Why Climate Change Is An Ethical Problem

Washington Post - Stephen Gardiner

Stephen M. Gardiner is professor of philosophy at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Calved icebergs from the nearby Twin Glaciers floating near Greenland in 2013. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Climate change presents a severe ethical challenge, forcing us to confront difficult questions as individual moral agents, and even more so as members of larger political systems. It is genuinely global and seriously intergenerational, and crosses species boundaries. It also takes place in a setting where existing institutions and theories are weak, proving little ethical guidance.
The critical question as we seek to address climate change will be which moral framework is in play when we make decisions. In many settings, we do not even notice when this question arises, because we assume that the relevant values are so widely shared and similarly interpreted that the answer should be obvious to everyone. Nevertheless, the values question is not trivial, since our answer will shape our whole approach.
If we think something should be done about climate change, it is only because we use our moral frameworks to evaluate climate change events, our role in bringing them about, and the alternatives to our action. This evaluation gives us both an account of the problem and constraints on what would count as relevant solutions.
Suppose, for example, one were deciding where to set a global ceiling on emissions.
At one extreme, we might give absolute priority to the future. It is technically feasible for us all to reduce our emissions by 50 to 80 percent tomorrow, or even eliminate them. We could, after all, just turn off our electricity, refuse to drive, and so on. The problem is not that this cannot be done; it is that the implications are bleak. Given our current infrastructure, a very rapid reduction would probably cause social and economic chaos, including humanitarian disaster and severe dislocation for the current generation. If this is correct, we are justified in dismissing such drastic measures. However, that justification is ethical: A policy that demanded those measures would be profoundly unjust, violate important rights and be deeply harmful to human welfare.
Still, the acknowledgement of those limits has its own implications. Even if any emissions cuts would be disruptive to some extent, presumably at some point the risks imposed on future generations are severe enough to outweigh them. Where is this point? That is an ethical question. So far, we do not seem very interested in answering it.
Perhaps this is because up until now we have been acting as if our answer is closer to the other extreme — giving absolute priority to our own short-term interests. Over the past 25 years — since the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report — we have continued to allow high levels of emissions, suggesting that we are giving the future no weight at all. Given the threat of a tyranny of the contemporary (a collective-action problem in which earlier generations exploit the future by taking modest benefits for themselves now while passing on potentially catastrophic costs later), this bias is highly predictable. Yet it also appears grossly unethical.
Of course, acknowledging that moral claim is deeply uncomfortable. Consequently, there is a temptation to prefer framings of the climate problem that obscure the ethical questions. Consider, for instance, those who reject any moral lens, arguing that climate policy should be driven solely by national self-interest, usually understood in terms of domestic economic growth over the next couple of decades.
Their accounts face deep problems. Given the time lags that climate change involves, most climate impacts, including many of the most serious, will take many decades to arise. Moreover, those that may occur in the near term are likely already in the cards, due to either past emissions or those that are by now inevitable. Amoral approaches constructed with a focus exclusively on the next decade or two would confront only a very small set of the relevant impacts of climate change, and would likely miss the most important — and the potentially catastrophic. Climate policy could become yet another venue where narrow interests crowd out longer-term and broader concerns.
The real climate challenge is ethical, and ethical considerations of justice, rights, welfare, virtue, political legitimacy, community and humanity’s relationship to nature are at the heart of the policy decisions to be made. We do not “solve” the climate problem if we inflict catastrophe on future generations, or facilitate genocide against poor nations, or rapidly accelerate the pace of mass extinction. If public policy neglects such concerns, its account of the challenge we face is impoverished, and the associated solutions quickly become grossly inadequate. Ongoing political inertia surrounding climate action suggests that so far, we are failing the ethical test.

Links

• Daniel Farber: Inaction on global warming is as reckless as drunken driving
• Robert Brulle: America has been duped on climate change
• John Nagle: Pope Francis was right on climate change
• Thomas Kostigen: If we’re going to fix climate change, we’ll have to get creative
• Eric Posner: When it comes to climate change, payback isn’t enough

When It Comes To Climate Change, Payback Isn’t Enough

Washington Post - Eric Posner

Eric Posner is a professor at the University of Chicago Law School and co-author of “Climate Change Justice.”

Ice floes in Baffin Bay above the Arctic Circle. (Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press via Associated Press)

Many people argue that rich countries like the United States should bear a greater burden for climate change mitigation than poor countries, because rich countries have emitted more greenhouse gases. This stance is based on the principle of corrective justice, according to which one who wrongfully does harm must compensate the victim. This principle explains why we fine litterers and force factories that pollute excessively to pay damages to people harmed by the pollution.
However, the application of this principle to climate change quickly runs into problems, while leaving other moral questions — of wealth sharing, redistribution and responsibility — unanswered.
Many of the people who have engaged in activities that emitted greenhouse gases are our distant ancestors; they are no longer around to pay. And most of the victims of climate change are not yet born. If the United States pays “climate reparations” to India, for example, the money will be paid in large part by people who are not directly responsible for global warming to people who have not yet been hurt by global warming. The real victims will be future Indians — people living many decades or centuries hence.
The common response is that Americans have benefited from industrialization in the distant past, so they ought to inherit the moral liabilities of our ancestors along with the benefits they gave us. However, while Americans have benefited from industrialization, so have Indians. The technology of industrialization has spread far and wide, benefiting people all around the world. If we are responsible for the effects of our ancestors’ behavior on future populations, we need to subtract the benefits from the costs. Very likely, unless climate change turns catastrophic, the benefits of steam engines, computers and vaccines will exceed the climate-related costs, meaning that rich countries will owe poor countries nothing at all.
There are other problems with the corrective justice perspective. It assumes that our ancestors acted wrongfully by emitting greenhouse gases, but there is a question of will and knowledge: No one in the past realized that this activity caused harm. And even if our ancestors did behave wrongfully, the argument assumes that this moral stain is transmitted down generations, and also transmitted to people who immigrated to the United States and their children, who are not even descendants of the climate wrongdoers.
Some commentators might still say that Americans living today are independently at fault because they have not taken more vigorous steps to curb their current energy usage or have not voted into office politicians who support strong climate change mitigation policies. This argument underestimates the difficulty of addressing such a significant problem. People cannot be expected to stop climate change through their individual actions — a person who uses electricity to run his refrigerator is not acting wrongly — and massive changes in public policy take time.
Changes in climate policy in the United States were further hampered by the global nature of the problem — if we had unilaterally cut back on emissions, some industry would have migrated to other parts of the world, leaving the problem unsolved. That’s why a treaty was needed. But moving forward, it does make sense that those who produce greenhouse gases should be required to pay for the harm in proportion to the magnitude of their activity. This is different from saying that people should be punished for their behavior from the past. It’s also worth keeping in mind that the highest per-capita emitters are not Americans but the citizens of Montenegro, Equatorial Guinea and Belize.
The most obvious argument for putting the burden of climate change on rich countries is simply that they can afford it. But if a meteorite destroys some property that is jointly owned by a rich person and a poor person, does the rich person have a moral obligation to bear the entire cost — or even a disproportionate share of the cost — of rebuilding the property? We might admire the rich person if he offers to pay to replace or rebuild the property, but we recognize this act as charity rather than as morally obligatory.
Rich countries should give more aid to poor countries, but the aid should be given to all poor countries — not just those that are hurt most by climate change. For that matter, rich countries should give more money to their own poor citizens. Redistribution of wealth from rich to poor is morally desirable, but it should be pursued broadly — not as compensation for historical wrongs.

Links:

• Daniel Farber: Inaction on global warming is as reckless as drunken driving
• Robert Brulle: America has been duped on climate change
• John Nagle: Pope Francis was right on climate change
• Thomas Kostigen: If we’re going to fix climate change, we’ll have to get creative

The Two Questions You Should Ask Yourself About Climate Change

Slate - Oliver Morton

How you answer them determines the way you will feel about geoengineering.

Coalbrookdale by Night by Philip James de Loutherbourg depicts the period of the Industrial Revolution. The Yorck Project/Wikimedia Commons

This essay is adapted from The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World, by Oliver Morton, published by Princeton University Press.

In March 2012, in a large-windowed conference hall on the snowy campus of the University of Calgary, I heard two simple questions. The man asking them was trying to help his audience get the most out of their day by giving them a clear understanding of where they, and others, stood when it came to action on climate change. To that end he asked them:
Do you believe the risks of climate change merit serious action aimed at lessening them?
Do you think that reducing an industrial economy’s carbon dioxide emissions to near zero is very hard?
The two questions posed that morning by Robert Socolow, a physicist from Princeton University, seem to me a particularly good way of defining your position on geoengineering. So take a moment to answer them, if you would.
Here’s a bit of context.
There is no serious doubt that the atmosphere’s greenhouse effect is a key determinant of the Earth’s temperature. Nor is there any serious doubt that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas or that humans have been adding to the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for the past few centuries by burning fossil fuels. In 1750, before the Industrial Revolution, the carbon dioxide level was 280 parts per million. In 1950, when the great global boom of the second half of the 20th century was taking off, it was about 310 parts per million. Today it is 400 parts per million. The bulk of that change has been due to the burning of fossil fuels. If you disbelieve any of those statements, you have been misled. I am not going to take the time to try and disabuse you, and you should read on in expectation of frustration.
There is, however, a lot of room for doubt about the level of climate change the planet will see over the next decades and centuries. The best current estimate is that if fossil-fuel use continues on anything like current trends, the Earth is likely to end up at least 2 degrees Celsius warmer than it was before the Industrial Revolution and possibly quite a lot warmer still. Change by 1 degree or 2 over a century or so may sound minimal, but it would be unprecedented in human history. Models of what happens to the climate in worlds in which fossil-fuel use is unconstrained point to severe, even cataclysmic, consequences in the form of damage to agriculture, greater harm done by extreme weather, the loss of biodiversity, and sea-level rise over timescales of decades to centuries.
That said, different models provide different possible climates at any given carbon dioxide level—some are more sensitive to the gas than others, in the language of modelers—and it is possible that the models on which warnings about climate change have mostly been based are, for some reason, skewed toward an unrealistically high sensitivity. It is also possible that humans and their natural world will be able to adapt to changed climates more easily and cheaply, and with less suffering, than most people concerned about climate change now believe. Thus it is possible that, even though carbon dioxide is unarguably a greenhouse gas and a lot of it is being added to the atmosphere, climate change due to human action will not in the end be a planet-changingly big deal.
The question, though, is not about the possibility of benign outcomes. It is about your willingness to do something about the risks of bad or even catastrophic ones. A catastrophe does not have to be certain for steps to avoid it to be worth taking.
Now here’s some context for the second question. The International Energy Agency, which compiles such statistics for governments, says that when the industrial nations committed themselves to cutting their carbon-dioxide emissions at the Kyoto, Japan, climate-change conference in 1997, 80 percent of the world’s energy demand was met with fossil fuels. Renewable energy sources furnished just 13 percent of the energy used; 10 of those 13 percentage points represented energy from biomass, including the wood burned on fires and in stoves by more than 1 billion people without other options. Wind, solar, and hydropower provided just three percentage points.
In 2012, after 15 years of post-Kyoto political action on climate, wind, solar, and hydro still provided 3 percent of the world’s energy needs; fossil fuels provided 81 percent. Industrial carbon dioxide emissions in 2013 were more than half as high again as they were at the time of Kyoto.
So how do you answer the two questions?
I answer them Yes and Yes. Yes, the risks posed by climate change are serious enough to warrant large-scale action. And Yes, moving from a fossil-fuel economy to one that hardly uses fossil fuels at all will be very hard.
To judge by what they say and what policies they support, most people in favor of action on climate change are in the Yes/No camp: They want to act on the risks; they don’t think that getting off fossil fuels is a terribly hard problem. Their way forward is to argue ever more strongly for emissions reductions; they believe these would be quite easily achieved were it not for a lack of political leadership willing to take on the vested interests of emitters.
Most of those against action on climate are in the No/Yes camp: They don’t think climate is very much of a worry; but they do think that getting off fossil fuels is difficult, even impossible. Their leaders tend to focus on the weaknesses they see in the science and politics underlying the case for action on emissions and on the drawbacks of renewable-energy systems.
Neither of these approaches works for people like me in the Yes/Yes camp. Yes/Yes people need different responses: responses that seek to lessen the risks of climate change without impractically rapid cuts in fossil-fuel use; or responses which seek to change society so deeply that such reductions become feasible. I think that deliberate modification of the climate—climate geoengineering—could offer a response of the first sort. It is to outline the promise and attendant perils of that idea and to appreciate its antecedents and its implications that I have written The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World.
Our world has already changed in all sorts of ways that are not spoken of as clearly as they should be. It is a world in which the impact of the human is far greater than it used to be: a world in which the global economy has become something akin to a force of nature, in which the legacies of past generations and the aspirations of generations to come dwarf the impacts of hurricanes and volcanoes. Some people reject or denounce the implications of this change; others blithely accept them in a way that underplays their magnitude. I think those implications need to be opened up, inspected from different angles, interrogated, analyzed, appreciated. Only then will it be possible to make the necessary judgments and choices.
Thinking about geoengineering is a worthwhile end in itself. But it is also an exercise in building up the imaginative capacity needed to take on board these deep changes the world is going through and which it will continue to go through whether or not anyone ever actually attempts to re-engineer the climate. The planet has been remade, is being remade, will be remade.

If We’re Going To Fix Climate Change, We’ll Have To Get Creative

Washington Post - Thomas Kostigen

Thomas M. Kostigen is a New York Times bestselling author and journalist. His most recent book is National Geographic’s “Extreme Weather Survival Guide.”

Corals appear pale white after a bleaching event in American Samoa, when the XL Catlin Seaview Survey responded to a NOAA coral bleaching alert. Bleaching of colorful coral is spreading worldwide, scientists announced. (XL Catlin Seaview Survey via Associated Press)

The developing world deserves reparations from wealthier nations as compensation for the harmful climate change effects that are mostly our fault. It’s us who have tainted our global commons by emitting vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and us whose actions have led to extreme weather and other disasters in the world’s most vulnerable regions.
But a strictly financial mea culpa from rich nations won’t be enough. Rich countries should also invest in geoengineering projects to provide solutions for those on the front lines of climate change: those who cannot afford to pay for more adaptive and resilient infrastructure or who happen to be geographically unfortunate.
According to World Bank reports, populations in low-income countries are most exposed to the natural disasters associated with climate change and face disproportionately higher economic losses, as well as long-term obstacles to growth and standards of living. Natural disasters cause an average of approximately $160 billion in damages per year, kill nearly 100,000 people and produce more than 140 million victims who suffer some kind of loss. Many become a new kind of migrant, climate refugees. Among the top 10 countries affected by disaster mortality in 2014, according to the international disasters database, seven are classified as lower income. Those from low-income countries comprise the majority of disaster victims.
Yet the largest emitters of the greenhouse gases that lead to climate change and in turn environmental disasters are rich, industrialized countries. And they have effectively admitted their culpability in environmental crimes.
At the recent United Nations climate change conference in Paris, where 196 nations agreed to reduce their carbon emissions to keep global temperature rise less than 2 degrees Celsius, another decision was reached that calls for developed countries to scale up their level of financial support to less-developed countries for mitigation and adaptation activities. The goal is to provide $100 billion annually by 2020 and to further provide appropriate technology and capacity-building support.
“Some of the impacts of climate change can’t be reversed,” said Secretary of State John F. Kerry in remarks at the Paris conference. “Therefore, we have a moral responsibility to adapt and prepare for those impacts and enable the most vulnerable among us to be able to do the same.”
Preparation plans and strong infrastructure can only go so far, and even the best may not hold up each and every time a disaster strikes. Mitigating the source of these disasters through geoengineering, or artificially modifying the Earth’s climate, is a different breed of mitigation tactic that can and should go hand in hand with natural defense plans.
While eccentric designs have been proposed — a giant parasol that could be constructed between the Earth and Sun to help control the amount of energy that reaches the planet, or blanketing all the world’s deserts with sun-reflective material — there are other approaches that do make sense today.
Take marine cloud brightening. One-quarter of all ocean species depend on coral reefs for food and shelter, and humans get food, medicines, shoreline protection and tourism jobs. But reefs are being destroyed by global temperature rise and increasing ocean acidity. One way to provide them with a level of protection could be to spray fine seawater onto clouds stationed over the reefs. The droplets would make clouds brighter, reflecting sunlight back into space and cooling the ocean below. Considering island nations are among those most at risk of climate change and often among the poorest, marine cloud brightening has merit.
Weather modification also has its place. Drought-stricken populations could benefit from cloud seeding, a process in which ice-forming particles are spread into clouds to stimulate precipitation. New, laser-targeted approaches could lead to rain on demand.
Carbon sequestration methodologies are also relatively recent, but equally worth our attention. Capturing carbon from the air using filters or vacuum-like devices could speed up a process normally performed by trees and other carbon sinks (which we are destroying at increasing rates), and could help to reduce the main cause of anthropogenic global warming.
To be sure, geoengineering has its risks. No one knows what the unintended results of tinkering with the global water cycle by cloud seeding or what effects unnatural carbon reduction schemes might unleash. There are online groups entirely devoted to the “clear and present danger” of climate engineering practices. They cite, often with alacrity, the threats that disrupting climate patterns through geoengineering programs could pose to health and property. Take, for example, the the deadly 1952 flood that occurred in England directly as a result of artificial rainmaking. Or the potential for earthquakes from storing carbon dioxide underground.
The National Research Council, which operates as part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, reckons in a recent report that radical climate intervention strategies are risky and cost-prohibitive, yet deserve further federally funded research and examination.
Still, it is by human hand that our environment has been degraded, and it is up to humans to innovate and devise a modified world that is safe for all. There may be no turning back to pre-industrial times, but that does not mean we have to turn our backs on those trapped by industry’s offenses. Tangible solutions are necessary to address the needs of those affected by climate change. Strategic options have timed out.

Links

• Daniel Farber: Inaction on global warming is as reckless as drunken driving
• Robert Brulle: America has been duped on climate change
• John Nagle: Pope Francis was right on climate change