP. It is important to do this because the problem is a powerful challenge to our intuitions about what we owe to future people. If it is correct, then future people have no basis on which to criticize our refusal to act meaningfully to avert climate disaster. Our actions do not wrong them, which means that they cannot blame us for what we do or fail to do. But if they cannot blame us, then aren’t we off the hook morally? Of course, there are plenty of people in the present and near future whose identities will not be affected by our choices. With respect to these people, ordinary moral constraints surely remain in force here and these might be significant enough to warrant aggressive mitigation measures in the present. In that case, the interests of future people—i.e., those whose identities our choices can help determine—will have been taken care of. But we may not be content with this thought. We may think that we have direct duties to future people even if our choices affect their identities. In that case, we will need to lean on the three kinds of arguments examined here (or some combination of them), arguments meant to undermine the NIP, or at least blunt its force as applied to the problem of climate change. With respect to identity-affecting cases, we will, that is, need to argue (a) that personaffecting morality is suspect; (b) that the comparative notion of harm is suspect; or (c) that in the case of climate change the claim that the lives of most future people will be worth living is suspect. Pushing back against the NIP in one of these three ways gives us a basis for moralizing our current behaviors in the right way. This allows us to raise the question of what precisely we should do for future people to help them cope with the effects of climate change. What do we owe the future?

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5.4 The contractarian gambit One way to think about this question is by appeal to contractarian moral theory. Contractarianism grounds our obligations to others in agreements we have with them. If I have hired someone to do a job for me, at a specific cost and by a specific date, then he is required to meet these terms and, if he does, I am required to pay him what we have agreed upon. Though useful as a paradigm case, one way in which this is oversimplified is that contractarian moral theory is, for the most part, idealizing. That is, it attempts to lay out what informed agents would agree to in conditions of ideal communication. That way, considerations that are extrinsic to the agreement—those stemming from various biases or power differentials among the contracting agents—can be weeded out. Though the theory has deep roots in the history of philosophy (a different version of which will be explored in chapter 11), John Rawls provides the most forceful modern version of it.17 Rawls thinks that the principles of justice governing our social lives must be derived from agreements among us. But the process by which we discuss these principles with a view to coming to an agreement about them must be designed in a way that negates the power of morally arbitrary facts about us, facts rooted in what Rawls calls “natural and social lotteries.” How can we do this? Rawls answers by way of a thought experiment whose purpose is to underwrite the egalitarian moral principles of the participants—these are citizens of liberal-democratic societies—by eliminating from their deliberations all sources of unfair or biased reasoning. He calls the thought experiment the “original position” and the device employed in it the “veil of ignorance.” Behind the veil of ignorance participants do not know anything about themselves that is the product of natural and social lotteries: their socio-economic position, their race, their gender, their age, and so on. Since these qualities are the sources of our biases, ignoring them helps the participants arrive at genuinely consensus-based principles of justice. Rawls argues that one of the things the participants will agree on is the “difference principle,” the idea that some economic inequality is to be tolerated so long as those on the bottom are better off than they would be under a system of strict economic equality (we referred to this aspect of the difference principle in our discussion of the ideology of business as usual, in chapter 4). Beyond this, they will all agree that each should be entitled to many social goods: adequate wealth, access to positions of power and prestige in society, and protection of the basic liberties. How does all of this apply to the matter of intergenerational justice? Well, surely one of the things over which nobody has control is when he or she will be born. Surely a person’s precise generational membership is the ultimate product of the natural lottery. So, shouldn’t we make it one of the things about which participants are ignorant in the original position? We can see how helpful this would be in grounding strong duties of savings and

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conservation across generations. If I don’t know which generation I belong to, then I would want to see to it that every generation was reasonably wellprovided for by the generations preceding it in the temporal order. In other words, it looks as though participants in the original position should be thought of as members of an intergenerational polity, whatever else they are. On the assumption that some generations are wealthier than others, but also that behind the veil of ignorance one does not know which generation one belongs to, participants should, it seems, endorse a policy of extreme environmental caution (among other things). This would effectively mean endorsing an intergenerational version of the difference principle. Even those on the bottom of the intergenerational heap would have access to whatever is required for them to live decent lives. Indeed, participants might allow for significant intergenerational inequality so long as each generation was better off this way than they would be under a system of strict intergenerational equality. This, of course, entails that every generation must take steps to constrain itself with respect to behaviors that might degrade the material resources upon which every generation depends. The application to climate change seems obvious. According to Rawls, participants in the original position are not comprehensively ignorant. They know about the state of the world as well as the basics of science and economics. So they are aware of the problem of carbon pollution as well as the connection between GHG emissions and national wealth. Since for all they know they might belong to a generation suffering the effects of catastrophic climate change, should they not endorse strong mitigation measures? Unfortunately, this is where Rawlsian contractarianism fails us, and the failure goes to the heart of all attempts to ground strong intergenerational duties in this form of contractarian moral theory. For Rawls, while participants in the original position do not know what generation they belong to they do know that they are all members of the same generation.18 This seems arbitrary, but it is not: it speaks to a deep feature of contractarian moral theory. The reason for restricting the moral gaze of the participants to members of their own generation is that contractarianism is premised on the notion of reciprocity among members of a political or social group. Here we see the sense in which the whole theory is constrained by key features of the paradigm example, sketched above. The person I have hired is bound to me and I to him in ways laid out in the explicit contract we have brokered. Now that the contract is signed by both parties, we have a rough equality of power over one another: neither side can breach the contract’s terms without penalty. It is this idea that our interests can be affected by the actions of others, and their interests by ours, that makes the metaphor of a contract between generations inapt. For the brute fact is that people in 2100 have no power over us. The implications for climate policy are far-reaching. To see why, let’s return to the logic of the intergenerational arms race, examined just above.

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Suppose we are in the original position and we must deliberate about emissions reductions. As Vanderheiden points out, it is implausible that we would ever endorse such reductions no matter which generation we end up belonging to.19 Remember, we know how the world works, broadly speaking, and so we understand the connections among carbon emissions, industrial development, and the generation of material wealth. We 21st-century inhabitants of the developed world exist in a charmed time and place. Things have never been as good as they are right now and, if we don’t change our ways soon, they probably won’t be again for a very long time. We are living at the apex of industrial civilization. We forget about this sometimes, or simply fail to notice it in the first place. We assume that things must always get better, but this assumption is itself a peculiar psychological feature of apex-dwellers. But now we find ourselves, by hypothesis, in the original position, knowing that such riches are an historical anomaly. We must decide about emissions reductions. If we turn out to be rich we can probably afford them, but why would we bother to incur the cost? After all, we are all members of the same generation. No other generation’s interests count in our deliberations. If we wind up as citizens of the apex that is very lucky for us, but we would have literally no reason in this case to share our wealth with those to come. The real problem, however, is that the odds of being born in this generation are very low. The possibility of belonging to a poor, preindustrialized or un-industrialized society looms large. Why gamble, since if it turns out that you belong to a generation needing to emit carbon in order to develop, your decision to place limitations on CO2 emissions will prevent this from happening? It seems to follow that, as far as contractarianism allows, we cannot justify the strong mitigation measures required to avert climate disaster. Rawls has given us no way of grounding intergenerational duties in the difference principle and the value of moral equality it expresses.20 But he has addressed the issue in other terms. Let’s turn to that discussion.

5.5 Just savings Rawls argues that generations do have future-spanning obligations, claiming it is right that “each [generation] receives from its predecessors and does its fair share for those which come later.”21 This is the basis of the “just savings” principle. Rawls is never very precise about what or how much should be saved according to this principle, but it must be an amount of capital and resources sufficient to preserve just institutions down the generations. Perhaps we can get a better sense of what the requirement is by looking at two distinct ways of criticizing it. The first criticism is that Rawls is asking for too much here, that in requiring us to do what it takes to preserve just institutions and their material prerequisites we are unduly or unjustly constraining the freedom of future generations to shape their own lives. The second criticism is that the

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requirement asks too little of us, that in particular it cannot account for strong duties of environmental preservation.22

5.5.1 The principle is too demanding Some have argued that the just savings principle illegitimately ties people of the future to our conceptions of the good life. Why, it is asked, should we be so concerned to pass on our institutions rather than allowing future people the freedom to develop their own? It is important to remember that in talking of “institutions” here we are including the material embodiments of our conceptions of justice: in the case of liberal democracies, this means universal adult enfranchisement, regular and fair elections, a transparent and rulebound judiciary, guaranteed protection of basic liberties, and so on. It also includes whatever stock of “natural resources” is required to keep the whole thing running smoothly. The commitment to maintaining the conditions of “justice” is meant to catch all of this. The complaint here is that this demands too much of future people, it constrains their choices too much. If this were correct, it would follow that we should not be striving to embody our ideals of justice in relatively permanent institutions. As Janna Thompson has argued, however, we cannot help but foist all of this on future generations. This is because the commitment to justice is “lifetime-transcending”: Justice is a lifetime-transcending ideal. The very nature of justice as a moral concept … requires people to believe that their reasonable, welldebated beliefs about justice ought to be accepted by everyone, including their successors. When they construct institutions of justice they are bound to think that they are building something for their successors as well as themselves.23 It would be odd to think otherwise, to believe sincerely that although the institutions of justice we have inherited and cultivated are good for us, future people might legitimately consider them dispensable. And Thompson seems right about the reason underlying this belief: that there is something universal about the arguments we have been making since the Enlightenment concerning the bedrock ideals of liberal-democratic polities. It does not follow that we should be complacent about these ideals. For example, they have enabled the rise of neo-liberal capitalism, an economic system that is in the process of destroying the biosphere, not to mention creating vast inequalities of wealth among people. It would be a good idea to figure out how the ideals became perverted to allow for this kind of development because this would tell us how to reform the ideals and thus make better institutions, including economic ones. In any case, what is of most importance to our discussion is that if we do think it worthwhile to preserve just institutions,

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we are also required to preserve the “natural resources” required to keep them, and us, thriving. If the institutions cannot function against the backdrop of a ruined biosphere, then we are morally obligated to avoid ruining the biosphere, whether or not this constitutes a “constraint” on future people. This leads us to the second broad challenge to the just savings principle.

5.5.2 The principle is not demanding enough From the standpoint of the just savings principle, the duty to maintain the integrity of the biosphere is minimalist, meaning that it is probably compatible with significant environmental degradation so long as we can find technological replacements for what we degrade or use up (assuming we depend on it). The worry about the just savings principle—captured in the claim that it is not demanding enough—is that it gives us no basis for opposing this trend. The biosphere is super-abundant with life, most of which has no conceivable function in the preservation of institutions down the generations. Much of this superabundance is therefore dispensable in principle. Those who are alarmed by this conclusion argue that we need to go beyond the just savings principle to determine what must be preserved—“saved”—for future generations. Call this the “environmentalist” critique of Rawls. Thompson argues that environmentalism thus construed is too exclusive a concern to expect special promotion by liberal-democratic governments.24 It is not a value endorsed by a sufficiently broad swath of citizens. One of the key requirements of government in liberal democracies is that they must maintain neutrality among what Rawls calls the various “conceptions of the good” held by citizens. Ideally, this prevents the capture of government by narrow conceptions of the good, those held by theocrats for example. Similarly, Thompson believes that we cannot justify allowing government to be captured by the environmentalist conception of the good. There are at least three possible responses to this argument. The first would reject the liberal-democratic approach to this issue, arguing instead that at least when it comes to something as important as biodiversity protection governmental neutrality is overrated. Second, we could accept the principle of neutrality but suggest that in failing to act robustly to protect biodiversity governments are in fact in violation of this principle. This is because the just savings principle depends on the view that only human interests count and that the rest of the biosphere is at best a resource for us. This position, it might be urged, itself implies a conception of the good, one moreover that is very congenial to the expansionist interests of neo-liberal capitalism. Why should we think it justifiable for governments to be captured by this conception and these interests but no others? Third, because climate change is a threat to civilization itself, the moral imperative to undertake strong measures to mitigate it simply does not express a narrow interest. These are measures all of us would endorse were we to

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see the issue unobstructed by ideology. Moreover, the just savings principle is far too weak to support the appropriate measures. This is because it is, Rawls says, a “natural duty” involving an obligation “to further just arrangements not yet established, at least when this can be done without too much cost to ourselves.”25 The invocation of subjective cost assessments is bound to produce mischief in the context of the climate crisis. For much of this and the previous chapter we have been pointing to the way in which citizens of the developed world tend to have a skewed view of costs. There are numerous reasons for this, which we do not need to repeat here. For now, the important point is just that the skewing exists and is likely to make us especially stingy in providing for future generations. The just savings principle licenses such stinginess, and will therefore permit the ruination of the global climate. To avoid this outcome, Rawls would need to provide an objective account of the distinction between reasonable and unreasonable costs. This he does not provide, and it is hard to see how he possibly could. For doing so would seem to require bringing future people into the original position so that their interests could be properly represented in the present.

5.6 Beyond the contract? We seem to have arrived at an impasse. Contractarian theory is attractive because it provides a clear and compelling account of what motivates agents: they are signatories to an agreement with other agents, or at least they would be in ideal conditions, and their self-interest is furthered by abiding by the terms of the contract. But the theory looks too weak to give us guidance on a problem like climate change. Again, the problem is not just with Rawls, but with the very structure of contractarian moral theory as it applies to our relation to future generations. Consider this remark by Mark Rowlands: Those who fall outside the scope of the contract fall outside the scope of civilization. They lie outside the boundaries of morality. You have no obligations to those who are significantly weaker than you. That is the consequence of the contractual view of civilization.26 Rowlands is talking about non-human animals here, but the point applies to future people just as well. They are powerless with respect to us, and this places them, in Rowland’s terminology, outside the bounds of civilization. The contractarian framing of the issue gives us permission to do anything we want to them. Let’s close the chapter with two broad ways of responding to this problem. The first attempts to answer it by revising our thinking about who belongs in the “scope of the contract”; the second accepts the criticism of contractarianism, suggesting that we need a different moral theory to make sense of our intergenerational duties.

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The first response to the challenge brings us back to Thompson’s notion of “lifetime-transcending interests.” Samuel Scheffler has made much the same point, arguing that we all have an interest in how the “afterlife”—his word for the future without us, not a different world to which we escape when we die—goes.27 In particular, we have a reason to care about how our important projects are brought to fruition by future people. We might think of a church that takes several generations to build, or the search for a cure to cancer. Or take the interest in promoting justice. We might believe that this is an ongoing project, one that will never be fully complete but that will require the work of generation after generation. In these cases, we should say that a necessary condition for these projects to have meaning in our lives is that future people be able to continue them. It follows that we have an interest in seeing to it that they can do this, that their world is not so ravaged that our projects fall to the wayside as future people scramble to survive. This thought may be sufficient to ground strong duties of mitigation in the present. It is crucial to see why. We may feel compelled to do this because we need people of the future, which means that some reciprocity has been brought to our relations with them. Without them, our projects would lose all point. If you doubt this, Scheffler argues, contemplate what certain knowledge of an asteroid strike in, say, 30 years would do to your investment in the kinds of projects just mentioned. Would you bother with any of them? Why? Because it reveals our dependency on the future, this thought can bring future people into the charmed circle of civilization, which is another way of saying that their powerlessness vis-à-vis the present has been diminished.28 These ideas may constitute the last, best hope for contractarianism with respect to finding a theoretical ground of our obligations to people of the future. It is difficult to see how some forms of the theory can accommodate them, but there is a broadly Rousseauian type that may fare better in this respect. This possibility is explored in chapter 11. But even that approach might be deemed insufficient, which brings us to the second response to Rowland’s challenge: to give up on the contract altogether. If we do, it is probably because we cannot get around the problem of reciprocity in spite of what philosophers like Thompson and Scheffler have been urging. That is, we might think that the reciprocity between generations offered by reflections on the afterlife and lifetime-transcending interests is simply too shadowy a thing, not material enough, not translatable into the language of real-world power relations. Or at least that it is not sufficient to motivate bold climate action, which is what we are interested in here. Fortunately, we have theoretical options. We could, for instance, insist on a deontological approach to the problem, arguing that future people are (or will be) moral agents and thus are (or will be) worthy of respect. This can act as a meaningful constraint on our actions now. The fact that future people are currently non-existent and, more importantly given our focus in these sections, powerless with respect to us is

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morally irrelevant from the standpoint of deontology. In fact, deontology, expressed in the theory of rights examined in the previous chapter, is in many ways a moral theory for the powerless and dispossessed. At least in comparison with contractarianism, it might for this reason be a good theoretical option for a sound intergenerational ethics. In this chapter, we have extended the analysis of climate change justice begun in the previous chapter by looking at how the topic encompasses future generations. We began by examining the possibility, introduced by Gardiner, that by doing nothing significant about the problem we might be setting in motion an intergenerational arms race. This was meant to emphasize the intergenerational badness of business as usual. Next, we took a step back and asked how it can be that we are capable of wronging people of the future at all. If our actions shape their identities and their lives are worth living, then we have not, it seems, made their lives worse than they would otherwise have been. This is because for those people the only other option was nonexistence. We analyzed three ways of responding to this challenge. Rawls’ contractarianism formed the backbone of the following two sections. We examined, in turn, his “original position” and “just savings principle” to see if either might provide the basis for strong intergenerational duties in the age of climate change. Finally, we asked about the adequacy of the contractarian model to the problem at hand, noting that its failures force us to either revise it or abandon it.

Questions for discussion 1

2 3

4

5

Explain the logic of the intergenerational arms race. Do you agree with Gardiner that generations that contribute to it—apart from ours—are acting out of self-defense? Must morality be person-affecting? Discuss this question with reference to the non-identity problem. Is Rawls justified in claiming that participants in the original position must be thought of as being aware that they all belong to the same generation, even if they do not know which generation it is? Is the just savings principle theoretically well-grounded? Do we have a “natural duty” to save for future people, as Rawls supposes, and if so how far does the duty go? Is it possible to ground duties to future generations in something like Thompson’s “lifetime-transcending interests”? Can these interests be strong enough to do enough for future people to avoid climate disaster?

Suggested reading Stephen Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), Part C.

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One of Gardiner’s three moral storms, and the most engaging aspect of his overall analysis. Seminal.

Samuel Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). •

An arresting attempt to show how we depend on future people to carry on our projects.

Derek Parfit, “Energy Policy and the Further Future: The Identity Problem.” In Climate Ethics: Essential Readings, edited by Stephen M. Gardiner, Simon Caney, Dale Jamieson and Henry Shue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 112–121. •

This got everyone talking about whether, and how, our actions can wrong future people if they determine the identities of those people.

Notes 1 Vanderheiden, Atmospheric Justice …, 111–112. 2 Eleanor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 3 Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm …, 162. 4 Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm …, chapter 6. 5 Thomas D. Bontly, “Causes, Contrasts and the Non-Identity Problem.” Philosophical Studies, 2016, 173, 1233–1251 (1233–1234). 6 Derek Parfit, “Future Generations: Further Problems.” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1982, 11(2), 113–172 (114). 7 Robert Huseby, “Person-Affecting Moral Theory, Non-Identity and Future People.” Environmental Values, May, 2010, 19(2), 193–210 (194). 8 Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 360. 9 Fiona Woollard, “Have We Solved the Non-Identity Problem?” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2012, 15, 677–690 (679). 10 Woollard, “Have We Solved …?”, 680. 11 M. Hanser, “Harming Future People.” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1990, 19, 47–70. 12 The example is mine, but similar examples of the point I’m making here abound in the literature. See, for example, David Boonin, The Non-Identity Problem and the Ethics of Future People (Oxford: Oxford University Press), chapter 3. 13 Quoted in Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the 17th-Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), epigraph. 14 Williston, The Anthropocene Project …, 76. 15 Peter F. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London: Routledge, 2008), 15. 16 Williston, The Anthropocene Project …, 163. 17 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. 18 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice …, 285. 19 Vanderheiden, Atmospheric Justice …, 119. 20 Vanderheiden, Atmospheric Justice …, 119. 21 Rawls, A Theory of Justice …, 291. 22 Janna Thompson, Intergenerational Justice: Rights and Responsibilities in an Intergenerational Polity (London: Routledge, 2009), 88.

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Thompson, Intergenerational Justice …, 89. Thompson, Intergenerational Justice …, 94. Rawls, A Theory of Justice …, 115. Mark Rowlands, The Philosopher And the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness (London: Granta, 2008), 124. 27 Samuel Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 28 Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife …, 41.

6

Jurisprudential issues

6.1 Introduction The discussion in the previous two chapters raises important questions about how determinations of injustice related to climate disruption are to be addressed in the real world. One promising way this is happening is through the law. Thousands of plaintiffs alleging harms from a breach of a duty of care on the part of corporations or governments have either taken their claims to one or another court or sought to raise public awareness through acts of civil disobedience. In this chapter, we will investigate some of the ethical complexities introduced by all of this activity. The focus on human rights is central to these debates and so we begin by making some conceptual connections among human rights, climate litigation, and the realism/idealism distinction. Next, because establishing causal connections between the wrongdoer and the wronged is so central to successful litigation, we examine the new science of extreme weather event attribution. In the final three sections we analyze, in turn, three areas in which legal instruments are being used to redress or bring wider attention to the harms of climate disruption: tort law, international law, and civil disobedience.

6.2 Realism, idealism, and climate litigation One of the most promising approaches to climate change litigation rests on an appeal to the various ways in which climate disruption threatens fundamental human rights. Furthermore, as Paul Gewirtz has remarked, human rights litigation is “the area of judicial activity that most clearly embodies the tension between the ideal and the real.”1 We thus begin the chapter by revisiting the realism/idealism distinction introduced in chapter 2. “Realists,” writes Alison McQueen, “take aim at theories that fail to take seriously the psychological, sociological, and institutional constraints on political action.” The realist is for this reason committed to at least three connected theses: (i) that politics is essentially agonistic; (ii) that it takes seriously the historical, social, and psychological constraints on political action; and (iii) that it prioritizes the demands of order and stability over those of justice.2 What’s most DOI: 10.4324/9781003284925-7

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attractive about realism is that it enjoins us to keep our theoretical feet on the ground. Among other things, this means that we should eschew looking at policy recommendations in isolation from both the social and political matrix in which they arise and from other related policy issues. But it does not sanction neglecting ideals altogether, a key point that becomes clear if we unpack McQueen’s points. The first point, about agonism, we can safely pass over: it is simply the idea that politics is intrinsically combative, a claim that is difficult to deny in a world of scarce resources. This does not deny the importance of cooperation in politics, but it does set the latter within a wider context of struggle and competition. Point (ii) helps us narrow the field of political options in the context of ongoing struggle. A proposed legal settlement that is unconnected to the relevant material constraints is by that fact off the table. Those constraints compel us to take people, including politicians, as they are. However, this cannot be true in an unqualified sense because both collectives and individuals are constituted as much by what they want to be as by what they blankly are. Charles Taylor argues that any “social imaginary” encompasses three elements: existing norms, ideals, and, finally, “some notion of a moral or metaphysical order in the context of which the norms and ideals make sense.”3 Even if, in the interests of parsimony, we are inclined to reject the third element it would be foolish to neglect the second. Politically uninstantiated ideals can be as real as instantiated norms. Only a dogmatically reductive realism would deny this. This interpretation of (ii) forces us to a qualified realism, a move reinforced by point (iii), the idea that politics, including the legal order that scaffolds it, is concerned with the demands of order and security over those of justice. For Bernard Williams, the “first political question” derives from Hobbes: “the securing of order, protection, safety, trust, and the conditions of cooperation.”4 From this arises a “basic legitimation demand” (BLD): the job of the political authority, operating in large part through the legal system, is to secure these goods for its people. The Hobbesian theme is common amongst realist philosophers. Geuss for instance argues that politics has centrally to do with collective decisions aimed at controlling “forms of disorder” that we “find intolerable.”5 The BLD is not a front-of-mind concern for political actors, judges, lawyers and citizens most of the time. It becomes salient only when the collective is pitched into crisis. Because we have failed to curb carbon emissions all signs point toward a future of prolonged crisis. As COVID-19 has illustrated, states will be able to cope with such challenges only through massive deployment of public monies. But such resources are not infinite and conflict over their availability and distribution will therefore be a perennial feature of politics. To be clear, this is conflict over potentially life-saving resources, so it will expose and possibly exacerbate existing divisions—those based in class, religion, race, etc.—among people. In such a world, the BLD will be an explicit object of contestation as people clash over basic matters of existential security.

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As noted, Williams’ invocation of the BLD includes a reference to securing the “conditions for cooperation.” However, in the context of the climate crisis this implies that concerns of justice cannot be separated from the quest for security. This is because there can be no cooperation on adaptation decisions that fails to recognize that climate change is the product of unjust power relations. As we have seen throughout this book, climate change has been caused by the richest people, countries and corporations on the planet while its most catastrophic effects will be visited on those least responsible for it, mainly the relative poor of the global south and Indigenous peoples. If 30 years of failed international climate diplomacy and legal wrangling has taught us anything it is surely that no proposed settlement that neglects these facts has any chance of succeeding and thus of bringing about even a semblance of political stability and security. This accords with what we said about realism in chapter 2: that the best approach to the issue involves locating and sticking to a middle position between extreme realism and extreme idealism. The key point in the present context is that the system of statues and laws is probably the most salient way any society has of expressing and enforcing the desire for stability in the whole political order. It is how the BLD gets codified in practice. If that is correct, and if it is also correct to say that the demands of justice are an ineliminable aspect of any socially sustainable distribution of the costs of climate mitigation and adaptation, then it follows that the concerns of climate justice are of central importance to the BLD and that political realists should embrace them as such. In arguing that governments must do more to curb carbon emissions or that corporations should pay for climate damages, lawyers should not shy away from making moralized appeals to justice and related concepts. Such appeals can be tailored to local norms—indeed this might make them most effective. Consider a recent court case, the decision of the district court of the Hague in Milieudefensie v. Royal Dutch Shell. In 2019, the environmental groups Milieudefensie and Friends of the Earth Netherlands (among other plaintiffs) issued a summons to Royal Dutch Shell claiming that because of its contribution to climate change the company had violated its duty of care under Dutch law. The plaintiffs have demanded that Shell reduce its CO2 emissions 45% by 2030 relative to 2010 levels and achieve net zero by 2050.6 The case is significant because the court sided with the plaintiffs. In 2021, the court ordered Shell to make the required emissions cuts (relative to a 2019 baseline). Shell has appealed the ruling. How should we understand the court’s decision in this case and how does it bear on the topic being considered in this section, the realism-idealism tension? In its initial defence, Shell argued that in failing to comply with emissions caps it was not acting in conflict with any relevant legal standard, written or unwritten.7 But the court denied this was the case, citing Article 6: 162(2) of the Burgerlijk Wetboek (the Dutch Civil Code). Crucially, this

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Article contains a reference to just the sort of moralized conception of justice we have been talking about here, even if it is a conception that is also highly culturally particular. As Laura Burgers sees it the relevant Article … defines what constitutes tortious behaviour, which includes negligent behaviour that violates unwritten law regarding what is betamelijk—that is, seemly/becoming/desirable in societal interrelationships. The central concept in this provision—betamelijk—is laden with normativity. However, what counts as betamelijk should be inferred from ‘unwritten law in societal interrelationships,’ suggesting a more ‘concrete’ approach.8 In other words, the concept of betamelijk is a nice illustration of the way in which we might put into practice the ideal theoretical relation between realism and idealism in the area of climate litigation. If we can generalize the point beyond the Dutch case we will have made some real headway in understanding this important issue. In defending themselves in these kinds of cases companies will often claim that their behaviour is no different from that of any other company and that they are being unfairly targeted because of this. But as Judge Learned hand remarks: Courts must in the end say what is required. There are precautions so imperative that even their universal disregard will not excuse their omission.9 This gives us helpful moral footing in our approach to the climate negligence of states and big coporations. However, it is still the case that with respect to CO2 emissions appropriately precautionary practices are largely ignored by these entities. Moreover, many of the tort cases brought against them for their negligence have either failed or are stalled. One of the major reasons for this has been defendants’ largely successful appeals to the vexed issue of causality. How, they have proclaimed, can we possibly trace the harms caused by climate change to the actions or omissions of specific corporations? As we will see, the tide is turning in favour of plaintiffs on this crucial question.

6.3 Causality and attribution All three topics to be considered in the remainder of this chapter—tort law, international law and civil disobedience—rely to varying degrees on drawing causal connections between the harms of climate change and the actions and/ or omissions of specific corporations or states. So before we deal with these three areas of the law we must analyze this topic further. There are at least two general conceptual issues here, both of which are of the first importance with respect to climate litigation. The first issue concerns the “but for” condition for attributing causal responsibility to someone for a particular outcome. As Arthur Ripstein notes,

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“the basic legal rule for factual causation in a negligence action is that a defendant who has breached a duty of care to a plaintiff is not liable for an injury to that plaintiff unless the injury was caused by the defendant’s breach of the duty of care.”10 If the injury would not have occurred but for the defendant’s actions or omissions then, other things equal, the plaintiff will be in a position to recover from the defendant. The second issue is related to this. It concerns “factual uncertainty” about responsibility for outcomes due to the presence in the causal chain of multiple actors. For example, Ripstein points out that while a boater might lose control of his boat and suffer damages to it on account of the negligent actions of two or more other boaters in the vicinity, it can be difficult for the plaintiff to recover because it is factually uncertain which of the other boaters is responsible for the outcome.11 Now consider climate change harms. It is easy to see how a corporation like Shell could benefit its case by raising both of these issues in an effort to oppose a plaintiff’s claim about the company’s responsibility for a particular outcome like a property-damaging wildfire. It might argue, first, that even though it is a relatively large fossil fuel company, the wildfire would likely have occurred without its contribution to the problem. And it might claim, second, that in any case it is difficult for the plaintiff to prove the relevant causal connection because climate change emerges from multiple sources spread out over time and space. In other words, if successful these defences both undermine the plaintiff’s “but for” claim and introduce significant “factual uncertainty” into our understanding of the relevant causal chain. In practice such arguments have been effective in quashing numerous cases brought by plaintiffs against carbon polluters. Let’s analyse these two issues more carefully. The first is the claim that Shell’s activity is not a necessary part of the harmful outcome, that the latter would have occured even in the absence of such activity. How should we assess this claim? While we cannot possibly treat the whole gamut of theoretical possibilities here, one approach seems especially promising in the case at hand. This is the “scalar” theory of causation, according to which causal responsibility comes in degrees. As Jeffrey Brand describes it: Scalar theories hold that c is a cause-in-fact of e if an only if c is a ‘substantial factor’ in the occurrence of e. Fanny pours ammonia down the kitchen drain while Leroy independently pours chlorine bleach down the bathroom drain. Neither chemical alone is volatile but they combine in the pipes and explode. A scalar theory treats both Fanny and Leroy as causes-in-fact of the explosion. Both contributed, although neither action alone risked an explosion. The law, similarly, holds defendants responsible when they are one of the causes of a harmful outcome, even if not the only cause.12 Neither Fanny’s nor Leroy’s contribution alone is sufficient to cause the explosion because neither substance alone is volatile. Both contributions are

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however necessary: without both the chlorine and the ammonia there is no explosion. We need to emend the case slightly to make it fit climate change, since the latter, unlike the explosion, is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. But remember that we are talking about single extreme events, like the hypothetical wildfire mentioned above. Suppose that this event would not have occured had the global average temperature not passed a certain threshhold. In that case, passing the threshold is equivalent to the explosioncausing mixture of chemicals in Brand’s example. What defendants like Shell are in effect saying is that their case is not like the Fanny-Leroy one, so that a scalar theory of causal liability will not apply to them. That is, they are claiming that their contribution is not necessary to the production of the harmful outcome, that the latter would have transpired entirely without them. Although it might be used to get an individual off the moral hook the claim is dubious for a fossil fuel corporation that in the final quarter of 2022 alone posted profits of roughly $40 billion and which has historically used its vast wealth to push fossil fuel extraction to the furthest reaches of the planet. Together, the world’s major fossil fuel corporations are thus the exact equivalent of Fanny and Leroy in Brand’s thought experiment. Their joint actions have caused a climate “explosion,” evident in extreme weather events like wildfires. It follows that each of these companies is guilty of what Brand calls “contributory negligence” with respect to such outcomes, and that is precisely because those outcomes would not have come about but for their involvement. Of course, all of this presupposes that we can tie the harmful outcomes to the activities of such corporationsin the first place. Perhaps we should not have taken this for granted. Rather than claiming that their activities have not been causally necessary to specific damaging outcomes, what if companies like Shell just said, more basically, that there is no way to establish legally actionable causal connections at all in this domain because the relevant causal chains are simply too complex and tangled? This brings us to the second issue. In a discussion of climate change and the German law of torts, Philipp Semmelmayer makes a point that can get our analysis started: In terms of climate change the question would therefore be: Would a specific event or change occur without the emission of a specific company’s or individual’s GHGs? This view, which is based on a probability analysis, needs to be supplemented by an evaluative assessment—accountability. Accountability therefore is a normative evaluation which is additionally applied.13 There is the strictly causal question—based on probability assessments—and then the normative judgement of accountability. In the remainder of this section we will deal with the first issue only, returning to the second one in the next section on tort law. The causal issue has been advanced tremendously in

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favour of plaintiffs—at least potentially, though not much progress has been made on this front in actual court cases—through the insights of extreme event attribution science, so we will focus here on this development. We can separate two aspects of any such analysis: first, attributing extreme weather events to anthropogenic emissions; and, second, attributing a specific quantity of those emissions to particular corporations. The analysis gets more granular as we move from the first of these to the second. We will consider each in turn. Attributing extreme weather events to anthropogenic carbon emissions proceeds by way of counterfactual analysis, asking whether or not the event would have occurred in the absence of those emissions. The results, which are obtained from running numerous models capturing the gamut of relevant variables in the alternative scenarios, are stated probabilistically. Once the models have been constructed they are run hundreds of times and the resulting data is synthesized in the form of a total picture of the two worlds, the factual one and the counterfactual one. This allows scientists to say whether or not the event in question was more likely because of anthropogenic emissions and, if it was, how much more likely. The result can be stated in terms of the frequency of events of this sort or of their intensity.14 For example, attribution studies have shown that climate change made the UK’s 2022 heat wave 10 times more likely;15 that it made India and Pakistan’s 2022 heatwave 30 times more likely;16 that it made the extreme rains in South Africa in 2022 twice as likely;17 that it made Europe’s 2019 heatwave 100 times more likely;18 that Japan’s 2018 heatwave would have been “impossible” without it;19 and so on. All of this is relevant to climate litigation because events like this cause immense human suffering. But plaintiffs are obviously not going to get very far in having these harms compensated for if the target defendant is simply anthropogenic climate change simpliciter. This brings us to the second level of analysis, saddling corporations with specific shares of causal responsibility for the harms. The ground-breaking work of Richard Heede is crucial here.20 Focusing on the “carbon majors,” Heede showed for example that Chevron is responsible for 3.5% of global emissions in the period studied (1854–2010), Exxon-Mobil for 3.2% and BP for 2.5%. These emissions-shares translate into shares of responsibility for specific climate impacts. Thus Exxon-Mobil was found to be responsible for 3.7% of average global temperature rise and 3.6% of total sealevel rise. And of course it is just a short step from attributing a specific share of such climate impacts to a specific corporation to establishing that entity’s responsibility for the harms caused by these impacts.21 Plaintiffs are making increasing use of this and related research. For example, in 2017 several coastal municipalities in California sued some of the carbon majors for their role in sealevel rise, the effects of which are damaging the municipalities’ infrastructure and negatively affecting the livelihoods of some residents. The municipalities want the carbon majors to pay for the construction of sea-walls, among other things. Similar cases have arisen in New York, Washington State and Colorado.22

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All of these cases are examples of tort law, an area of civil litigation covering the harms caused by one person or group of persons to another person or group of persons. It thus excludes criminal law and contract law but includes suits that individuals may bring against governments (where this is not itself prohibited by statute). Tort law is philosophically and ethically complex and because many of these complexities are relevant to climate litigation our next section examines this tributary of law closely.

6.4 Climate change and tort law The analysis so far, especially the previous section, gives us a considerable head start as we explore the nature of tort law as it applies to climate litigation. That is because, at its most general, tort law addresses “two fundamental questions of morality and social life: how people are permitted to treat each other and whose problem it is when things go wrong.”23 Obviously, this description of the field presupposes a causal relation between the wronged and the wrongdoer, plaintiff and defendant. Heede’s research, and all the research that it has spawned, is seminal in this respect because we are now in a position to link the harms to people from anthropogenic climate change to the actions and omissions of specific corporate agents. We can thus address the two main questions posed above: are corporations permitted to treat people this way and, if they are not, what can be done to redress the harms they have caused? This is one way of addressing the general accountability issued raise toward the end of the previous section. We begin with some conceptual aspects of tort law before considering its application to climate litigation. Tort law covers a range of wrongs for which plaintiffs might seek compensation. The most common of them is negligence, often understood as a legally inexcusable breach of the duty of care by a defendant resulting in some form of injury to the plaintiff. English legal scholar Sir Frederick Pollock put the point this way: All members of a civilized commonwealth are under a general duty toward their neighbours to do them no hurt without lawful cause or excuse. The precise extent of the duty, as well as the nature and extent of the recognized exceptions, varies according to the nature of the case.24 In the case of preventable harms resulting from climate change we have already explored a significant aspect of this problem: establishing a causal relation between the defendant’s actions or omissions and the resulting harms. But how should we understand the wrong for which the defendant is responsible? What makes the action or omission wrong? Numerous theories have been advanced in an effort to answer this question at a general level. We cannot canvas all of them but will instead contrast two of them, a contrast that illuminates the unique wrongs of preventable climate

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disruption. The first set of theories are efficiency based economic analyses of tort law. If an injury has occurred as a result of the market externalizing costs in ways that impose those costs on other people—and this is how economic theories generally understand “negligence”—then the goal of civil action is to rebalance the accounts. On this conception, tort law is entirely forwardlooking, and involves transferring assets from the injurer to the injured in a manner that ideally ensures an optimally efficient allocation of total resources. The injury is what has put the system out of balance since it has, by hypothesis, led to quantifiable economic loss on the part of the injured. The law of torts, then, is simply a neutral mechanism for transferring resources in an optimal way from one social party to another, a mechanism that is triggered by the plaintiff suing the defendant.25 Does this description of tort law fit our intuitions about what is going on in the kinds of cases we are interested in here? Does it explain adequately the moral revulsion felt by so many people about the fact that, as Heede has shown, 90 companies are responsible for over half the cumulative carbon emissions from 1751 to 2010 and just 20 of those companies are responsible for nearly 30% of total emissions in that period?26 This includes emissions in the period from roughly 1990–2010, when everyone knew or should have known about the harmful effects of these activities. We might agree with Ripstein that the problem with the economic approach is that it neglects two key aspects of tort law. The first is that the latter is in place to address, not just some abstract “imbalance” in the general economic ledger, but the fact that one person (a term covering corporate entities) has wronged another. In other words, the economic analysis cannot make sense of the seemingly obvious idea that a lack of respect for persons and an insufficient regard for considerations of justice on the part of the wrongdoer have occasioned the civil suit in the first place.27 The second problem is that the economic analysis blurs the distinction between wronging someone and failing to confer a benefit on them. If rebalancing is the only problem, then why should corporations (or anyone else) not be compelled to help those experiencing some level of loss or injury even if the would-be benefactor did not actually cause the injury? Perhaps such individuals should be forced to assist the injured simply because “the cost of assisting another would be lower than the cost of that person’s anticipated loss.”28 If we find this suggestion counter-intuitive we should probably reject the economic analysis. Note that this does not imply that we should reject every aspect of the economic approach. The decision of the district court of the Hague in Milieudefensie v. Royal Dutch Shell, examined in section 6.2, above, reminds us that forward-looking judgements, which again is what the economic analysis focuses on, are often a key aspect of just resolutions of civil cases. However, it is not the whole story and it is also not obvious that purely economic analysis allows us to understand it properly. Is there a good alternative to economic analysis of tort law? A promising set of candidates with respect to climate litigation (but also more generally)

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are “corrective theories,” which are importantly, though not exclusively, backward-looking. According to Weinrib, the idea goes back to Aristotle, for whom the wronged and the wrongdoer exist in a symbiotic relation. The connection between the two is “transactional,” and we cannot make sense of the notion that there is a situation to be remedied through the mechanism of the law without bearing this in mind.29 Though there is much more complexity to Weinrib’s account than this summary indicates, we can see at once that this way of conceptualizing the issue avoids the two problems that beset economic analysis. First, the transactional nature of any tort case forces us to focus on the persons involved in it. Second, and precisely because of this, the theory gives us way to make a distinction between righting wrongs and simply conferring benefits. Tort law is centrally about the former, not the latter. Even the case of Milieudefensie v. Royal Dutch Shell, which we have defined as largely forwardlooking since the company has been ordered to slash its emissions drastically, can be understood best as a matter of corrective justice. This is because such an understanding highlights the harmful, and therefore tortious, actions of one entity with respect to another: in this case members of both past, present and future generations. This is no mere balancing of the books. Even if courts became more receptive to the causal aspect of plaintiffs’ cases due to advances in attribution science, there is another major hurdle for such cases to surmount. Consider Urgenda v. The Netherlands. In 2015 a Dutch environmental group, the Urgenda Foundation, along with 900 citizens, filed a suit against the government of the Netherlands, claiming that the latter was moving too slowly on emissions reductions. Initially, the Court of the Hague found in favour of the plaintiffs, ordering the government to limit carbon emissions to 25% below 1990 levels, a more ambitious goal than the government’s 17% target. The Court’s found that the existing target was incompatible with the commitments made by the state to do its fair share to keep global temperatures below 2°C. Here, it is the government’s appeal of the ruling that concerns us. The government argued that the Court’s ruling constituted “an order to create legislation.”30 This has become known as the “political question.” The claim, in brief, is that courts ought not to be in the business of forcing governments to make or alter public policy, which is arguably what the lower court ruling in this case was seeking to do. Instead, courts’ rulings should be confined to interpreting existing civil law. This is essentially a separation of powers argument, the insistence that the judiciary stay out of the business of the executive.31 But the higher court rejected the State’s claim, arguing that the lower emissions target violated a duty of care owed by the State to the its citizens. Crucially, it claimed that this is not a case of the judiciary usurping the proper functions of the executive, but rather a breach of the State’s duty as specified by the European Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the terms of which had been integrated into the Dutch legal system. The State appealed

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the ruling of the appeals court but in 2019 the Supreme Court upheld the ruling of the lower courts. From the standpoint of the need to act aggressively to combat the clear and present dangers of climate disruption this is a happy story. But the “political question” is bound to be raised by governments in future challenges to existing emissions reduction and/or adaptation policies. Indeed, in 2018 a federal court judge dismissed one of the California cases considered just above because the plaintiff’s claim was deemed to encroach on the prerogatives of executive power.32 This is a telling outcome because in this case we have a municipality, Oakland, suing a carbon major, BP, with a federal court finding in favour of the latter partly on the basis of the political question. The citizens of Oakland, for their part, might be surprised to learn that the mandate they gave local political authorities to protect their interests had been interpreted in this case as a violation of the separation of powers. The truth is less principled than this: in dismissing the claims of the municipality the federal court was effectively favouring the policy prescriptions of one level of government—the climate-denying Trump administration—over those of another. This was a contest between two levels of government, not two branches of it. What it shows is only that some governments, as well as elements of the judiciary, remain fully in thrall to the carbon majors. The Urgenda case is important because of the extent to which the appeal to human rights was woven into the claims and decisions at various points. Because the threat to human rights is the overwhelming focus of climate litigation in international law, we will consider these two topics in the next section.

6.5 Legitimacy and the Paris agreement One of the most striking features of many of the climate litigation cases that have arisen in Europe over the past 20 years or so is the extent to which the plaintiffs rely on governments’ existing commitments to the basic principles of the international human rights regime which arose in the wake of WWII. Here are just a few examples. In 2020 Greenpeace sued the government of Austria, claiming that the latter’s tax credits on air travel violate human rights due to the emissions they will cause; in 2021 Klimatika zaloba CR sued the Czech Republic for its inaction on climate change and couched this as a rights issue; in 2021 A Sud sued the government of Italy for the same reason; and in 2020 Neubauer et. al. sued the German government, claiming that the latter’s target GHG reduction—55% by 2030 relative to the 1990 baseline—threatened human rights. In all these cases, and there are many more, plaintiffs invoked Articles of either the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) or the European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights (EUCFR) (or both).33 This focus also shows up in climate litigation in the Americas. For example, as early as 2005 the Inter-American Court on Human Rights heard a case brought by Inuit communities against the government of the United States.

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The claim was that the actions of the US in causing climate change were a violation of its obligations under the American Declaration of Human Rights. The remedies sought by the Inuit were far-reaching: … a fact-finding mission; a report finding the United States responsible for violation of the rights protected in the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of man; recommendations that the United States adopt mandatory emissions reduction targets … and ‘any other relief that the Commission considers appropriate and just.’34 The petition failed but it is an especially instructive one because of the light it sheds on the threats posed by climate disruption to the basic rights of the world’s Indigenous peoples. As we saw in chapter 4 it is a relatively straightforward matter to show how climate change poses a threat to human rights such as life health and subsistence; but the above case demonstrates that the threat to specific cultural practices, in particular those of Indigenous peoples, is just as potent. The Paris agreement of 2015 is the most important legal instrument in the international climate regime but there are others accords, conventions and treaties that are crucial as well, most prominently the Kyoto Accord and the UNFCCC itself. The question we explore in this section is the ethical status of these agreements considered as legally salient instruments in international law and how this salience is tied intrinsically to considerations of human rights. Traditionally, philosophers have asked about the legitimacy of such international instruments, for the obvious reason that they seem designed to curtail absolute state sovereignty on certain matters. It is therefore important to remember that, as Tasioulas and Verdirame note, As a matter of positive international law in force today, states are not fully sovereign—i.e., they are not the final arbiters—on matters pertaining to the use of force. In particular, they are not free to develop a set of rules governing the use of force that contravenes the prohibition in the UN Charter, nor do they have any legal means of escaping such rules by withdrawing their consent. The same can be said of other fundamental rules and principles, such as self-determination and human rights.35 So rules like those enshrined in the UN Charter governing the use of force and respect for human rights give states reasons for action that should be understood as ethical constraints on the exercise of otherwise undiminished state power. But why should states accept—i.e., consider themselves bound by—these reasons for action? One approach that will clearly not work is the consent theory of legitimacy. According to this theory, states should uphold the rules and norms if but only if they have consented to do so by signing and ratifying the relevant treaty or

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treaties. But as the above quote indicates explicit consent is not actually necessary to explain the bindingness of these norms. Dworkin, for example, claims that some norms have achieved the status of jus cogens—in English “peremptory norms”—which means that they are fundamental or overriding principles structuring the international legal order. Among these we can place fundamental human rights.36 Dworkin’s own theory provides a useful corrective to consent theories. Dworkin holds that the question of legitimacy can be answered by asking whether or not the norms in question are enforceable, in the sense that they would be upheld by an ideal court. They would be if in adhering to them states both enhanced their own legitimacy and strengthened the international order. Dworkin claims that the ideal court so construed would seek to coercively enforce a broad range of rights and principles, among them encouraging international cooperation on matters vital to all of humanity and upholding human rights.37 But there is a further twist to the theory that is especially pertinent to our understanding of the legal instruments comprising the international climate regime. Dworkin calls it the “principle of salience”: If a significant number of states, encompassing a significant population, has developed an agreed code of practice, either by treaty or by other form of coordination, then other states have a least a prima facie duty to subscribe to that practice as well, with the important proviso that this duty holds only if a more general practice to that effect, expanded in that way, would improve the legitimacy of the subscribing state and the international order as a whole.38 In Dworkin’s view, virtually all the major international treaties, norms and bodies—from the UN Charter to the Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court—have achieved salience in this sense are therefore legitimate.39 It is no stretch whatsoever to add to this list the UNFCCC, the Kyoto Accord and the Paris Agreement. There is of course some fuzziness in determining what number of states counts as a “significant number” such that having achieved it we have crossed the threshold of salience, but if Dworkin claims the UN Charter (which has 193 signatories) is “salient,” then surely so too are the UNFCCC (at 198), the Kyoto Accord (at 192) and the Paris Agreement (at 194). In all these cases there is now universal or near-universal adoption. And what that means, if Dworkin is right, is that even those states that have not signed or ratified any such agreement are nevertheless morally bound by them. The US, for example, was morally if not legally bound by the terms of the Paris Agreement even when the Trump Administration pulled out of it. The missing premise in the argument just sketched is that the emissions reduction targets (and other aspirations) codified in the international climate regime are genuinely required to uphold human rights in the required way or to the required extent. But this is surely beyond dispute by now. Consider the goal of the Paris Agreement to limit warming to 1.5°C. A 2018 IPCC Special

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Report on the differences between that target and the previous 2°C target claims that the lower target could “reduce the number of people both exposed to climate-related risks and susceptible to poverty by up to several hundred million by 2050.” Similar differences apply to heat-related morbidity, ozonerelated mortality and water-stress. In general, it will be much more difficult for people, especially those already most vulnerable to the effects of climate change (like northern Indigenous peoples), to adapt to 2°C than to 1.5°.40 The effects of these climate impacts on basic rights to life, health and subsistence are indisputable. It follows that the Paris Agreement has become a fully legitimate set of norms that is as such binding on all states (this is not meant as a blanket endorsement of the Agreement). It provides states, even those that have not signed or ratified one or more of the legal instruments of the regime, with morally binding reasons for action in the policy spheres of carbon mitigation and intelligent adaption. However, we should probably temper our enthusiasm for these conclusions. There are a few major emitting countries, like Iran, that have not signed the Paris Agreement and are unlikely to be swayed by Dworkin-type articulations of the concept of sovereignty. Authoritarian regimes do not necessarily seek legitimacy in the ways Dworkin specifies and they do not always place the same emphasis on human rights that many other countries do. They are not justice-oriented societies. Realism demands that we take these points seriously. Even so, two points should be stressed. First, Dworkin is, recall, talking only about a “significant number of states” endorsing the relevant norms, not all of them. But if the number is large enough important practical conclusions follow even for the rogues and holdouts. When we are talking about the level of consensus enjoyed by instruments like the UN Charter and the Paris Agreement recalcitrant states might find themselves unable to do very much of consequence in the world. In a hypothetical world in which carbon emissions were being slashed dramatically, for example, Iran will have a hard time finding buyers for its oil. Second, some authoritarian states have in fact signed and ratified the Paris Agreement. Russia has done so, vowing to reduce emissions 70–75% relative to 1990 levels by 2030. And China has pledged to reach peak emissions before 2030 and achieve net zero emissions before 2060. Like all official commitments on the climate front these goals must be taken with a hefty grain of salt (recall the 2022 emissions gap report discussed in chapter 2) but the point here is just that we can interpret the pronouncements themselves as indicating that these regimes likely do see the legitimacy of their rule in part through the lens of avoiding substantial climate disruption. This fits Dworkin’s analysis of the issue.

6.6 Civil disobedience Our final section of the chapter is not about climate litigation under tort law or the status of international legal instruments like the Paris Agreement but

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rather the ethical dimensions of climate-directed civil disobedience. In the fall of 2022 members of groups like Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, Letzte Generation and Ultima Generazione took to defacing great art works like Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait in St. Remy and even a dinosaur display at Berlin’s Natural History Museum. Activists glued themselves to the walls near the paintings or sculptures or dashed soup or mashed potatoes at the artwork. Public reactions to these staged events were almost uniformly negative, many people failing to see the connection between acts of civil disobedience like this and the threat of climate change. The attacks on great art works, none of which were actually damaged in a serious way, follow a long line of climate civil disobedience. In 2011, the eminent climate scientist James Hansen, along with 140 0thers, was arrested for a sit-in protesting the proposed Keystone XL pipeline which would have transported tar sands oil from Alberta to refineries in Texas. The Hansen incident is itself part of a much longer history of civil disobedience, including such iconic events as the Salt March led by Mahatma Gandhi in 1930 and the refusal by many UK citizens in 1990 to pay the poll tax. And of course, speaking of the poll tax, we get the term “civil disobedience” from American philosopher Henry David Thoreau who refused to pay his poll tax on the grounds that the money was being used to support an unjust institution, namely slavery. Thoreau was jailed in 1846 for this refusal. In what follows in this section we will explore the nature of civil disobedience. What is civil disobedience and under what conditions can it be justified? We will then use the insights gained in this analysis to look more carefully at the ethical status of climate protests, taking the art defacers as exemplary. Civil disobedience is the deliberate breaking of a putatively unjust law for principled reasons and the voluntary acceptance of the resulting penalty for doing so. Although there is ample disagreement among scholars as to the precise nature of the phenomenon, the following four essential characteristics recur in most discussions of it. First, it is communicative, a symbolicallyloaded message sent from one person or group to the rest of the political community. Second, it is as such necessarily public: an act of civil disobedience done purely privately or secretly is an oxymoron. Third, it is meant to be non-violent, though proportionate damage to property is often justified. Fourth, the civil disobedient does not seek to evade authorities nor, more generally, to avoid paying some kind of penalty for the action.41 All of these features highlight the key quality of civil disobedience: that the person engaging it is seeking to communicate to the rest of the citizenry that a particular law or set of laws is unjust. This allows us to distinguish civil disobedience from anarchy, for while anarchic actions are aimed at overturning the rule of law as such, civil disobedience accepts such rule and addresses its concerns to particular laws like those upholding slavery or the unsustainable exploitation of fossil fuels.

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Is civil disobedience ever justified? Let us consider briefly Rawls’ influential discussion of this issue. Somewhat paradoxically, acts of civil disobedience are in principle justified for Rawls if they are aimed at strengthening the ties of political obligation that bind members of a just society, and they can do this if they raise awareness of a fundamental unfairness in the law: Civil disobedience is a public act which the dissenter believes to be justified by the common conception of justice by reference to which citizens regulate their political affairs, and for this reason it may be understood as addressing the sense of justice of the majority in order to urge reconsideration of the measures protested and to warn that … the conditions of social cooperation are not being honored. For the principles of justice express precisely such conditions, and their persistent and deliberate violation in regard to basic liberties over any extended period of time cuts the ties of the community and invites either submission or forceful resistance.42 More specifically, Rawls lists three conditions that any act of civil disobedience must fulfill in order to be morally justified. First, it must be aimed at a serious and long-standing injustice and must also appeal to the principles of justice held by most people in the relevant political community. Second, it must be engaged in only as a last resort. If there are alternative ways of addressing the injustice these must be fully exhausted before the law is deliberately broken. Third, it should happen in a way that engages other minority groups that are in solidarity with the aims or principles expressed in the action.43 Although Rawls himself was somewhat stingy in applying these conditions to the real world (he did not think that civil disobedience aimed at abolishing economic inequality was justified, for instance), on the face of it all three conditions appear to be met in the case of civil disobedience on the climate front. First, given the threat to fundamental human rights posed by climate change, the latter is definitely a “serious” injustice. Is it appropriately “longstanding”? Yes, if 30–50 years of policy inaction qualifies as long-standing (and why should it not?). Second, that very history of policy inaction, encompassing (at the time of writing) 27 COP meetings held against the backdrop of continually rising carbon emissions, indicates that the regular levers of policy-making are simply not working the way they should be to address the threat we all face. The third condition is about building solidarity among those threatened by the unjust laws. One way to characterize the actions aimed at classic art works is that they are trying to get people to see connections in the things we value: why, they are symbolically asking, are we so horrified at the defacing of one priceless thing (a Vermeer) and not another (the biosphere)? If it works this can help forge alliances among otherwise disparate groups in civil society (art lovers and climate activists) in pursuit of a common aim.

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Even with these Rawlsian constraints in place we might worry about opening the floodgates, effectively excusing so much civil disobedience that the very stability of the law is threatened. A good way to explore this possibility is through the distinction between stability and flexibility in the law. Stability refers to the law’s universality, the idea that it applies always and everywhere within a jurisdiction. Citizens rightly expect the law to be a reliable guide to behaviour in this sense. On the other hand circumstances might arise in the life of any polity that reveal the injustice of a current law, and we want the law to be flexible in these cases. For example, in 1928 the National Union of Women’s Suffragette’s Societies in Britain encouraged women to disrupt Parliament, chain themselves to railroads, go on hunger strikes after being arrested, and more.44 This was all aimed at overthrowing laws that prohibited women from voting. A just and robust legal system should be flexible enough to allow for actions like these because they are ideally the precursors of substantive change in the positive law. How do we strike the balance between the ideals of stability and flexibility in the law in the case of climate change civil disobedience? A promising way of doing so relies on the legal defence of necessity. An illegal action can be deemed legally necessary if it is aimed at addressing a grave and imminent peril. Analysing the way this has been articulated in the Canadian legal system, Hugo Tremblay picks out three conditions any such claim must meet. First, there must be a “peril, danger or harm that must be imminent.” Second, there must be no “reasonable legal alternative to the course of action undertaken.” And finally, there must be “proportionality between the harm inflicted and the harm avoided.”45 According to Tremblay, these conditions have almost certainly been met in the case of climate change: As science progresses in its ability to demonstrate that continued trends in environmental degradation push ecosystems to the brink of destruction, statutory frameworks for the sustainable management and protection of natural resources appear increasingly futile, and circumstances conform evermore to factual situations where the objective application of necessity’s requirements could result in the successful defence of acts of civil disobedience committed against polluters. In other words, necessity may ultimately offer a defence against the application and enforcement of legal frameworks that, de facto, authorize catastrophic environmental destruction.46 With these ideas in mind, let us return briefly to those climate activists defacing famous artworks. As mentioned, public response to these dissenters has been almost uniformly hostile. It is difficult to see why. These protests are proportionate and symbolically powerful. And not only do the dissenters not attempt to seek evasion of the authorities they literally glue themselves to the

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site, ensuring their capture. Like all good civil disobedience this fact alone represents a deep respect for the rule of law. More importantly, in a world that has made so little effort to halt or even slow down imminent climate catastrophe these modest acts are surely legally “necessary.” To employ Rawls’ language they are meant to bring to wide public attention the fact that climate inaction constitutes a “persistent and deliberate violation” of international and intergenerational principles of justice. Because these violations “cut the ties of the community” they “invite either submission or forceful resistance.” In refusing the path of submission, climate activists engaging in acts of civil disobedience belong to a long and venerable historical lineage attempting to make the rest of us more aware of the core principles underlying the duty of political obligation in a just society. Indeed, given this analysis we might conclude that the art defacers do not go nearly far enough. Perhaps the climate crisis is now so grave that more extreme forms of civil disobedience—mass public protests, refusal to pay taxes or even the sabotaging of fossil fuel infrastructure—can be justified according to the principles laid out in this chapter.

Chapter summary In this chapter, we have examined the ethical dimensions of the law as it applies to climate disruption. The new century has seen a wave of actions brought against alleged climate wrongdoers by their victims. Such actions are either heard in courts or are expressed through civil disobedience. The focus on human rights is central to these actions and the debates they have inspired and so we began by making some conceptual connections among human rights, climate litigation, and the realism/idealism distinction. Next, because establishing causal connections between the wrongdoer and the wronged is so central to successful litigation, we examined the new science of extreme weather event attribution. In the final three sections we analyzed, in turn, three areas in which legal instruments are being used to redress or bring wider attention to the harms of climate disruption: tort law, international law, and civil disobedience.

Questions for discussion 1

2 3

Can concepts like the Dutch notion of betamelijk be used effectively against corporations that are responsible for climate disruption? Are there analogous concepts in your language or community? Can the new science of climate change event attribution do the work required of it in climate litigation? Extending Dworkin’s theory we can say that the terms of the Paris Agreement are morally binding on all countries, even those who did not sign or ratify it. Why is this the case and is it correct?

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Do you agree that the purely economic approach to understanding the tortious wrongs of climate change is contrary to our intuitions about what has gone wrong in these cases? Do the actions of the climate activists who defaced great works of art qualify as legitimate civil disobedience?

Suggested reading Climate Case Chart. http://climatecasechart.com •

An online resource tracking all the developments in every case of climate litigation in the world, helpfully broken down into regions and dispute categories. Crucial reference source.

Richard Heede, “Tracing Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide And Methane Emissions to Fossil Fuel and Cement Producers: 1854–2010.” Climatic Change, 2014, 122, 229–241. •

A ground-breaking work establishing the connection between climate disruption and the activities of the “carbon majors.” Crucial for establishing causation in legal cases.

Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh, State Responsibility, Climate Change and Human Rights under International Law (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2019). •

Connects climate cases to other international bodies and cases dealing with human rights issues. A clear analysis of where the action is as regards holding corporations and governments accountable for climate disruption.

Notes 1 Paul Gewirtz, “Remedies and Resistance.” Yale Law Journal, 1983, 92, 585. 2 Allison McQueen, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 10–11. 3 Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 25. 4 Bernard Williams, In The Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 3. 5 Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 22. 6 Milieudefensie et. al v Royal Dutch Shell, http://climatecasechart.com/non-us-case/milieudefensie-etal-v-royal-dutch-shell-plc/. Accessed October 26, 2022. 7 Ibid. 8 Laura Burgers, “An Apology Leading to Dystopia, Or, Why Climate Change is Tortious.” Transnational Environmental Law, 2022, 11(2), 419–431 (422). 9 Ibid., 425. 10 Arthur Ripstein, “Theories of the Common Law of Torts,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tort-theories/#OtheIssuCaus. Accessed October 27, 2022.

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11 Ibid. 12 Jeffrey Brand, Philosophy of Law: Introducing Jurisprudence (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 134. 13 Philipp Semmelmayer, “Climate Change and the German Law of Torts.” German Law Journal, 2021, 22, 1569–1582 (1575). 14 Nicholas J. Leach, Antje Weisheimer, et al., “How Weather Forecasts Can Spark a new Kind of Extreme Event Attribution,” Carbon Brief (December 2021). https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-posthow-weather-forecasts-can-spark-a-new-kind-of-extreme-event-attribution/. Accessed October 27, 2022. 15 Ayesha Tandon, “Climate Change Made the UK’s 2022 Heat Wave ‘At Least 10 Times More Likely’,” Carbon Brief (June, 2022). https://www.carbonbrief.org/climate-change-made-2022s-ukheatwave-at-least-10-times-more-likely/. Accessed October 27, 2022. 16 Daisy Dunne, “Climate Change Made India and Pakistan’s early 2022 heatwave ‘30 Times More Likely’,” Carbon Brief (May, 2022). https://www.carbonbrief.org/climate-change-made-india-andpakistans-2022-early-heatwave-30-times-more-likely%EF%BF%BC/. Accessed October 27, 2022. 17 Ayesha Tandon, “Climate Change Made Extreme Rains in South Africa’s 2022 Floods ‘Twice as Likely’,” Carbon Brief (May, 2022). https://www.carbonbrief.org/climate-change-made-extremerains-in-2022-south-africa-floods-twice-as-likely/. Accessed October 27, 2022. 18 Daisy Dunne, “Climate Change Made Europe’s 2019 Heatwave Up To 100 Times More Likely,” Carbon Brief (August, 2019). https://www.carbonbrief.org/climate-change-made-europes-2019record-heatwave-up-to-hundred-times-more-likely/. Accessed October 27, 2022. 19 Daisy Dunne, “Japan’s Deadly 2018 Heatwave Could Not Have Happened Without Climate Change,” Carbon Brief (May, 2019). https://www.carbonbrief.org/japans-deadly-2018-heatwavecould-not-have-happened-without-climate-change/. Accessed October 27, 2022. 20 Richard Heede, “Tracing Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide and Methane Emissions to Fossil Fuel and Cement Producers: 1854–2010.” Climatic Change, 2014, 122, 229–241. 21 Zia Akhtar, “Greenhouse Gas Emissions, ‘Event Attribution’ and Locus Standi in Foreign Courts.” Environmental Law and Policy, 2020, 50, 309–323. 22 Anita Foerster, “Climate Justice and Corporations.” King’s Law Journal, 2019, 30(2), 305–322 (310). 23 Ripstein, “Theories of …” 24 Sir Frederick Pollock, The Law of Torts: A Treatise on the Principles of Obligations Arising from Civil Wrongs in the Common Law, 5e (London: Stevens and Sons, 1897), 1. 25 Richard A, Posner, “A Theory of Negligence.” The Journal of Legal Studies, 1972, 1(1), 21–96. 26 Akhtar, “Greenhouse Gas Emissions …,” 318. 27 Ripstein, “Theories of …” 28 Ibid., section 4.2. 29 Ernst Weinrib, The Idea of Private Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 30 Climate Case Chart. Urgenda Foundation v. State of the Netherlands. http://climatecasechart.com/ non-us-case/urgenda-foundation-v-kingdom-of-the-netherlands/. Accessed October 27, 2022. 31 Akhtar, “Greenhouse Gas Emissions …,” 317. 32 Climate Case Chart. City of Oakland v. BP p.l.c. http://climatecasechart.com/case/people-statecalifornia-v-bp-plc-oakland/. Accessed October 27, 2022. 33 Jospehine van Zeben, “The Role of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights in Climate Litigation.” German Law Journal, 2021, 22, 1499–1510 (1507). 34 Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh, State Responsibility, Climate Change and Human Rights Under International Law (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2019), 152. 35 John Tasioulas and Guglielmo Verdirame, “Philosophy of International Law,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=international-law, 3.1 36 Ibid., 4.2 37 Ibid., 4.4 38 Quoted in ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 IPCC, 2018. ‘Summary for Policymakers.’ In: Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/. Accessed November 3, 2022.

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41 Candice Delmas and Kimberlee Brownlee, “Civil Disobedience,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=civil-disobedience. Accessed November 3, 2022. 42 John Rawls, “The Justification of Civil Disobedience.” In John Rawls: Collected Papers, edited by S. Freeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 176–189 (181–182). 43 Delmas and Brownlee, “Civil Disobedience …,” 3.2 44 Caroline Grebbell, “15 examples of civil disobedience (which have made a difference).” Extinction Rebellion. https://rebellion.global/blog/2020/11/03/civil-disobedience-examples/. Accessed November 3, 2022. 45 Hugo Tremblay, “Eco-Terrorists Facing Armageddon: The Defence of Necessity and Legal Normativity in the Context of Environmental Crisis.” McGill Law Journal, 2012, 58(2), 323–365 (340–341). 46 Ibid., 363–364.

7

Nature in the Anthropocene

7.1 Introduction Nature often gets short shrift in philosophical treatments of the ethics of climate change. This is a pity because the damage we are in the process of doing to nature through unconstrained GHG emissions is just as morally problematic as the way our actions and omissions on this issue are affecting humans. In this chapter, we focus on the destruction anthropogenic climate change is wreaking on ecosystems and the non-human species that make them up. The chapter begins by asking why species and ecosystems matter morally. Why are they valuable? The discussion brings us to an analysis of what our duties of species preservation look like in the age of climate change. This is a difficult task because we are now in the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch defined by pervasive human influence in the earth system. In the next two sections, we examine the permissibility of engaging in the sort of “activist preservationist” projects the new epoch seems to demand of us. This is followed by a critical analysis of the claims (a) that the Anthropocene is a welcome moment in human history and (b) that nature is at an end.

7.2 Why species matter We have seen (in chapter 1) that anthropogenic climate change poses a profound threat to many non-human species. What is at stake here from the standpoint of our values? In the history of environmental ethics, it has been common to argue that species and ecosystems—among other things—have “intrinsic value,” a value entirely independent of the human. If the claim is just that the way these things matter is not reducible to how they serve human purposes, it is unobjectionable. However, if it means that these things are somehow self-valuing, then the claim is difficult to support. From the fact that the value of x is not reducible to how humans can use it, it does not follow that x’s value cannot be captured by some other way in which we might value it. Although some balk at the idea, it is hard to see how a world without humans would have any value in it, even though it contained lots of nonhuman life. Humans, as far as we know, are the only genuine valuers in the DOI: 10.4324/9781003284925-8

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universe, and we are therefore forced to ask about the value of species by reference to the modes of valuation we have at our disposal. As Jamieson points out, were we to attempt to describe the value of the world without humans, it seems like we would always refer back to one of these modes of valuation, in the process smuggling ourselves back into the picture.1 This is not meant to settle the issue but pursuing it any further would take us too far afield. So let’s side-step it and instead ask candidly why we think species are valuable or worth preserving. We will look at three ways of understanding this.

7.2.1 Objective value The eminent evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould has argued that species are “nature’s objective packages.” For Gould, a duty of preservation flows directly from this conception of species. It’s not entirely obvious what Gould means by this, but since he is speaking from the perspective of science, it seems likely that what he means is that species have value as potential objects of scientific investigation: By grasping the objective status of species as real units in nature (and by understanding why they are not arbitrary divisions for human convenience), we may better comprehend the moral rationale for their preservation. You can expunge an arbitrary idea by rearranging your conceptual world. But when a species dies an item of natural uniqueness is gone forever.2 Gould has surely hit on something important here. One of the reasons we generally shrink from the idea of expunging species is that they represent biological lineages (often) millions of years in the making. They have emerged victorious from the long struggle for existence and this very fact, we seem to think, should give us pause as we make decisions that are likely to impact them significantly. Other things being equal, surely the appropriate attitudes about them are awe and respect and the default behaviors toward them are constraint and care. However, Gould’s appeal to the objectivity of species does not get us very far, for two reasons. First, we might think very little of destroying a species that is deadly to humans. It is easy to sympathize with the human attempt to kill every last one of those multi-jawed space monsters in the Alien movies, for example. In this case, the objective reality of the species is not a sufficiently compelling reason to preserve it. The same point presumably applies to realworld threats to humans, like deadly bacteria.3 Second, we may be faced with a situation in which an action required to save one species threatens another. Perhaps “rewilding” an area by re-introducing a predator species into it threatens a species native to that place, something lower down the food chain.

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In this case, both species are, of course, objective, which means that this criterion provides no guidance for us. Clearly, we must look elsewhere for the locus of species value.

7.2.2 Economic value The most natural place to begin is with our own interests. Species diversity is key to healthy ecosystems, acting as a kind of insurance policy for them. Because ecosystems are by definition highly interconnected networks comprised of biotic and abiotic elements, harms to ecosystems can cascade throughout them. Climate change, for example, might disrupt weather patterns in some regions so severely that some populations of a species have difficulty finding food. Perhaps because temperatures have risen, they awaken from hibernation a few weeks earlier than normal only to discover that their traditional food source has not yet appeared on the scene. This can make it difficult for the population to feed its young, causing many of them to die. If the problem persists for a few years, and the animals in question cannot migrate to a safer place quickly enough, the species may become extirpated in their current place. The point here is this sort of phenomenon can reverberate throughout the entire ecosystem of which that species is a part, bringing the whole system perilously close to crashing. But biodiversity creates virtuous redundancies in such systems: when one species goes down there’s another to fill its place and the system is preserved. Biodiversity is thus key to ecosystemic resiliency. Now, although we have a tendency to forget the fact, humans depend on healthy ecosystems for their very survival. Food, water, medicines, protection from storm surges, air quality, pest control, and so much more—these are gifts to humans from healthy ecosystems. Recognizing this, economists have attempted to put a monetary value on biodiversity. But this area is rife with uncertainties, and uncertainty is generally fatal to accurate accounting. For instance, decisions about biodiversity protection affect the life world we pass to our descendants and such decisions, therefore, depend on what we think about the values of future people. Not only might future people find a use-value for the species whose value we discount, but they might also, or alternatively, find a reason to value it for non-economic reasons. Were they to learn about the way our activities led to the extinction of polar bears people of the future might be justly critical of us, even if they could point to no economic benefit to them deriving from the existence of this species. Moreover, since we have no idea how wealthy they will be, the prospect of determining accurately future generations’ “willingness to pay” for biodiversity protection—which, if successful, would give us some indication of how much value we should ascribe to it on their behalf—looks hopeless. Economic value is obviously important, but we should resist the erstwhile attempts of economists to convince us that it is the only game in town.

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7.2.3 Aesthetic value Dale Moellendorf has argued that the loss of a species is bad in the same way that the loss of a “genre of art” is. It is the beauty of species—or more precisely of an individual member of a species insofar as it is “a good instance of its kind”—that is of utmost value to us, or ought to be.4 There is no reason to deny the claim that we value nature generally because of its aesthetic qualities, but the approach has problems. One reason for skepticism about it derives from what Glenn Parsons calls the “preservationist’s dilemma.” This has to do with the weight we ascribe to aesthetic considerations in our overall evaluations of what to do when our policy options threaten valuable natural places. Imagine a public building with a beautiful display of lighting, powered by coal extracted through the process of mountaintop removal. The process of extracting the coal has made the world uglier, in part by destroying the fauna and flora that used to live on the mountain. But what if most people judge that the beauty of the building’s lighting outweighs the ugliness of the altered mountain landscape?5 With this example in mind, here’s the dilemma. Either (a) aesthetic valuation is all we have to go on, in which case we will be hostage to people’s shifting and often deplorable conceptions of beauty; or (b) in an effort to avoid this outcome we make aesthetic judgments subservient to other forms of valuation, such as moral evaluation. In the case of (b), according to Parsons, aesthetic considerations become mere “rhetorical” props for more basic kinds of valuation.6 That is not necessarily a bad thing, but the champion of aesthetic valuation might have been hoping for something a little more substantive. In any case, option (b) is surely better than option (a), because of the possibility illustrated in the example just considered. Perhaps we should simply give up on the notion that one kind of valuation is paramount. In other words, we should reject the idea that there is one basic and many non-basic forms of valuation when it comes to nature generally and species diversity more particularly. Why not be open-minded and pluralistic when it comes to valuing biodiversity? There are many ways to value species: economic, cultural, spiritual, aesthetic, philosophical, scientific, and so on. And such values emerge from a large variety of groups: academic researchers, aboriginal groups, recreational enthusiasts, economists, policymakers, religious organizations, ordinary citizens, and more. The more of these values we can invoke in the job of nature preservation the stronger will be the case for adopting the precautionary principle (PP) in this area. In any case, with respect to minimizing the damage anthropogenic climate change is doing to nature all the values just listed will probably converge on a single solution in the short term: as Sandler puts it, “mitigate, mitigate, mitigate.”7 However, since we are not doing this with the requisite urgency, in the longer term assisting species in adapting to climate change is both important and inevitable. Having examined why such assistance might be

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important—i.e., because it expresses our commitments to the value of nonhuman life—let’s focus on the more difficult claim that it is “inevitable.” We begin with some geological stage-setting.

7.3 The Anthropocene Climate change is unfolding against epoch-defining alterations in the planet’s basic workings. We are re-ordering the biosphere. This insight was made possible by the rise and development of earth system science, beginning in the 1970s. A key event here is the establishment, in 1986, of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program. Its mandate was to … describe and understand the interactive physical, chemical, and biological processes that regulate the total Earth system, the unique environment it provides for life, the changes that are occurring in that system, and the manner in which these changes are influenced by human actions.8 The idea that we are now dealing with a single, massively complex system and that human actions have the potential to disrupt this system in discernable and lasting ways provided the impetus for the eventual proposal, first put forward by the scientist Paul Crutzen in 2000, that we have entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. There is as yet no official declaration from scientists that we are in the new epoch, but the idea has spread remarkably quickly through the social sciences and humanities. When we talk about entering a new epoch, we are speaking the language of geology, specifically stratigraphy or the study of the earth’s sedimentary rock layers. Geologists understand the history of the planet as a series of evershorter and more fine-grained demarcations, represented in the Geologic Time Scale. The key way in which these demarcations are made is by noticing changes in the composition of rock from one stratum to the next. For example, if at a certain place in the strata the composition of fossils changes dramatically this likely indicates a mass extinction event, the kind of thing that can radically alter the whole biosphere. Such an alteration may call for a new epoch. The series begins with eons, proceeding next to eras, periods, epochs, and ages. The later terms are nestled within the earlier ones. For example, we are just coming out of the Holocene epoch, which began about 11,700 years ago. The Holocene, in turn, is contained within the Quaternary period and itself contains a number of ages. So from the standpoint of stratigraphical analysis, to say that we have entered the Anthropocene is to claim that humans (the “anthropos” of the Anthropocene) are now laying down traces of their presence in the crust of the earth. Even if we were to become extinct within, say, the next 500 years, these traces—visible in the accumulation of plastics,

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fuel ash particles, carbon dioxide, and methane concentrations, the radiocarbon bomb spike, and more—could in principle be detected by an alien geologist from the far future analyzing the stratum of earth rock dating from roughly the middle of the 20th century. From the standpoint of climate change ethics, it is important not to get too distracted by the purely stratigraphical aspect of this phenomenon. Rather, we need to appreciate the ethical implications of the claim that “the earth system as a whole [is] being qualitatively transformed by human action.”9 Why? Because among other things, ethics is about responding appropriately to risks, and, as Sunstein notes, “risks are parts of systems.”10 We, therefore, need to be aware of how our actions reverberate throughout the larger systems in which they have become enmeshed. From our standpoint, the key message of the Anthropocene is that humans have become responsible for the whole Earth system. To appreciate how momentous this is, think of it in the context of our historically evolving understanding of how we fit into the larger cosmic order. Prior to the modern period (circa 1600) we thought of the earth as the center of the solar system. This was geocentrism, a synthesis of the views of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) and the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy (100–168 CE). It was culturally dominant in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds and throughout most of the Christian period in the West. The notion was especially amenable to the Christian Church because it accorded so well with the biblical emphasis on the special place of humans in the larger Creation. We were, on this conception, the most important part of the divinely created order and so our planet had to be literally at the center of things. All of this changed when Copernicus (1473–1543) discovered that the heavenly bodies revolve around the sun and that heliocentrism is thus the correct astronomical theory. These events might seem a long way from the concerns of environmentalists, but there is a sense in which contemporary environmental awareness is one of many late cultural offshoots of the “Copernican Revolution.” What Copernicus did, most fundamentally, is unseat humanity from its elevated position in the cosmos. The sort of environmental concern that emerges in the 1960s—and that is reflected to a large extent in the field of environmental ethics—is thus “Copernican” because it is aimed in the first place at putting humans in their place vis-à-vis the rest of the biosphere. It is premised on the notion that we humans are part of a larger natural order and that the most pressing ethical task is to find our appropriate place in this larger order, not to simply dominate and exploit it. As with the original Copernican Revolution, it is thus an attempt to infuse our understanding of our place in the whole—whether the cosmos or the biosphere—with a measure of humility. But wait! Doesn’t the very idea of the Anthropocene fly in the face of this evolving self-understanding? Aren’t we now saying that we humans are, in effect, the center of the earth’s system? Isn’t the Anthropocene therefore a

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“pre-Copernican” throwback? We need to be very careful here. To recognize that we have entered a new epoch defined by the human impact on the Earth system is not necessarily to adopt an attitude of arrogance about the place of humans in the whole. We’ll come back to this point in what follows but for now, it will suffice to underline a single basic claim. It is this: we cannot help but shape the Earth system now, so the only remaining question is whether we do so with purpose or haphazardly. Climate change is a shining example of haphazard shaping. The effects we are having on the planet’s flora and fauna are the unintended consequences of rampant industrialization powered by fossil fuels, but nobody intended this outcome. Let’s see what’s involved in more purposeful Earth system shaping.

7.4 Activist preservationism Perhaps the most dramatic discovery our hypothetical alien geologist would make is the sharp alteration in the fossil record between our time and what came before. As we have seen (in chapter 1), we are facing a biodiversity crisis so grave that it rivals the five previous mass extinction events in potential scope. Some have proposed responding to this crisis by actively intervening in ecosystems to save them and the species making them up. Compare this stance to the one that dominated our thinking about species preservation previously, the notion at work in the national park systems of Canada and the USA for instance. Here, the idea was to create a space apart from the human sphere, a space in which plants and animals could be left alone to flourish on their own terms, protected from the most destructive forms of human influence. The point is that the interests of species will be best served by our leaving the places they inhabit alone. This is an oversimplification of the national park system mandate (in both countries), but the point is only to highlight the contrast between a laissez-faire attitude to nature and one that stresses a more activist or interventionist role for humanity in the project of preservation. In the new epoch, the laissez-faire model is obsolete. As Ronald Sandler has noted, climate change is intensifying the threats to biodiversity even as it undermines the manner in which we have traditionally dealt with such threats: Place-based preservation strategies depend upon the relative stability of background climatic and ecological conditions. Global climate change disrupts that stability. To the extent that it does so in a particular location, place-based preservation strategies for the at-risk species that are there are less viable. They cannot preserve the species’ form of life in their ecological context.11 In response to this new reality, we have come to realize that we sometimes need to intervene directly in ecosystems to save their constituent members.

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Ecologists have expressed the commitment to reshaping the biosphere in this context through the following novel preservation strategies: • •

• • • •

Assisted migration: moving populations from one place to another. Rewilding: assisted colonization of multiple species to a new place in order to make it “wilder.” This often involves re-introduction of predator or keystone species. Ecosystem engineering: restoring whole ecosystems to some previous historical baseline state. Conservation cloning: cloning a species in order to conserve it. De-extinction: cloning extinct species from extant DNA. Facilitated genetic adaptation: altering a species’ genetic make-up to assist it in adapting to the effects of climate change.12

These are all examples of what we might call activist preservationism (AP). We will examine one AP scheme—facilitated genetic adaptation—more carefully later in the chapter, but for now, it is important simply to note what they all represent. Proposing them as options for preservation policy is at least an implicit recognition that we are indeed in the Anthropocene, and that we had better learn how to become more conscious and conscientious designers of the biosphere. Now, although they are by definition aimed at preserving species, we cannot dismiss the possibility that AP strategies will also create harms to the biosphere. For example, if we assist a species in migration, perhaps placing it further north because its existing habitat has become too hot, it may outcompete native species for scarce resources. If this leads to the extirpation of the native species, we have effectively made the decision that the introduced species is more important than the native one. On what basis? Similar challenges and dilemmas arise for the other strategies. For example, if we get sufficiently good at de-extinction we will have to decide where to put these reanimated plants and animals. The biosphere is crowded, resources are scarce, and ecosystems are relatively closed networks of energy transfer. With AP we are proposing to redesign large parts of the biosphere as a response to climate change but this will inevitably have its casualties. This fact challenges us to be specific about the values we are defending in the choices we make. However, even if there were no casualties of AP, in this sense, it does not follow that the strategies come with no moral cost. In an influential early treatment of this issue, Robert Elliot argues that we have reason to oppose the “faking” of nature involved in nature restoration projects even where there are no overt harms to other species. The analogy Elliot uses is that of a forged artwork. Suppose you were under the impression that the painting you own is an original Vermeer, when in fact it is an exact replica. Setting aside the issue that you probably paid too much for the forgery, in what sense have you been harmed if nobody, including you, ever finds out that your painting is a fake?

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Elliot claims that the two pieces of art—the original and the forgery— having distinct provenances matters immensely. What you value about your painting is, among other things, what you take to be the history of its coming to be in a certain way, namely by the hand of Vermeer. If this is right then the forgery is, as a matter of fact, less valuable than the original. Similarly, “faking nature” by re-shaping it in the ways suggested involves altering the history of places and species in a way that might cheapen the value of what is created. If one of the things we value most about nature is how it came to be the way it is—expressed in a story about the long evolutionary pathways of its places and species—then replacing this with a new origin story represents a loss.13 If we take worries about faking nature seriously, our response might be to reject all forms of AP. The philosophical rationale for this approach is that it is morally better just to let nature be, whatever the costs of doing so. Elliot gives us one way of grounding this kind of claim, but his argument is mainly about the aesthetic values that are lost in faking nature. Is there a way of grounding our assessment of AP that is more centrally about morality?

7.5 Two moral doctrines In fact there are two. The first is the doctrine of double effect (DDE) and the second is the DDA, which we have already put to work in our discussion of Woollard’s analysis of the non-identity problem in Chapter 5. As we will see, the DDE provides some grounds for thinking that AP is permissible, while the DDA looks like it produces the opposite result.

7.5.1 The doctrine of double effect (DDE) The DDE has its roots in Catholic moral theory but there is nothing intrinsically theological about it. The idea is that there is a fundamental distinction between what an agent intends to do and what comes about as an unintended but foreseeable consequence of what she does. All else being equal, it may be permissible to bring about an unintended but foreseeable state of affairs although it would be impermissible to intend directly to bring about that state of affairs. Is this a well-founded principle? It seems so. The DDE is sometimes invoked as a way of justifying civilian casualties in war. Whereas it is impermissible to intend to kill civilians (to make this the aim of military actions, whether as an end or a means), it may be permissible to kill civilians so long as this is a merely foreseen side effect of some other action. Since some will argue that it is never permissible to kill civilians in war, think instead of one way of responding to the famous trolley problem. A trolley is coming down the tracks and will kill five people who are tied to the tracks just down the line. You can pull a switch that will divert the trolley onto a different track, thus saving the five people. Unfortunately, one person is tied to the track onto which you divert the train and she will be killed as a

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result of your action. Are you permitted to pull the switch? Many people say that you are and the reason given is that whereas you can foresee that one person will die because of your action, you do not intend that person’s death. It is a foreseeable but unintended side effect of your action, an action moreover that is aimed at something good (saving five lives). But is it not implausible in these cases to say that we do not intend the otherwise forbidden actions, the deaths we cause? The deaths just seem so close to the actions we take that surely the only honest way to describe the situation is to say that we intend them. Shouldn’t the DDE itself, therefore, prohibit the actions? Let’s consider a final example, one that is meant to help deal with this problem. Suppose you are with a group of people trapped in a room that is filling with deadly carbon monoxide. The largest person in your group is stuck in the only door, thus preventing everyone else’s escape. It looks as though according to the DDE you should not dynamite the door since there is no way to interpret this action as anything but the intentional killing of the large person. But perhaps we can rescue the permissibility case here. What if you could dynamite an opening just beside the large person, and in this way free yourself and your companions while also killing the large person? Here it looks like the DDE would allow the action because although he is close to the door, the large person is far enough away from it that it becomes plausible to say that his death is foreseen but unintended. Now, we might say that AP is on a moral par with killing civilians in war or diverting the trolley to kill the one person. AP will cause foreseeable harms but in resorting to it we are clearly not intending to produce these harms. But as we have just seen, there may be problems with describing as unintentional the actions involved in the trolley and civilian casualties cases. So it is the final example—the man near the door—that seems most pertinent to AP. This is because for the most part the harms AP causes are close, but perhaps not too close, to the actions that cause them. If we relocate a threatened species, for example, it can take years for harmful knock-on effects to appear in the new habitat. AP is therefore permissible for the same reason that it is arguably permissible to blow a hole near the large person to save everyone else in the room. If we think the DDE is a sound doctrine, and that it fits AP on analogy with the man in the door, then AP looks like a justified environmental practice. But is it a sound doctrine? The intentions of moral agents bear a heavy justificatory load in this doctrine and we might be suspicious about that. From the standpoint of an agent’s moral responsibility for a harmful state of affairs, isn’t the more important consideration whether or not she was part of a causal chain that helped bring about the state of affairs? It might be suggested that the ethically important question is simply whether or not an agent caused, or helped to cause, a harmful state of affairs to obtain. For instance, with respect to any harmful state of affairs, we can ask if the agent helped produce it or simply allowed it to happen. Answering this question in any particular case requires no appeal to the agent’s intentions. If this type of

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consideration causes us to reject the DDE, then the latter will not ground a judgment of permissibility for AP. Is there a reason to jump directly to the other possibility, and declare AP impermissible?

7.5.2 The doctrine of doing and allowing (DDA) This question brings us to the DDA, according to which it is worse to cause a harmful state of affairs than to allow it to happen. As with the DDE, the doctrine does appear to be a well-founded piece of common sense morality, so we should take it seriously. As we saw in the previous chapter it is, for instance, at the heart of a commitment adopted by many national medical associations around the world to oppose active euthanasia (“killing”) while allowing for passive euthanasia (“letting die”). It is a fairly straightforward matter to see how the DDA can be applied to our issue. Climate change, as we encounter it now, is an ongoing causal sequence that will produce a certain harmful state of affairs. The decision to deploy certain AP strategies, by contrast, represents an active initiation of a causal sequence that will also produce a specific harmful state of affairs (among other things, including beneficial states of affairs). So AP is a doing while climate change is an allowing. If the choice is between AP and allowing unabated climate change to wreak havoc on non-human species and ecosystems, we are morally required to refrain from AP. The argument is not obviously implausible. It does not tell us that we should cease combatting climate change altogether, for example. Presumably, we should engage in appropriate mitigation actions to lessen the harmful effects of climate change down the road. But we cannot rely on AP to help us save species in the event of a climatic emergency. Even so, there are at least two significant problems with the argument. First, why characterize climate change as an “allowing” rather than a “doing”? It is true that the current generation is not in the process of initiating climate change in the clear-cut way in which we might decide to initiate a program of AP. The roots of the climate crisis reach deep into the past and most of us have simply inherited a way of going about our lives that is, as it happens, leading to planetary calamity. This can make it look as though we are passive in the sense of that term relevant to the DDA. But our decision to continue burning fossil fuels at current rates and to engage in unsustainable land use practices does initiate future states of affairs for which we appear to be morally responsible. After all, if we refrained from acting in these ways a different, and less harmful, future state of affairs would thereby likely be produced. If anything is clear from the failure to act meaningfully to combat climate change since 1988 it is that we are active agents in the production of harmful states of affairs. Of course, it is crucial to be precise about how this “we” is constituted. Not everyone is equally blameworthy for the production of the relevant harms (as we discovered in chapter 4).

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Second, if generalized in such a way that it becomes a guiding principle of public policy the DDA is probably too restrictive. Consider an analogy put forward by Brian Berkey. A government is deciding whether or not to redistribute taxation to reduce poverty. It can (a) refuse to do so and allow the economy to take its “natural” course, the result of which is that a large number of people are impoverished; or (b) redistribute aggressively, the result of which is that fewer people are impoverished. Assume for the sake of argument that the harms are roughly equal in either case (though this is probably unrealistic). According to Berkey, the DDA, applied in the way we have been doing so far, would prohibit option (b) and counsel option (a). Importantly, the government is not blameworthy for the higher level of poverty this would produce since, by hypothesis, it has merely allowed this to occur rather than doing it. Berkey’s conclusion is compelling: These implications are, it seems to me, unacceptable. The state is no less responsible for the avoidable poverty that exists when it chooses a policy of non-redistribution than it is for similar poverty that exists as a result of its choice of a redistributive policy. Policy making ought to be guided by the aim of establishing background conditions that best promote the values underlying principles of justice, regardless of whether the policies that do so involve state action or inaction.14 What makes the two cases—AP and redistributive taxation—analogous is that although both are aimed at producing good consequences, they will also likely produce some harm. Again, assume for the sake of argument that the harms are roughly equal (in the taxation example, those who would have benefited from a more laissez-faire approach to the economy will presumably be harmed by aggressive redistribution). The DDA prohibits the state from ever being an agent of harm, even where the harm is outweighed by good consequences. That really does appear to be too restrictive. Our consideration of the DDE and the DDA has left the moral status of AP somewhat in the air. While the DDA does not establish its impermissibility, there are also reasons to doubt that the DDE shows it definitively to be permissible. However, it is probably safe to conclude that the case for permissibility is slightly stronger than the case for impermissibility. Does this result provide moral carte blanche to would-be designers of the biosphere? Some think it does and that the opportunity the Anthropocene affords us in this regard should be embraced with enthusiasm.

7.6 Ecomodernism Such enthusiasts come in different guises: the “ecomodernists,” “ecopragmatists,” or advocates of the “good Anthropocene.” For simplicity, let’s refer to them all as ecomodernists. What they have in common is the cheerful

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view that the Anthropocene heralds a new Enlightenment for humanity, a chance to imprint nature fully with human purposes, to recreate it technologically in the image of our best self-conception. It is an opportunity not a calamity. Erle Ellis, for example, has argued that humans have always been responsible “stewards of the biosphere,” and that the Anthropocene finally gives us the chance to extend our essentially benevolent influence to the entire Earth system.15 Ecomodernism’s critics, in turn, are worried that widespread adoption of the term “Anthropocene” will reinstate human arrogance toward the natural order. We can certainly appreciate this worry when confronted by the ecomodernist’s smiling assessment of our current situation. Can such people really be so blind to all that is dark and problematic about a single species—one moreover of dubious moral competence, judging by the last hundred years or so of its history—now working the levers of the entire Earth system? In the interpretation of it offered by ecomodernism the Anthropocene looks like a cancellation or negation of the humility at the heart of the ethical approach to nature that has, as we saw earlier in the chapter, been developing for the past 50 years or so. Better to just ditch the whole idea of the Anthropocene if it invites this sort of hubris. But this is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. For we can retain the idea that we have entered the Anthropocene without believing that there is anything intrinsically “good” about this. The ecomodernist belief that it is good is based on the assumption that we now have—or can at least aspire to have—control of the Earth system so that we can make it over in accordance with our highest ideals. This confuses power and control. Although we now have more power than ever before—this is the central message of the Anthropocene—we have very little ability to predict or control the Earth system over whose workings we are exerting so much power. This is a crucial point.16 Let’s reflect on it a little more carefully. Systems theorists have alerted us to the existence of “wickedly complex” systems. Wicked complexity refers to extreme interdependency among the elements of a system. Consider an example. Recent research has revealed that climate change will likely lead to a marked increase in eutrophication, the process by which oxygen-starved dead zones are created in large bodies of water. Here’s how it works. CO2 emissions lead to higher air temperatures; this increases evaporation, which alters precipitation patterns, causing, in some areas, much heavier rainfalls; in these areas, the rate at which nitrogen is washed from agricultural fields into major waterways increases; the added nitrogen causes blooms of algae; the algae’s decomposers consume the water’s oxygen; finally, other oxygen-dependent species are potentially killed off. The problem is likely to be pronounced in the corn belt of the U.S., but also in India, China, and Southeast Asia.17 The key here, and in the Anthropocene more generally, is the entanglement of human and biogeophysical systems. It can be very difficult to grasp the ethically

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salient connections, but they are there in abundance. For instance, the discovery regarding increased eutrophication means that the decision of someone living in Perth to buy corn-based products originating in Iowa or basmati rice grown in India is connected to so many other events in the Earth system, including, potentially, both the extirpation of some marine species half way around the world and the impoverishment of the humans that depend on this species for food. That is wicked complexity. It cannot be controlled, but it can be approached in a spirit of humility and ethical responsibility. What, at bottom, is the difference between ecomodernists and advocates of AP? Both are proponents of intervening actively in nature through the use of various technologies. The difference is that AP does not necessarily express arrogance and hubris, whereas ecomodernism necessarily does. This point forces us to expand our understanding of the person we are calling “the advocate of AP.” AP is a constellation of technology-enabled environmental practices, which as such might of course be pursued in the arrogant manner of the ecomodernist. The point here is that while an ecomodernist can also be an advocate of AP, the latter’s more responsible advocates are much more apt to recognize the inherent limitations of the practices. By contrast, although they claim to recognize the scope of the challenges we face with a phenomenon like climate change, the ecomodernists are often absurdly optimistic about our capacity to meet these challenges so long as we leave technology and the market free to work their magic. There are two basic errors here. The first is an overestimated ability to appreciate the sort of natural complexity that defines ecosystems. In this regard, the ecomodernists are dangerously ignorant of the science of ecology. The second is a tendency to forget about the extent to which the climate challenge is fundamentally political. According to Clive Hamilton, this second error is closely connected to the ecomodernist’s unwarranted belief in the techno-fix (most of them are big boosters of the nuclear industry, for example): For the ecomoderns, the story of the past and the story of the future revolve around one thing: “Meaningful climate mitigation is fundamentally a technological challenge.” It’s an entire historiography in which the human relationship to the natural world depends essentially on human ingenuity and entrepreneurship. It is not kings, presidents, proletarians or generals who make history—but rather scientists, inventors and engineers, and it is they who will save us.18 Remove the regulatory shackles currently binding the engineers and the positive results will flow freely, assisted of course by an equally unfettered flow of capital. Because we live in a world of skewed opportunities and vulnerabilities, this is a politically naïve position. Because of it, ecomodernists have played right into the hands of climate change deniers, many of whom now style themselves ecomodernists. This convergence is not accidental: both

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groups—the ecomodernists and climate deniers—view environmentalists as their primary opponents. So, let’s speak of the “responsible advocate of AP” in order to distinguish this person clearly from the ecomodernist. Again, the distinction between the two approaches is itself grounded in the more basic distinction between those who recognize the deep limits of our ability to control the Earth system (responsible advocates of AP) and those who do not (the ecomodernists). We can engage in AP out of a deep respect for natural processes. We can seek to keep our technological interventions to the minimum required to preserve biodiversity in some places. We can back off if we judge that our technologies might be going too far. And of course, we recognize that we can do all of this only against the backdrop of a politics deeply informed by considerations of justice. The ecomodernist is not constrained in any of these ways. Coming back to a worry expressed earlier in the chapter, if we bear in mind the point that we cannot control the Earth system, we should not think that the Anthropocene necessarily takes us back to a pre-modern, pre-Copernican, understanding of our place in the whole. In other words, we should not balk at the purely scientific claim that we are now in the Anthropocene. This claim is merely descriptive. By itself it has no implications about what we should do in the face of this new reality, nor does it imply that there is something morally good about our new status in the Earth system. These are normative claims or questions and as such the science has little direct bearing on them. To announce the advent of the Anthropocene is not necessarily to celebrate its coming. We might instead bemoan and regret it, but also recognize that it brings with it new moral challenges. Otherwise put, and against ecomodernist triumphalism, we should stress that many of our environmental policy choices in the age of climate change are going to be tragic. They will involve irreducible loss. We are probably stuck with being active interveners in the natural order on a scale significant enough to change evolutionary pathways. It is morally important to accept this task in a spirit of humility and respect for nature rather than with arrogance and hubris. Whichever attitude we ultimately adopt all of this raises another key question: is “nature” as something independent of the human effectively dead?

7.7 The end of nature Saving some species and ecosystems will place others at risk. That is bad enough. But in this section, we will focus on an additional source of potentially tragic conflict, one between the value of wilderness preservation and that of species preservation. This is a conflict of values. It is easy to state in the abstract: protecting this or that species from the ravages of climate change obviously requires intervention in natural processes but this reduces or even eliminates the “otherness” of nature, its “wild” independence of the human.

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Does saving species entail losing wilderness in this sense of the term? To address this question we will focus on a single preservationist strategy: the genetic adaptation of species aimed at insulating the stock from certain climate change induced threats. What exactly do we mean by the “wild”? The concept is intimately connected to that of “nature.” Both terms have come to be understood as that which is independent of the human.19 This formulation need not be taken to deny that humans are a part of nature, only that there is a whole sphere of happenings in the biosphere that has little if anything to do with us. The horseshoe crab has been living at the bottom of the ocean for some 300 million years. In that time, it has gone about its business entirely unaffected by our schemes. In this deflated sense of the term, there seems to be nothing to object to in the notion of nature as that which is independent of the human. But there’s a problem here. After all, in acidifying and heating the oceans by loading the atmosphere with CO2, have we not in fact cancelled the “otherness” even of the horseshoe crab? Its habitat is now, in some measure, a human construct. Generalizing from examples like this, many now speak of the end of nature, of wilderness as something that is effectively dead. Steven Vogel is the most articulate philosophical spokesman for this view. According to Vogel, we need to recognize that we live in a “postnatural” world and that this has implications for how we do environmental philosophy and ethics. There has been a strain in Western culture generally insisting on a separation of the products of culture and the things of nature. Cultural products, in addition, were seen as superior to natural things. In one of its strains, environmental philosophy simply inverts this value judgement without abolishing the fundamental distinction that underlies it, the one between culture and nature. Contrary to the traditional view, nature now becomes the normative standard for the cultural. For example, the commonplace suggestion that industrialization and urbanization have cut us off from nature and that to regain what we have lost we need to reestablish our “connection” to the natural world relies on this understanding of the key terms. This idea is the basis of the notion that we now suffer from “nature deficit disorder.” Vogel rejects this understanding of nature. His reason for doing so is not just that, as a matter of empirical fact, nothing is really human-independent now because anthropogenic climate change has altered the planet’s basic chemistry (as we saw with our humble horseshoe crab). Just as importantly, the “natural” has never been a proper normative standard for us. The form of argument sketched above—that nature can be used as a standard for critiquing certain aspects of human culture or behavior—overlooks the fact that nature is rather nasty (red in tooth and claw). It is also a typical move for cultural conservatives to make. Slavery, for example, has been defended on the basis that some races are said to be “naturally” inferior to others. The same sort of claim has been made to deny rights to homosexuals and women.

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Vogel, therefore, thinks we would be better off without the concept of nature.20 We can still do environmental philosophy and ethics but only if we reject the distinction between what is built and what is natural and instead conceptualize all of reality as a built environment. In this case, the only question left to ask is whether or not what we make has been well built or poorly built. Some of this is undeniably compelling. For reasons that should be obvious, Vogel presents a view of reality—and of philosophy and ethics—that is eminently well-suited to our self-understanding in the Anthropocene. The new epoch is defined by the breakdown of a sharp distinction between the things of culture and the things of nature. However, Vogel himself is quite vague about how we can go on employing the distinction between good and bad building that, he thinks, we still require. What is it to make or build well in the postnatural Anthropocene? This is a large question and we don’t need to answer it comprehensively, but here’s a suggestion. So far we have been assuming that there’s no real distinction between “nature” and the “wild.” But what if we say instead that postnature might allow some place for wilderness? Assuming that wilderness preservation is a good thing, we will in that case have provided one example of a practice that can produce well-built environments. So what is wilderness? Clare Palmer provides a useful analysis of the concept and also addresses the question of whether species preservation and wilderness protection are necessarily at odds in the age of climate change. Let’s look briefly at her analysis. Palmer examines one strategy of species preservation, the genetic adaptation of animals to help them cope with the effects of climate change on their habitats. We have seen (in chapter 1) that one of the ways in which animals are responding to increased temperatures is by moving north or upwards into alpine regions (where these are available). But the species may not be able to move as quickly as isotherms (temperature zones) are. James Hansen has shown that the average speed of migration was about 4 miles per decade in the second half of the 20th century, but that isotherms have been moving at about 35 miles per decade in this period. He predicts that the speed of isotherm movement could double by the end of this century.21 In the face of this onslaught it will not always be possible to assist species to migrate elsewhere, to say nothing of the dim possibility that species might accomplish this without our assistance. But what if some form of “genetic rescue” were technically feasible for a population facing extirpation? What if they could be made more tolerant to heat, for example? Are there any ethical issues with this kind of manipulation? In particular should we object to such strategies on account of their interference with wilderness? Palmer thinks not, that in many cases we can preserve species from the ravages of climate change through genetic adaptation while leaving them relatively wild. Focusing just on animals, there are three aspects of the concept of wildness with which she is working here: (a) “dispositional wildness,” which refers to non-tameness, usually cashed out in terms of fear of or aggressiveness toward

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humans; (b) “self-willed wildness,” the notion that these animals are free from human control or manipulation; and (c) “constitutive wildness,” referring to non-domestication. Now, genetic adaptation is clearly no threat to (a) or (c). The goal is neither to tame nor domesticate species. But it does seem to affect (b). That is, the genetic rescue of these animals “does compromise wildness understood as the absence of intentional human influence on the location, shape, and design of beings and places.”22 Even so, the impact is minimal because the animals are not being modified to suit human purposes. On the contrary, the point is simply to make them better able to do what they were already doing but would not have been able to continue doing given the climate-altered landscape they inhabit. The question of whether this form of AP is morally permissible becomes more urgent if we insist on doing ethics in a non-ideal manner in this area because in this case, we must always compare our choices with feasible options. For the species we are considering, the only other option is extinction or extirpation. Surely, it is permissible to compromise to some extent the value we place on leaving wilderness untrammeled if in doing so we are saving species from this fate. Though the details and differences matter, this conclusion should be generalizable to all AP strategies. Indeed, it can serve as one test for the ethical permissibility of any AP proposal. The insight provided by this example gives us a way to think critically about Vogel’s postnaturalism. We can agree with him that when we do environmental ethics we should be thinking mostly in terms of how to build the world well, but add that one measure of such building is the extent to which we allow for wildness, in Palmer’s sense of this term, to flourish. That way, we can minimize the conflict between two values that clearly matter to us: wilderness protection and species preservation. These are the kinds of conflicts climate change foists on us. They do not appear to allow for a utopian or ideal resolution.

Chapter summary We have now entered the Anthropocene, a fact which means that we must think of ourselves as responsible for the whole Earth system. This is the context in which we must think of what anthropogenic climate change is doing to nature. We began the chapter with some reflections on the value of species. After laying out the general features of the Anthropocene, we next examined the ethics of protecting biodiversity in the age of climate change, focusing on various strategies of AP. This was followed by a look at two ways of thinking about the permissibility (or lack of it) of AP, grounded in the DDE and DDA. Next, we subjected “eco-modernism” to critical scrutiny, making a careful distinction between it and the more humble attitude allowed for by AP. This brought us, finally, to an assessment of the “end of nature thesis” now popular with some environmental philosophers.

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Questions for discussion 1 2 3 4

5

What is the ethical significance of the claim that we have entered a new epoch, the Anthropocene? Do you agree with the ecomodernists that the Anthropocene presents us with the opportunity to realize our dreams of planetary control? Have we reached the end of nature? What exactly does this mean and is the claim warranted? Explain the various ways we have of valuing nature, especially species diversity. Does any one of them have priority over the others? Why or why not? Does the preservationist’s dilemma force us to question the point or power of aesthetic valuation in our choices? Would you agree with the claim that such valuation is at best rhetorical?

Suggested reading Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (London: Polity, 2017). •

A clearly written synthesis of the science and social science of the Anthropocene. Very accessible.

Dale Moellendorf, The Moral Challenge of Dangerous Climate Change: Values, Poverty, and Policy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), chapter 2. •

A spirited defence of aesthetic valuation applied to the problem of biodiversity protection.

Clare Palmer, “Saving Species But Losing Wildness: Should We Genetically Adapt Wild Animal Species to Help Them Respond to Climate Change?” Midwest Studies in Philosophy XL, 2016, 40, 234–251. •

Excellent analysis of the ethics of facilitated genetic adaptation.

Notes 1 Dale Jamieson, Ethics and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 74. 2 Stephen J. Gould, “What is a Species?” Discover Magazine (December, 1992). 3 Byron Williston (ed.), Environmental Ethics for Canadians, second edition (Don Mills: Oxford University Press), 346–347. 4 Darrel Moellendorf, The Moral Challenge of Dangerous Climate Change: Values, Poverty, and Policy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 52–53. 5 Williston, Environmental Ethics …, 202. 6 Glenn Parsons, “Aesthetic Weight and the Preservationist’s Dilemma,” in Williston (ed.), Environmental Ethics …, 195–201 (201).

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7 Ronald L. Sandler, “Global Climate Change and Species Preservation,” in Williston (ed.), Environmental Ethics …, 358–365 (365). 8 Quoted in Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), 30–31. 9 Angus, Facing the Anthropocene …, 33. 10 Cass Sunstein, The Laws of Fear …, 47. 11 Sandler, “Global Climate Change …,” 359. 12 Sandler, “Global Climate Change …,” 360–361. 13 Robert Elliot, “Faking Nature.” In Environmental Ethics, edited by Robert Elliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 76–88. 14 Brian Berkey, “State Action, State Policy, and the Doing/Allowing Distinction.” Ethics, Policy and the Environment, 2014, 17(2), 147–149 (149). 15 Quoted in Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (London: Polity, 2017), 15. 16 Byron Williston, The Anthropocene Project …, chapter 2. 17 E. Sinha, A.M. Michaluk, V. Balaji, et. al., “Eutrophication Will Increase During the 21st Century as a Result of Precipitation Changes.” Science, 28 July 2017, 357(6349), 405–408. 18 Clive Hamilton, “The Techno-fix is in: A Critique of ‘An Ecomodernist Manifesto.’” April 28, 2015. At: http://clivehamilton.com/the-technofix-is-in-a-critique-of-an-ecomodernist-manifesto/. Accessed January 30, 2018. 19 See Steven Vogel, Thinking Like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature (Cambridge, MA, 2015), 9. 20 Vogel, Thinking Like a Mall …, chapter 1. 21 James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 146. 22 Clare Palmer, “Saving Species But Losing Wildness: Should We Genetically Adapt Wild Animal Species to Help Them Respond to Climate Change?” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 2016, 40(1), 234–251 (249).

8

Individual duties

8.1 Introduction Everything we have said so far about justice—both international and intergenerational—was focused on what collectives should do about climate change. We have been asking, for example, what a just distribution of the remaining carbon budget among countries looks like. That leaves untouched a large domain of philosophical inquiry: individual duties of climate justice. In this chapter we will address this topic. We begin by locating it in the inescapable context of collective action problems. In an effort to understand the psychological dynamics that make those situations go awry so often, we look at the idea any individual might have that his or her contributions to the problem are “negligible.” We will attempt to find a way around this very compelling thought, first by showing how to moralize the small consumption choices we make all the time; and second, by turning to a virtue-ethical analysis of the problem. This will bring us to a direct consideration of what individuals should do in our non-ideal situation. We examine two options: (a) working for meaningful institutional change; and (b) carbon offsetting.

8.2 The prisoner’s dilemma In chapters 3 and 4 we saw how the failures of international diplomacy to find a just solution to the problem of climate change can be understood on the model of the tragedy of the commons. A similar problem haunts individual behaviors, though here the prisoner’s dilemma is a better trope. We can see why this is so by looking again at the structure of collective action problems in the abstract. A collection of agents is engaged in some enterprise that requires the cooperation of all, or nearly all, members. Such cooperation involves restraint on the part of each. In the short term this can look like a pure cost to the agent: she gets less now than she would if she had acted purely out of selfinterest. But she also recognizes that not everyone can act on the basis of selfinterest because the result of that would be contrary to everyone’s interest. It is therefore collectively rational for all members to abide by the rules in order DOI: 10.4324/9781003284925-9

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to achieve the optimal outcome. But each agent also has a powerful individual incentive to defect from the cooperative effort, to leave the pack. This is because of the “nearly” qualifier just mentioned. Each agent can reason that he will achieve the best outcome for himself if he defects from the group while the others do not. That way, he will gain the benefits of both cooperation and non-cooperation. However, worried that other members of the group will do just this, the cooperative effort is undermined, resulting in the production of what economists call sub-optimal outcomes. This problem affects even those who are very worried about such outcomes. I might care a great deal about climate change and realize that if everyone switched to electric vehicles a big part of the problem would be solved. But I’m unlikely to make the switch myself if I believe there are too many others who will want to carry on driving gasguzzlers. Electric cars cost more, so wouldn’t I be a “sucker” if I bought one while recognizing that not enough others will do the same to alter the climate problem positively? Nobody wants to be a sucker, so nobody makes the positive choice (or not enough do). The result of our collective (in)action, however, is exactly as it is in Jamieson’s amended bike-theft example (examined in chapter 2): lots of people in far away parts of time and space will be deprived of the conditions of a good life by it. As Jamieson points out, one of the things we need to be able to do in order to come to grips with this problem is to “moralize” apparently innocent actions. As it stands, almost nobody in the developed world feels like they are doing anything wrong in living high-carbon lifestyles. Moreover, many consumption choices are not even linked by consumers themselves to the problem of climate change, though they are in fact feeding it. People might not see the connection between consumer “upgrades” like heated steering wheels in their cars or increased Internet speed at home and a worsening climate. The big question, therefore, is how to get people to constrain themselves in their seemingly innocent consumer choices for moral reasons, but Jamieson argues convincingly that this “process of moralization is not well understood.”1 Actually there are two distinct problems here, two reasons for being skeptical about the prospects for successful moralization. The first is that with climate change it really is difficult to link individual actions to discernable changes in the climate, let alone to the harms these cause. This is because, as we have seen in chapter 1, the climate system is so complex. It involves feedbacks, non-linearities, and thresholds. Moreover, we have seen that emissions emerge from billions of point sources and can result in harms spread out over the whole global population as well as to people of the future. In between, the emissions get mixed into the carbon cycle in bewilderingly complex ways. In light of these facts, here is how Jamieson characterizes the key issue about attributing responsibility for climate change harms to individuals:

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Individual duties I, along with many other people, toss an invisible smidgen of something into a blender. A man takes a drink of the resulting mixture. Am I responsible for the graininess of the texture, the chalkiness of the taste, the way it makes him feel after drinking it, his resulting desire for a Budweiser? You might think that I am a smidgen responsible, since a smidgen is the amount that I tossed into the blender. But I am tempted to say that I am not responsible even for a smidgen of the result because there are so many thresholds, non-linearities and scalar differences that intervene between my action and the outcomes.2

We might therefore refer to the first problem of moralization as an epistemic one. Blaming people for harm-causing actions depends on drawing a clear line between cause and effect but that is just what we cannot do in the case of the harms of climate change. The second problem is that, even if we could make the appropriate causal connections and so overcome the epistemic problem, getting people to care about the production of harmful outcomes goes beyond showing them that they are causally responsible for those outcomes. Here’s a somewhat gruesome analogy to help support the point. Suppose a slave-owner was whipping a slave for some trivial misdemeanor. The slave-owner need not be a skeptic about the causal chain beginning with his actions and ending with the pain visited on the slave’s body. He would also likely be entirely willing to call this a harm. Perhaps the slave will be unable to work, or even move very much, for several weeks because of the assault. That’s a clear harm to both the slave and the slave-owner. But because he considers the slave his property, the slave-owner cannot think that what he is doing is wrong. He doesn’t care about the harms he is causing except insofar as they are effective in bending the slave’s will to his aims. The problem, noted by Jamieson, is that for most people morality is not tightly tied to harm. On the one hand, people can get very worked up morally about harmless activities like flag-burning while, on the other hand, they can be unmoved by obviously harmful actions, as with our slave-owner. Jamieson refers to the recent work of psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Jonathan Haidt to show that commonsense morality draws mostly on considerations of fairness and reciprocity, in-group loyalty, as well as purity and sanctity to ground its moral assessments of actions and agents.3 It seems as though people need to be offended by a particular action in order to consider it out of bounds morally, but an action being perceived as harm-causing does not entail that it will also be seen as offensive. We should probably take this point with a grain of salt. Jamieson notes that the psychologists on whom he is leaning here recognize that considerations of harm are relevant to commonsense morality, even if they are not the most important consideration. In fact, however, it seems as though they are quite often paramount. The debate in the U.S. about gun control, for example,

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appears to be focused on the issue of harm causation. Advocates of tighter restrictions on access to certain weapons point to the harms caused by relatively unlimited access. Those favoring the status-quo, by contrast, believe, among other things, that citizens ought to have ready access to these weapons because, if this is denied to them, the government is likelier to harm them. It is true that considerations like these are usually surrounded by appeals to some of the forces Gilbert and Haidt cite—in-group loyalty, most obviously—but the appeal to harm, or potential harm, seems to be primary on both sides. In addition, there is often a complex interplay between perceptions of harm on the one hand and all the other factors on the other. What we often see in debates like the one about gun control is one side accuse the other of exaggerating the harms that will flow from the adoption of their policies. In other words, the forces cited by Gilbert and Haidt bias us in ways that enable misperceptions of the harms that are likely to be caused by specific actions. This is what happens with one kind of climate change denial, for instance. As we will see in the next chapter, in the U.S., many people have become convinced that aggressive action on climate change is some kind of socialist plot, something that threatens “the American way of life,” and because of this they are inclined to downplay the harms climate change will cause. Here, a specific conception of group loyalty biases agents in ways that distort their beliefs. That’s a very important psychological move because it testifies to the importance even climate deniers place on harm. It seems safe to say that both of these problems—the epistemic problem and commonsense morality’s tendency to misperceive harm—reinforce the sub-optimal outcomes of the prisoner’s dilemma of consumer behavior faced by people in the developed world. They complicate the issue of moralization. I might refuse to buy an electric vehicle, install solar panels on my roof, buy locally grown produce, buy offsets, or cut down on my air travel either because I genuinely cannot see what harms these refusals produce or because, though in some sense I see the harms, I don’t fully appreciate them because I’m not “offended” by their occurrence. Either way, we seem justified in focusing on the way our actions are genuinely harm-causing. In particular, it seems intuitively plausible to say that one way to break out of the vicious logic of the prisoner’s dilemma is to make those participating in it more keenly aware of the harms their failures might bring about. Put negatively, it makes sense to suppose that the production of sub-optimal outcomes in these scenarios will persist so long as agents are either unaware or insufficiently appreciative of the harms their actions cause. The paradigm example of two prisoners locked in separate interrogation rooms by the police might obscure this to some extent. Each of these imaginary agents seems willing to allow the worst sort of harms to come to the other so long as his own neck is saved. But most of us aren’t criminals, driven solely by avarice, so a clear-eyed view of the harms a free-riding course of action can cause to other members of our collective can make the temptation to adopt that course less compelling.

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If these thoughts are on the right track, then we should focus on the task of making the connection between individual action and harms as perspicuous as possible. But, as we have been saying, this is daunting in the case at hand. Let’s plot a way forward by stating the case against this connection as starkly as we can. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong does this nicely for us: [We] should not think that we can do enough simply by buying fuelefficient cars, insulating our houses, and setting up a windmill to make our own electricity. That is all wonderful. But it does little or nothing to stop global warming, and also does not fulfill our real moral obligations, which are to get governments to do their job to prevent the disaster of excessive global warming. It is better to enjoy your Sunday driving while working to change the law so as to make it illegal for you to enjoy your Sunday driving.4 There’s much to endorse here. For instance, Sinnott-Armstrong is surely correct to stress the importance of getting governments to do the right thing. This should make us work hard to build institutions that take climate change justice seriously. We’ll return to this point in this chapter’s penultimate section. For now, let’s focus on the idea that there’s nothing wrong with the “Sunday drive,” a handy symbol of unnecessary consumption. It’s not wrong, for SinnottArmstrong, because nothing we do as individuals can actually alter climatic outcomes, for good or ill. This is sometimes called the “negligibility thesis.”

8.3 The negligibility thesis In describing the negligibility thesis (NT) metaphors and analogies abound. We have already seen Jamieson’s blender metaphor used to describe it. One also often encounters the example of multiple agents throwing a brick through a window. More than one of them is required to break it, but not all of them. Or, we are told that the situation with climate change is like the voter’s paradox. This problem is the most well-developed, with a whole game of theoretical literature devoted to it completely separate from the climate change issue. The basic idea of the voter’s paradox is that because there is a negligible chance that your single vote will swing an election one way or another it is irrational to vote. After all, there is a convenience cost associated with voting—waiting in a long queue at a polling station, for example—that outweighs the minuscule probability that your vote will actually matter in tipping the election’s outcome one way or another. Best to just stay at home and watch the results on TV. Of course, every individual can think and act this way, and if enough of them do the influence on the election’s outcome will not be negligible. This is the paradox: individual acts do and do not matter to the election’s outcome.

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The person who genuinely doubts that he has a duty to vote because of this argument is appealing implicitly to a definition of morality put forward by Frank Jackson: … the morality of an action depends on the difference it makes; it depends, that is, on what would be the case were the act performed and what would be the case were the act not performed.5 In particular, it is not possible to say that any individual’s decision to refrain from voting is wrong. It’s pretty easy to see how this can be applied to the individual acts that cause climate change. None of them by itself is going to make any difference to climatic outcomes, and there is, as we have seen, some convenience cost associated with acting in a less carbon-intensive manner. But perhaps we can avoid all the problems of the NT by simply denying the premise that our individual actions will have no appreciable effect on climatic outcomes. This is the course taken by John Nolt, in an effort to counter the notion that “the harm caused by an individual’s participation in a greenhousegas-intensive economy is negligible.”6 Under a business-as-usual scenario if we divide the total harm caused by America, for example, by the number of Americans, Nolt thinks that each American is responsible for the deaths of two future people. Broome, presumably employing the same kind of calculation, comes up with a more modest figure: each of us in the developed world is responsible for destroying “more than six months of healthy human life.”7 Broome also gives the same point as a monetary expression: … the monetary value of the harm you do over a lifetime ranges between $19,000 and $65,000, or between 65 cents and over $2 per day for every day you are alive.8 The difference between Nolt’s and Broome’s numbers is probably due to the fact that Nolt is talking about Americans and Broome about members of the developed world more generally. Since Americans, per capita, emit substantially more than most, they are responsible for more future death—or cost—than others. In any case, sticking with the death metric each of us in the developed world is directly responsible for wiping out somewhere between 6 months and 150 years of future human life (assuming that each human life is equivalent to roughly 75 years). No matter where any particular individual emitter belongs on this continuum she is thus responsible for very serious harm. Doesn’t that answer the worry expressed by the NT? Not really, and the clue as to why not is contained in the manner in which the numbers are obtained. As mentioned, the first step is to get some notion of the total harms—in either lives or money lost—that will obtain on a particular emissions trajectory. Then you divide that total by the number of current emitters, assigning more or less to each of them based on the country to which they

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belong, in accordance with data about differential national emissions. But the NT shows that the total amount of harm with which you begin the calculation will be only negligibly affected by the subtraction of any single emitter’s contribution. It’s a mere drop that simply gets lost in the sea of other contributions. So if I decide to go carbon neutral, my actions by themselves make no difference to the total amount of climate change-induced suffering that will obtain in the world at some specified future date. How do we get around this problem? Parfit argues that the kind of reasoning just rehearsed illustrates a “mistake in moral mathematics.” Think of this with respect to the voter’s paradox. The “mistake” is that the stakes are often very high in national elections, but the purely “rational” voter described just above fails to account for this in deciding what to do. Perhaps enough people reasoning as she does and staying home allows the far-right candidate to win a plurality of votes, causing a country’s immediate political future to take a sinister turn in the direction of fascism. Think of the difference, Parfit urges, between an act that has a one-in-a-million chance of killing one person and an act that has the same odds of killing a million people. It might even be the same type of act, but what we might call its moral valence clearly alters in light of the different possible outcomes. We should focus on the severity of outcomes, not just the odds of their coming to pass. If we do, Parfit argues, then where the stakes are very high we will see that “no chance, however small, should be ignored.”9 Another way to put the point is that with climate change we are dealing with threshold effects, and this fact changes the nature of the individual acts that go to make up the set of acts producing the harm. A threshold effect obtains when individual contributions to a problem are negligible but which together can produce a harm (or benefit). So far this is unhelpful. It simply gives a fancy label to the phenomenon already picked out by the NT. Jackson, presumably, would be unimpressed by the mere application of the label. He would still deny that the individual acts themselves can be praised or blamed morally in these kinds of cases. Parfit disagrees: [E]ven if an act harms no one, this act may be wrong because it is one of a set of acts that together harm other people. Similarly, even if some act benefits no one, in can be what someone ought to do, because it is one of a set of acts that together benefit other people.10 How do we adjudicate the matter between Jackson and Parfit? The key question is how it could be that a single act can be innocent in one context and not in another. Can the moral valence of a single consumer choice involving relatively high emissions be altered simply by the fact that a large enough mass of other agents are making similar choices? Perhaps so if we could be relatively secure in the belief that such group behavior will indeed produce unwanted outcomes. Building on Parfit’s insights, Barry and Øverland argue that we have a reason to constrain ourselves in these

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situations insofar as it is rational to believe that they are likely to produce harmful outcomes. Here, the reasons for constraint are … a function of how bad the … outcome is and the probability that by [contributing] this agent will be an element of a set of actual antecedent conditions that brings this outcome about.11 This is important because of the probability condition. Such a condition can be significant with respect to uncertainties about threshold effects. In the case of climate change this is a very pressing worry. As we have seen, many scientists are warning us about the dangers of tripping the kinds of positive feedbacks that could result in runaway climate change. We do not know how close we are to doing this, which means that we are acting in a situation of extreme peril. If Barry and Øverland are correct, this gives each of us ample reason to refrain from being a member of the group that is emitting at unnecessarily high levels. The key is to notice the groups to which we belong and to become aware of the extent to which our choices are made and shaped by collective ideals and pressures. Focusing on individual consumer choices is a good idea for the obvious reason that the way we consume is a big part of the problem of GHG emissions. But it also highlights the difficulty we are having in framing the issue properly because it is counter-intuitive to see ourselves, in our consumption choices, as acting in a collective. The main problem here is that the collective in question—virtually everyone in the developed world—is about as unstructured as collectives can get. There is almost no coordinated activity among the members of the group, but we usually think of such coordination as an important feature of genuine collectives. This is why it is relatively straightforward to think of more structured collectives—like states or firms—as “agents” that can as such be responsible for what they do, whereas this is much harder to do with highly unstructured collectives. But we must nevertheless attempt to do just this. This is the key to moralizing the small stuff. More specifically, we must think of ourselves as agents whose actions get their moral valence from three principal factors. Together, these factors define the circumstances of moral action in the age of climate change: • • •

A global population of 8 billion set to become 10 billion by 2050 The looming threat of runaway climate change A finite and diminishing carbon budget that must be allocated justly

This is meant to apply mainly to consumers in the developed world, to give them the reasons for constraint with respect to their carbon-intensive consumption choices that Barry and Øverland are talking about. Any one of these agents is (a) emitting in a world of 8 billion or more other emitters, in a situation in which (b) our actions may trigger dangerous positive feedbacks in the climate

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system at any time and (c) the limited space remaining in the carbon budget must go chiefly to the developing world. There is literally nothing wrong with any carbon-intensive act in the absence of these three conditions, but with the conditions in place, the very same act is morally blameworthy. So SinnottArmstrong is simply wrong about that Sunday drive. Or is he? Maybe we are still trapped in moral mathematics! The focus on risk is laudable, but Barry and Øverland’s approach to the issue might still strike us as overly rationalistic. One way to pursue this thought, and also lead us into the next section of the chapter, is to consider an entirely different reason for reacting negatively to the examples we have been pondering. Instead of deciding that participation in them is risky an agent might simply find the idea of participation morally repugnant. In all these cases, in refraining from contributing to the effect she might not want to be a part of the group in question. She might be ashamed to be seen acting as these other people are, or she might feel morally tainted by the possibility that she will be judged “guilty by association” with such people. We should not dismiss this response as being “overly-emotional.” Sometimes, emotions are sound guides to properly moral action. Look again at the examples we have been using in this discussion. Many people do go out and vote with full knowledge of how the NT applies to this practice. Why do they do this? Presumably because they are worried about the outcome. That is, they are afraid that if they failed to vote and the fascists won they would be partly responsible for this outcome. Is this simply irrational? It seems not. Or, take the example of a group of people throwing a brick through a window. No single brick will break the window, and each vandal knows this, but together the bricks do just that. If I refrain from throwing a brick because I find such vandalism repellent, am I being irrational? Again, it seems not. To be sure, in these cases I am guided more by a “gut reaction” than a concrete belief but perhaps my gut is telling me something important here. Take one final example. Michael Sandel argues that we often respond in this fashion to price-gouging in times of resource scarcity: … outrage at price-gougers is more than mindless anger. It gestures at a moral argument worth taking seriously. Outrage is the special kind of anger you feel when you believe people are getting things they don’t deserve. Outrage of this kind is anger at injustice.12 Similarly, we might think that those who engage in the sort of mob behaviour that concerns us here are acting outrageously. Notice the important parallel between the Sunday driver and the price-gouger: both are acting, as we sometimes say, “within their rights.” But this is compatible with saying that they are behaving outrageously because they have failed to take proper account of how their acts might be unjust. This kind of consideration leads us naturally to the virtues.

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8.4 Turning to the virtues Consider an individual’s thought process in the midst of a collective action problem like a prisoner’s dilemma or tragedy of the commons. She is hyperfocused on the other agents with whom she is dealing. She is wondering what moves they will likely make in the “game” and is ready to make her own moves on the basis of theirs. She is flexible, her decisions being contingent upon how others behave or are likely to behave. In the classic case of the prisoner’s dilemma examined above this is very easy to see, and it is also easy to appreciate how this way of deliberating gets both agents into trouble. Each is being interrogated by the cops, who get each to think that if the other prisoner beats him to a confession he will get the maximum sentence while the other will walk. This forces each prisoner to think in the first place about what the other prisoner will do. Fearing that the other will confess, he confesses which means, of course, that both confess. This is very bad for both. Suppose, on the other hand, that the prisoners had gone into the situation thinking in the first place about the sorts of people they consider themselves to be. Maybe one of them considers herself unwaveringly loyal, for example: the sort of person for whom breaking a pact is literally unthinkable. An agent like this would not make her decisions contingent on what she took to be the likely behaviors of the other agents to whose fate she is bound in this situation. If both agents in the prisoner’s dilemma thought of themselves this way, the sub-optimal outcome would be avoided since neither would confess. In the very process of trying to moralize the small stuff the way we tried to do in the previous section, we might still be thinking too much about what other agents—all the other members of that huge, unstructured collective of coconsumers—are doing. Noticing this dynamic in the context of climate change Dale Jamieson argues that we should abandon moral mathematics altogether: Instead of looking to moral mathematics for practical solutions to large-scale collective action problems, we should focus instead on noncalculative generators of behaviour: character traits, dispositions, emotions … When faced with global environmental change, our general policy should be to try to reduce our contribution regardless of the behaviour of others, and we are more likely to succeed in doing this by developing and inculcating the right virtues than by improving our calculative abilities.13 What exactly are these “non-calculative generators of behavior” and how can they help us become better at negotiating our way through collective action problems? The short answer to the first question is, “the virtues.” Virtue ethics began with Aristotle. It was developed by his immediate philosophical successors

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in the Greco-Roman tradition and was the dominant form of moral theory in the Christian and Arab worlds for much of the period up until the 18th century Enlightenment. It was also the dominant model in the Chinese tradition, forming the backbone of Confucian ethics. With the subsequent rise of alternative moral theories—especially deontology and utilitarianism—the influence of virtue ethics waned in the West (though not in China), but it was reinvigorated in the last few decades of the 20th century and currently receives widespread attention from philosophers. Virtue ethics looks to dispositions or traits as the proper targets of moral assessment. It is concerned with the virtues and vices that make up the individual character. So in praising people we might refer to them as courageous, kind, compassionate or frugal; in blaming them we might refer to them as cowardly, selfish, immoderate or unjust. In both cases, we are saying something about what we take to be a relatively stable, though not unchanging, foundation of behavior in the person. This is an important feature of this type of assessment of others because it allows us to predict their future behaviours with some confidence. If you ask me whether or not my friend Hardeep is likely to donate money to your breast cancer campaign, I might answer by saying that I know Hardeep to be a very generous and kind person, making it likely that she will do so. This brings us to what is most important about the virtues. They impart, as Jamieson puts it, a measure of “non-contingency” to our behavior. That is, they provide us with an orientation to collective action situations that is exactly the opposite of what gets us into trouble in them. Hardeep enters her cooperative involvement with others with a self-definition as kind and generous, doing whatever the situation at hand demands of such a person. She does not allow her deliberations about what to do to become hijacked by worries about what the other agents with whom she is dealing are going to do. If this is broadly speaking what we need for the climate crisis, we need to ask, more specifically, what virtues will help with the task.

8.5 Virtues for the climate crisis It might be helpful to divide such virtues into two broad categories. The first would have to do with our relations with other humans and the second with the rest of the biosphere. The distinction is for illustrative purposes only, of course, because human relations are not a sphere separate from our relations with the rest of the biosphere. But it serves a useful analytic purpose.

8.5.1 Human–human relations Under the first heading, we are concerned chiefly with virtues that allow us to fulfill the demands of international and intergenerational climate justice. Here are a few prominent virtues that might help in this task.

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8.5.1.1 Courage Courage is the ability to manage fear. Aristotle argued that we should not try to transcend fear altogether, since this would invite recklessness. Nor, however, should we simply succumb to it, since this would result in cowardly behavior. The trick is to find what he called a “mean” between these two extremes. That sweet spot is courage. We need it because the pressure to live in accordance with the ways of business as usual is very strong in our culture. Even consuming more sustainably can be difficult, demanding courage. If all of your peers are living in the lap of luxury, refusing to do so even though you have the means can come with social costs. This may seem trivial, but it is anything but. The virtue of courage can also show up in the context of environmental activism. It can take courage to expose yourself to the ridicule of others by speaking out against the fossil fuel regime or, more obviously, standing in the path of machines building oil pipelines. 8.5.1.2 Benevolence Benevolence means, literally, “good willed” or “of good will.” It refers to the disposition to take the suffering and interests of others seriously, to seek as much as possible to alleviate their suffering and further their interests. The demands of international justice place a duty on us to take up this stance toward those who are most vulnerable to the ravages of climate change but did little or nothing to make it happen. The same applies to people of the future. We should add that benevolence can be a spur to act in accordance with all aspects of justice: procedural, distributive, and compensatory. Finally, notice that benevolence is very often parasitic on our conception of the things that count morally. We would not likely feel benevolent toward animals if we truly believed, with the 17th century French philosopher René Descartes, that they are just super-fancy machines. This thought can make us wonder why we display so little benevolence toward people of the future. Is it because we think they are not morally considerable in virtue of being nonexistent? If this is what we think, we should be prepared to defend this notion with reasons, not an easy task. 8.5.1.3 Hope Hope is a dangerous virtue but probably a necessary one now. It is dangerous because it can degenerate so easily into wishful thinking. But it is conceptually distinct from this vice because by definition the hopeful person is aware of the probability of the hoped-for outcome. The wishful thinker ignores the relevant probabilities. It is necessary because it can be energizing. So long as the hoped-for outcome is not considered impossible, the hopeful agent will strive diligently to bring it into being. In an age when the temptation to despair is

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strong, withdrawal and political passivity become increasingly pronounced. In these times this virtue will be important. For example, the retired ecologist Guy McPherson has warned of the imminent extinction of humanity because of climate change. His views are not well-grounded in science, but he seems to have engendered a groundswell of despair among the scientifically unwary. His message embodies a kind of moral darkness that may descend on us in the decades to come. So long as it does not degenerate into wishful thinking, hope is one antidote to the sort of scare-mongering engaged in by McPherson and his ilk.

8.5.2 Human–nature relations This brings us to the virtues we require to help us live more sustainably on the planet. Ronald Sandler has provided the most comprehensive analysis of environmental virtues. Here are a few of the most important. 8.5.2.1 Frugality To be frugal is to live as simply as possible. This need not be seen as a justification of Puritan restraint for its own sake or because one believes it to be what the divinity demands. Rather, it is the disposition to live conscientiously on a planet in ecological overshoot, in the recognition that the planet simply cannot sustain high-carbon lifestyles en masse. So, frugality here is understood as being intimately tied to ecological awareness. One crucial manifestation of it would be to stop consuming cattle products. The methane produced by the cattle industry is, as we have seen, out of control. This example illustrates the fact that being virtuous is not a call to perfection. The message is not “veganism or bust!” A genuinely frugal person can still enjoy life’s many gustatory pleasures while taking a pass on the filet mignon. 8.5.2.2 Humility To be humble is to seek to avoid that ancient vice, hubris. In the environmental domain, hubristic people believe that humans and their technologies are superior to the natural processes that govern the workings of the earth system. It is the belief that no matter what trouble we get ourselves into, ecologically speaking, our technologies will always light the way out. Many people see geoengineering, which we explore in chapter 10, as the ultimate expression of hubris. And we have already seen, in chapter 7, that it is an apt way of characterizing the ecomodernists’ approach to life in the Anthropocene. To be humble, then, is to recognize that the human species is just a tiny part of the total story of life on this planet, that we are utterly dependent on healthy ecosystems, and that our ultimate goal should therefore be to fit into the biosphere rather than dominate it.

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8.5.2.3 Respect It is at first jarring to see respect as a virtue under this heading, but respect for nature is probably a crucial virtue to cultivate now. To respect a thing is to allow it to go on in its own distinctive manner. This is the way we understand respect for other humans. We think for example that there is a general duty to avoid coercing other people, to bend them to our will, because such treatment involves a refusal to see them as beings with their own ends and interests. We should, other things being equal, simply leave them alone. Here, we can see how the virtue of respect is tied to a more principle-based moral theory like deontology. Respect would be a good disposition to have in an age when our interference with other species is causing a mass extinction. Perhaps if we were more inclined to adopt an attitude of wonder at and reverence for other members of the biosphere, we’d be less inclined to usher them out of existence so unceremoniously. These then are just a few of the virtues the cultivation of which would likely make it easier for us to avoid sleepwalking into climate catastrophe. Four more points about all of this. First, the list is not exhaustive.14 Many more virtues could be added: diligence, temperance, commitment, aesthetic sensibility, love, care, attunement, gratitude, and, as William Throop has suggested, “grit.”15 Second, the virtues are often mutually enforcing. This applies within each of the headings just discussed as well as between them. For example, being frugal in the sense required for a sound relation to the biosphere also helps an agent to be benevolent to those humans threatened by the effects of climate change. This is because being benevolent requires one to constrain oneself in one’s consumption choices, something it is easier to do if one is frugal. Third, we should stress the importance of moral education in virtue ethics. It can take a long time to cultivate the virtues, so if we think acquiring them is important we need to focus on the way they become inculcated in the young. Finally, we should not confine ourselves to the Western tradition in thinking about the place of virtue in our lives. Many other moral and religious traditions have stressed the importance of this aspect of life. Obviously, we cannot catalogue all of those traditions here. But consider just one example, the Confucian tradition of virtue ethics. One of the possible problems with Western virtue ethics is that it still seems too oriented to the individual, and cannot, therefore, grasp the extent to which we need to think of ourselves as embedded in larger wholes. As Neville argues this is both why we need to turn to Confucian ethics and why it is misguided to translate the latter into Western terms: For the classic Confucians, … understanding and engaging the metaphysical basis of value and order was essential. They always conceived the human to be set within the social which in turn is set within the cosmic … . Translating Confucianism into [Western] virtue ethics runs the risk of

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Those of us working within the Western tradition of ethics should bear this in mind. It may be that, even with the turn to the virtues, we are still thinking about moral responsibility in too subjective a manner—not metaphysically enough—and that this is precisely why we are mired in the sort of collective action problems characteristic of the climate crisis. We need to be open to the possibility that other traditions can show us a better path through this crisis. This leaves one large question: what should individuals do to address the crisis? Having shown that we have some reasons for changing the way we are living, we surely need some guidance about what concrete steps we might take.

8.6 Building just institutions We might argue that individual duties of climate change justice are best specified in the principles and regulatory arrangements of just institutions. This is an application of the more general view that all individual duties of justice are defined by and limited to the specifications of such institutions. This is known as the institutional theory of justice (ITJ). ITJ is an attractive theory because it leaves a whole sphere of moral behavior largely untouched by the demands of such institutions. In liberal-democratic moral culture, individuals are given wide, though not unlimited, latitude to develop and organize their lives around personal conceptions of the good. The big problem with this approach to our problem is that we do not have just institutions for the climate crisis. IJT as just sketched is therefore an ideal theory. So the question becomes this: what responsibilities of climate justice do individuals have in the non-ideal circumstances currently prevailing? KokChor Tan has addressed this question in a helpful way, so we will work through his analysis carefully. As Tan sees it, there are at least three ways we could respond to a situation like the one we are in.

8.6.1 Deny that any duties of justice are binding on us This is, roughly, the response of someone embracing the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes, a 17th century philosopher, believed that justice and injustice—right and wrong—exist only within an institutional framework, what he called “civil society.” Take that framework away—which for him was the state of nature—and there are literally no responsibilities of justice remaining, though of course individuals could still consider themselves

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bound to look after the interests of particular other people in this situation. This is really an extreme or literal version of the ITJ. The problem with it is that it defies our intuitions. Most people do not believe that in non-ideal conditions we have no responsibilities of justice whatsoever. This failure brings us to the second possible option.

8.6.2 Individuals must pick up all the slack of the missing institutions This is, again roughly, the position of the utilitarian. It is also diametrically opposed to the previous position. Since just institutions do not exist, individuals must devote their lives to realizing the demands of justice all on their own. As Tan points out, the problem with this position is that it is too demanding. The claims of justice would effectively swallow up all of our personal concerns. This is because the circumstances in which we currently exist with respect to dangerous emissions are so non-ideal. The developed world is so far from carrying out its emissions reduction responsibilities that, on this second approach, each individual must devote herself tirelessly to making up the difference. Virtually every act in this agent’s life would have to be assessed from the standpoint of the demands of climate justice. This, for Tan, is unacceptable.17 Of course, we might respond to Tan by rejecting the ITJ in cases like this. In other words we might say that when the stakes are high, and compliance with the demands of justice is so low, individuals are required to devote themselves wholeheartedly to morality in this fashion. It is unfortunate that little space is left for purely private pursuits but that is just the nature of the problem. However, even if our individual duties are thought to be much more stringent in a situation of non-compliance than they would be in a situation of greater compliance, the real problem is that whatever individuals do in a situation of non-compliance is bound to be futile. This is because the approach is insufficiently collective. As Tan points out, a major source of emissions comes from the very structure of our “industrial and agricultural rules and practices.”18 If it suits me, I can become a vegan, get off the grid, and stand in the path of the bulldozers, but if the institutions under which I live favor widespread meat-eating, electricity generated by burning coal and unchecked industrial development, my acts will have little impact. These are things that can be changed only through collective action aimed at the modification of our institutions. Individuals by themselves cannot affect this basic structure. This brings us to the third response.

8.6.3 Work to build just institutions Tan argues that building institutions that comply with the demands of climate justice is the chief ethical task in our non-ideal situation:

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Individual duties [S]ignificant emissions reductions cannot be achieved through personal action alone—such as recycling and reducing consumption—but … require collective action. Real change can be brought on only through infrastructural changes, revisions and institutional reforms. These infrastructural changes will require … a focus on institutions rather than on personal conduct.19

This is surely the right focus. It demands that individuals think less about their personal consumption choices and more about getting involved in the politics of climate change. Among other things, this means we have duties to work and vote for politicians who take the problem seriously by, for instance, advocating for the imposition of a meaningful carbon tax or cap and trade policy. Even so—to return to a problem broached in chapter 2—we must be mindful that our ethical theories, according to Gardiner, … have offered little guidance on the central question of the kinds of institutions that are needed to confront the problem, and the specific norms that should govern those institutions.20 From this it follows that there is a great deal of work to do on this front. We are now in a position to appreciate what was right about Sinnott-Armstrong’s approach to Sunday driving. He argues, recall, that we should not worry about the drive itself but should vote for politicians that make behavior like this impossible or more costly. However, the main thrust of this chapter is to claim that we probably need both approaches. We need to work for changes at the institutional level as well as moralize the Sunday drive. Indeed, it is difficult to see how one will work without the other. Tan’s approach to the issue allows for this dual focus though he is, as we have just seen, overwhelmingly focused on the institutional half of it. What more can we say about individual consumption choices if we want to highlight both aspects of the problem?

8.7 Carbon offsetting Let’s explore one approach to responsible consumption. The approach is carbon offsetting. Since you cannot eliminate your emissions altogether, the idea behind offsetting is that for every unit of carbon you emit you should see to it that an equivalent amount of carbon is not emitted. There is a thriving market in offsets. The way they work is that you pay an offsetting company and your money is used to fund projects, usually though not exclusively in the developing world, aimed at producing energy in green ways (construction of a biofuel plant for example). One of the most important requirements that such projects must meet is that of “additionality.” It must be the case that the project you are funding would not have gone ahead anyway, that its development is due entirely to

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funds received through offsetting. If the additionality requirement is not met with respect to some particular project then your funds are not helping to prevent the carbon that would otherwise have been emitted from being emitted. Broome sums up the case for offsetting thus: Preventive offsetting is genuine offsetting, provided it leads to a real reduction of greenhouse gas. If you offset all your emissions by this means, you make sure that your presence in the world causes no greenhouse gas to be added to the atmosphere. You therefore do no harm to anyone through emissions.21 That is a bold claim: it entails that by offsetting you can effectively cancel the wrongness of your carbon emissions. In response to it, let’s notice two things. The first is that it is somewhat difficult in practice to ensure additionality. Fortunately, however, there are certifications that have been developed to help consumers make responsible choices here. Shopping for legitimate offset companies is now much like shopping for tuna that is dolphin-friendly or coffee that is fair trade. The options exist, you simply have to work a bit harder than usual to find them. Second, offsetting is remarkably cheap. This is largely because the projects being funded are in the developing world where labor and the cost of raw materials are significantly cheaper than they are in the developed world. This is important because it means that many individuals in the developed world can probably afford to pay for both their direct and their indirect emissions. Direct emissions are those you are responsible for in your driving, flying, household heating and cooling, and so on. These can be tallied pretty accurately with carbon footprint calculators readily available online. Indirect emissions are more difficult to measure accurately because their sources are in things like the food we eat (much of which is imported) and the infrastructure we use (roads, buildings, etc.). The safest bet is to calculate your direct emissions and double or triple the amount you owe.22 That should cover everything. Of course by following this advice, you may overshoot what you owe but even with significant overshoot, we are talking about sums that are—let’s be frank—objectively trivial for those whose household wealth puts them economically in the top 5% of the global population. Nor should we worry that the practice of offsetting somehow tries to make wrong actions right. That is, we might think that offsetting is a bit like the medieval practice engaged in by the Catholic Church of selling indulgences to sinners so that they could have their time in purgatory reduced.23 To many, like the rebel Luther, this normalized sin, perhaps even increasing it among those who thought they could pay their way out of it. The same would go for emissions-intensive behaviors. Those willing to buy offsets might not cut back on or may even increase their emissions, convinced that the practice of offsetting renders them permissible.

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This may not be a significant worry. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with emitting carbon (unlike sinning, perhaps). It is wrong only insofar as it leads to dangerous interference in the climate system. If this effect can be negated through a practice like offsetting, then, for Broome, the wrong disappears altogether (as we have just seen). Not everyone will be satisfied with this answer. There are those who think that the real task is to reduce our collective carbon footprint radically. Practices like offsetting, they will insist, perpetuate a system of behaviors among individuals—long-haul flying, for example—that is not sustainable, partly because the vast majority of individuals doing these things do not offset their carbon emissions. So everyone should offset and reduce and fight for institutional reform. The climate crisis surely requires this sort of multi-pronged approach on the part of every individual who is capable of it. Perhaps we can add that these are among the things the ideally virtuous agent will likely do as part of her understanding of what sort of person one should be in the age of climate change.

Chapter summary This chapter has been about individual moral responsibility for climate change. We began by setting the problem of overconsumption in the context of prisoner’s dilemma-type collective action problems. This led us to a discussion of the negligibility thesis, the thought any individual might have that his contribution to the problem of climate change is morally meaningless because it is so small. We tried to find a way around this thought, a way to moralize those small consumption choices. This brought us to consider a way of thinking about morality—the virtue-ethical approach—that departs significantly from standard moral theories. The task here was to find a way of thinking about our duties that avoided the “calculative” aspect of typical deliberation in collective action problems. After looking at a few of the key virtues we need to cultivate if we are to adopt this approach successfully, we examined the institutional approach to climate justice. Here, we concluded that, whatever other duties they have, individuals surely have a duty to change the institutions that govern and structure our collective existence. We concluded with a discussion of the practice of carbon offsetting, a duty that can be thought of as supplementary to that of changing our institutions.

Questions for discussion 1

2

Explain how prisoner’s dilemmas typically result in sub-optimal outcomes and how this happens with respect to high-carbon consumption choices. Is it possible to moralize individual consumption choices by showing that their moral valence changes under certain circumstances?

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Does the turn to the virtues solve the problem of being too “calculative” in the context of collective action problems? If so, how? If not, why not? Is the Western approach to the virtues too focused on the personal? Is something like the Confucian approach a good alternative? What are the reasons, if any, for opposing the practice of carbon offsetting as a key way of fulfilling our individual duties of climate justice?

Suggested reading Ronald Sandler, Character and Environment: A Virtue-Oriented Approach to Environmental Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). •

The most comprehensive treatment of environmental virtue ethics. Not about climate change specifically, but very useful.

Byron Williston, The Anthropocene Project: Virtue in the Age of Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). •

The only book-length attempt to apply virtue ethics to the problem of climate change. The focus is on the virtues of justice, hope and truthfulness.

Kok-Chor Tan, “Individual Duties of Climate Justice Under Non-Ideal Conditions.” In Climate Change and Justice, edited by Jeremy Moss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 129–147. •

A thorough analysis of the institutional approach to individual justice.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time …, 176. Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time …, 164. Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time …, 168. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “It’s Not My Fault: Global Warming and Individual Moral Obligations,” in Gardiner et. al., (eds.), Climate Ethics …, 332–346 (344). Frank Jackson, “Which Effects?” In Reading Parfit, edited by J. Dancy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 42–53. John Nolt, “How Harmful are the Average American’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions?” Ethics, Policy and the Environment, 2011, 14(1), 3–10 (3). Broome, Climate Matters …, 74 Broome, Climate Matters …, 75. Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 75. Also the discussion in Vanderheiden, Atmospheric Justice …, 159–167. Parfit, Reasons and Persons …, 70. Christian Barry and Gerhard Overland, “Individual Responsibility for Carbon Emissions: Is there Anything Wrong with Overdetermining Harm?” In Climate Change and Justice, edited by Jeremy Moss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 165–183 (177).

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12 Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 7. 13 Dale Jamieson, “When Utilitarians Should Be Virtue Theorists.” Utilitas, 2007, 19(2), 160–183 (167). 14 For a truly exhaustive list, see Ronald Sandler, Character and Environment: A Virtue-Oriented Approach to Environmental Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 82. 15 William Throop, “Review of Byron Williston, The Anthropocene Project: Virtue in the Age of Climate Change.” Environmental Ethics, Spring, 2017, 39(1), 105–108 (107). 16 Quoted in Eric L. Hutton, “On the ‘Virtue-Turn’ and the Problem of Categorizing Chinese Thought.” Dao, 2014, 14, 331–353 (338). 17 Kok-Chor Tan, “Individual Duties of Climate Justice Under Non-Ideal Conditions,” in Moss (ed.), Climate Change and Justice, 129–147 (136). 18 Tan, “Individual Duties …,” 137. 19 Tan, “Individual Duties …,” 144. 20 Gardiner and Weisbach, Debating Climate Ethics …, 259. 21 Broome, Climate Matters …, 87. 22 Broome, Climate Matters …, 88–89. 23 Robert E. Goodin, “Selling Environmental Indulgences,” in Gardiner et. al., (eds.), Climate Ethics …, 230–247.

9

Climate change denial

9.1 Introduction Donald Trump once tweeted that climate change is a “total, and very expensive, hoax.” Assume he believes this. He might be (accidentally) right about the high cost of climate change if we continue to do nothing about it, but what about the bit about climate change being a hoax? We can examine this belief itself and show—pretty easily, of course—that it is, in the language of epistemologists, “unjustified” because it is clearly contradicted by the facts. But does this go far enough as an evaluation of the belief? It seems not to. The assertion is so stupid that we may also want to ask, “who could believe such a thing?” Here, we are in the domain of virtue epistemology, the investigation of the character traits of believers. In this chapter, we look at climate change denial from this perspective. We begin with a sketch of virtue epistemology, moving next to a description of what the ideal epistemic agent believes about climate change. This brings us to climate change denial, which we examine in the subsequent three sections. The first two deal with a familiar form of denial—here, following Harry Frankfurt, analyzed as climate change “bullshit“—the third with a less familiar form that can show up among otherwise progressive people.

9.2 Virtue epistemology Sometimes we are so appalled by what a person has done that our inclination is ask, “what sort of person would do a thing like that?”1 We might answer our own question by asserting that this person must be especially greedy, selfish, unkind, or lacking in compassion. To illustrate, let’s return to Sandel’s price-gouger, encountered in the previous chapter. Suppose a coastal community is suffering immensely after an unexpectedly high storm surge destroyed much of the local power grid. Think, for instance, of the people of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria struck in 2017. Now imagine that the proprietor of a small hardware store in San Juan raises prices on essential goods like battery-powered generators, realizing that he has the city’s inhabitants in a desperate situation and that they will therefore be forced to pay the prices he is demanding. DOI: 10.4324/9781003284925-10

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The case is interesting because the proprietor is, let’s suppose, violating nobody’s rights: he is legally allowed to gouge his customers. In cases like this it seems insufficient to criticize his actions alone. We feel compelled to say something negative about the person’s underlying character as well. Hence the question above. As we saw in the previous chapter, when we make this sort of move in morality we are in the domain of virtue ethics. Sandel says that the price-gouger’s actions are objectionable mainly because he fails to exhibit “civic virtue” when this is what we expect of him.2 Epistemology—the theory of knowledge—has always been normative at its core: it is about getting our beliefs right, getting them to match up with the way the world really is. Epistemologists tell us that we should try and do these things, that we ought to increase the ratio of true to false beliefs in our total set of beliefs. Traditionally, however, the target of this exercise has been the beliefs themselves. Philosophers ask whether or not a particular belief is “justified” given available evidence and prevailing standards of logical argumentation. This focus is fine with respect to many of our beliefs. For example, progress in science can be understood this way. When a theory has been falsified by the discovery of new facts it is abandoned and the scientist will accordingly attempt to formulate a more appropriate theory, one that fits the facts better than the first. In the language of epistemology, the first belief has been shown to be unjustified and has been replaced by another that is, at least provisionally, justified. Recently, epistemologists have begun to wonder about the normative connection between beliefs and character traits, making the latter rather than the former the main target of normative assessment. This is virtue epistemology. We require it because the language of justification sometimes does not seem to be normatively deep enough. For example, many Americans have asked, “what kind of person could believe that giving ordinary citizens legal permission to stockpile assault weapons is good public policy?” Given the alarming frequency with which mass shootings occur in the United States, an answer might suggest itself readily: only those who are especially callous, close-minded, or too dim-witted to grasp the limited applicability of the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to the contemporary world. In examples like this we are of course interested in actions. We are worried about the gun-rights advocate voting for politicians who will not challenge the gun lobby. These politicians enable the proliferation of dangerous firearms among the populace and so are partly responsible for the problem. But we may also feel compelled to assess the character of the belief holder herself. It seems somehow inadequate to say only that her beliefs about guns are unjustified. The point applies just as strongly to what we consider especially praiseworthy epistemic achievements. Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) was burned at the stake for disseminating heretical cosmological theories about the place of the earth relative to the sun. Calling his Copernican worldview “justified” or “warranted,” though correct, hardly seems to capture what we

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think about this feat of belief. Surely we want to add something about the courage or integrity of this believer. So our intuitions seem to push us toward accepting the idea of epistemic virtues and vices. Virtue epistemologists have developed two competing theoretical models used to pick out these virtues and vices. The first is “reliabilism.” The reliabilist thinks that the virtues are skills or faculties the correct employment of which results, other things being equal, in justified beliefs. So we can speak here of good vision or hearing, as well as memory and logical skill as virtues. For the reliabilist what really matters is the production of justified beliefs, so anything that can produce them in a reliable way should be called a virtue. The failure of the skills or faculties—poor vision, memory, etc.—are, in turn, the intellectual vices.3 The second theoretical model is “responsibilism.” The responsibilist believes that our moral assessment of believers should focus on the motives producing beliefs.4 The differences between reliabilism and responsibilism are diverse and complex, and quite beyond the scope of our inquiry. However, one difference is important to highlight because it bears on an issue that is relevant to this chapter. The issue has to do with the tendency we have to praise or blame agents for the beliefs they hold. It looks as though reliabilists will not give us a very robust account of this. Of course, it may be true that my intellectual failings are the product of a poor memory, let’s say, and that this is something I could have worked more diligently to improve. I should have been doing Sudoku puzzles instead of watching so much football all those years (or at least doing the puzzles while watching the football). Perhaps, but how do we explain this failing? Do we point to some other underdeveloped skill or faculty or do we say instead that I’ve been lazy? At some stage in the explanation for my intellectual shortcomings it may be quite tempting to point to something that looks like a motive or disposition rather than a mere skill or faculty. This is usually what we intend when we use the language of “vice.” Of course, the reliabilist can use the language of vice too, as we have seen. Poor memory is a vice for the reliabilist. But this usage looks to be metaphorical. Memory is a skill or capacity which as such exists on a spectrum of development. It makes little sense to understand capacities like this as legitimate targets of moral assessment. Virtue and vice, by contrast, are rooted in our characters and these are legitimate targets of moral assessment. Why? Because we have some control over them. We are responsible for them and therefore also for the behaviours and beliefs to which they give rise. If this is right it means that in addition to being moral agents we are also epistemic agents. We have some control over the set of beliefs we hold at any time. We can revise and refine this set in accordance with appropriate evidentiary and logical standards. We can be blamed for epistemic failure and praised for epistemic success. However, the real value of responsibilist virtue epistemology is that it allows us to go beyond mere praise and blame. We can say exactly what it is about the underlying character that warrants these

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attitudes. We can celebrate an epistemic agent for being courageous and open-minded in espousing her beliefs; or we can criticize and shun her for being conformist and close-minded in her beliefs. Responsibilism looks like the right theoretical model. There’s a further feature of both versions of virtue epistemology that is especially important to highlight, though, again, I think the responsibilist can make better sense of it than can the reliabilist. Character assessments are important because they deepen or increase our understanding of ourselves and others as co-producers of knowledge. They draw us, as believers, into a normative circle of agents whose ultimate goal is to find out more and more about the world we inhabit together. They help us understand the sense in which the acquisition of knowledge is something social, something we do as a collective. We are apt to think of knowledge as something acquired and owned by individuals, but this conception of knowledge misconstrues things quite badly. Our beliefs are built on the epistemic labor of others. This is especially the case with true beliefs and the point applies to intellectual mavericks as much as it does to ordinary believers. Newton—a genuine epistemic maverick—once remarked that if he seemed to see further than some, it was only because he stood on the shoulders of giants. That expresses the social conception of knowledge that is especially congenial to virtue epistemology. If you are inclined to doubt this, ask yourself what the point of epistemic character assessment is supposed to be minus this social aspect. We could say that we are inclined to worry about another agents increasing the ratio of true to false beliefs in her total belief set because it is better for her if she does this. This is no doubt true but it is at best half the story. Think of a simple example. If a child expresses the belief to his parents and siblings that he should get to both slice the pie and choose the first piece, the parent might chide him for his greed. What more can we say here? Well, we might say the family is a collective, trying to develop fair practices of resource distribution among its members. The greedy child has a false belief about how this can best be achieved. But the key point is that if the lesson has been imparted successfully the whole group is better off for it, not just the greedy child. The collective stock of beliefs with respect to the problem of resource distribution among its members has been improved. The focus on epistemic exemplars like Bruno and Newton can obscure this basic insight, so, having made the point, let’s move on to our issue. How can virtue epistemology help us understand climate change denial? In the aftermath of the devastating 2017 hurricane season in the Caribbean, Pope Francis called climate change deniers “stupid.” The statement fits the virtueepistemological approach nicely. The Pope went on to say that deniers should ask scientists what is going on with the climate because the scientists “speak very clearly” on this issue.5 Although his remark is not exactly subtle (at least for a Pope), Francis is clearly attacking the character of certain epistemic

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agents, arguing in effect that only stupid people deny the reality of climate change. So in the spirit of the pontiff, let’s explore the question from this angle. Who are these stupid people and how exactly have they gone wrong in the all-important task of belief-formation?

9.3 How to believe in climate change Actually, before attempting to get a philosophical grip on the phenomenon of climate change denial it might be a good idea to show what the virtuous epistemic agent looks like with respect to her beliefs about climate change. Here we remain in the territory of standard or traditional epistemology. It is somewhat difficult to get a start on this because there are innumerable beliefs one might have about this issue. But given what we have said so far in this book, it seems correct to boil things down to these three beliefs: B1 Climate change is happening now B2 Contemporary climate change is anthropogenic B3 Avoiding dangerous interference in the climate system requires aggressive mitigation measures in the short term. These three beliefs—let’s call them the Trio—are pretty basic. We could expand on each of them to show that it contains many subbeliefs and we could probably add a few more basic beliefs. But let’s be parsimonious and stick with the Trio in this form. An agent who has her epistemic house in order on this issue will believe all three elements of the Trio. It follows that there is more than one way to be a climate change denier. Most of the people who earn this label deny (B1) and/ or (B2). The deniers who get much less attention are those who accept (B1) and (B2) but refuse to accept (B3), or who accept it “in theory” but do not believe it requires them to do very much to address the problem. We’ll analyze the first type of denier in the next two sections and the second type in the final section, but let’s first assemble a picture of how an ideal epistemic agent approaches the Trio. This will give us someone concrete with whom to contrast deniers. We’ll start with an obvious question: why should anyone who is not an expert in climate science believe the Trio? As befits the social theory of knowledge defended just above it is important to notice that our belief-sets are permeated with items rooted in the testimony of others. If we read about a coup d’état in some far away country and believe it, we are doing so on the testimony of the journalist filing the report. When you think about it you will realize that many, perhaps most, of our beliefs—from the weather forecast to your child’s assertion that she did indeed brush her teeth this morning—are formed this way. This makes the issue of trust central to epistemology. In reading a particular paper for your political news you are evidently trusting it more than you do some alternative. Why? You might say

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that your preferred source does not sensationalize the stories, that its journalists regularly win awards for the quality of their reporting, that the editor is considered an honest person, and so on. But what about the beliefs we have that are based on the testimony of scientific experts? Most of us do not understand all the scientific detail behind each element of the Trio. If we nevertheless believe it this is because we trust the scientists, but why should we? This is a special kind of testimonial belief, that involved in the transmission of knowledge from experts to nonexperts. Surely, we must be able to point to some criteria that justify our accepting the testimony of experts about climate change. After all, it is always possible that we are being hoodwinked. The 18th-century philosopher Thomas Reid argues that beliefs based in testimony, including expert testimony, can be justified. He offers two tests such beliefs must pass in order to deserve the support of nonexperts.6 The first is what he calls “concurrence” among various experts working on different aspects of a problem. One of the most striking things about climate change science is the degree to which the basic facts are corroborated from a number of distinct perspectives. For instance, a recent study compared the instrumental temperature record to data from over 170 temperature-sensitive paleo proxies, concluding that the concurrence among these sources indicates “a significant warming trend from 1880–1995.”7 Findings like this are important because they render implausible, or even absurd, the notion that scientists are somehow colluding to misrepresent the facts. The second test of testimonial beliefs is what Reid calls the “number and disinterestedness of witnesses.”8 Let’s analyze these two components separately. First, “number.” Deniers sometimes pour scorn on the oft-repeated claim that 97% of climate scientists are in agreement on the basic facts, but the number is well-established. It comes from a 2009 survey of the scientific literature that looked at how many articles published in proper peer-reviewed journals expressed agreement with the claims that climate change is happening and is anthropogenic, i.e., (B1) and (B2) of the Trio.9 Ninety-seven percent agreement on any topic is about as high as it gets in science. It puts climate change on an epistemic par with the theory of natural selection. This brings us to the “disinterestedness” of scientists. To be disinterested is to be objective, to remove personal—“interested”—considerations from one’s deliberations about the facts. The first point to note here has to do with the motives of scientists. The claim made by some deniers that scientists are falsifying data in order to obtain grant money from governmental and nongovernmental funding agencies is laughable on its face. Most scientists are disinterested in the sense Reid intends: they are motivated by a desire to discover the truth about the natural world. This is, we might say, a good intrinsic to the practice of science, something any individual scientist might therefore aim to acquire. Like all of us, however, scientists also require goods extrinsic to their practice, like money. But from the fact that they require financial support to do research it does not follow that securing research

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money is their primary professional aim. To think otherwise is to confuse intrinsic and extrinsic goods. However, we don’t need to rely wholly on this understanding of the motives of the scientist to ground the belief in his or her disinterestedness because scientists have developed a process that brings us as close to a guarantee of objectivity as we are ever going to get. That process is peer-review. It is a commonplace feature of all academic research but it gets amped-up significantly in the products that interest us the most here: IPCC reports. The 2007 IPCC report (AR4) analyzed over 10,000 articles and reports, all of them already peer-reviewed. AR4 as a whole went through four separate levels of peer-review, receiving over 90,000 comments from over 2,500 scientists. Similar statistics apply to AR6. That is an extraordinarily thorough process of oversight. According to Paul Beggs, a geophysicist, it is “arguably the most rigorous and transparent peer-review process in the history of science.”10 In sum, employing Reid’s criteria, nonexperts would appear to have solid reasons for believing what the experts have told them about (B1) and (B2). The same is true with respect to (B3), though here things are more complex because of the different ways in which “dangerous interference in the climate system” can be understood. Still, in spite of the fact that people have different perceptions of risk we should not overstate this point. The effects associated with an increase in global temperatures approaching 5°C are going to be bad for virtually all of us as well as most nonhuman members of the biosphere. This is something we know from the science alone. Moreover, it follows that the best way to avoid these effects is to reduce the flow of GHGs to the atmosphere very quickly, i.e., to engage in aggressive mitigation. That’s all there is to (B3). This leads us to a consideration of the virtues our ideal epistemic agent will likely possess. She will probably have to be quite courageous because there are deniers everywhere whom she will sometimes feel compelled to confront. These people can be quite nasty. Some of them, for instance, sent death threats to the climate scientist Michael Mann. But our agent will also need to have integrity. Integrity is about psychic “wholeness,” in this case ensuring that one translates one’s beliefs about the world, where appropriate, into action. Belief is not an end in itself. As the philosopher W.K. Clifford put it, “nor is that truly a belief at all which has not some influence upon the actions of him who holds it.”11 This may be a slight overstatement—my belief that my kitchen floor has 56 tiles might never manifest in any action on my part, including speech-acts—but Clifford was surely on to something. We will return to integrity in the final section of this chapter. So in believing the Trio an ideally virtuous agent will likely display both courage and integrity. But there is at least one more virtue she will possess, namely open-mindedness. According to Nomy Arpaly, open-mindedness is especially important when two conditions prevail. The first is that something morally meaningful is at stake, in which case the person in question is uniquely attuned to the facts that matter. The second is when there is counter-evidence

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presented. Now climate change matters morally if anything does. But it is also true that it is really easy for most people to disregard climate change. They might say: most of the effects will be in the future, most of the people affected live elsewhere, the weather today is more or less normal, driving my car won’t make a difference anyway, climate science is just complicated “mathematics.” Etc. All these strategies are ways of making the evidence for climate change less salient than it should be and, by implication, making the “evidence” against it more salient. But once we engage in this inversion of salience we also invite a forgetting of the moral importance of the issue, the pressing demands it is making on us. Arpaly argues that being open-minded helps us resist these powerful urges because it keeps our attention riveted on the morally important facts themselves. It is this attention-focusing aspect of the virtue that makes Arpaly’s account so relevant to the climate change issue: Who then is the person who is morally praiseworthy for open-mindedness? She is the person whose moral concern insulates her from the pull of other concerns that would otherwise render her unresponsive to evidence, in contexts in which something morally significant might be at stake.12 Open-mindedness, courage and integrity help support belief in the Trio. This list of virtues is not meant to be exhaustive, but it paints a sufficiently detailed picture of the ideal epistemic agent to serve as a helpful contrast to the denier.

9.4 Climate change bullshit As might be expected, the most prominent forms of climate change denial are aimed at (B1) and (B2). Here, as compiled by Danny Chivers, are some of the things one often hears from deniers under each heading: •

Attacks on (B1) • • • • • • • • •

•

CO2 is not a greenhouse gas When the climate changed in the deep past the warming came first and the CO2 rose later Many scientists disagree with the consensus on climate change The planet is not warming up The planet cooled between 1940 and 1970 Scientists have manipulated the data We can’t trust the computer models on which IPCC projections rely The glaciers are growing, not shrinking It’s all a hoax created by the Chinese

Attacks on (B2) • •

Volcanoes produce more CO2 than humans Current warming is caused by sunspots

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Current warming is caused by cosmic rays Current warming is caused by … anything but us

Some of these are just silly, others have the appearance of plausibility, but all have been conclusively refuted. So we won’t bother to catalogue the arguments against those claims here.13 We are more interested in the person who believes such things. From this perspective, the claims just catalogued are not actually the most important part of the problem of climate change denial. The main problem is rather the way such claims can get translated into our perceptions of risk and cost. It is not difficult to understand how this might work. One hears claims like the ones just listed articulated in the media on a fairly regular basis and concludes that there is evidently a good deal of scientific confusion about climate change. Most people get their opinions about the world from the news media and, in a misguided effort to appear balanced and objective on this issue, the media has presented things as though there are two roughly equal sides to this story. But if that is the case, then surely we cannot be certain that the threat is imminent and this means that we should be careful about taking drastic steps to address it. This line of reasoning is most pronounced in the developed world, among people who think they have the least to lose from climate change and the most to gain from being stingy about addressing it through robust mitigation efforts. In Canada, the U.K., Germany, and Australia citizens tend to be divided along partisan lines on the key questions about climate change, but this kind of division is most stark in the U.S. For example, only 20% of Republicans think that climate change is a serious issue, whereas 68% of Democrats believe this. Half of Republicans support limiting GHGs, while 82% of Democrats support this measure. Only 12% of Republicans believe that climate change will harm them personally, while 42% of Democrats believe this. And finally, while 53% of Democrats believe that climate change is harming people now, only 24% of Republicans believe this.14 While it is tempting to focus on the differences between supporters of the two political parties revealed by these numbers, it is perhaps more shocking to observe that barely half of all Democrats—the most progressive portion of the American electorate—believe that climate change (a) will ever affect them in any meaningful way; and (b) is creating present harms. We should also point out that although 83% of Democrats support efforts to reduce GHGs, there is no indication that the number would be that high were the U.S. forced to do this on the scale required to address the problem meaningfully. In other words, the survey asked people only if they were willing to countenance some action in this area. It is plausible to suppose that the results would have been much less encouraging if the question had been more precise about how much the developed world should cut if, say, we took the PPP seriously. How did this come to pass? How did so many people in the developed world come to believe, in effect, that the problem is either not real or is not

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worth addressing seriously? The short answer is that, at least in the U.S., there has been a well-funded, concerted, and exhaustively documented effort to confuse ordinary people about this issue. Fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil and billionaires like the Koch brothers have spent enormous sums of money to fund conservative think tanks whose sole purpose is to spread disinformation about climate change and to bankroll politicians who will work tirelessly to oppose any measures aimed at regulating fossil fuels. In her landmark study of the billionaires behind the rise of the Radical Right in America, Jane Mayer notes, for example, that from 2005 to 2008 Charles and David Koch—most of whose personal investments are in the fossil fuel industry—put about $25 million into various organizations aimed at combatting action on climate change. The main strategy employed here is what Mayer refers to as “weaponized philanthropy,” the creation of nonprofit and therefore largely tax-exempt organizations set up to challenge climate science. Mayer cites the research of the sociologist Robert Brulle on this issue: During the seven-year period [Brulle] studied, these foundations distributed $558 million in the form of 5,299 grants to ninety-one different nonprofit organizations. The money went to think tanks, advocacy groups, trade associations, other foundations, and academic and legal programs. Cumulatively, this private network waged a permanent campaign to undermine America’s faith in climate science and to defeat any effort to regulate carbon emissions.15 Years ago, cigarette companies hired advertisers to convince the public that the science on the links between smoking and lung cancer was not settled. “Doubt”, they proclaimed, was their “product.” The fossil fuel industry hired the very same advertisers to peddle essentially the same message about climate change.16 It worked. How do we characterize the people behind this vast deception? Harry Frankfurt makes a useful distinction between the liar and the bullshitter. Both are deceivers, but Frankfurt argues that the bullshitter is worse than the liar. This is because the bullshitter has no interest whatsoever in the truth. His sole aim is to assert epistemic power over others by deceiving them. The liar, by contrast, displays a certain perverse respect for the truth, since he must track the truth in order to assert its opposite. To be an effective liar you must know the truth, but to be an effective bullshitter all you need to know is whatever is required to get you into a position of power. Frankfurt holds that the bullshitter is deceiving us “not about the facts, nor even what he takes the facts to be,” but, more darkly, about “his enterprise.”17 His enterprise is power and domination, and it is just this he seeks to cover up. There is another important distinction between lying and bullshitting, not discussed by Frankfurt. It is that lying can sometimes be permissible because it is done to prevent greater harms or out of respect for the person lied to. Not everyone agrees with this. Kant, famously, argued that lying is always impermissible. But not many people agree with him about this. If someone is being chased by an axe-murderer and has hidden in your home, most people

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believe that it is permissible to lie to the axe-murderer about his would-be victim’s whereabouts. Or again, if my aunt asks for my opinion about her new shoes, which I find ugly, I might tell her they are beautiful if I know that the truth would make her feel awful. Bullshitting is not like either of these cases. It is always disrespectful and, arguably, harm-causing.18 It is an epistemic tool of unjust domination. All those who have sowed doubt about climate change, or paid others to sow it for them, are producers of bullshit. Their victims, those who believe that the science is not settled, are consumers of bullshit. It is difficult to know what more to say about the producers, but here is one way of registering moral disapproval of their “enterprise.” Discussing examples like O’Brien from Orwell’s 1984, Jason Baehr has coined the phrase, “epistemic malevolence” to describe those who seek to undermine the “epistemic well-being” of other agents.19 By deliberately polluting the pool of socially vital information so that other agents find it very difficult to assess the facts accurately, the climate change bullshitter would appear to have an evil will (the literal meaning of “malevolent”). This might be the worst thing we can say about anybody, though it is, alas, unlikely to move the bullshitter himself. Given the stakes—the potential for runaway climate change consequent on just the sort of political inertia for which they have been paying so handsomely—and the nakedly pecuniary motives that seem to be driving them, describing the producers of climate change bullshit as epistemically malevolent appears warranted. So, how can we fight back against them?

9.5 Dealing with bullshit: producers and consumers The distinction between producers and consumers of climate change bullshit gives us a useful way to approach this question. But what exactly is the question? Well, as regards the producers it is whether or not we should tolerate their speech. The language of toleration in political philosophy has to do primarily with whether the authorities are justified in preventing people from expressing themselves in certain ways. In liberal democracies, freedom of expression is widely tolerated, for reasons laid down famously by John Stuart Mill. Mill argues that “… there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered.” For Mill, the reason for this wide permission is that stifling freedom of expression is likely to lead to social conformity and moral stagnation, what he called “mental slavery.”20 Of course, there are limits to this kind of toleration, limits defined by the harm principle, which we encountered in chapter 2. According to the harm principle, recall, we are justified in interfering with the freedom of expression of others when, but only when, that expression is harming another member of the community. Otherwise, the policy is one of hands-off, no matter how

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morally repugnant we find the views being expressed. The paradigm example of speech that is justifiably prohibited by appeal to the harm principle is yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theatre when there is no fire. But speech that merely “offends” is not considered harmful in the same way. Some philosophers have attempted to show that offensive speech should not be tolerated any more that harmful speech is, but we need not enter into that debate here. Our initial question is whether or not the production of bullshit about climate change should be considered politically protected speech, according to the relatively narrow terms defined by the harm principle. Catriona McKinnon has argued recently that it should not be. Drawing on Jason Stanley’s work on propaganda, McKinnon classifies what she calls “industrial climate denial” as a form of what Stanley terms “undermining demagoguery.” This is: A contribution to public discourse that is presented as an embodiment of a worthy political, economic or rational ideal, but is in the service of a goal that tends to undermine that very ideal.21 This seems to fit the case of climate change bullshit. For one of the things the producers of this form of denial have done over the years is present themselves as the defenders of “sound science” against what they call “junk science” (basically the IPCC). For example, in 1995 a few members of the U.S. Congress, working through the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, set up hearings called “Scientific Integrity and the Public Trust.” Here is how Vanderheiden characterizes this process: Describing climate science as based on “junk science,” … the central strategy of these hearings was to call into question the integrity of mainstream science, and thereby to discredit the empirical bases of the nation’s environmental policies.22 Now, if the nation’s environmental policies are put in place partly to protect its citizens from perceived threats, and if sound empirical analyses are required to do this properly (i.e., actually to address the threats), then it looks as though McKinnon is correct to say that by masquerading as sound science, climate change denial is undermining the very project it claims to be defending. This is all very pressing given the potential for catastrophic climate change. It means that the enterprise in which climate bullshitters are engaged is very likely to lead to substantial social harms. With this in mind, McKinnon would have us alter the example of yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theatre so that it better fits the case at hand. With climate denial, she argues, it is more like a fire has started in a crowded theatre. While plenty of people recognize the danger, and begin warning others of it, a small group attempts to drown out these voices in an effort to convince people that there is no danger. The result is a paralysing confusion. Since there is in fact a fire the result of this confusion is catastrophic, with many lives lost that could have been saved had the fire deniers been silenced coercively (or, if it is too late for that, punished after the event for their misdeed).23

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McKinnon concludes from this analogy that we are permitted to silence—coercively, if necessary—industrial climate change denial. This is provocative, but we should register some suspicion of it as a practically workable approach to our problem. For one thing, the silencing strategy is unlikely to work very quickly and even if it begins to bear fruit it will probably never fully eradicate the production of climate bullshit. This is because it is essentially a legal tool and legal challenges to expression can take a very long time to work their way through the courts. Even if legislators closed some of the loopholes that allow for the sort of “weaponized philanthropy” described by Mayer, others will surely open up. And those defending the production of bullshit will drag the legal process out for longer than we have to wait. We are, after all, talking about people with very deep pockets. Or there could be something like “denial leakage” on analogy with carbon leakage. Prevented from expressing themselves in one jurisdiction deniers will simply relocate to a more permissive one. Of course, in the age of the Internet this talk of jurisdictional boundaries constraining the flow of information might not make much sense anyway. For as long as is relevant there will therefore likely be some bullshit about climate change in the air. This means that even as we attempt to silence its producers we need to think about how to deal with its consumers. What can we say about them? Coercive silencing is surely out of the question with this group, at least on the grounds laid out just above. Bullshit’s consumers are not intending to undermine public policy, hence they are not creating social harms in the same way or to the same degree as are the producers. So the consumers need to be moved entirely by persuasion, though as it stands currently those convinced of the Trio and those who think it is a liberal hoax designed to increase governmental control of the lives of ordinary citizens are talking past one another. In a recent analysis of this phenomenon, Simon Keller has presented a way for the “environmentalist”—basically, someone who accepts the Trio—to “empathize” with the climate change denier in an effort to spur meaningful dialogue between the two groups. The key, says Keller, is to see both positions as examples of “ideology.” Keller uses the concept of ideology to indicate something like a more or less coherent “worldview” (so it should not in this context be confused with our treatment of it in chapter 4). On this understanding, the problem of climate change fits into the worldview that has been espoused by environmentalists for decades. This is because climate change reveals the following “truths:” • • • •

The global rich exploit the global poor. We need to be more frugal, consume less. We should respect nature. We should eat less meat.

182 • •

Climate change denial Governments should regulate polluting industries aggressively, perhaps through taxation. We should challenge state sovereignty and instead build more effective international institutions.24

What about the climate change “sceptic”? Keller says she likely has these beliefs, among others: • • • • • •

Industrial activity benefits all of us and is a sign of progress. Consumption and innovation bring people out of poverty. Nature is a resource. A vegetarian diet is not appealing. Governments already tax us too much. We should be suspicious of international institutions.25

Both of these are belief “packages.” Adopting either commits you to a specific stance on particular policy questions. In particular, if you buy the sceptical package, then you will, other things being equal, also be very strongly inclined to believe what the producers of climate change bullshit are telling you: that climate science is overblown, that it represents an effort to establish more governmental control over our lives, that environmentalists are seeking “world government,” that there are better scientific explanations for the weird weather we have been seeing than those offered by the IPCC, that climate science is part of a socialist scheme to suck money away from wealthy countries and channel it to poorer ones, that climate scientists are just in it for the grant money, that the Chinese are trying to hoodwink everyone else. And so on. Of course we can tell an analogous story about the environmentalist. As Keller puts it, from inside either belief package this is all “subjectively rational.”26 If this is right, then the solution to the impasse is to keep ideology out of the conversations we have about climate change. Keller argues that we can separate questions about whether or not climate change exists from questions about what to do about it if it does: If we were not presented with the science of climate change as part of a broader package—if descriptions of what is happening to the climate were not paired with exhortations to change our lifestyles, for example— then our independent assessment of elements of that broader package would not be so relevant to decisions about whether to trust the science.27 There are good reasons to endorse this strategy in principle. Ideological commitments are generally very deeply entrenched parts of an agent’s moralpsychological makeup. They are rooted in powerful nonrational sources of group loyalty. Each element gains its motivational power precisely from being a member of this emotionally grounded package. So if we could pick out parts

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of these packages and construct our policy discussions around them we might make some progress. However, we should not be too optimistic about the chances of a strategy like this succeeding, for at least two reasons. First, the way the package functions in practice—that is, in real conversations about climate change—is that any element, when raised out loud, triggers the others. For example, it is difficult to speak intelligently about the science of climate change without invoking the work of the IPCC, but the moment one does this in conversation with a denier she will invariably move to fears about world government or the corruption of climate scientists. Keller’s argument here thus appears somewhat naïve. Second, it may not always be a good idea to separate discussion of the climate science from other elements of the packages we tend to bring to our discussions of it. To take Keller’s example just above, what if habits of consumption in the developed world are the root of the problem, as seems plausible? In that case, taking them off the table in discussions of what is to be done about climate change guarantees that we will have the wrong sort of discussion. In short, isolating individual beliefs about climate change from their ideological packages is either desirable but impractical or not desirable at all. Perhaps we will never eradicate altogether the production and consumption of climate change bullshit, though we can probably succeed in limiting it to some extent along the lines of the two strategies discussed in this section. In any case, there may be another source of “denial” worth exploring, one that hits closer to home than we might find comfortable.

9.6 The problem of integrity In the previous two sections we have been discussing climate change denial as if it were something in which “we” more enlightened people would never indulge. We have been tapping into what the environmentalist George Marshall calls an “enemy narrative” about climate change. Marshall thinks this is misguided: The missing truth, deliberately avoided in these enemy narratives, is that in high-carbon societies everyone contributes to the emissions that cause the problem and everyone has a strong reason to ignore the problems or to write their own alibi.28 This is an important insight and Marshall is correct to underline it in the context of a discussion about climate change denial. But we must expand on his somewhat underdeveloped treatment of the issue. There are various ways of writing one’s own “alibi,” various beliefs one might hold that have this function. To complete our picture of climate change denial, let’s put this in terms of strategies aimed at undermining (B3): •

Attacks on (B3) • •

Climate change will have net benefits. There are bigger problems for us to tackle than climate change.

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It’s too late to mitigate, so we should focus entirely on adaptation instead. Anthropogenic climate change is primarily a population issue. I can do my moral part to address the problem without material sacrifice.29 Technology will show us a way out of the crisis We are hard-wired to ignore things like climate change

Belief in one or more of these items is widespread among people who otherwise consider themselves progressive. This is a much more difficult problem than the one involving denial of (B1) and/or (B2). Rather than analysing each belief separately, let’s try to find a more general problem with all of them (though we will want to say something specific just below about the last item). In constructing our picture of what the ideal epistemic agent believes about climate change, we noted that she will likely need to possess the virtue of integrity, so let’s begin by coming back to that virtue. Why is integrity important? Because it is one thing to accept the Trio, quite another to live up to its demands in one’s behaviors and choices. Integrity is sometimes treated as a moral virtue, but specifically epistemic integrity is about the fit between an agent’s belief set and her choices and behaviors. In this section, we are interested in agents who accept (B1) and (B2) and who claim to accept (B3) but also espouse at least one of the anti-(B3) beliefs listed above or some other belief that has the same effect on her choices and behaviors as the anti-(B3) ones do. There is a precedent for speaking this way among researchers interested in this issue. For example, the sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard has written about a small Norwegian ski village she calls “Bygdaby” (the fictionalized name of a real village). She constructs a picture of how the people of the village think about climate change that reveals a great deal about the problem we are investigating. The people of Bygdaby consider themselves to be progressive, “liberals” in the American political vernacular. They are aware of and concerned to do something about the social, economic, and environmental problems that generally trouble this sort of person. They are also relatively wealthy from the exploitation of North Sea fossil fuels reserves. Norway is the eighth largest oil exporter and the third largest natural gas exporter in the world. We have here the curious situation of people who, for the most part, understand the gravity of the climate crisis and are typically motivated to help alleviate problems that have anything to do with social justice, but whose high standard of living depends on perpetuating the main cause of the crisis. The people of Bygdaby, in short, are a good stand-in for a large sector of people in the developed world, especially those—like North-Americans—living in oilproducing and exporting liberal democratic countries. Norgaard provides a detailed account of the manner in which the people of Bygdaby avoid talking

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and thinking about the climate crisis, the way they control information about it so as to lessen its emotional impact on them. In a telling passage she describes these tactics as a form of “denial:” [A]t this time, people had a variety of methods available for normalizing or minimizing disturbing information. These methods can be called strategies of denial. It is significant that what I describe as “climate denial” felt to people in Bygdaby (and, indeed, to people around the world) like “everyday life.” Nonresponse to climate change was produced through cultural practices of everyday life.30 It is important to emphasize that, like the citizens of Bygdaby, many of us consider ourselves to be just people. We demand that our governments live up to the ideals in the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, for example. We are rightly appalled by government-sanctioned human rights abuses, and will not countenance behaviour like this from our own representatives. So why are we not appalled by climate change? The question is rhetorical: we are not appalled because we have not squarely faced the truth about the issue. There is no getting around the fact that, if we are to avoid massive violations of human-rights, we must change the way we are currently acting. We must cut our carbon emissions drastically in the short-to-medium term. Because we have moved so slowly the switch to a fossil-free economy is not going to be painless. The path to what is sometimes called deep decarbonization is steep and rocky, an arduous climb. It may be that at some level many of us get this, which is why we seek out ways of not coming fully to grips with it in our actions (just like Norgaard’s subjects). We want a solution to the climate crisis that involves no material sacrifice from us, no downward pressure on our standard of living. This desire explains the attraction of most of the items on the anti-(B3) list. These beliefs can help us avoid painful or disruptive information about our lifestyles, so we are predisposed to take them more seriously than they deserve to be. For example, it is often said that we are not able to make the requisite changes because of our biology. Marshall, for example, subtitles his book, Why Our Brains Are Hard-Wired to Ignore Climate Change. The message is straightforward and ubiquitous in the popular literature on climate change: we evolved in small, tightly knit groups and are therefore not equipped by the forces of natural selection to adopt the sort of long-range concerns climate change demands of us. We don’t care about the spatially and temporally farflung consequences of our actions, but the fault is in our genes. If the claim is just that our biological inheritance makes the requisite thinking difficult for us, there is no reason to dispute it. However, if it is taken as a form of biological determinism—and this is in effect how many people do take it, when they reference it to rationalize inaction—there are counterexamples to it. First Nations groups in Canada think explicitly of how their

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decisions will affect nonhuman members of the biosphere as well as human members of the “seventh generation.” Human rights victories like the abolition of slavery and the suffragette movement are clear examples of pushing our moral boundaries well beyond the small groups in which we evolved. Adopting the proper level of moral concern for the entities affected by climate change is of a piece with these instances of moral expansion. History shows that we can do this, which brings us back to the responsibilist version of virtue epistemology. Doing the right thing requires having the right beliefs. These beliefs—the Trio—are out there, waiting to be adopted. It is in our power to do so and to act on them. But unless we prize the epistemic virtue of integrity we are unlikely to make all the appropriate connections.

Chapter summary In this chapter we have explored the phenomenon of climate change denial from the standpoint of responsibilist virtue epistemology. We began with a description of the standpoint itself, moving next to a consideration of what the ideal epistemic agent believes about climate change. Here, we highlighted the importance of “the Trio” of beliefs such an agent must adopt and what virtues she will likely require in order to hold them steadfastly. This brought us to climate change denial. We examined the nature of “bullshit” about climate change, the production and dissemination of information designed deliberately by people in positions of economic and social power to confuse others about the fundamental facts of climate change. We also noticed an important distinction between producers and consumers of climate change bullshit. This brought us, finally, to a consideration of a different kind of denial, that involved in a deficiency of integrity among those who claim not to be deniers in the more obvious sense of this term.

Questions for discussion 1

2

3 4 5

Describe virtue epistemology. Is it helpful in some cases to go beyond an agent’s beliefs to a moral consideration of the agent holding the beliefs? Why or why not? Can you think of virtues—beyond courage, open-mindedness and integrity—that an ideal epistemic agent might possess for the climate crisis? Is the characterization of some climate change deniers as bullshitters both accurate and helpful? Explain. Should we tolerate the producers of climate change bullshit? Should we empathize with its consumers? Are you a climate change denier?

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Suggested reading Byron Williston, The Anthropocene Project: Virtue in the Age of Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), chapter 5. •

The most extensive philosophical treatment of this issue in the literature. The current chapter is a condensation of the analysis in this text.

Kari Marie Norgaard, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011). •

A detailed sociological portrait of climate change denial among the wealthy and progressive.

Quassim Cassam, Conspiracy Theories (London, Polity, 2019). •

A short, up-to-date analysis of the social and ethical challenges associated with conspiracy theorizing. Climate change is mentioned, but the problems is helpfully extended to other examples.

Notes 1 Thomas E Hill Jr., “Ideals of Human Excellence and Preserving Natural Environments.” Environmental Ethics, 1983, 5(3), 211–224. 2 Sandel, Justice …, 6. 3 Ernest Sosa, Knowledge in Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 4 Linda Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 5 Al-Jazeera, 12 September, 2017. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/09/pope-francis-slamsclimate-change-doubters-stupid-170911172634528.html. Accessed October 23, 2017. 6 Thomas Reid, Inquiry Into the Human Mind, edited with an introduction by Timothy Duggan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 197. See Williston, The Anthropocene Project …, 117–119. 7 D.M. Armstrong, et. al., “Global Warming in an Independent Record the Past 130 Years.’ Geophysical Research Letters, 2013, 40(1), 189–193. 8 Reid, An Inquiry …, 197. 9 P.T. Doran and M. Kendall Zimmermann, “Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change.” Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, 2009, 90, 22. 10 Quoted in Stacey Feldman, 26 February, 2010. “Climate Scientists Defend IPCC Peer-Review as Most Rigorous in History.” Inside Climate News. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20100226/ climate-scientists-defend-ipcc-peer-review-most-rigorous-history. Accessed October 25, 2017. See Williston, The Anthropocene Project …, 118. 11 W.K. Clifford, The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays (Amhesrt, NY: Prometheus Books, 1999), 73. 12 Nomy Arpaly, “Open-Mindedness as a Moral Virtue.” American Philosophical Quarterly, 2011, 48(1), 75–85 (81). 13 If you want to track all this down, start with Chivers’ excellent summary and go to his sources for more information. Danny Chivers, Climate Change Denial (Adelaide, SA: New Internationalist Publications, 2013). 14 PEW Research Center, “What the world thinks about climate change in 7 charts.” http://www. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/18/what-the-world-thinks-about-climate-change-in-7-charts/. Accessed October 25, 2017.

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15 Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Anchor Books, 2017), 253–254. 16 James Hoggan, Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2009), 64–67. 17 Harry Frankfurt, “On Bullshit.” The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 117–133 (130). See Williston, The Anthropocene Project …, chapter 5. 18 Williston, Environmental Ethics …, 314–315. 19 Jason Baehr, The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and virtue Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 20 Mill, “On Liberty,” 218. 21 Jason Stanley quoted in Catriona McKinnon, “Should we Tolerate Climate Change Denial?” Midwest Studies in Philosophy XL, 2016, 205–26 (210). 22 Vanderheiden, Atmospheric Justice …, 37. 23 McKinnon, “Should we Tolerate … ?”, 213. 24 Simon Keller, “Empathising with Skepticism about Climate Change.” In Moss (ed.), Climate Change and Justice, 219–235 (222). 25 Keller, “Empathising …,” 229. 26 Keller, “Empathising …,” 229. 27 Keller, “Empathising …,” 234. 28 George Marshall, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Hard-Wired to Ignore Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 42. 29 Chivers, Climate Change Denial. 30 Kari Marie Norgaard, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011), 121.

10 Geoengineering

10.1 Introduction So far we have considered, among many other things, the steps we must take in order to avert the disaster of a 4–5°C rise in average global temperatures by 2100. The most important task is to decarbonize the global economy rapidly, thus mitigating future damages. This must, we have seen, be coupled with the aggressive pursuit of a variety of adaptation measures designed to help us cope with the challenges that are in store for us no matter what we do. But what if the focus on mitigation and adaptation is not sufficient to avoid climatic disaster? What if our political inertia on this issue is simply too entrenched to ground the reasonable belief that we will change our ways in time to avert disaster? In this chapter we will explore one increasingly prominent way of responding to this perceived situation: the turn to geoengineering. This term refers to a suite of technologies whose aim is to cool the planet artificially, ideally buying us time to adapt to the effects of climate change. As we will see, proposals to research and deploy geoengineering technologies raise profound ethical questions.

10.2 The turn to geoengineering According to the influential Royal Society Report, geoengineering can be defined as “the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change.”1 The idea has gained considerable traction in policy circles recently. Indeed, in its most recent report the IPCC has, for the first time, provided a synthesis and assessment of the current literature on this topic.2 There are two broad geoengineering categories. The first is Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), the second Solar Radiation Management (SRM). The point of CDR schemes is to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in planetary reservoirs of some kind. CDR technologies include afforestation, soil carbon management, biochar, ocean fertilization, and direct air capture. In each case, carbon is “pulled” from the atmosphere and sequestered in biomass (trees, algae, etc.) or underground geological pockets (depleted aquifers or oil reservoirs, etc.). CDR technologies have a DOI: 10.4324/9781003284925-11

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slow impact on planetary temperatures, are relatively costly to implement, and difficult to scale-up. SRM technologies are aimed at reducing the planet’s temperature by lowering the quantity of solar energy absorbed by the earth. This is done by increasing the earth’s albedo (reflectivity) in one way or another. Techniques include loading the stratosphere with sulfate aerosols, placing mirrors in space, seeding clouds to enhance their brightness, converting rooftops and other terrestrial spaces to a lighter color, and genetically engineering plants with brighter leaves. In contrast to most CDR technologies, SRM technologies have the potential to affect planetary temperatures quickly, are relatively inexpensive and, in some cases, can be scaled-up significantly. As the Royal Society’s definition makes clear, geoengineering has arisen as a response to anthropogenic climate change. More particularly, many see it as a reasonable response to that threat given our evident inability to adopt appropriate mitigation measures. Since this failure could lead to climate disaster it makes sense to have some climatic “insurance,” a planetary “Plan B” to help ameliorate the disaster. The most widely discussed option is a form of SRM, stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI). SAI works by lofting large quantities of sulfates into the upper atmosphere, thus creating what the IPCC refers to as “a high-altitude reflective layer.”3 The idea is modeled on a natural phenomenon, the climatic effects of volcanic eruptions. In 1991 Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted, spewing massive quantities of sulfates into the atmosphere. This had the effect of lowering global temperatures discernibly for several weeks after the eruption. So the plan is, roughly, to mimic volcanoes in case of a climate change– induced planetary emergency. Again, there is some agreement among scientists that deployment of SRM is technically feasible, that it would be an effective means of temperature reduction and that it would not be prohibitively expensive. Because so much of the literature on geoengineering, including the philosophical literature, focuses on this form of SRM (i.e., SAI) we will do so in this chapter as well. Many of the conclusions arrived at will also apply to other forms of SRM. According to the IPCC, because it would lower average global temperatures, successful deployment of SRM could have beneficial climatic side effects. It could, for instance, slow down sea-level rise significantly. This is because, as we saw in Chapter 1, climate change–induced sea-level rise is caused by enhanced glacial and ice sheet run-off as well as “thermosteric” water expansion. Both would likely be curtailed by a reduction in global mean temperature.4 However, SRM comes with many risks and uncertainties. For example, models indicate that its deployment would affect the hydrological cycle in ways that could have negative impacts on humans and other species. There are two ways this might happen. The first is through alteration in precipitation and evaporation patterns in regions, such as South Asia, that rely on the monsoon for agriculture. The second is by altering the rate of

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plant transpiration, which could impact the “recycling of water over continents, soil moisture and surface hydrology.”5 But the most important point to note regarding risks is that the SRMinduced temperature reduction we are talking about merely masks the effects of all that carbon in the atmosphere. If it is not accompanied by mitigation in the form of reducing GHG emissions, SRM is not really solving the problem. It is only applying a Band-Aid to it. There are two points to emphasize about this. The first is that if GHG emissions continue to rise even as we deploy SRM, we can never stop deployment. But since continued deployment depends on high levels of international co-operation, there is no guarantee that we will achieve it in the face of potential geo-political friction. This is the “termination problem,” discussed at some length below. If we cease deployment, we invite swift climate catastrophe because all that carbon we have been emitting will be suddenly unmasked. Second, SAI will not help decrease the problem of ocean acidification. The latter is, we have seen (in chapter 1), a function of the amount of carbon dioxide transferred from the atmosphere to the oceans. But, by hypothesis, this amount will continue to rise even if we have masked the temperature effects of increased atmospheric carbon. So ocean biodiversity will remain severely threatened, something that would have severe knock-on effects throughout the biosphere. The problem of political inertia about climate change is undeniable. We have done virtually nothing to head off this problem since we identified it clearly as such in 1988. There are few reasons to think that is going to change any time soon. This invites contemplation of radical technological proposals. We find ourselves at an impasse, and must effectively choose geoengineering as the “lesser of two evils.” Here is the argument for this conclusion: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

If we continue to emit carbon at current levels, we will bring on climate disaster. There is no evidence to suggest that we will stop emitting at these levels in the time required to avoid disaster. So we need an insurance plan. Geoengineering is the most viable insurance plan we have got. Geoengineering is risky. But it is less risky than unchecked climate change. Therefore, we should expand research into geoengineering with a view to deploying it in case of a climate emergency.6

It is difficult to deny propositions (1) and (2), though it is still ethically important to fight the inertia so we may want to resist (2). Proposition (5) looks unassailable. Almost all scientists, as well as the IPCC, advocate extreme caution in our approach to these technologies, sometimes suggesting we should declare a moratorium on further research into them for decades to come.

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However, propositions (3), (4), and (6) are not obviously correct. Moreover, they conceal value judgments and ethical complexities that we need to bring to light. Much of the rest of this chapter will seek to do this. For example, proposition (6) is subject to acute and unavoidable uncertainty, the more so the further into the future we are gazing. If any of these propositions is shown to be false, or improbable, the conclusion (7) will not follow. Let’s begin with an analysis of the idea that geoengineering represents some kind of insurance policy.

10.3 Moral hazard and moral corruption Perhaps the most ubiquitous claim one finds in these discussions is proposition (3). But does framing geoengineering as an insurance policy invite reckless behavior on the part of the “insured”? This is the problem of “moral hazard.” As we will see, it is tied intimately to worries about the “corrupt” moral reasoning allegedly involved in our whole approach to the phenomenon of climate change.

10.3.1 Moral hazard The problem of moral hazard originated with the insurance industry. It describes what many take to be a pervasive behavioral pattern. When people have insurance on a good they will take bigger risks in their treatment of the good than they would without insurance. Most people, for example, will take extra precautions to fireproof their house if they do not have insurance on it. Having insurance on your car will cause you to drive less carefully than you would without it. And so on. Applied to our case, the claim is that if we believe we have a feasible Plan B for the climate in the form of some geoengineering scheme we will be less likely to engage in serious efforts at mitigation and adaptation. Because we have convinced ourselves that we are technologically protected, we might not only do nothing to curb GHG emissions but even increase them. But although the moral hazard problem seems straightforward, recent philosophical work on it has revealed it to be anything but. In a careful discussion of the issue, Ben Hale has argued that the concept of moral hazard is too vague to do much philosophical work. For Hale, the moral hazard problem is invoked to pick out three distinct reasons for concern about our behavior: its bad consequences, its abdication of epistemic responsibility, and its encouragement of moral vice. Consequentialist reasons invoke the likelihood that the insured individual will behave in ways that increase losses. Abdication of epistemic responsibility points to the tendency to ignore or dismiss reasons for caution. The problem of vice is that insurance produces dispositions in the insured that are morally objectionable: overindulgence, greed, hubris, and so on. Hale’s main point is that the appeals we

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find to the problem of moral hazard with respect to geoengineering all make implicit use of one or more of these reasons for concern. We need to clarify which is being assumed in each invocation of the moral hazard problem and decide if these reasons are compelling in that case.7 Let’s take a closer look at these three reasons for concern. Take first the consequentialist reason. As mentioned already, it has been suggested that insurance produces negative outcomes because those who are insured behave more recklessly. This seems to make intuitive sense applied to examples like driving. But even here we might raise some questions. Do you really drive more recklessly than you would were you not insured? It seems as though there are reasons for caution on the road—most obviously, the near universal desire to avoid death or injury—that are entirely independent of the driver’s knowledge that he is insured. The same line of reasoning presumably applies to anti-lock brakes, airbags, eye wash stations in chemical labs, having fire extinguishers handy, smoke alarms in good working condition, and so on. The most important questions to ask with respect to any of these technologies is not whether they lead to more reckless behavior but whether or not they lead to more death or injury. And there is little evidence to support the claim that they do.8 This brings us to the second reason for concern, the one about abdication of epistemic responsibility. It is of course possible that some set of behaviors, tied to the adoption of a technology, will produce negative outcomes but that we tend to underestimate—or ignore altogether—the probability of the bad outcomes occurring. This is a real concern with SRM, but it looks as though it can be overcome by clarifying what this technology is and is not capable of providing by way of protection. As we have seen, it can at best keep global average temperatures lower than they would be without it and prevent some sea-level rise. But it will not prevent or slow down ocean acidification and it will have negative knock-on effects in the biosphere of uncertain severity. Once we realize this, it should be obvious that SRM without mitigation and adaptation will probably produce bad outcomes. In a recent update to its report the Royal Society emphasizes this point: Cutting global greenhouse gas emissions must remain our highest priority. Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change should make increased efforts toward mitigating and adapting to climate change, and in particular to agreeing to global emissions reductions of at least 50 per cent by 2050 and more thereafter. Nothing now known about geoengineering options gives any reason to diminish these efforts.9 The solution to the moral hazard problem in this form is, then, simply to ensure that people are better informed about the limitations of geoengineering technologies. The main problem with framing our response this way, however, is that this model of science communication—formally known as the

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“knowledge deficit hypothesis”—has been discredited by social scientists. People need more than the bare facts if they are to be moved to change their ways or their beliefs. Analysis of this issue would take us too far afield. In any case, nobody is suggesting that the communication of facts by scientists should be abandoned, only that it is not by itself sufficient to get the relevant points across to the wider public. Suppose we take the recommendation of the Royal Society just quoted to entail that it is impermissible to pursue SRM without also engaging aggressively in mitigation and adaptation (they don’t use this sort of language themselves). The question then is why we might advocate for research into SRM in the knowledge that we are doing so little to mitigate and adapt. This describes current reality, but it looks as though we can get away with it only if we are deceiving ourselves about the nature of SRM. And maybe we are doing this because we are beneficiaries of the current state of affairs—the one involving high GHG emissions—which we therefore want to perpetuate for as long as possible. This would make us greedy and our greed would be an important part of the explanation of why we are prone to moral hazard on this issue. This brings us to Hale’s third and final reason for concern: that our approach to geoengineering is somehow vicious. Because it fits this description so well and has also become so influential in climate ethics, let’s look briefly at Gardiner’s analysis of geoengineering.

10.3.2 Moral corruption Gardiner has argued that our tendency to frame the geoengineering challenge as a “lesser evil” argument betrays a fundamental “moral corruption” in us. In one form or another the lesser evil argument is ubiquitous here (we relied on it in the 7-proposition argument, just above). Its advocates say that we should conduct research into and perhaps deploy SRM to deal with a potential climate emergency because the effects of the climate emergency would be so much worse than whatever negative outcomes would be produced by SRM deployment. Gardiner’s argument is complex so I want to expand upon one of its key features: the claim that in employing lesser evil arguments we give ourselves the moral luxury of supposing we face a real dilemma.10 To see how this works, think of agents in genuine moral dilemmas. Abstractly, these take the following paradigmatic form. An agent must perform action A or action B. She believes that both A and B are morally wrong, but that B is more morally wrong than A. So she chooses the lesser evil, action A. For example, imagine I find myself financially destitute but I’m the sole provider for my family and my child requires expensive emergency medical treatment. My only options are (a) to sell our home, which has been in the family for generations and which I promised my father on his deathbed I would never sell; or (b) to take a lucrative job with a company that is known to manufacture land mines, though I believe the use of these weapons is reprehensible.

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Assuming these two courses exhaust the options available to me, it makes sense to say I should probably choose (a) because it is the lesser of two evils. Whereas option (a) involves promise-breaking, which is usually bad, being an accessory to the spread of land mines is clearly much worse since it will contribute to harming some people very gravely. There are a number of things we can say about agents in this kind of situation. For example, although I have by definition done something wrong in choosing (a), and wrong by my own lights, it is difficult to blame me for my decision. Even so, we might think it appropriate for me to be “marred” by that decision, to feel guilty for breaking the promise. We would react with dismay to someone who simply shrugs off all such negative feelings in cases like this. However, this paradigm situation could be altered in a way that would affect our assessment of the agent. For instance we might discover that the agent had culpably put himself into a dilemma. Since in this case he would be blameworthy for the existence of the dilemma itself we would be much less inclined to let him off the hook for the bad outcomes of his choice than we would if he had been forced into the dilemma by someone else (or by the world itself). In the above example, you would presumably assess me differently were you to discover that it was my gambling habit that put me into such dire financial straits. And this looks to be the appropriate way to think about the geoengineering case. SRM might be the lesser evil in case of a climate emergency, but it cannot be forgotten that we have created the emergency through our culpable neglect of the problem of climate change. The reason this is important is because it exacerbates the wrongness of what we do. The agent who has put herself into a moral dilemma has done something more morally wrong than the agent who simply finds herself in one, even if both choose the same action in order to get beyond the dilemma. It follows that it is morally important for us to strive to avoid situations of moral dilemma if we can. We are not yet in a situation of moral dilemma with respect to climate change and geoengineering but we tend to interpret our situation as though we are. That is, it may still be possible to avoid the emergency, or at least diminish it, through aggressive mitigation and adaptation. But because we have succumbed to “moral corruption,” we have prematurely cast ourselves as dilemmatic choosers. In truth, we are in the process of putting ourselves into a moral dilemma. The distinction is absolutely crucial from the moral point of view. Gardiner’s overarching claim is that because we greedily desire to perpetuate our highcarbon lifestyles, but also realize dimly that this is leading to catastrophe, we are looking for a means of moral assuagement. Geoengineering thought of as the lesser evil fits the bill perfectly. It means we can refrain altogether from making significant material sacrifices while congratulating ourselves for being strong enough to make the “tough” choice in the form of a techno-fix. Of course, it does not follow that we should never pursue SRM. At some point we may well find ourselves in the relevant dilemma, whichever way we got there.

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Gardiner’s point is only that if we do get there it will be our own fault and that this fact should mar us deeply if we choose to geoengineer. This still leaves us with the task of determining whether or not it is permissible to engineer the climate. In the very first discussion of the ethics of geoengineering by a philosopher, Dale Jamieson argues that, quite apart from questions of technical feasibility and economics, we need to ask of any geoengineering scheme whether “implementing the project would not seriously and systematically violate any important, well-founded ethical principles or considerations.”11 Any proposal that cannot meet this condition should be considered impermissible. One of the most important results of our discussion in previous chapters is that the principle or conviction that is perhaps most well-founded in our thinking about climate change—and more generally too—is that of justice. Despite the efforts of some—neo-liberal economists mostly, as well as the politicians who follow their lead—to dismiss considerations of justice, they will simply not go away that easily. So, it might be fruitful to apply Jamieson’s test of geoengineering permissibility to this concept. Is geoengineering a just response to climate change?

10.4 Just governance Chapters 4 and 5 have already examined the question of climate justice at both the international and intergenerational levels. In this section we will rely on some of the results of those chapters, but there are also problems of justice that are unique to the phenomenon of geoengineering. To help maintain our focus, we will address concerns about justice through a particular lens: the legitimate governance of geoengineering technologies. The reason for this focus is that geoengineering is a much narrower phenomenon than climate change. Because it involves choices about how political institutions will handle a relatively well-defined set of technologies, it makes sense to consider geoengineering as a problem of governance. As we will see, the governance lens illuminates important issues of domination, distribution of likely harms, consent, and compensation as they arise in thinking through the challenges of geoengineering. First, let’s see why governance is thought to be such an important concern in this area. In 2010, there was a major international conference on geoengineering held at Asilomar, California. Five principles were adopted by the delegates, one of which has specifically to do with governance: Governments must clarify responsibilities for, and, when necessary, create new mechanisms for the governance and oversight of large-scale climate engineering research activities that have the potential or intent to significantly modify the environment or affect society. These mechanisms should build upon and expand existing structures and norms for governing

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scientific research and, in the event of damaging outcomes, establish who would bear the cost and the degree of liability and proof that are required.12 As this principle implies, we need subnational, national, and international institutions capable of dealing with all this complexity. But we won’t know how to structure the institutions without a clearer picture of whose rights and interests are at stake with respect to the policy proposals we are contemplating. Of special concern in this context are power imbalances existing either among countries (or groups of countries) in the present or between the present and the future. Where such imbalances exist the relatively disempowered are vulnerable in a number of ways and are therefore in danger of having their rights violated. This is the broad possibility on which we should concentrate in talking about the justice of SRM. Let’s separate our analysis into four areas of concern about power imbalances and the vulnerabilities to which they give rise: distributive justice, intergenerational justice, procedural justice, and corrective justice.13

10.4.1 Distributive justice Distributive justice concerns how to distribute, or allocate, benefits and burdens within some politically circumscribed group. With respect to geoengineering, we are most concerned with who bears the burdens of the harms caused by deployment. There are three important sources of vulnerability to be considered here: geographical, military, and economic.14 First, some people will be forced to bear disproportionate burdens simply because of where they live. For example, if monsoons are disrupted, agricultural output in some parts of South Asia could drop. Populations having difficulty feeding themselves because of this may be forced to migrate in order to find food. Generally speaking the costs and risks of migration—whether within a state or across an international border—are very high. Whatever else it is, migration should therefore be thought of as an extreme burden for those who are forced to undertake it. This is morally arbitrary and therefore unjust. It would be akin to depriving someone of equal access to education just because of the morally arbitrary fact that she has darker skin than members of the majority population of a political community. At the very least, people subject to harms like this must be compensated, a point addressed just below. Second, because SRM can be “weaponized” some populations face specifically military vulnerability. This could both express and exacerbate situations of existing international power disparity. Somewhat paradoxically, the threat here could be either of deployment or prevention of deployment of SRM. With respect to the threat of deployment imagine the U.S. had been granted special authority to deploy SRM through the U.N. Security Council. If it wanted to coerce India into accepting the terms of a lopsided trade deal it could threaten deployment of SRM, in full knowledge of the potential for monsoon disruption

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this would lead to. As for the threat of prevention, suppose a coalition of Baltic States were suffering from heat waves, which a reflective shield would likely ameliorate. Russia, fearing a drought-induced collapse of its wheat crop from this deployment, might threaten the coalition with military attack if it went ahead with the deployment. Existing imbalances in military strength among countries can thus force unjust burdens on the relatively weak. The final area of concern under the heading of distributive justice is economic vulnerability. Imagine that SRM deployment would allow global temperature rise to stay below 2°C, and that this would benefit nearly everyone on the planet because far fewer people would be subject to the ravages of heat waves and sea-level rise. However, if carbon emissions continue to rise throughout the SRM deployment and this causes a spike in ocean acidification, global fisheries could be damaged. Now, approximately 2.5 billion people derive at least 20% of their animal protein from fish. Thriving fisheries are located all over the world but tend to be concentrated in the global south. The result is that a disproportionate number of people in countries from this part of the world—Sri-Lanka, Philippines, Mauritania, Bangladesh, Morocco, Mozambique, etc.—are vulnerable to a shock in the global fish stock of the sort that could be caused by unchecked ocean acidification. Richer countries that also rely on their fisheries—Japan, Norway, The UK, Canada, etc.—will feel the shock too. But these are among the most diversified economies in the world. Diversification is an important measure of economic stability, and therefore also of wealth, because where significant economic diversification exists damage to one sector of an economy can be balanced by enhanced performance in another sector. It is therefore likely that Japan or Norway could cope economically with a temporary shock to its fishery, whereas this would devastate the Philippines or Morocco. Moreover, even if the disruption were not temporary, developed countries are generally much further along in the use of aquaculture and genetic modification technologies, so they could in principle adapt to the new reality with relative ease by employing these technologies. In short, in the imagined scenario developing countries will be forced to bear costs that could be overwhelming, whereas developed countries can likely avoid this. Because this state of affairs is a product of economic—as well as geographical—luck it seems unjust on its face. Generalizing from this case we see that the economic disparity between the rich and poor countries of the world can affect their vulnerabilities to geoengineering in a way that reflects their vulnerabilities to climate change itself.

10.4.2 Intergenerational justice We have seen in chapter 5 that the problem of intergenerational climate justice is in some ways an intensification of the dynamics underlying international

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climate justice. Wherever there are power imbalances and a consequent skewing of vulnerabilities, appeals to justice are important. But there is no more pronounced power imbalance than the one between present and future generations. The latter have literally no power over us even though some of the decisions we make will affect their rights and interests in fundamental ways. This is, as we have seen, why some philosophers working in this area have employed the very strong moral language of “tyranny” (Gardiner) and “domination” (Nolt) to characterize the stance of present people to people of the future. This is related to SRM due to the “termination problem.” If SRM is not accompanied by mitigation and carbon emissions continue to rise, the reflective shield will have to be maintained in perpetuity. This will demand ongoing international agreements about burden-sharing, technology transfers, and so on. The usual stuff of international diplomacy, to be sure, but in this case the potential cost of disagreement is exceedingly high. It is very risky to hold the global climate hostage to the vagaries of garden-variety geopolitical bargaining. By deciding to deploy SRM now, we saddle future generations with all the problems of perpetuating it, even though they played no part in the decision to deploy it. That might be considered tyrannical on its face, but this judgment is probably too hasty. Suppose the main problems here could be overcome. That is, suppose (a) the reflective shield worked sufficiently well that temperatures and sea levels were prevented from rising dangerously; and (b) international institutions were created that were able to maintain the system in perpetuity. In this case SRM would provide significant net benefits to the future relative to the world they would inherit without it. In that case would we be doing something wrong in forcing them to perpetuate the system? Patrick Taylor Smith thinks we would be and that this is because we would be exercising undue power over them, i.e., dominating them: It is irrelevant that this new power could be used to benefit those subject to it, and it would be equally irrelevant even if the negative side effects of its deployment were relatively de minimus; dominating power is not immune from moral criticism simply because it might be used well or because it might not be all that harmful.15 For Smith, SRM is like “humane” slavery. We can imagine a slaveholder who treated his slaves just like family, but of course the problem is that his authority over them is still exercised arbitrarily and is therefore intrinsically unjust. The reason for this is that the threat of abuse hangs over the head of the slave even as she is otherwise being treated “well.” Similarly, SRM without mitigation is intrinsically unjust because it places future people under the threat of termination and the climate catastrophe that would follow. This is a powerful analysis. For one thing, it does not rule out SRM altogether. Were SRM accompanied by aggressive mitigation and adaptation—this

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is the so-called “portfolio” approach to geoengineering—the threat would effectively be removed at some point in the future. It follows that we would not stand in a relationship of dominance to that generation for which the threat was removed and that SRM deployment in the present might therefore be permissible. Still, there are at least two grounds for suspicion here. First, the residency time of carbon in the atmosphere can be very long, so even if we were to undertake decarbonization immediately the threat identified would persist well beyond the current generation. What do we say about the generations intervening between the deployers and those no longer under the threat? Suppose we are generation A and they are generation D. Generations B and C will still have to live under the threat and so our relationship to them is one of domination, on Smith’s understanding of the notion. It does not look as though we can justify violating the rights of generations B and C in this manner. At the very least, more work is needed to show how this might be justified, since it is arbitrary to say that we are permitted to dominate some people (those belonging to B and C) but not others (those belonging to D and beyond). Second, we might wonder if an argument like this proves too much. Imagine a national health care system that was very costly to maintain but that shielded a significant number of people from health care costs that would otherwise sink them financially. Imagine in addition that no measures are taken at the governmental level to combat the main sources of declining health in society: obesity, smoking, etc. If we are the generation that decides to implement a program like this in response to a crisis are we dominating future generations, those “forced” to maintain the program? On Smith’s understanding we would appear to be if the consequence of dismantling the program in the future is that many people die or become morbid. This would be the threat under which we have placed future people because of (a) our refusal to tackle the root causes of poor health; and (b) our creation of an expensive health care program that must be maintained in perpetuity. But we might argue that these considerations alone do not justify refraining from creating the program if it is needed to manage a health care crisis, even if we take no measures to address root causes. By parity of reasoning, it might be permissible to have SRM ready for deployment in case of a climate emergency even if we take no significant measures to mitigate and adapt.

10.4.3 Procedural justice Procedural justice is about equity in the processes employed to facilitate decision about how benefits and burdens are distributed. It has to do with constructing institutionally embedded rules that govern the negotiations of interested parties—including, somehow, future generations—about anything from the allocation of scarce resources to the specification of research priorities. To qualify as genuinely fair, such procedures must be transparent and

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it must be reasonable for all interested parties to consent to them. There are two issues to consider under the heading of procedural justice as it relates to geoengineering: securing broad consent for deployment and defining research priorities. The issue of securing consent arises because one of the key worries with this technology is that of unilateral deployment. That is, because SRM is relatively cheap a country that believed deployment was necessary to protect its own vital interests could undertake it without cooperating or even consulting with other interested parties. Moreover, it could attempt to justify doing so by appeal to self-defense. China, for example, might decide that too many of its citizens are dying in heat waves and respond accordingly. But this could have negative knock-on effects for other countries that were not consulted about the deployment. It might, for instance, exacerbate drought conditions in the Sahel region of Africa. Even a nonstate actor such as a corporation might decide to launch some geoengineering scheme as a way to make money on the “voluntary offset market.” These possibilities point to the need for institutional mechanisms that regulate the behavior of all parties to optimize outcomes for all. Jamieson doubts that we will be able to come up with ethically appropriate mechanisms to decide on SRM deployment: Even if we assume that nations are the proper decision-makers for attempts to change the global climate, [this] leaves open the question of the threshold of agreement that is required (majority? consensus?) and the institutional location of the decision-making process. It is sometimes suggested that the UN Security Council would be the most appropriate institution for authorizing intentional climate change, but the moral authority of the Security Council is itself in question and it is not clear that under the UN Charter it has competence over such matters.16 However, we should not consider the problem insurmountable. One reason for some optimism is that poorer countries have some leverage over rich ones precisely because of the possibility of relatively easy, unilateral deployment. Assuming that this is something rich countries want regulated, they will at least have to sit down somewhere and negotiate in good faith with everyone else. Contrast the power that nuclear-armed countries have over those without nuclear arms. Because the costs of nuclear armament are so high, nonarmed countries generally have no credible leverage over armed countries on this issue. That is one reason why the current global nuclear arms arrangement—which is really a geopolitical power imbalance—has remained more or less static since the end of the Second World War. This brings us to the second issue of procedural justice. Everything we have been talking about so far is premised on the idea of deployment of SRM. But there is a prior question that is relevant to concerns about justice: what is the

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best way to do research into the possibilities? This might sound like a question with an obvious answer: let the scientists do the research. But this simple answer conceals significant moral complexity. As is the case with much hightech research, most of the research currently being done on geoengineering is happening in the developed world. This could understandably make developing countries nervous about whose interests are being looked after in this research. Additionally, there is the significant problem of “lock in” or “path dependency.” When governments or private corporations sink significant money into researching a particular technology, there is an increased chance of that technology ultimately being deployed. This has led some to worry that enhanced research into geoengineering is a fast track to deployment.17 These points raise many questions. Will those technologies that primarily benefit rich countries be emphasized in research programs? In seeking out “public-private” ventures in an effort to raise capital for geoengineering projects will governments become beholden to the interests of profit-driven firms? Will embarking on a research program of this magnitude undermine the effort to mitigate climate change through reductions in carbon emissions? And finally, how do we incorporate the vital interests of future people into our decision-making procedures so that the institutions governing geoengineering research and deployment are genuinely intergenerational in scope? Such questions indicate clearly that any research program embarked upon must be defined and constrained ahead of time by multiple justice-based considerations.

10.4.4 Corrective justice Corrective justice is about compensating the victims of actions (or omissions) that have harmed them. With respect to SRM, corrective justice requires that we are able to identify beneficiaries and victims of these technologies. On the assumption prevalent in the literature that SRM will create “winners” and “losers,” this should not in principle be difficult to do. Those of us in the present who, let’s say, decide to deploy SRM will clearly benefit from the deployment (if it works). Not only will we be protected from the ravages of excess heat or sea-level rise but we will also be forced to pay less than we would were we to engage strenuously in mitigation and adaptation. The same considerations apply to some members of the future, namely those who are still protected from the heat and sea-level rise by SRM and who also do not have to spend an inordinate amount of money to keep the whole thing going. The victims would be those members of the present or future who suffered net losses due to deployment, for example those whose livelihoods were affected negatively by changes in the hydrological cycle. Considerations of corrective justice would require those identified as beneficiaries to compensate those identified as having been harmed. However, things are not as simple as this portrayal of them suggests. As Toby Svboda

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and Peter Irvine have argued, there are considerable difficulties on two points. The first concerns establishing a causal connection between the harms we have identified and SRM. Call this the technical issue. The second is about what ethical principles should guide our decisions about compensation. Call this the ethical issue.18 The technical issue is similar to the challenge of attributing a particular weather event to climate change. In fact Svboda and Irvine assimilate the difficulty inherent in SRM detection to the difficulty inherent in climate change detection. In either case we need to rely on computer modeling. Suppose there is an interruption of the Indian monsoon for two years running, beginning just one year after SRM deployment. The basic approach is to create two simulations with slightly different inputs. The first includes all known causal factors including SRM. The second is the same as the first minus the SRM input. If the first model scenario captures the observed phenomena better than the second, then the interruption of the monsoon can be attributed, at least in part, to SRM.19 The problem is that it is difficult in principle to be sure that any model captures all relevant causes. There could be some cause that was not a part of the model even though it played a large role in bring about the consequence. If we are demanding that some people pay compensation to others, this sort of uncertainty can be quite problematic morally because it can lead us to misidentify those responsible for payment, the real “polluters.” There is much more to be said about this issue. The attribution problem has received a lot of attention from researchers of late. The result is that steady progress is being made in our ability to attribute specific weather events to anthropogenic climate change. These results will clearly be relevant to establishing causal links between SRM deployment and subsequent harms. So although the worry raised by Svoboda and Irvine is worth paying attention to, it should not be considered the end of the debate. In other words, we should not overstate the difficulty of the technical issue. The task is to go with the pronouncements of our best science regarding attribution, and let the chips fall where they may. If we later discover that a party had been asked unjustly to provide compensation, it will, one hopes, always be possible to re-compensate them for their losses. This brings us to the ethical issue. Svboda and Irvine argue that the most obviously applicable theoretical tool we have here, the polluter pays principle (PPP), is not up to the challenge. As we have seen in chapter 4, the PPP tells us that those who are historically responsible for harm-causing pollution should pay to clean it up, other things being equal. Svboda and Irvine claim that there are at least two problems with the PPP as applied to SRM: • •

It is not clear whether individuals or collectives are responsible for SRM. The PPP is unfair to countries that deploy SRM for purposes of selfdefense.20

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These are important points but they do not undermine the applicability of the PPP to this issue. The first problem is much more relevant to climate change than to geoengineering. With climate change there are billions of point sources, varying in size from individual agents to states. This is one of the factors making responsibility so difficult to determine in this case. But if geoengineering is undertaken it will be because of the decision of an entity that is, by contrast, eminently identifiable as a collective: a state, a coalition of states, or a corporation. Individuals play little role here except, perhaps, as citizens of states or shareholders of corporations that may be responsible for deployment. In that case, the bearer of primary responsibility, the collective, would pass on compensation costs to citizens and shareholders. The second problem arises because a state might engage in SRM literally to save itself, for instance if it were threatened with imminent and catastrophic flooding due to sea-level rise. Would this state be on the hook to compensate the victims of the deployment? If so, this seems unjust. R.K. Garcia responds as follows: The problem with this argument is that it fails to acknowledge the scope restriction built into the PPP. The PPP does not range over all agents causally responsible for pollution. It ranges over all agents morally responsible for pollution.21 Here, the state is not culpable for the harms consequent on its actions because it is forced to engage in such actions as a matter of survival. This seems to be a correct application of a principle of self-defense most of us recognize. We should add, however, that whether or not the state in question ought to compensate the victims of its actions will also depend on (a) its ability to pay and (b) its historical responsibility for climate change.

10.5 Two final points This concludes our consideration of SRM and justice, but we should note two more points before moving on. First, it is worth underlining a key point of this analysis, namely that the justice-related threat of SRM is not so much that it will create situations of international and intergenerational injustice as that it will exacerbate existing power imbalances. Shue’s notion of compound injustice—referred to in chapter 4—is helpful here: Compound injustice occurs when an initial injustice paves the way for a second, as when colonial exploitation weakens the colonized nation to such an extent that the colonizer can impose unequal treaties upon it even after it gains independence.22 In the kinds of scenarios we have been examining in this section, SRM deployment could function much like the process of colonization in this

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respect. It could compound existing injustices. More precisely, it is probably best viewed as a potential third or even fourth level of compound injustice. Thus an original injustice between two countries—colonization, to take Shue’s example—might be compounded by post-colonization trade arrangements that are unjust, which might in turn be compounded by the injustice of climate change. If the effects of SRM are even worse for the disempowered country than those of climate change itself, the original injustice will be compounded on yet another level by SRM. That is a special reason for caution with respect to these technologies. Second, we have to this point been trying to determine whether or not SRM deployment, or even research into it, breaches any well-founded principles of justice. However, we might instead conceive of SRM as a means to the pursuit of justice. Holly Jean Buck, for instance, has argued that geoengineering, properly conceived and executed, “could be scaled up in ways that alleviate structural aspects of human development problems such as inequality, energy, poverty, food security, and land access.”23 That is, to the extent that these problems are, in significant part, attributable to climatic conditions, and we have the means to alter these conditions technologically in ways that ameliorate the problems, we should do so. Buck interprets the event that has given rise to the possibility of geoengineering—that is, climate change—as an opportunity for moral progress rather than a crisis we should bemoan. Geoengineering is the tool for seizing the opportunity. Others have put forward a similar view. Here, for example, is Timothy Morton, talking specifically about SAI: The ultimate challenge is not just to picture what an earthsystem subject to some deliberate level of design might be like. It is to picture a world in which you would feel happy about such a design being realized. It is about finding happiness and exercising compassion on a planetary scale …. The goal is to help you imagine a world attractive enough that many would welcome it, but robust and provisional enough that its creation does not require everyone to agree on every aspect of it; a world that requires neither uniformity of outlook nor the suppression of dissent, but offers ways for justice and sympathy to spread out through the human world and into the earthsystem beyond.24 Such sentiments should remind us of the discussion of ecomodernism in chapter 7. There, recall, we pointed out that ecomodernism has a peculiar blind spot insofar as it tends to ignore the political dimensions of our environmental problems. While in no way abandoning that analysis, we can now state the problem more crisply. Ecomodernism is a form of magical thinking. As Morton would have it, universal justice will emerge all by itself from the unconstrained application of technology, in this case SAI. Our discussion of geoengineering in this chapter allows us to appreciate the

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profound error in this way of thinking. Unless considerations of justice constrain research into and deployment of these technologies they will almost certainly extend and even exacerbate the current system of skewed vulnerabilities and opportunities. The prospect of geoengineering shows how far down the path of moral compromise we have travelled in the age of climate change. The lesser of two evils argument for geoengineering illustrates this nicely. What we are proposing to do with these technologies is alter the entire biosphere technologically so that we might survive a few decades or centuries more. This is a moment of grave and unprecedented existential uncertainty in our collective career. I think we must admit that we do not really know where we are going, that we are tampering recklessly with forces we do not comprehend, and that a question mark therefore hangs over the future of our species. This concern is also raised by other technologies. For example, many people are now very worried about the possibility that AI might run amok. What exactly is the content of this worry? It is usually stated as the potential for misalignment between our values and the “values” of systems that evoloved to a significant extent on their own through the process of selflearning. If the misalignment is severe enough the machines might even turn on their makers. According to some people this presents an existential risk to humanity. There are probably good reasons for this worry, but we might ask why the same level of worry has not emerged about the prospect of poisoning the sky for ever through an over-hasty deployment of a technology we barely understand. At the very least we need to be asking pointed questions about the values that are most important to us and the trade-offs we are willing to make just to survive. In its ancient and often forgotten role as the conscience of the species, philosophy has therefore never been more important.

Chapter summary This chapter has considered an intriguing but also deeply morally problematic way of responding to the climate crisis. The prospect of geoengineering raises fundamental questions about justice, moral corruption, and international cooperation, among others. We began by examining why the prospect has emerged, showing how it is meant to counter the threat of climate catastrophe. Next, we discussed the problem of moral hazard, the worry that belief in a techno-fix for climate change will cause us to give up on mitigation and adaptation. We also saw how this problem is illuminated using Gardiner’s concept of moral corruption. Since to this point the discussion left open the central question of geoengineering’s moral permissibility, we explored this by reference to the multifaceted concept of justice.

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Questions for discussion 1

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Some have defended a “portfolio” approach to geoengineering, according to which it is permissible but only if accompanied by mitigation and adaptation. Is this approach promising? Is the moral hazard argument sound as applied to geoengineering? Should such an argument focus on consequences, epistemic responsibility, or vice (or some combination of them)? Which of the four justice-based approaches—distributive, procedural, intergenerational and corrective—provide the best basis for a critique of geoengineering? Is the very idea of geoengineering morally outlandish? Explain. What does the prospect of geoengineering tell us about ourselves? Are the ecomodernists perhaps correct to say that we should look forward to this prospect?

Suggested reading Christopher J. Preston (ed.) Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012). •

The first collection of essays on this topic, including some destined to become classics in the field. Very broad-ranging.

Holly Jean Buck. After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair and Restoration (London: Verso, 2019). •

A deep reflection on what the world might look like if geoengineering were implemented. The account is scientifically informed and balanced.

Gernot Wagner. Geoengineering: The Gamble (London: Polity, 2021). •

Wagner is a climate economist, focusing here on the moral hazard aspect of geoengineering. Clear and bracing.

Christopher J. Preston, Climate Justice and Geoengineering: Ethics and Policy in the Anthropocene (Lanham: Roman and Littlefield, 2016). •

This is the second volume on the topic edited by Christopher Preston. It is more focused than the first volume, containing some superb analyses of geoengineering and justice.

Notes 1 John Shepard et. al., Geoengineering the Climate: Science, Governance and Uncertainty (London: Royal Society, 2009) 1. 2 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 2014. Assessment Report 5 (AR5), WG II, chapter 6, Assessing Transformation Pathways, 485–489.

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IPCC Assessing Transformation Pathways, chapter 6, 486. IPCC Assessing Transformation Pathways, chapter 6, 487. IPCC Assessing Transformation Pathways, chapter 6, 487. Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm …, 353. This is an adaptation of Gardiner’s presentation of the lesser evil argument. Ben Hale, “The World That Would Have Been: Moral Hazard Arguments Against Geoengineering.” In Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management, edited by Christopher J. Preston (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012) 113–131. Hale, “The World That Would Have Been …,” 130. J.G. Shepard, “Geoengineering the Climate: An Overview and Update.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 2012, 370, 4166–4175 (4173). Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm …, 379–394. Dale Jamieson, “Ethics and Intentional Climate Change.” Climatic Change, 1996, 33, 323–336 (326). Asilomar Scientific Organizing Committee, Recommendations on Principles for Research into Climate Engineering Techniques. Washington: Climate Institute, 2014. http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/ documents/AsilomarConferenceReport.pdf This follows the approach of Toby Svboda, Klaus Keller, Marlos Goes and Nancy Tuana, “Sulfate Aerosol Geoengineering: The Question of Justice.” Public Affairs Quarterly, 2011, 25(3), 157–179. A similar analysis is in Christopher J. Preston, “Solar Radiation Management and Vulnerable Populations: The Moral deficit and its Prospects.” In Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management, edited by Christopher Preston (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012), 77–94 (83). Patrick Taylor Smith, “Domination and the Ethics of Solar Radiation Management.” In Preston (ed.), Engineering the Climate …, 43–61 (50). Jamieson, Reason in A Dark Time …, 223. On this issue, see Gardiner “Is ‘Arming the Future’ with Geoengineering Really the Lesser Evil?: Some Doubts about Intentionally Manipulating the Climate System.” In Gardiner et. al., (eds.), Climate Ethics …, 284–315. Toby Svboda and Peter Irvine, “Ethical and Technical Challenges in Compensating for Harm Due to Solar Radiation Management.” Ethics, Policy and the Environment, 2014, 17(2), 157–174. Svboda and Irvine, “Ethical and Technical Challenges …”, 161. The discussion here tracks R.K. Garcia’s analysis of Svboda and Irvine. See Garcia, R.K, “Towards a Just Solar Radiation Management Compensation System: A Defense of the Polluter Pays Principle.” Ethics, Policy and the Environment, 2014, 17(2), 178–182. Garcia, “Towards a Just Solar Radiation Management System …”, 182. Shue, Climate Justice, 4. Holly Jean Buck, “Climate Remediation to Address Social Development Challenges.” In Preston (ed.), Engineering the Climate, 133–148 (133). Oliver Morton, The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 31.

11 Capitalism and the climate crisis

11.1 Introduction Apart from some fairly general reflections on economic thinking as applied to climate change in chapter 2 we have so far not said much about the economic system that currently dominates the global economy and whose workings have brought the climate to its knees. This, of course, is capitalism. In this chapter we will attempt to gain insight on those features of capitalism that are relevant to climate ethics. We begin by situating the analysis in the widespread call among climate activists for “system change.” How can we delineate system change philosophically? Next, we examine the conception of the self that underpins the capitalist world order, tracing this conception back to the social contract theories of the early-modern period. The next two sections tackle the notion that there is, allegedly,no alternative to capitalism as we find it today, first by diagnosing the claim critically and then by undermining it by sketching an alternative. Finally, we look at how the alternative offered can be given a foundation in a form of social contract theory not explored so far in the book: the idea of a general will first articulated by Rousseau.

11.2 Social ecology and system change One of the most commonly seen placards at various climate change marches over the past few years reads, “system change not climate change,” or something to that effect. What does “system change” mean and why does the phrase come up so often in articulations of the challenges of climate change in particular? These are difficult questions to answer. One of the earliest attempts to say something similar within environmental ethics was known as “social ecology,” a way of thinking originating with philosopher Murray Bookchin (1921-2006). Bookchin’s key insight was that the domination of humans by other humans is the origin of the domination by humans of the rest of the natural world. But the causal arrow works the other way too: the domination of nature by humans can exacerbate existing patterns of domination among groups of humans (for example, the domination of women by men, an idea taken up by ecofeminists).1 Furthermore, the hierarchies built by DOI: 10.4324/9781003284925-12

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and through systems of domination work their way into our sense of ourselves as agents. We come to define ourselves and others in ways that perpetuate these structures over time. This latter point is what made social ecology so popular when it first emerged. It seemed to fit a post-1960s zeitgeist just waking up to the broadly destructive aspects of late industrial capitalism. This is a mere historical claim but the point of invoking social ecology at all in this context is that it can genuinely illuminate our times as well, specifically the climate crisis. To see how, let’s look a little further into the history of the movement, in particular the debate that erupted in the 1980s and 1990s between social ecologists and deep ecologists. Deep ecology was a movement begun by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. It stressed the connections—including, crucially, the affective connections—between humans and the rest of the biosphere. The core principle of deep ecology is that all the beings making up the biosphere have intrinsic value and that when trying to determine our duties to these beings we should attempt as much as possible to abstract from human interests. This turning away from the political and social roots of our dysfunctional relation to the biosphere was anathema to the social ecologists. The debate got quite heated at times, as this characteristically intemperate outburst from Bookchin illustrates: Let us face these differences bluntly: deep ecology, despite all its social rhetoric, has virtually no real sense that our ecological problems have their ultimate roots in society and in social problems. It preaches a gospel of a kind of “original sin” that accurses a vague species called humanity— as though people of color were equitable with whites, women with men, the Third World with the First, the poor with the rich, and the exploited with their exploiter.2 The debate was multi-faceted, but it is safe to say that, among environmental ethicists at least, the social-ecological position is now more entrenched. This dominance goes well beyond environmental ethics, however. The current vogue concept of “intersectionality,” for instance, is really a late offshoot of social ecology, while one encounters deep ecological ideas and sentiments much more rarely in the wider culture. One of the basic points of contestation that coalesced in this debate had to do with whether or not humanity could change its ways, and if so how. Deep ecologists, at least as characterized by their opponents, tended to be pessimistic about this, arguing that humans are on the whole something of a scourge on the planet. Social ecologists, by contrast, did not deny that the human-nature relation was badly dysfunctional but they also thought it could be repaired and that political action was the means for accomplishing this. The difference can also be expressed in terms of the way each group defines the self: in one case we are essentially continuous with the biosphere while our

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political arrangements are secondary; in the other, we are essentially social and political beings while our relation to the biosphere is secondary. There is an implicit recognition of the truth of Bookchin’s ideas in many of the demonstrations that have taken place over the past decades, just in the variety of issues and concerns that are so often found among the protesters. At climate change events one often sees placards denouncing racism, colonialism, imperialism, transphobia, and more. Domination as such is the target. Conservative critics of such events often seize on this feature, pointing out that these protesters seem to be “against everything” and must therefore not stand for anything. But if Bookchin is right, this kind of dismissal misses the point. What the tools of social ecology allow us to do is to look for the commonalities that exist across the many faces or manifestations of injustice. And indeed, it seems implausible to suppose that a certain kind of injustice could exist in one area without spilling over into others. For example, Carolyn Merchant has shown that the early modern scientific revolution was couched by its defenders in terms invoking the submission and subjugation of nature and that this attitude also informed male attitudes towards both women and colonial subjects.3 If we take the basic orientation of social ecology to heart and apply it to the climate crisis, two key insights emerge. The first is that the climate crisis is a product of the workings of a specific economic system, namely capitalism. No attempt to think clearly about this crisis can avoid confronting the pathologies of this economic system. This point will become very important in later sections of the chapter, where it is suggested that although it is true that there are multiple forms of domination in society, the economic one should be considered primary. The second insight is that capitalism’s staying power is largely a function of the way it helps us construct our sense of who we most fundamentally are, our personal or practical identity as agents. Although capitalism is often presented in morally neutral terms—as, for example, simply the most efficient way for any group to allocate various goods and services among its members—it is in fact rooted in a conception of the self. Let’s leave the first point to subsequent sections and focus in the rest of this section as well as the next one on the second one. In what sense is a focus on the identity question relevant to any kind of ethics? In his work on the nature and origins of the modern self, philosopher Charles Taylor puts the connection this way: To give a good first approximation of what [the modern identity] means would be to say that it involves tracing various strands of our modern notion of what it is to be a human agent, a person or a self. But pursuing this investigation soon shows that you can’t get very clear about this without some further understanding of how our pictures of the good have evolved. Selfhood and the good, or in another way selfhood and morality, turn out to be inextricably intertwined themes.4

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A crucial part of Taylor’s task here, and throughout his philosophical career, has been to oppose the self-understandings of the whole gamut of modern moral philosophies. To his mind what unites contemporary forms of deontology, contractarianism, and utilitarianism (though the criticisms do not apply so readily to virtue ethics) are two related features. The first is a general blindness to the conception of the good which they themselves implicitly rely on. Utilitarianism, for example, makes no sense if the reduction of suffering among sentient beings is not considered to be a good thing. The second feature is that this blindspot is maintained by focusing solely on a theory of the right, that is, on articulating a procedure the following of which will delineate our obligations. This explains the focus on the calculation of welfare, the categorical imperative, the veil of ignorance, etc. What gets lost in the quest for practical reason’s ideal procedure is the sense in which morality is always bound up with who we are and what we most deeply value and admire or, conversely, find most repugnant and shameful. For Taylor, ethics should be reconceived around these concerns. What happens if we combine the Taylorian approach to ethics, so construed, with that of the social ecologists and then apply this synthesis to the issue of climate change? Think of the question in relation to the problem with climate ethics explored in chapter 2. For Gardiner, recall, our understanding of the challenge of climate change is beset by three “storms”: the global, the intergenerational, and the theoretical. The theoretical storm is expressed in the claim that in large measure because of the first two storms we have no way of articulating our moral disquiet about the climate crisis in the theoretical terms currently available to us. Perhaps the problem here is precisely the one identified by Taylor: that, so far at least, philosophers have made no serious attempt to define the climate crisis in a way that is informed by the interconnected concepts of identity and the good. We have, in short, become bewitched by proceduralism in ethics and this is a clear hindrance in the present context. To some extent, this is the same idea expressed in chapter 8. Jamieson’s intriguing suggestion there was that we should be less calculative and reactive in our approach to the relevant subset of our duties. Jamieson’s turn away from utilitarianism and towards virtue ethics is rooted in the notion that we should think more seriously than we do about what sort of people we take ourselves to be. The current suggestion is related to this recommendation but goes beyond it by incorporating Bookchin’s insights more fully into the analysis. On the surface this might look like something of a hodge-podge, but in fact the whole structure hangs together rather elegantly, as the following summary of it makes clear. Climate change is not an isolated phenomenon. It implicates nearly every aspect of our social and political existence. More than this, it implicates our sense of who we are and what we consider good. Taylor’s work shows us that these latter aspects are not always conspicuously revealed in what we take ourselves explicitly to be, our self-justifications. We are often mired in false or

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misleading or ideologically confused modes of self-description, and this affects how we evaluate ourselves. So given that we are trying to overcome an unjust mode of social and political organization—i.e., interconnected forms of domination that have arisen in capitalist modernity—we need to do two things: diagnose the deep features of the system and then indicate what ways are available to us, if any, of escaping or at least altering it for the better. The next section begins the first task.

11.3 Two iterations of the capitalist self The best place to begin uncovering what we call the capitalist self is at the historical origins of this entity, in early-modern European philosophy. Call this figure the capitalist self 1.0. Philosopher CB Macpherson (1911-1987) traced the capitalist self 1.0 to the thinking of Hobbes and Locke (as well as their followers) in the 17th century. This is the heyday of modern social contract theory, the origin of what philosopher David Gauthier calls “morals by agreement.”5 We have encountered this normative theory already in this text, most prominently in the version of it offered by Rawls. What all contract theories have in common, implicit in Gauthier’s description of them, is the notion that principles of justice or moral rules emerge from the consensus of ideally rational agents. As Macpherson sees it, what emerges in these thinkers is a theory of “possessive individualism,” from which we might extrapolate a notion of the possessive individual. The account has seven key features. First, what makes us human is our independence from the will of others. This is not to deny, absurdly, that other people are never of use to us or that it would be prudent always to disregard the advice, counsel or even love of those others. What it means, rather, is that a key mark of rationality is the ability to assess one’s interests on one’s own and to develop the ability to find the means to satisfy those interests the same way. This leads to the second feature, that the individual’s most important relations with others are those into which he or she voluntarily enters with a view to advancing his or her own interests. Third, the individual is the proprietor of his or her own body and the works that flow from the voluntary exercise of that body. Nothing is owed back to society, though the individual is of course permitted to give back if they wish to. Fourth, individuals may alienate their capacity to labour, but they can never alienate the right to be protected by the civil authority from a certain basic level of existential insecurity. For both Hobbes and Locke voluntary slavery cannot, as Hobbes puts it, be covenanted into and any arrangement of this sort is therefore “void.”6 Fifth, what we call “society” is reducible to a series of market transactions. Again, we should not read too much into this point. Although it is a fairly radical claim about the purpose and meaning of “society,” it does not entail that literally all human relations are, or ought to be, transactional. Room can be made from within the theory for the existence of a private sphere that is not governed by transactional norms.

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Even so, it is instructive to contemplate fictional depictions of agents whose public lives are governed by these norms to a high degree and the destructive way those norms then work their way into interpersonal relations. The series Succession is a good example of this fictional genre. Sixth, the freedom of individuals can be abridged only to the extent that doing so is necessary to secure a like freedom for other members of the group. This should remind us of Mill’s famous dictum that my freedom ends at the tip of your nose. It is a staple item of a certain brand of liberal morality, endorsed in the most fullthroated way by libertarians. Finally, picking up on the fifth point, politics is nothing more than a human contrivance for protecting private property.7 What is the picture of the human agent emerging from this account? And what theory of the good does such a picture presuppose? The agent is essentially disengaged, both from other agents and from the material world, including nature. Both of these extra-individual things can be valued instrumentally, but never intrinsically. The good on this view is control, both of the self and of the rest of nature.8 What this means is that from within the confines of the theory we will never be able to understand what it means to transcend individual interest. But if this is the correct origin story of the capitalist self, and capitalism is the system that is in the process of destroying the biosphere via climate change, then perhaps in order to combat the latter we must dispense with the idea that morality is the product of agreement, per Gauthier. There is seemingly no room in this conception of agency and of the good for any level of concern for ecology, the welfare of future people or the fate of the global poor. This fits the critique of contractarianism offered in chapter 5. This outright dismissal of the entire theoretical model is too swift, however, for the very good reason that there are numerous strands of contractarian thinking and not all of them are vulnerable to the critique just sketched. But the version of the theory that has given us the possessive individual including the theory of the good that comes with it, is clearly inadequate. In the final section of this chapter I will come to a version of the theory—based in the philosophy of Rousseau—that is better suited to helping us meet the challenges of climate change. For now, however, because possessive individualism is the dominant paradigm we need to deepen or update our description of it. As we will see the twin ideals of disengagement and control are even more pronounced in the age of what has come to be called “hyper-capitalism.” Fast-forward then to the 21st century and consider what author Jonathan Crary says about the “24/7” culture that now defines a capitalism mediated by high tech and especially the internet. It is important to appreciate the extent to which these new technologies have altered the social and political landscape. This has happened in many ways, but the one to focus on here is the totalizing nature of virtual technologies, the degree to which they have managed to absorb and co-opt so much of our political energies, self-understandings, private space, and sheer time.

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Whereas before the rise of these technologies we were generally able to conceive of and cultivate a world apart from the one governed by transactional market norms, Crary argues that these norms have now penetrated nearly every facet of existence. A good example of this is the gig economy, where “enterprising” individuals can now monetize every spare moment of their time. More generally, the 24/7 imperative, powered by the internet and social media, impels us to be continuously alert to the possibility of advancing our interests through ever more available forms of consumption and connection. What this has created, according to Crary, is a self increasingly disengaged from anything not directly tied to or serving its consumptive interests: [W]hatever remaining pockets of everyday life are not directed toward quantitative or acquisitive ends, or cannot be adapted to telematic participation, tend to deteriorate in esteem and desirability. Real-life activities that do not have an on-line correlate begin to atrophy, or cease to be relevant. There is an insurmountable asymmetry that degrades any local event or exchange. Because of the infinity of content available 24/7, there will always be something online more informative, surprising, funny, diverting, impressive than anything in one’s immediate actual circumstances. It is now a given that a limitless availability of information or images can trump or override any human-scale communication or exploration of ideas.9 How can the actual planet possibly compete with this attention-devouring techno-colossus? It is no accident that new order is sometimes referred to as the “attention economy.” It is this massive potential divergence of attention away from difficult real world issues like climate change that poses one of the biggest threats to our collective welfare and that of future generations. One way to think about what it means to take the climate crisis and related issues seriously is that they attune us to the interests of others. One way of conceiving of ethics, for instance, of philosophers as otherwise diverse as Arthur Schopenhauer and Iris Murdoch, is that it is one way of transcending our own interests, of escaping the demands of what Murdoch calls the “fat, relentless ego.” The problem with life on the internet and virtual reality generally is that it has become increasingly possible to fully curate the contents of that world. The rough edges and sheer resistance to my aims of that which is external to me as an agent—the challenges I have in working with and around other objects, forms of life, and people in my ordinary dealings with them—can be programmed away, as I construct a world fit smoothly to my individual demands and available on command in an elegantly sanitized and highly personalized form. In one sense this is clearly something new under the sun, but we should also see it as an intensification of the earlier form of possessive individualism. That is, it intensifies the disengagement of

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the agent and also this agent’s sense of or search for control, the theory of the good underpinning the ideal of disengagement. What impact will this development have on the essentially collective project of combatting climate change? Crary, for one, does not say directly, but we can certainly glean an answer from comments like this: What is new is the sweeping abandonment of the pretense that time is coupled to any long-term undertakings, even to fantasies of “progress” or development. An illuminated 24/7 world without shadows is the final capitalist mirage of post-history, of an exorcism of the otherness that is the motor of historical change.10 This is a philosophically loaded passage. Progress on an issue like the climate crisis, it suggests, comes from having both a sense of how one fits into larger collective narratives unfolding over time and a robust understanding of how our interests must come genuinely to terms with the interests of others in the process of pushing history forward. All of this is threatened by the virtual world’s new version of the possessive individual. This is the capitalist self 2.0, another aspect of which is that it is presented to us as though there is literally no alternative to it.

11.4 “There is no alternative” (TINA) One of the dangers of adopting the framework of early-modern social contract theories to illuminate contemporary issues is that there is a tendency in doing so to naturalize elements of the human condition. This after all is the point of the Hobbesian and Lockean appeal to the state of nature as the quasi-historical precursor to civil society. The move can make certain aspects of the civil order look unchallengeable by claiming that they are rooted in certain features of human nature. This point has often been made in critiques of these philosophical theories. Here, we will show how the same sort of thinking applies to the economic system that currently rules the world, capitalism. After all, if capitalism answers to some deeply rooted features of human nature, then, it will be suggested, even if we could change it doing so would run against the grain of our nature. This is one very powerful way (there are others) of arguing that “there is no alternative” to capitalism in its current form. The mantra has become so commonplace in our culture, by both critics and supporters of capitalism, that it has acquired its own acronym: TINA. In this book we are concerned with climate change and in this chapter with the primary driver of anthropogenic climate change, the fossil economy. So let’s begin our diagnosis of TINA with some history, tracing the origin of the fossil economy in 18th century Britain. Although the emergence of coal-powered steam technologies from the water mill is often presented in a naturalized

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way—factory owners setting up shop in the towns and installing the new machines because water had become scarce as a source of energy—Andreas Malm has shown that this distorts the historical picture significantly. The first point to note about the transition from water to steam is the theory of human nature often invoked to explain it. According to Malm, theorists at the time often invoked an “impulse to growth” latent in the human spirit, an impulse being thwarted or suppressed by the relatively small scale of the water mill. This impulse, … requires the invocation of a transhistorical factor, some urge shared by all formations in history, which, by the time of the Industrial Revolution, found its wanted object … Britain deviated from all others not because it developed some novel system or peculiar disposition but because it broke through the constraints ‘that had previously limited everyone’s horizons’— doing what all humanity had vainly dreamed of, Icarus-like … In fossil energy as in capital, bourgeois theorists see human proclivities—Icarus, Robinson [Crusoe]—realized at last; on both issues they can be charged with substituting myth for that vexing, unsettling vector of human life: change over time.11 Two points about this. First, notice that the two mythological figures often invoked in this context—Icarus and Crusoe—fit the early model of the capitalist self perfectly. They are essentially socially independent figures, even anchorites, whose daring and enterprise owe exactly nothing to wider contexts of social formation. Second, Malm claims that this myth is the opposite of the concept of historical change. What does this opposition signify? There is of course a sense in which purveyors of the myth—Malm has in mind here some of the canonical political economists of the time, like Ricardo, Malthus and Smith—do recognize some historical change. The capitalist self, after all, is held to have been bottled up for eons, waiting patiently for propitious conditions to emerge and release his creative energies for the benefit of present and future humanity. True, but Malm has something else in mind. It is that this self itself is a construct emerging from the way the new fossil regime was able to reconfigure social and political power. That story begins with the analysis of the problem of scarcity, the notion that Britain as a fledgling industrial nation was facing an energy crisis. Part of the bourgeois narrative posits early fossil capitalists responding to scarcity and crisis in the prevailing energy source at the time: the water mills that powered the cotton mills. But Malm shows that, at least in the early days of the transition, there was no shortage of water power and moreover coal was much more expensive in view of the fact that it usually had to be shipped to the towns from distant locations. This fact has immense implications for our understanding of the emergence of the fossil economy. As Robert B. Gordon argues:

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Capitalism and the climate crisis If it can be shown that nearly all the water power physically available in the industrial regions was exploited before steam power was much used, the energy crisis hypothesis would be proved. But if there were unused water power resources throughout this period, it would be necessary to appeal to the social factors for support of this hypothesis.12

So why did the transition happen if not because of the relative scarcity of water power and the concomitant abundance and therefore relative cheapness of coal? According to Malm, following Gordon, an appeal to specific “social factors” is required here. In particular, “steam had the prime advantage of overcoming barriers to procurement not of energy, but of labour.”13 This is chiefly because there were already large numbers of workers in cities like Manchester, and capitalists could play them off against one another, thereby lowering labour costs overall. Also, they did not have to pay for the housing and other costs (like education costs) of the workers. In the country mills, by contrast, workers had to be brought from elsewhere to live, the owners themselves assuming most of the costs just mentioned. Malm’s key insight is that to focus on energy in abstraction from social factors like this is an abstraction, usually an ideologically motivated one. As he puts it, it is to think of the way we harness and deploy material power—the energy sources that power civilization—as unencumbered by or uninvolved with social power. But the two always come together. There is a profound lesson here for how we think of the climate crisis. Harnessing fossil energy to the degree we have was not inevitable, from which it follows that replacing this energy source with something more sustainable—and doing so swiftly—is not the impossibility it is often made out to be. In other words, recognition of the historical contingency of the many structures that shape our lives can be liberating. Unfortunately, we have not been liberated from those forces that are in the process of destroying the biosphere. Why not? It is one thing to recognize or realize that the way social and economic power are distributed among various social groups is a key factor in diagnosing the current state of affairs, and quite another to be able to find a locus of that power. With respect to climate change in particular this point brings us back to an issue we encountered earlier in the book: the dispersal of agency in the creation and perpetuation of this problem. But it is also implicit in our analysis of social ecology because that school of thought insists, much in the way Malm does, on the complex and messy interconnection of our humanhuman relations and our human-nature relations. There is, unfortunately, a tendency to shoot the messenger here. Some claim that because the social ecological analysis plays a part in dispersing the target of critique that it is unjustifiably obfuscating things and thereby making it more difficult for us to see how we might respond to a phenomenon like the climate crisis. This is unfair as a criticism of the view under consideration, but it should spur us to perform some further diagnostic work. In an extended analysis of

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the TINA phenomenon, Mark Fisher points out that our age is characterized by a “detached spectatorialism” which “replaces engagement and involvement.” Being a mere spectator is, of course, a form of passivity and can induce feelings of impotence. Fisher’s point is that we are not so duped and mesmerized by capitalism that we cannot see its problems. More sinisterly, we see many of the problems but manage somehow to convince ourselves that we are liberated from the system just in our cynical awareness of its shortcomings. Again, this is particularly evident in our consumption of media—films, internet content, and books—that are ostensibly critical of capitalism. The film Wall-E, for example, portrays an ecologically ravaged earth over which a community of grotesquely bloated consumers floats in a spaceship. In one way it’s an arresting depiction of our state of affairs, but, as Fisher notes, what is really disturbing about it is that “the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.”14 So even would-be critique of the system fuels the system or is co-opted by it. Crary scarcely exaggerates the impasse in which we find ourselves in asserting that “[t]o characterize current arrangements, in reality untenable and unsustainable, as anything but inevitable and unalterable is a contemporary heresy.”15 Even so, we must be careful about what we are and are not capable of changing. Recognition of the historical contingency of the fossil fuel regime and indeed of capitalism and the capitalist self can loosen the grip of this system on the contemporary political imagination. Good philosophical genealogy, Like Malm’s, often has this power. As has been noted at several points, however, this book is guided by a broad commitment to realism, a stance that is especially necessary in the context of a swiftly gathering catastrophe like climate change. What this means in the present context is that we cannot hold out hope for the overthrow of capitalism. It might be suggested that part of the problem with films like Wall-E is not so much the smug complacency they induce in us—the point emphasized just above—but rather that they encourage an allor-nothing hopelessness in us. They allow us to believe that because the system as a whole cannot be overturned we may as well join the party for as long as it lasts. The more ethically responsible approach is to find ways to guide capitalist markets into less destructive patterns of exchange. TINA is a false mantra if, but only if, the alternative we imagine is conceived as steering the current system in the direction of genuine sustainability rather than overturning it altogether.

11.5 People’s capitalism In assessing the morality of cultural elites in the capitalist economy, economist Branko Milanovic says this: Members of the ruling class are hard-working and have an amoral outlook on life. Everything that enables this class to maintain and reinforce its

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This is meant as a description of the elites in countries defined by what Milanovic calls “liberal meritocratic capitalism,” which is distinct from “political capitalism.” The former reigns in most of the Western world, the latter mainly in China. Though he describes himself as a clear-eyed realist, however, Milanovic does not endorse the amoral ethos of liberal meritocratic capitalism. In this section, we will use his analysis as a guide to understanding what alternatives to both liberal meritocratic and political capitalism might exist from within a broadly realist paradigm. As we will see, even if capitalist elites are amoral there is no reason to think everyone else is. The overarching problem with liberal meritocratic capitalism, according to Milanovic, is that it enhances inequality over time. This is that feature of the system in virtue of which the morality of the economic elite is increasingly out of sync with that of everyone else. If this diagnosis is correct and the features mentioned just below are becoming increasingly entrenched then we have sound moral reasons for finding an alternative to this system. There are six sources of the dramatic rise in inequality in these societies: (i) an increasing aggregate share of capital (relative to labour) in national income; (ii) a high concentration of capital ownership; (iii) higher rates of return on the assets of the rich; (iv) an “association” of high capital and high labour income in the same people; (v) greater homogamy (“people of the same or similar education and income level marrying each other”17); and (vi) greater transition of wealth down the generations.18 What unites these items is that they tend to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Milanovic does not mention climate change in any detail. But it is easy to see how we might extend his analysis to this issue. With respect to the climate crisis, inequality is a problem for two related reasons. The first is that climate change is going to exacerbate existing inequality, thereby also widening the gap between common-sense and elite morality mentioned by Milanovic. According to the IPCC, allowing global average temperatures to exceed 1.5°C is extremely worrisome from the standpoint of global economic inequality: At approximately 1.5°C of global warming, climate change is expected to be a poverty multiplier that makes poor people poorer and increases the poverty head count … Poor people might be heavily affected by climate change even when impacts on the rest of the population are limited. Climate change alone could force more than 3 million to 16 million

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people into extreme poverty, mostly through impacts on agriculture and food prices … Unmitigated warming could reshape the global economy later in the century by reducing average global incomes and widening global income inequality … (IPCC 2019, 244).19 That, to repeat, is what we get with 1.5°C. The same effects will be multiplied dramatically as we approach 2°C and beyond. The second reason for worrying about the related issues of climate change and inequality is that there is already a tight connection between the global capitalist elite and carbon emissions. In Chapter 6, we encountered Heede’s demonstration of this connection. In the same vein, the Carbon Disclosure Project has reported that just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of all emissions from fossil fuel and cement production since 1988.20 These are not all privately owned companies, of course, many of them being state-run entities in China, Iran, Russia, and so on. So this is not only a problem with private firms in liberal meritocratic capitalism. But if what we are concerned about is the way global capitalism exacerbates inequality in part through the trade in fossil fuel commodities it simply does not matter whether the companies in question are state-owned or privately owned because all are participating in a single, globally-spread energy market. Again, think of all this with reference to Milanovic’s claims about the gap between ordinary and elite morality. A huge global survey about climate change—the so-called People’s Climate Vote, conducted by the UNDP in 2021—reported that roughly 64% of people believe that climate change is a global emergency requiring swift and decisive action. Not a crisis, an emergency. UNDP official Achim Steiner summarized the survey this way: The results of the survey clearly illustrate that urgent climate action has broad support amongst people around the globe across nationalities, age, gender and education level. But more than that the poll reveals how the people want their policymakers to tackle the crisis. From climate-friendly farming to protecting nature and investing in a green recovery from COVID-19, the survey brings the voice of the people to the forefront of the climate debate. It signals ways in which countries can move forward with public support as we work together to tackle this enormous challenge.21 These are not the sentiments of amoralists. On the contrary, they are responses of people who appear to care deeply about the plight of the global poor, future people, and the biosphere, and who grasp the clear threat climate change poses to their values. Now, if we have good reasons for opposing inequality then we have equally good reasons for opposing whatever forces are perpetuating or enhancing it. The two factors just mentioned—the likelihood that climate change will make inequality worse and the elite’s addiction to the trade in fossil fuels—provide strong reasons for moving away from an economic system structured the way the existing one is.

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UN documents and reports like the one just cited are generally very careful not to throw stones at particular institutions and so what is not said there, but is implied, can be just as important as what is said out loud. The measures mentioned by Steiner—the ones so many people are calling for— cannot be achieved simply by allowing markets to figure all of this out on their own. If unfettered markets had a way of protecting nature, investing in a green recovery from the pandemic, building green agricultural economies of scale, and so on, they would have done so by now. It follows that changing course to the degree required will involve moving away from both liberal meritocratic and political capitalism. If it is morally important to listen to the voices of the people—as revealed perspicuously in the UNDP survey—then it is necessary to craft a different kind of capitalism. What name we give to this is not terribly significant. Many of the proposals for a Green New Deal (GND) that have emerged over the last few years advocate for what can be termed either market socialism, eco-socialism, green capitalism, sustainable finance, or whatever. But the focus on what so many ordinary people want, rather than what elites want, does seem primary, so it might be best to adopt Milanovic’s term of art, “people’s capitalism.” He defines it thus: Everyone has approximately equal shares of capital and labour income. People’s incomes still differ; some have more of both capital and labour income. Increased capital share does not translate into greater interpersonal inequality, so inequality does not have a tendency to rise. Direct redistribution is limited but free health care and education help intergenerational income mobility.22 Note that this is just a framework; by itself, it tells us nothing about how to address the climate crisis. What it can do much better than the current system, however, is channel the desire of ordinary people for real action on climate change into concrete policy measures. This is because it liberates wealth from the sources of its concentration (items (i) to (vi), above) and thus empowers the currently powerless. However, it is crucial to stress the enhanced powers the government must have in order to apply the framework to the climate crisis. And this will require an unapologetic commitment to public spending. As economist Robert Pollin argues, the GND cannot happen through markets alone and as such it “defines an explicit and viable alternative to austerity economics on a global scale.”23 Once economic power is wrested from rightist austerity hawks, a number of possibilities are opened up as the suite of climate friendly policies goes through the messy process of policy development and implementation. We can probably afford to be somewhat agnostic about what precise balance of market mechanisms and government regulations are required to get the job done, but within this broad recommendation which

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policies are most important? This is where the burgeoning literature on the GND is helpful. Policy recommendations in this area tend to coalesce around four broad measures. The first and arguably most important is doing whatever it takes to keep nearly all fossil fuels in the ground. This entails both stopping all subsidies to fossil fuel corporations and restricting the political access and power of the CEOs of those corporations. It also means there should be no new fossil infrastructure—like pipelines—built, starting now. Second, because this first policy will cause social disruption governments must provide a universal job guarantee. As Pollin puts it, full employment is important for two reasons: (a) it will “create a supportive overall environment for the full range of investments needed for building a clean energy economy”; and (b) it will be “critical in managing a just transition for workers and communities now dependent on the fossil fuel economy.”24 Third, there must be an enhanced commitment to biodiversity protection. A good aspiration here might be the idea put forward by biologist E.O. Wilson that we should conserve half the earth for non-human life.25 The goals of the Half Earth Project (HEP) have been echoed by the Nature Needs Half (NNH) coalition. A comprehensive recent review of the HEP and the NNH notes correctly that because we are talking here about an area of land that is 70 ×106 km2—four times the land mass of Russia—this would represent “an unrivalled level of land system governance.”26 Finally, there should be a moratorium on deployment of geoengineering schemes until we have a much better handle on the profound governance issues these technologies pose. This connects to the themes explored in chapter 10.

11.6 A general will One of the advantages of an approach like this—a people’s capitalism steered by a commitment to a global GND—is that to a significant extent it cuts across traditional right/left political positions. It is easy to see why rightist market fundamentalists will object to it: the suggestion that governments ought to provide universal free education and health care will obviously set alarm bells ringing across those precincts of the political spectrum. As for the left, many will object to what they see as a “reductive” focus in the foregoing analysis on matters of class, and economics more generally, to the exclusion or downgrading of matters of race, gender, etc. However, as Picketty has argued with respect to the inseparable challenges of climate change and inequality, “we should be thinking about the social, fiscal and political institutions that can help to create a just society and allow class cleavages once again to take priority over identity cleavages.”27 If justification were required for this latter claim, surely the very lack of any significant progress on the climate crisis provides it. This crisis has been

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allowed to fester precisely as the left has become obsessed with “identity cleavages.” Indeed, businesses and other institutions are more than happy to tout a concern for “equity” in their public relations campaigns while stoutly resisting any attempts to alleviate the profound inequalities that define the status quo and that benefit them so handsomely. Swiftly growing economic inequality and a galloping climate crisis: that is the dual legacy of the contemporary left’s obsession with the woke politics of identity. We need to rethink our options in a way that centers the connection between the climate crisis and economic inequality. That is the point of citing Milanovic’s version of people’s capitalism in the previous section. The proposal is to tackle the current maldistribution of wealth first, a move that will make the other extant forms of domination identity theorists wrongly consider primary much easier to overcome. This will not happen, however, unless something more fundamental transpires first, namely that we somehow internalize the notion that we are all in this together. The task can sound so easy when it is couched in terms of policy desiderata. But what the analysis in previous sections of this chapter shows is that the rot propping up business-as-usual runs deep. To challenge the current capitalist formation we need to overcome the capitalist self. Think of this again in relation to leftist politics. Some leftists—Marxists, for instance—will concur with the critique of identity politics just sketched, but will add that the policy program laid down there cannot work because it is still tied to a commitment to upholding market mechanisms. Unless we overthrow capitalism root and branch, including the role of markets in our lives, we will not undermine the sway of the capitalist self and everything that comes with this construct. But quite apart from what should be the obvious fact that we are not going to overthrow capitalism in the short time available to us to avoid climate catastrophe, there is little to recommend this view. As Daniel Halliday and John Thrasher argue, capitalist systems have five essential features: relatively strong legal protections for private property; a wide dispersion of private property across the population; extensive international trade; some level of consumer sovereignty; and a diversity of employment contracts.28 Now, under the sway of a full-scale commitment to implement GND policies some of these items will be challenged to some extent. For example, in the process of making the transition away from fossil fuels and towards greener forms of energy, full “consumer sovereignty” may be compromised. Should this bother us? It will bother market purists, of course, but most people in liberal meritocratic capitalist countries already accept some constraints on full consumer sovereignty. Items like cigarettes and alcohol are often saddled with Pigouvian taxes in order to discourage people from consuming them, especially those in countries with free national health care systems. An analogous point might be made about the commitment to “extensive” international trade.

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Even so, the account so far presupposes that we can find a way of bringing sufficient numbers of people together in order to tackle the problem in the robustly collective way required. This is a challenge that has troubled political philosophy for a very long time, well before the emergence of the climate crisis. The sort of social contract theory we find in Hobbes, Locke, and Rawls is insufficient to address it because none of these theories challenges the primacy of the capitalist self (in versions 1.0 and 2.0). But the basic contractarian idea that morality is the product of agreement among equals is deeply attractive. Mark Fisher points us in the right direction: … the goal of a genuinely new left should not be to take over the state but to subordinate the state to the general will. This involves, naturally, resuscitating the very concept of a general will, reviving—and modernizing—the idea of a public space that is not reducible to an aggregation of individuals and their interests.29 The notion of a “general will” comes from the social contract theory of JeanJacques Rousseau. Many philosophers in the continental tradition talk about the need to find a new historical Subject, a collective agent capable of bringing people together around common political projects. This is usually articulated with reference to Hegel and Marx, but Rousseau also looms conspicuously in the background of most of these discussions. Rousseau describes the general will by means of the following contrast: For while it is not impossible for a private will to accord with the general will on some point, it is at least impossible for such an accord to be regular and enduring; for the private inclines by its nature towards partiality, and the general will towards equality.30 The problem with the merely occasional agreement between private and shared wills is that it is unstable. This is because it is prone to defections on the part of would-be free-riders, those who judge that while signing on to the collective project is in their interests now they are ready to abandon it the moment this calculation changes. As Arthur Ripstein notes, the Rousseauian general will is going to be stable only if three conditions are met with respect to any action relevant to the furtherance of the common project: (a) I perform action x; (b) I hold others to the performance of x; and (c) others hold me to the performance of x.31 Built into the notion of a general will are thus two broad components. First, the aim of the contract is to establish and perpetuate equality among citizens; second, citizens hold each other to account, by coercion if necessary, in the maintenance of the collective so construed over time. As with the other contract theories, here too both a theory of the self and a theory of the good emerges. The self is in significant measure attached to and

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dependent on other members of the collective. The good is the furtherance of whatever common projects this collective deems important and pursues at the level of policy formation and implementation. Ever since the French Revolution (which his thinking inspired) critics of Rousseau have seen this view of politics and the self as the royal road to servitude and despotism, as though decent people who want to take seriously the idea of citizenship and collective purpose will not be able to help themselves from endorsing large-scale political murder if the need for it arises. But this is mere hyperbole, a point we can appreciate more clearly if we come back to the way the theory connects to the demands of the climate crisis. There are two points to stress in this context. Since this is the final chapter of the book, these points will have a very general and summative quality about them. First, the dominant model we have for understanding political obligation is rooted in the social contract tradition. It has given us the possessive individual, the capitalist self of early modernity, intensified in version 2.0. This self, protected by increasingly accommodating political formations, has produced two things that are unambiguously bad: nearly unprecedented levels of economic inequality and the climate emergency. These phenomena are intimately related to one another, both in their genesis and in their perpetuation. Climate change has been caused by a global economic system that has created huge dividends for a small minority of humans while largely externalizing the costs of industrial development onto everyone else. Second, it is simply not true that there are no alternatives to the current formation. TINA rhetoric gets its power from those on both sides of the political spectrum engaging in all-or-nothing, binary thinking. Overthrow capitalism altogether and institute some form of utopian socialism or we are stuck with business-as-usual, where the planet remains a latrine for the disengaged, controlling capitalist self. This chapter has sketched an alternative to both of these options: a people’s capitalism steered by key elements of a GND. No thinker in the social contract tradition believed that the expression of the will of the collective should be held hostage to stubborn nay-sayers and free-riders. The overwhelming majority of the human population wants both a reduction in economic inequality and strong action on climate change but these will not happen unless and until we think more seriously about collective purpose, forging a general will for the age of climate change. In other words, we should seek to preserve the core idea of the social contract tradition—that morals are founded and justified only in agreement among citizens about the basic terms of their association—but bend it in the direction of overcoming the asocial capitalist self. This is an extraordinarily challenging task, but it is difficult to see how we will come through the next few decades with our deepest values intact unless we are guided by some such idea. In this way and for these reasons, climate ethics must become climate politics.

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Chapter summary In this chapter we have confronted the economic system—capitalism—that is responsible for the climate crisis. We began by situating the analysis in the widespread call among climate activists for “system change.” Next, we examine the conception of the self that underpins the capitalist world order, tracing this conception back to the social contract theories of the earlymodern period. The next two sections tackle the notion that there is no alternative to capitalism as we find it today, first by diagnosing the claim critically and then by undermining it by sketching an alternative. Finally, we look at how the alternative can be given a foundation in a form of social contract theory not explored so far: the idea of a general will first articulated by Rousseau. The final point of the chapter is worth repeating: that a plausible climate ethics cannot be confined to an analysis of the duties of mutually isolated individuals—though it is crucial to specify these duties—but must also lead to transformative climate politics.

Questions for discussion 1

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3 4

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What do you make of the claim that there is a specific conception of the self that underpins capitalism, a self that is both disengaged and that considers control to be the highest good? Are those who call for “system change not climate change” asking for something realistic? What exactly do you think they mean by this demand? Is there no alternative to capitalism as we find it today? Are we stuck historically with this system? If so, is this is good or a bad thing? What do think of the proposal for a “people’s capitalism” steered by a green new deal (GND)? Does it have a chance of success? Why or why not? Do you see a way in which a Rousseauian “general will” can be crafted without this drifting into some form of political tyranny?

Suggested reading Jonathan Crary, 24/7 (London: Verso, 59–60). •

A short and punchy diagnosis of the current social psychology of the capitalist self. Crary focuses on the way the demands of consumption are colonizing the whole life world.

Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016).

228 •

Capitalism and the climate crisis A detailed and rich history of the transition from water power to steam power in Britain in the 18th century. A brilliant account of the origins of the fossil economy in that country.

Branko Milanovic, Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System that Rules the World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). •

An economist’s hard-headed look at the various forms of capitalism in the world today, the key problems with them, and the realistic alternatives to them.

Notes 1 Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (New York: Black Rose Books, 1990). 2 Murray Bookchin, “Social Ecology Versus Deep Ecology: A Challenge for the Ecology Movement.” Anarchy Archives. http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/socecovdeepeco.html 3 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper One, 1976). 4 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 3. 5 David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 6 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1944), II.11 (141). 7 CB MacPherson, Possessive Individualism from Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 8 Taylor, Sources of the Self …, 174–5. 9 Jonathan Crary, 24/7 (London: Verso, 59–60). 10 Crary, 24/7 …, 9. 11 Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016), 258 12 Quoted in Malm, Fossil Capital …, 81. 13 Malm, Fossil Capital …, 124. 14 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is there no Alternative? (London: Zero Books, 2009), 12. 15 Crary, 24/7 …, 49–50. 16 Branko Milanovic, Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System that Rules the World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 66. 17 Milanovic, Capitalism, Alone …, 37. 18 Milanovic, Capitalism, Alone …, 23–42. 19 IPCC. “Summary for Policymakers.” In: Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report World Meteorological Organization, (Geneva, 2019). https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/ 20 Carbon Disclosure Project. “100 companies are responsible for 71% of GHG emissions.” https:// www.activesustainability.com/climate-change/100-companies-responsible-71-ghg-emissions/?_ adin=02021864894 21 UNDP, “World’s largest survey of public opinion on climate change: a majority of people call for wide-ranging action.” https://www.undp.org/press-releases/worlds-largest-survey-public-opinionclimate-change-majority-people-call-wide-ranging-action 22 Milanovic, Capitalism, Alone …, 216. 23 Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin, Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal (London: Verso, 2020), 146. 24 Chomsky and Pollin, Climate Crisis …, 86.

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25 E.O Wilson, Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life (London: Liveright, 2017); also, T. Hiss, Rescuing the Planet: Protecting Half the Land to Heal the Earth (New York: Knopf, 2021). 26 E. Ellis and Z. Mehrabi, “Half earth: promises, pitfalls and prospects of dedicating half of earth’s land to conservation.” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability (38, 2019), 22–30 (23). 27 Thomas Picketty, Capital and Ideology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 965. 28 Daniel Halliday and John Thrasher, The Ethics of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 8. 29 Fisher, Capitalist Realism …, 76. 30 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), 59. 31 Arthur Ripstein, “The General Will.” In The Social Contract Theorists, edited by Christopher W. Morris (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 219–238 (223).

Glossary

Ability to pay principle (APP) A principle of distributive justice applied to environmental problems. If a party is able to reduce or prevent harm then, other things equal, it may have to pay to do so. Usually applicable in a situation of non-compliance, i.e., when those who should be paying are not. Abrupt climate change Dramatic shifts in climatic regimes over relatively short period of time (centuries or even decades). Acidification The process by which ocean water’s pH is reduced through the introduction of unusually high amounts of CO2 into the water. Affects negatively the ability of many marine organisms to build shells. Activist preservationism (AP) The idea, especially relevant to the Anthropocene, that in order to preserve species effectively we may need to actively manage their habitats or even alter them technologically. Examples: de-extinction; rewilding. Additionality With respect to carbon offsetting, it must be the case that the carbon that is prevented from being emitted would have been emitted had the offsetting measure not been adopted. Anthropocene A new geological epoch in which humans are the most powerful single causal force in the earth system. Although the body in charge of assigning these designations—the International Commission on Stratigraphy—has yet to make it official, the term has become ubiquitous across academic disciplines and in the culture at large. Anthropogenic Human-caused. Basic legitimation demand (BLD) A fundamental tenet of political realism. According to the philosopher Bernard Williams, the job of the political authority, operating in large part through the legal system, is to secure material security for its people. Beneficiary pays principle (BPP) A principle of corrective justice applied to environmental problems. Even if a party is not to blame for an historically produced injustice, it can be liable for payment if it benefited from the economic structures the injustice has produced. Business as usual The economic and political status-quo surrounding climate change behaviors.

Glossary

231

Carbon cycle The various ways carbon moves through the earth system. For example, atmospheric carbon can move from the atmosphere to the bodies of plants (through photosynthesis), and from there into rock formations once the plants die and fossilize. Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) A form of geoengineering whereby carbon sinks are enhanced. Example: spreading iron filings in the ocean to increase marine photosynthesis. Carbon offsetting Seeing to it that for every unit of carbon emitted an equivalent amount is prevented from being emitted. Civil disobedience The deliberate breaking of a putatively unjust law for principled reasons and the voluntary acceptance of the resulting penalty for doing so. Common But Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) A principle enunciated at the Rio earth Summit in 1992. It recognized that although all countries have obligations to fight climate change these obligations are not the same for every country. In particular, those bearing most historical responsibility for the problem might be required to do more. Consequentialism A moral theory according to which the moral worth of an act is a function of the outcomes it produces. Contractarianism A moral theory which holds that an action is right to the extent that it is the product of an agreement among ideally wellinformed and unbiased agents. Corrective justice That aspect of the theory of justice concerned with compensating victims of past injustice. Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) A tool used by economists to determine which policy measures should be chosen. The costs of each proposal are weighed against its benefits (usually in monetary terms). The rational choice is the one with highest net benefits or lowest net costs. Deep ecology A school of thought in environmental ethics first developed by Arne Naess, according to which humans are essential natural rather than social beings and should cultivate their emotional affiliations with the rest of the natural world. Demographic transition The move from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates. Most societies experience the transition moving from pre-industrial to late-industrial development. Deontology The moral doctrine that all humans are fundamentally equal and their status as rationally autonomous agents ought to be respected by all other moral agents. The philosophical foundation of human rights. Difference principle A principle of distributive justice introduced by John Rawls. Some economic inequality is permissible in society if and only if those on the bottom of the economic ladder are better off than they would be under a system of strict economic equality. Discounting A tool used by economists to determine the present value of expected future costs or benefits.

232

Glossary

Distributive justice That aspect of the theory of justice concerned with how benefits and burdens are distributed among a group. Doctrine of Doing and Allowing (DDA) It is morally worse to be the agent of harm than it is to allow that same harm to happen on its own (or through someone else’s actions) Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) It is morally permissible to cause harm so long as the harm was a foreseen but unintended consequence of one’s action. Extreme Event Attribution Science A new branch of climate science attempting to attribute specific extreme weather events to anthropogenic climate change. General Will A term from the 18th-century French philosopher JeanJacques Rousseau. It indicates the concurrence among the members of the collective to concrete social policies aimed at improving the lot of the whole. A major inspiration for many leaders of the French Revolution and a form of social contract theory that is an alternative to those of Hobbes and Locke. Geoengineering A suite of technologies designed to cool the planet as a response to dangerous heating, either by enhancing carbon sinks or increasing the earth’s capacity to reflect incoming solar radiation. Geologic Time Scale A system of dating the ages of the earth based on changes in rock strata. Great Acceleration That period, beginning about 1945, in which the human impact on the planet’s biogeophysical systems expands exponentially. Green New Deal (GND) A set of policies meant to push society to a greener economy and more equitable future. Modeled on the new deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the US in the 1930s. Greenhouse gases (GHGs) Gases that have the ability to trap heat in the lower atmosphere by absorbing the energy that would otherwise be reradiated back to space. This warms the planet. The key GHGs are carbon dioxide, water vapor, and methane. Harm principle First introduced by John Stuart Mill in the 19th-century. The principle specifies that governments may not interfere with individual activities except insofar as those activities harm, or are likely to harm, other members of the political community. Intergenerational arms race A term coined by Stephen Gardiner, it refers to a state of affairs in which each generation is forced to burn fossil fuels to cope with climate chaos, thus making the problem even worse for each succeeding generation. The problem thus compounds down the generations. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) The body established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Association and the United Nations Environment Program to monitor the development of global climate change. The IPCC has issued five reports and is currently in the process of producing a sixth.

Glossary

233

Institutional Theory of Justice (ITJ) Individual duties of justice are specified in and limited to what relevant institutions allow. Instrumental temperature record The record of global temperatures obtained by the use of thermometers. It dates back to about 1880. Just savings principle Introduced by John Rawls as a way of accounting for our duties to future generations. We are required to maintain for them the institutions of justice as well as the material conditions supporting such institutions. Kyoto Protocol An international agreement about binding emissions reduction targets reached in 1997. It entered into force in 2005. Moral cosmopolitanism The moral doctrine that we are all citizens of the world, and that the ties we have to all of humanity are more important morally than those we have to our individual countries. Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) Part of the pledge and review system set up in the 2015 Paris Agreement. The NDCs are the emissions reduction targets each country develops on its own, to be inspected by other countries on a regular basis, then revised accordingly. Negative feedback Any effect of a causal system that turns back on that system in a way that diminishes the power of the cause. Negative rights Those rights citizens have not to be interfered with by their governments. Example: free speech and assembly. Negligibility Thesis (NT) The notion that individual contributions to some process or outcome are irrelevant to that process or outcome. Examples: individual voting and the election of a specific candidate; individual carbon emissions and climate change. Non-identity problem (NIP) First introduced by Derek Parfit, the idea that future people cannot rightly blame us for polluting their world because their identity is contingent on our having made that choice. We have not wronged them since the only option for them is non-existence. Paleoclimatology The scientific study of the planet’s deep climatic history. Paris Agreement The agreement reached at COP 21 in Paris in 2015 committing the world to staying at 1.5°C relative to the pre-industrial baseline. Polluter Pays Principle (PPP) A principle of corrective justice applied to environmental problems. In short: you broke it, you fix it. Positive feedback Any effect of a causal system that turns back on that system to enhance the power of the cause. Positive rights Those rights citizens have to be supplied with certain goods by their governments. Example: free health care. Possessive individualism The theory attributed by CB Macpherson to the early-modern political philosophies of Hobbes and Locke, according to which humans are essentially mutually isolated and self-interested. Precautionary principle The idea that we should not wait for full scientific certainty about some phenomenon to act on it if the consequences of not acting are potentially severe.

234

Glossary

Pre-industrial baseline A point of reference, circa 1750, for current and future temperature valuations. So, for example, the Paris Agreement would have us strive to keep the rise on global temperature to 1.5°C above the baseline. Principle of Salience From Dworkin’s jurisprudence, the principle holds that if a significant number of states, encompassing a significant population, has developed an agreed code of practice, either by treaty or by other form of coordination, then other states have a least a prima facie duty to subscribe to that practice as well. Prisoner’s dilemma A game-theoretical construct in which two prisoners, separately interrogated by the police, produce a sub-optimal outcome for themselves by reneging on their prior agreement to stay silent. Procedural justice That aspect of the theory of justice concerned with the processes governing our decisions about how benefits and burdens are distributed among a group. Proxy data A way of gathering information about one phenomenon by inferring it from another. For example, temperatures not available through the instrumental record can be inferred from carbon dioxide levels revealed in ice cores. Runaway climate change A situation in which so many of the climate system’s positive feedbacks have been tripped that accelerated warming is inevitable and unstoppable. Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) In AR6, five “narratives” aimed at giving a sense of possible future warming scenarios. SSPs incorporate much richer social, economic and political detail than earlier scenarios—such as the Representative Concentration Pathways of AR5—did. Sixth mass extinction In the history of life on earth there have been five mass extinction events, events in which between 50% and 95% of all species were wiped out. Humans are now in the process of causing the sixth such event. Climate change is a significant causal factor in this unfolding event. Social ecology A school of thinking in environmental ethics first developed by Murray Bookchin, according to which human-human forms of domination spill over into human-nature forms of domination. Solar Radiation Management (SRM) A form of geoengineering aimed at increasing the capacity of the planet to reflect incoming sunlight. Example: mirrors in space. Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) Currently the most prominent form of SRM. The scheme is to inject sulfates (sulfur dioxide) into the stratosphere to reflect incoming sunlight. ‘There is no alternative’ (TINA) A popular slogan expressing the view that there is no alternative to the capitalist economic order more or less the way it is structured now.

Glossary

235

Tort Law That branch of law dealing with disputes between private individuals or groups. In the climate case it usually involves groups of citizens or environmental groups taking governments or countenance to court for damages from climate disruption. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) Established in 1992, this is the document that lays out the terms of the global effort to understand and address climate change. Utilitarianism A moral theory according to which an act is good insofar as it maximizes the net happiness or welfare of all those it affects. A form of consequentialism. Virtue ethics A moral theory holding that the moral quality of actions is a function of the character of the agent who performs them.

Index

ability to pay principle (APP) 82, 85 acidification 2; ocean 58, 191, 193, 198 activist preservationism (AP) 134–139, 141–142, 145 additionality 164–165 afforestation 54, 189 Africa 2, 15–16, 18–19, 57, 201 agricultural productivity 15; loss of 18, 19 American Declaration of Human Rights 118 Annex I countries 62 Anthropocene 4, 57, 128, 132–133, 135, 139–140, 142, 144–146, 160 anthropogenic 9, 11–12, 174; emissions 113 AP see activist preservationism APP see ability to pay principle Aristotle 23–24, 69, 116, 133, 157, 159 Arpaly, Nomy 175–176, 187n12 Asia 15, 53, 57, 70 Australia 15–16, 73, 177 Baehr, Jason 179, 188n19 Balaji, V. 147n17 Barnosky, Anthony D. 27n34 Barry, Christian 154–156, 167n11 basic legitimation demand (BLD) 108 Belgium 7, 79 beneficiary pays principle (BPP) 79–80, 82, 85 Berkey, Brian 139, 147n14 Berlin Mandate 62–63 Bookchin, Murray 209–212, 228nn1–2 BPP see beneficiary pays principle Brand, Jeffrey 111–112, 126n12 Broome, John 41, 44, 47n19, 153, 165–166, 167nn7–8, 168nn21–22 Brownlee, Kimberlee 127n41, 127n43 Brulle, Robert 178 Bruno, Giordano 170, 172 Buck, Holly Jean 205, 208n23 Burgers, Laura 110, 125n8 Bush, George H.W. 75

business as usual 4, 16–17, 38, 48, 87, 97, 104, 153, 159, 224, 226; ideology of 71–76 Byrd-Hagel Resolution 63–64 capitalism 58–59, 61, 211, 216, 219; carbon 56; ethical dimensions of 5; friendly to 60; global 221; green 222; hyper- 214; industrial 210; liberal meritocratic 220–222; neoliberal 100–101; people’s 222, 223–224, 226; political 220, 222 carbon cycle 9, 149 carbon dioxide 8–12, 16–17, 22, 40–41, 54–56, 58–61, 72, 78–79, 92, 99, 109–110, 140, 143, 176 Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) 189–190 Carbon Disclosure Project 221, 228n20 carbon offsetting 5, 148, 164–166 carbon pollution 18, 72, 98 Catholic Church 73, 165 causality and attribution 110–114 CBA see cost-benefit analysis CBDR see common but differentiated responsibilities CDR see Carbon Dioxide Removal China 7, 56, 59, 63, 72, 81, 83, 95, 120, 140, 158, 201, 220–221 Chivers, Danny 176, 187n13, 188n29 Christianity 43–44 civil disobedience 4, 107, 110, 120–124 Clifford, W.K. 175, 187n11 Climate Case Chart 126n30, 126n32 climate catastrophe 52, 83, 124, 161, 191, 199, 206, 224 climate change: abrupt 11; age of 4, 45, 84, 87, 104, 142, 144–145, 155, 166, 206, 226; anthropogenic 2, 114, 128, 131, 143, 145, 190, 203, 216; bullshit 176–179, 180–182, 186; catastrophic 38, 98, 180; causes of 11; challenges of 214; communication 23; concept of 8; denial 5, 151, 172, 176–177, 183; disasters 89; drivers of 56–61; effects of

Index 1, 7, 16–17, 36, 40, 53, 62, 80, 82, 120, 138, 144, 161; ethics 5–6, 23, 28–29, 45, 133; harms 111, 149–151; health impacts of 19; and human rights 68–71; injustice of 205; justice 82, 104, 152, 162; landscape 4; phenomenon of 3, 24; physical impacts of 20; politics of 164; problem of 49, 61, 75, 88, 148–149, 166, 195; ravages of 89, 142, 144, 159; runaway 11, 179; science of 24, 28, 50, 183; threat of 121; and tort law 114–117 Climate Change Ethics in Anglo-American philosophy 2 climate crisis, virtues for 158; benevolence 159; courage 159; frugality 160; hope 159–160; humility 160; respect 161–162 climate economics 33–39 climate justice 109, 148, 166, 196; demands of 163; intergenerational 158, 198; international 87, 158, 198–199; nature of 3, 31, 68; principles of 4, 79–83; responsibilities of 162 climate litigation 4, 107, 110, 113–115, 117, 120, 124 Clinton, Bill 62 coastal flooding 18, 20 common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR) 62–65 community 52–53, 179, 219, 223; coastal 169; human 51; international 48; Inuit 117–118; philosophical 29; political 71, 121–122, 197; scientific 29 Conference of the Parties (COP) 49, 61–65, 122 consequentialism 30, 42 contractarian gambit 97–99 contractarianism 30, 32, 42, 51, 97–99, 102–104, 212, 214 COP see Conference of the Parties Copernican Revolution 133 Copernicus 133 corrective justice 5, 71, 79, 116, 197, 202–204 cost-benefit analysis (CBA) 33–35, 37, 39, 45 Crary, Jonathan 214–216, 219, 228nn9–10, 228n15 Crutzen, Paul 132 Cuff, Madeline 6n2 Currens, Ben 27n35 DDA see Doctrine of Doing and Allowing DDE see doctrine of double effect deep ecology 210 Delmas, Candice 127n41, 127n43 demographic transition 19, 57 deontology 30, 42, 51, 69, 104, 158, 161, 212

237

Dessler, Andrew 67n14, 67n18 Dietz, Rob 67nn15–17 difference principle 97–99 Diogenes 69 discounting 37–39, 45 distributive justice 71, 197–198 Doctrine of Doing and Allowing (DDA) 93, 136, 138–139, 145 doctrine of double effect (DDE) 136–139, 145 Doran, P.T. 187n9 drought 3, 7, 15, 17–19, 21, 25, 50, 72, 201 Dunne, Daisy 126n16, 126nn18–19 Dworkin 119–120, 124 ecomodernism 139–142, 205 economic growth 56, 57–59, 66 ecosystem 4, 18, 50–51, 134–135, 141; forest 34; global 17; healthy 130, 160; management 53; ocean 22–23; species and 4, 17, 128, 138, 142; terrestrial and freshwater 21–22 efficiency 59–61 Elliot, Robert 135–136, 147n13 Ellis, Erle 140, 229n26 Enlightenment 100, 140, 158 ethics: adequate 41–45; climate change (see climate change); Confucian 158, 161; environmental 3, 28, 128, 133, 143–145, 209–210; necessary 39–41; procreative 90; sound intergenerational 104; transitional 31, 59; virtue 30, 32, 42, 52, 157–158, 161–162, 170, 212 European Human Rights Commission (EHRC) 116–117 European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights (EUCFR) 117 Extinction Rebellion 121 extreme event attribution science 12, 14, 113 Exxon-Mobil 54, 74, 113, 178 Feldman, Stacey 187n10 Fisher, Mark 219, 225, 228n14, 229n29 fossil fuels 1, 7–9, 12–13, 15, 22, 33, 36, 41, 50, 58–59, 72–75, 77, 79–84, 134, 184, 221, 224; burning 22, 36, 56, 82–83, 89, 138; combustion 55; company 74, 111, 178; corporation 112, 223; economy 223; industry 54, 178; infrastructure 124; price 56, 61; regime 159, 219; reign of 89; stock 71 Frankfurt, Harry 5, 169, 178, 188n17 Freeden, Michael 68–69, 86n1, 86n3 French Revolution 226 Gandhi, Mahatma 121 Garcia, R.K. 204, 208nn20–21

238

Index

Gardiner, Stephen 6, 32, 39–40, 42, 44, 47nn8–12, 47nn15–18, 47n22, 67n4, 76, 86n4, 86n9, 86n12, 86n14, 86n25, 88–89, 104, 105nn3–4, 164, 167n4, 168n20, 168n23, 194, 199, 208n6, 208n10, 208n17, 212 Garvey, James 29, 46n2 Gauthier, David 213–214, 228n5 GDP 38, 51, 56, 58–60, 75 Geishert, Charles 27n35 general will 5, 209, 223–226 genetically modified organisms (GMOs) 50 geoengineering 5, 13, 51, 160, 193–198, 200–202, 204–207, 223; turn to 189–192 Geologic Time Scale 132 Germany 7, 83, 177 Geuss, Raymond 108, 125n5 Gewirtz, Paul 107, 125n1 GHGs see greenhouse gases global warming 8, 10, 15–17, 152, 220 GMOs see genetically modified organisms GND see Green New Deal Goodin, Robert E. 168n23 Gould, Stephen J. 129, 146n2 Great Acceleration 57–58 Grebbell, Caroline 127n44 greenhouse gases (GHGs) 7–11, 14, 16, 25, 40–42, 54–56, 61–63, 80–82, 98, 112, 117, 128, 155, 165, 175, 177, 191–192, 194 Green New Deal (GND) 222–224, 226–227 Hadjinicolaou, P. 26n17 Hadley, Elizabeth A. 27n34 Hale, Ben 192, 194, 208nn7–8 Half Earth Project (HEP) 223 Halliday, Daniel 224, 229n28 Hamilton, Clive 141, 147n15, 147n18 Hansen, James 121, 144, 147n21 Hansen incident 121 Hardin, Garret 76 harm principle 29, 33, 52, 179–180 Harper, Stephen 62 Hausfather, Zeke 26n13 Heede, Richard 113–115, 126n20, 221 Hegel 225 Heyward, Clare 27n41, 46n6 Hill, Thomas E. 187n1 Hobbes, Thomas 108, 162, 213, 216, 225, 228n6 Hoggan, James 188n16 Holocene 11, 132 human rights 3–4, 68, 70–71, 84–85, 107, 117, 120, 124, 185–186; fundamental 119, 122 Hume, David 38–39 Hurricane Ida 7, 17

Hurricane Irma 75 Hutton, Eric L. 168n16 idealism 4, 107, 110, 124; extreme 109; moral 32 ideal theory 28–33, 162 India 19, 21, 81, 83, 89, 113, 140–141, 197 Indonesia 15 institutional theory of justice (ITJ) 162–163 instrumental temperature record 9, 11, 174 Inter-American Court on Human Rights 117 International Geosphere-Biosphere Program 132 intergenerational arms race 87–90, 98, 104 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 1, 7, 11–12, 16, 18, 20–21, 25–26, 26n1, 26n3, 26n14, 27nn24–25, 27n31, 27n33, 27n36, 27nn38–39, 28, 37, 46n1, 53–54, 67nn6–8, 67nn10–12, 91, 126n40, 175–176, 180, 182–183, 189–191, 207n2, 208nn3–5, 220–221, 228n19 IPCC see Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Iran 120, 221 Irvine, Peter 203, 208nn18–20 ITJ see institutional theory of justice Jackson, Frank 153–154, 167n5 Jackson, Tim 60 Jamieson, Dale 6, 14, 26n2, 41–44, 46, 47nn20–24, 65, 67n21, 67n27, 86nn17–18, 105, 129, 146n1, 149–150, 157–158, 167nn1–3, 168n13, 196, 201, 208n11, 208n16 Jameson, Frederic 58 just governance 196–204; corrective justice 202–204; distributive justice 197–198; intergenerational 198–200; procedural 200–202 justice: climate 4, 31, 79, 109, 148, 162–163, 166, 196; corrective 71, 79, 116, 202–204; distributive 71, 197–198; institutions of 100; intergenerational 97, 198–200; international 3, 18, 87, 159; procedural 71, 200–202; serious 122; social 184; universal 205 just savings principle 99–102, 104; principle is not demanding enough 101–102; principle is too demanding 100–101 Just Stop Oil 121 Kant 69, 178 Kaya, Yoichi 56 Keller, Simon 181–183, 188nn24–27

Index

239

Kiehl, Jeffrey 17 Kolbert, Elizabeth 22, 24, 27n40 Kump, Lee R. 26nn4–6, 26n8, 26n11, 26nn15–16, 26n18, 27n27 Kyoto Accord, the 118–119 Kyoto Protocol 61–63

morality 35, 69, 76, 91, 95–96, 102, 104, 114, 136, 153, 163, 166, 170, 211–212; common sense 42–44, 93, 138, 150, 220; elite 220–221; liberal 214; ordinary 221; person-affecting 92–93 Morton, Timothy 205

laissez-faire 134, 139 Lamb, Michael 23, 27nn41–43 Lane, Melissa 23, 27nn41–43 Leach, Nicholas J. 126n14 legitimacy 118–120; and the Paris agreement 117–120 Lelieveld, J. 26 Letzte Generation 121 liability 80–82, 197; causal 112 lifetime-transcending 100 lifetime-transcending interests 103, 104 Little Ice Age 95 Locke 213, 216, 225

Naess, Arne 210 Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) 64–65 National Union of Women’s Suffragette’s Societies 123 nature 24, 35, 43, 45, 65, 131, 134, 140–141, 154, 161, 163, 194, 222; of civil disobedience 121; domination of 209; end of 142–145; faking 135–136; human 216–217; rational human 69; state of 162, 216; transactional 116; volatile 31 nature deficit disorder 143 Nature Needs Half (NNH) 223 NDCs see Nationally Determined Contributions negative feedback 10 negative rights 69–70, 85 negligibility thesis (NT) 152–154, 156, 166 Newton 172 Nigeria 19 NIP see non-identity problem NNH see Nature Needs Half Nolt, John 153, 167n6 non-ideal theory 28–33, 45–46 non-identity problem (NIP) 4, 90–96, 104, 136; comparative notion of harm 94; personaffecting morality 92–93; worth living 94–96 Nordhaus, William 36 Norgaard, Kari Marie 184, 188n30 NT see negligibility thesis Nussbaum, Martha 68, 70, 86n2

Macpherson, CB 213, 228n7 Malm, Andreas 217–219, 228nn11–13 Mann, Michael 24, 26nn4–6, 26n8, 26nn10–11, 26nn15–16, 26n18, 27n27, 175 Manson, Neil A. 67n5 Marshall, George 183, 185, 188n28 Marx 224–225 Mayer, Jane 178, 181, 188n15 McKinnon, Catriona 180–181, 188n21, 188n23 McQueen, Alison 107–108, 125n2 Mehrabi, Z. 229n26 Merchant, Carolyn 211, 228n3 methane 8, 10, 55, 133, 160 Michaluk, A.M. 147n17 Milanovic, Branko 219–220, 228nn16–18, 228n22 Milieudefensie v. Royal Dutch Shell 109, 115–116, 125n6 Mill, John Stuart 29, 46n3, 52, 69, 179, 188n20, 214 mitigation 54, 62, 65–66, 70, 75, 138, 190–191; and adaptation 3, 48, 52–56, 192–194, 199, 202, 206; aggressive 61, 96, 175, 195, 199; burdens 78; carbon 120; costs 40, 81, 90, 109; robust 177; strategy 55; strong duties of 103 Moellendorf, Dale 24, 27n44, 131, 146n4 moral corruption 76, 194–196, 206 moral cosmopolitanism 69–70 moral culture 44, 162 moral evaluation 43, 131 moral hazard 192–194, 206

Oliver, Morton 208n24 O’Neill, Dan 67nn15–17 Øverland, Gerhard 154–156, 167 Paalberg, Robert 36, 47n12 Pakistan 113 paleoclimatology 17 Palmer, Clare 144, 147n22 Parfit, Derek 4, 87, 90, 92–95, 105n6, 105n8, 154, 167nn9–10 Paris Agreement, the 31, 61, 64–66, 78, 117–120, 124 Parson, Edward A. 67n14, 67n18 Parsons, Glenn 131, 146n6 People’s Climate Vote 221

240

Index

permafrost 10 PEW Research Center 187n14 pluralism 34; value 34, 45 Pollock, Sir Frederick 114, 126n24 polluter pays principle (PPP) 4, 68, 79, 81, 85, 203 Pope Francis 172 population 19, 54, 56–57, 66, 91–92, 95, 119, 130, 144, 197, 224; control 56; global 13, 18, 53, 81, 149, 165; growth 19, 58; human 20, 226; vulnerable 18 portfolio approach 200 positive feedback 10, 15–17 positive right 69 possessive individualism 213–215 PPP see polluter pays principle precautionary principle (PP) 48 pre-industrial baseline 9, 87, 95 principle of salience 119 prisoner’s dilemma 76, 88, 148, 151, 157, 166 procedural justice 71, 197, 200–202 Proestos, Y. 26n17 proxy data 9 Ptolemy 133 Rawls, John 4, 30–31, 46nn4–5, 69, 74, 84, 86n7, 87, 97–99, 101–102, 104, 105nn17–18, 105n21, 106n25, 122, 124, 127n42, 213, 225 realism 4, 32, 107–110, 120, 124, 219 Reid, Thomas 174–175, 187n6, 187n8 responsibility 40, 54, 63; causal 80–81, 110–111, 113; degree of 82; epistemic 192–193; ethical 141; historical 77, 79, 81, 204; moral 137, 162, 166 Ripple, William J. 6n1 Ripstein, Arthur 110–111, 115, 125n10, 126n23, 126n27, 225, 229n31 risk policy (RP) 90–96 Romm, Joseph 16, 24, 26n7, 26n9, 26nn19–20, 27nn22–23, 27n26, 27n28, 27n30, 27n32, 27n37, 27n45, 67n13 Roser, Dominic 27n41, 46n6 Rousseau, Jacques 5, 103, 209, 214, 225–227, 229n30 Rowlands, Mark 102, 106n26 Royal Dutch Shell 109 RP see risk policy Russia 19, 120, 198, 221, 223 safe policy (SP) 90–92 SAI see Stratospheric Aerosol Injection Salt March 121 Sandler, Ronald 131, 134, 147n7, 147nn11–12, 160, 168n14

Saudi Arabia 74 Scheffler, Samuel 103, 105, 106nn27–28 science 4, 7, 50, 129, 142, 160, 170, 175, 179, 203; attribution 116; climate 173–174, 176, 178, 180, 182–183; communication 193; of ecology 141; and economics 98; ethical communication of 23–24; junk 180; physical 3; social 132; sound 180 sea-level rise 3, 7, 16–18, 20, 25, 29, 190, 193, 198, 202, 204 Second World War 201 security 18, 20–21, 75, 109; energy 50; existential 108, 213; food 205; livelihood 53; military 29; national 13; regional 13 Semmelmayer, Philipp 112, 126n13 Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) 12–13, 17 Shklar, Judith 74, 86n6 Shue, Henry 6, 51, 67n4, 73, 79–80, 84, 86n5, 86n12, 86n14, 86n22, 86n26, 105, 204–205, 208n17, 208n22 Sinha, E. 147n17 sink-enhancement 54 Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter 152, 156, 164, 167n4 Sixth mass extinction, The 22 slavery 121, 143, 186, 213; harm of 80; humane 199; institution of 80; mental 179 Smith, Patrick Taylor 199–200, 208n15, 217 social ecology 209, 218; and system change 209–213 Solar Radiation Management (SRM) 189–191, 193–195, 197–205 Sosa, Ernest 187n3 sovereignty 120; consumer 224; state 72–73, 118, 182 SP see safe policy Special Message to the Congress on Conservation and Restoration of Natural Beauty 80 SRM see Solar Radiation Management SSPs see Shared Socioeconomic Pathways Stanley, Jason 180, 188n21 Steiner, Achim 221–222 Stern, Sir Nicholas 37–38, 47nn13–14, 51, 75, 86n8 Stern, Todd 63, 75, 78 St. Louis Missouri 15 Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) 190–191, 205 Sunstein, Cass 49–50, 67nn2–3, 133, 147n10 Supreme Court 116–117 Svboda, Toby 202–203, 208n13, 208nn18–19

Index Tan, Kok-Chor 162–163, 168nn17–19 Tanarhte, M. 26n17 Tandon, Ayesha 126n15, 126n17 Tasioulas, John 118, 126n35 Taylor, Charles 108, 125n3, 211–212, 228n4, 228n8 ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA) 216–219, 226–227 Thirty Years War 72 Thompson, Janna 100–101, 103–104, 105n22, 106nn23–24 Thoreau, Henry David 121 Thrasher, John 224, 229n28 Tillerson, Rex 54, 74 TINA see ‘there is no alternative’ tort law 4, 107, 110, 112, 114–116, 120, 124 trajectory issue 40 Tremblay, Hugo 123, 127n45 Trump, Donald 31, 65, 117, 119, 169 Tyrlis, E. 26n17 U.K. 74, 79, 177 Ultima Generazione 121 UN Charter of Human Rights 70, 118–120, 201 U.N. Declaration of Human Rights 185 UNFCCC 67n20, 118–119 United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) 67n26 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) 48, 66, 67n1 United Republic of Tanzania 19 United States (U.S.) 7, 15–17, 19, 21, 36, 62–65, 73–74, 78–82, 117–118, 150, 170, 177, 197 U.N. Security Council 197 U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization 55 Urgenda Foundation 116 Urgenda v. The Netherlands 116 U.S. Secretary of State 54, 74

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U.S. Senate 63 utilitarianism 30, 32, 52, 158, 212 Valentini, Laura 31, 46n7 Vanderheiden, Steve 77, 81, 86nn10–11, 86nn20–21, 86n24, 87, 99, 105n1, 105nn19–20, 180, 188n22 Van Gogh, Self-Portrait in St. Remy 121 van Zeben, Jospehine 126n33 Verdirame, Guglielmo 118, 126n35 Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring 121 virtue ethics 30, 32, 42, 52, 157–158, 161–162, 170, 212 Vogel, Steven 143–144, 147nn19–20 wealth 57, 71, 77, 79, 100, 198, 220, 222, 224; adequate 97; brings 36, 77; household 165; material 99; national 98; net 74; vast 112 Weinrib, Ernst 116, 126n29 Weisbach, David 35–36, 45, 47nn8–12, 47n22, 84, 86n25, 168n20 Weisheimer, Antje 126n14 West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) 16 Western culture 143 Wewerinke-Singh, Margaretha 126n34 wildfires 3, 7, 11, 15–17, 19, 25, 111; hypothetical 112 Williams, Bernard 108–109, 125n4 Williston, Byron 47n12, 86n19, 86n25, 105n14, 105n16, 146n3, 146nn5–6, 147n7, 147n16, 187n6, 187n10, 188nn17–18 Wilson, E.O. 223, 229n25 Wolf, Christopher 6n1 Woollard, Fiona 92–94, 105nn9–10, 136 Zagzebski, Linda 187n4 Zeitgeist 210 Zimmermann, M. Kendall 187n9 Zittis, G. 26n17