" My Emissions Make No Difference": Climate Change and the Argument from Inconsequentialism (original) (raw)

Climate Change: Evidence of Human Causes and Arguments for Emissions Reduction

In a recent editorial, Raymond Spier expresses skepticism over claims that climate change is driven by human actions and that humanity should act to avoid climate change. This paper responds to this skepticism as part of a broader review of the science and ethics of climate change. While much remains uncertain about the climate, research indicates that observed temperature increases are human-driven. Although opinions vary regarding what should be done, prominent arguments against action are based on dubious factual and ethical positions. Thus, the skepticisms in the recent editorial are unwarranted. This does not diminish the general merits of skeptical intellectual inquiry.

Can Dangerous Climate Change Be Avoided

This article discusses obstacles to overcoming dangerous climate change. It employs an account of dangerous climate change that takes climate change and climate change policy as dangerous if it imposes avoidable costs of poverty prolongation. It then examines plausible accounts of the collective action problems that seem to explain the lack of ambition to mitigate. After criticizing the merits of two proposals to overcome these problems, it discusses the pledge and review process. It argues that pledge and review possesses the virtues of encouraging broad participation and of providing a procedural safeguard for the right of sustainable development. However, given the perceptions of the marginal short term costs of mitigation, pledge and review is unlikely, at least initially, to issue in an agreement to make deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Because there is no rival approach that seems likely to better instantiate the two virtues, pledge and review may be the best available policy for mitigation. Moreover, recent economic research suggests that the co-benefits of mitigation may be greater than previously assumed and that the costs of renewable energy may be less than previously calculated. This would radically undermine claims that the short term mitigation costs necessarily render mitigation irrational and produce collective action problems. Given the circumstances, pledge and review might be our best hope to avoid dangerous climate change.

Climate Change For: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics

and Keywords Understanding the complex set of processes collected under the heading of climate change represents a considerable scientific challenge. But it also raises important challenges for our best moral theories. For instance, in assessing the risks that climate change poses, we face profound questions about how we ought to weigh the respective harms it may inflict on current and on future generations, and on humans and other species. We face, in addition, difficult questions about how to act in conditions of uncertainty, in which at least some of the consequences of climate change – and of various human interventions to adapt to or mitigate it – are difficult to predict fully (Gardiner, 2006). Even if we agree that mitigating climate change is morally required, furthermore, there is room for disagreement about the precise extent to which it ought to be mitigated (insofar as there is room for underlying disagreement about the level of temperature rises which are morally permissible). Finally, once we determine which actions we ought to take to reduce or avoid climate change, we face the normative question of who ought to bear the costs of those actions, as well as the costs associated with any climate change which nevertheless comes to pass. The primary focus of this chapter will be upon this final issue. On the assumption that limiting climate change is morally required, our mitigation efforts are likely to prove costly for some if not all of us. Moreover, even if we mitigate now, some people will incur losses as a result of greenhouse gas emissions to date. We therefore require guidance on exactly how, from the point of view of justice, the associated burdens ought to be shared.

Dissertation extract: Structural Barriers to Avoiding Catastrophic Climate Change

2022

Understanding why the politics of climate change are contentious requires examining the structural barriers which make it so hard for humanity to stop burning fossil fuels and adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Why-despite the credible scientific assessments and reputable organizations highlighting the dire threat from climate change-does humanity show undiminished enthusiasm for fossil fuel extraction and the lifestyles it facilitates?

Climate Change and Collective Responsibility

Can persons be held morally responsible for harmful consequences that result from the acts or omissions of their nation or society, even if they conscientiously avoid contributing toward those consequences qua individuals? What if those acts and omissions, together with a great many other similar ones committed against the backdrop of social norms that tolerate and even encourage such harmful behavior, contribute to a global environmental problem that gives rise to valid claims for compensation on the part of those harmed by it, but where discrete instances of harm cannot be attributed to any specific persons as directly causally responsible? Such is the case with global climate change, which results in part from social norms that are permissive of polluting activities and which often frustrate efforts to avoid them, rather than being caused by culpable individual choices alone, in which case individual fault and responsibility could more plausibly be assigned. Furthermore, the harm associated with climate change is caused by aggregated greenhouse pollution from a great many untraceable point sources rather than being the direct result of discrete emissions of heat-trapping gases by particular persons, undermining standard accounts of individual moral responsibility and thus giving rise to claims for assigning responsibility collectively instead. But holding nations and peoples collectively responsible for climate change raises objections from the perspective of individual moral responsibility, at least insofar as some persons may be implicated qua members of groups when they are faultless as individuals.