I. Introduction

This post identifies twenty questions that the US press has failed to ask opponents of proposed US climate change policies that should be asked if climate change raises civilization challenging ethical issues.

To understand why these questions should be asked, it is first necessary to review the kinds of arguments that have usually been made in opposition to US climate change policies, programs, and legislation and why these arguments fail to deal with the profound ethical questions raised by the threat of human induced climate change.

Since international climate change negotiations began in 1990, the United States has yet to adopt meaningful greenhouse gas emissions reduction legislation For almost 20 years arguments against US climate change legislation or US participation in a global solution to climate change have been made that have almost always been of two types.

By far the most frequent arguments made in opposition to climate change policies are economic predictions of various kinds such as claims that proposed climate change legislation will destroy jobs, reduce GDP, damage US businesses such as the coal and petroleum industries, or increase the cost of fuel. A variation of this argument is that the United States should not adopt policies on climate change until other nations such as China take steps to reduce their emissions because if the United States acts and other nations don’t reciprocate this will harm the US economy.

The second most frequent argument made by opponents of climate change policies are assertions that governments should not take action on climate change because adverse impacts have not been sufficiently scientifically proven. These arguments range from assertions that what is usually called the “main-stream” scientific climate change view is a complete hoax to the milder assertions that the harsh climate change impacts on human health and the environment predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other climate change researchers are unproven.

Both the economic and scientific arguments against climate change policies implicitly argue that climate change policies should be opposed because they are not in the US national interest.

The responses of advocates of US climate change policies to these arguments are almost always to take issue with the factual economic and scientific conclusions of these arguments by making counter economic and scientific claims. For instance, in response to economic arguments opposing climate change legislation, proponents of climate change action usually argue that climate change policies will create jobs or are necessary to develop new energy technologies that are vital to the health of the US economy in the future. In responses to the lack of scientific proof arguments, climate change advocates usually stress the harsh environmental impacts to people and ecosystems that climate change will cause if action is not taken or argue that climate change science is settled. In other words, advocates of climate change action, respond to claims of opponents to climate change programs by denying the factual claims of the opponents.

By simply opposing the factual claims of the opponents of climate change, the advocates of climate change policies are implicitly agreeing with the assumptions of the opponents of climate change action that greenhouse reduction policies should not be adopted if they are not in national self-interest.

Yet, climate change is a problem that clearly creates civilization challenging ethical issues. By ethics is meant the domain of inquiry that examines claims that given certain facts, actions are right or wrong, obligatory or non-obligatory, or when responsibilities attach to human activities.

If nations or individuals have ethical obligations, they are likely to have duties, responsibilities, and obligations that require them to go beyond consideration of self-interest alone in making decisions. And so, if climate change raises ethical considerations, governments may not base policy decisions on self-interest alone.

Given this, one might ask what aspects of climate change raise ethical questions. In fact there are several distinct features of climate change call for its recognition as creating civilization challenging ethical questions.

First, climate change creates duties because those most responsible for causing this problem are the richer developed countries, yet those who are most vulnerable to the problem’s harshest impacts are some of the world’s poorest people in developing countries. That is, climate change is an ethical problem because its biggest victims are people who can do little to reduce its threat.

Second, climate-change impacts are potentially catastrophic for many of the poorest people around the world. Climate change harms include deaths from disease, droughts, floods, heat, and intense storms, damages to homes and villages from rising oceans, adverse impacts on agriculture, diminishing natural resources, the inability to rely upon traditional sources of food, and the destruction of water supplies. In fact, climate change threatens the very existence of some small island nations. Clearly these impacts are potentially catastrophic.

The third reason why climate change is an ethical problem stems from its global scope. At the local, regional or national scale, citizens can petition their governments to protect them from serious harms. But at the global level, no government exists whose jurisdiction matches the scale of climate change. And so, although national, regional and local governments have the ability and responsibility to protect citizens within their boarders, they have no responsibility to foreigners in the absence of international law. For this reason, ethical appeals are necessary to motivate governments to take steps to prevent their citizens from seriously harming foreigners.

And so if climate change raises civilization challenging ethical questions which imply duties, responsibilities, and obligations what questions should the press ask opponents of climate change policies when they make economic and scientific arguments against climate change policies?
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I. Introduction

If ethical and justice arguments about why climate change policies are necessary are taken off the table in the climate change debate, it is like a baseball pitcher unilaterally agreeing to not throw any fast balls or breaking balls during a World Series game. Yet, as we will explain, there is almost a complete absence of ethical arguments for climate change policies in the US debate about proposed approaches to climate change. This failure to expressly examine the ethical issues entailed by arguments made by opponents of climate change action has important practical consequences.

This post first looks at how climate change policies are usually debated. Next, the post looks at why these controversies must be understood to raise ethical questions. And finally, this post lists ten practical reasons why climate change policies must be examined through an ethical lens.

II. Common Climate Change Policy Arguments

Arguments against climate change policies are usually of two types. By far the most frequent arguments made in opposition to climate change policies are assertions of various kinds of adverse economic impacts that will flow if climate change policies are adopted. Examples of this are claims that proposed climate change legislation will destroy jobs, reduce GDP, damage US businesses such as the coal and petroleum industries, increase the cost of fuel, or will destroy the recovery from a recession. The second most frequent argument made by opponents of climate change policies are assertions that adverse climate change impacts have not been sufficiently scientifically proven.

The responses of advocates of US climate change policies to these arguments are almost always to take issue with the factual economic and scientific conclusions of these arguments by making counter economic and scientific claims. For instance, in response to economic arguments opposing climate change legislation or policies, proponents of climate change action usually argue that climate change policies will create jobs or are necessary to develop new energy technologies that are vital to the health of the US economy in the future. In responses to the lack of scientific proof arguments, climate change advocates usually stress the harsh environmental impacts to people and ecosystems that climate change will cause if action is not taken or argue that climate change science is settled. In other words, advocates of climate change action, respond to claims of opponents to climate change programs by denying the factual claims of the opponents.

Although these alternative economic and scientific arguments are relevant to whether climate change policies should be adopted, noticeably missing from the US debate are ethical and justice arguments for action on climate change. In fact, there is a hardly a murmur in US press coverage of climate change controversies about the ethical and justice reasons for adopting climate change policies when arguments against adopting climate change policies are made. This failure of the press to examine these issues is because advocates of climate change policies are rarely racing these issues.

III. Why Climate Change Policy Issues Must Be Understood to Raise Ethical Questions.

What distinguishes ethical issues from economic and scientific arguments about climate change is that ethics is about duties, obligations, and responsibilities to others while economic and scientific arguments are usually understood to be about “value-neutral” “facts” which once established are often deployed in arguments about self-interest.
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I. Introduction

If climate change must be understood as a civilization challenging ethical problem, what can be said about the positions taken by governments and results achieved at the recently concluded Copenhagen conference?

To evaluate what happened in Copenhagen one must understand that the Copenhagen meeting was only the last in  almost two decades of meetings that have failed to achieve a global solution to climate change. Copenhagen was the 19th meeting of governments from around the world that have been meeting every year since 1990 to forge a comprehensive climate change regime. Copenhagen was also the 15th conference of the parties (COP-15) since the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) came into effect in 1994. (UN, 1992)

For more than twenty years some nations have been taking positions on climate change that raise serious ethical concerns. Copenhagen meeting was no exception. However, as we saw in a prior ClimateEthics post, there were two issues that arose with a new force in Copenhagen. They were the intensity and frequency of calls for: (a) global justice, and (b) increased funding for adaptation programs in vulnerable developing countries. See, ClimateEthics, Two Climate Change Matters Move To Center Stage In Copenhagen With Profound Implications for Developed Nations: Ethics and Adaptation, http://climateethics.org/?p=331.

Yet, at the conclusion of the Copenhagen conference, as we shall see, little was accomplished in response to these issues or the other climate change disputes that have now plagued climate negotiations for almost two decades. Although, as we shall see, some have pointed to a few positive Copenhagen outcomes, most observers have judged COP-15 to be a disaster.

This post begins with an analysis of what actually happened in Copenhagen and contains the following sections:

• The path to the Copenhagen Accord
• Arguments about whether Copenhagen was a disaster or a positive step forward.
• Analysis of the “disaster-step forward” controversy
• Ethical analyses of the Copenhagen Accord
• Climate change ethics after Copenhagen

II. The Path To The Copenhagen Accord

The Copenhagen conference took place from December 7-19, 2009. Copenhagen was intended to be the culmination of a two-year negotiating process that was agreed to in Bali, Indonesia, in December 2007.
In 1990 negotiations began that led in 1992 to opening for signature and ratification of the UNFCCC. This treaty itself does not contain binding greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions limitations for countries but nevertheless includes numerous other binding national climate change obligations.
To understand the significance of what happened in Copenhagen, it is necessary to understand the goals and objectives for an international climate regime that were originally set out in the UNFCCC. Among other things, for instance, the parties to the UNFCCC agreed that: (a) They would adopt policies and measures to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system, (b) Developed countries should take the first steps to do this, and (c) Nations have common but differentiated responsibilities to prevent climate change, (d) Nations may not use scientific uncertainty as an excuse for not taking action, and (e) Nations should reduce their GHG emissions based upon “equity.” (UN, 1992) As we shall see, some national proposals in Copenhagen, seventeen years after the UNFCCC was agreed upon, failed to abide by many promises made by governments in the UNFCCC.

As of December 2009, the UNFCCC had 192 parties, a number that includes almost all countries in the world including the United States which ratified the UNFCCC in 1994.

The UNFCC is a “framework” convention because it has always been expected that additional requirements would be added to the framework in updates that are known as “protocols” or in annual decisions of the conferences of the parties.

The first major addition to the UNFCCC was the Kyoto Protocol which was negotiated in 1997 because the international community had been convinced by emerging climate change science that developed nations needed to be bound by numerical emissions reductions targets. The Kyoto Protocol entered into force on February 16, 2005 and currently has 190 parties. The United States is the only developed country that never ratified the Kyoto Protocol.

Under the Kyoto, Protocol, the developed countries agreed to reduce their overall emissions of six greenhouse gases by an average of 5.2% below 1990 levels between 2008-2012. The developing countries had no binding emissions reductions obligations under Kyoto.

The Copenhagen negotiations were necessary because the emissions reductions obligations of developed countries set out in the Kyoto Protocol expire in 2012.

At climate negotiations at COP-13 in Bali, Indonesia in 2007, parties to the UNFCCC agreed to replace the Kyoto Protocol with an agreement that would create a second commitment period under the UNFCCC and would include binding emissions reductions for developed countries and new programs on adaptation for developing countries, deforestation, finance, technology transfer, and capacity building. This agreement is referred to as the Bali Roadmap which also called for articulating a “shared vision for long-term cooperative action,” including a long-term global goal for emission reductions.

The Bali decision also recognized that developing countries could make contributions to solving the climate change through the development of Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs), that is climate change strategies for developing countries. The NAMAs, however, would not constitute binding emissions reduction requirements for developing countries in contrast to the binding obligations of developed countries in the Kyoto Protocol that would be further developed in Copenhagen.

At Bali the parties also agreed on a two-year negotiating process to achieve the objectives of the Bali Roadmap. Under this action plan, nations would proceed on two negotiation tracks. One under the UNFCCC and the other under the Kyoto Protocol. The first track was know by the acronym “AWG-KP,” standing for the Ad hoc Working Group on the Kyoto Protocol. The second track was referred to as “AWG-LCA,” standing for the Ad hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action. The Bali agreement also included a deadline for concluding these negotiations in Copenhagen in December of 2009.

Intense negotiations in preparation for Copenhagen took place during the two years between Bali and Copenhagen including four separate meetings in 2009 alone. In these deliberations, many contentious issues surfaced. Among other things, these disputes included particularly strong disagreements about the magnitude of developed country emissions reduction commitments and institutional arrangements and funding amounts for financing developing country needs for technology cooperation, adaptation, reducing emissions from deforestation, and capacity building.

Although some progress was made on a few issues in the two year lead-up to Copenhagen, little progress was made on the major issues and particularly on commitments for GHG emissions reductions and funding for adaptation, deforestation programs, and technology transfer.
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Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of reports from the Copenhagen climate change negotiations.

I. Introduction.

There is something new in the air here in the Copenhagen climate change negotiations.

These new developments have profound implications for the international community but particularly for developed nations such as the United States, Australia, Canada, and the European Union countries.

I have been participating in international climate change negotiating sessions since the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992 including seven conference of the parties (COPs) under the United States Framework Convention on Climate Change. I also negotiated climate change and other environmental issues for the United States EPA at the United Nations from 1995 to 1998. This experience leads me to conclude that there are two new big stories here in the Copenhagen that have implications far beyond those generated by the perennial climate change debates about whether nations should make meaningful commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, the world is still watching which nations will make significant greenhouse gas reduction commitments. Yet other climate change issues are pushing to be the central focus in  Copenhagen.

II. Ethics and Climate Change.
The first is the frequency and centrality in which the claim that climate change is an ethical problem, that is responses to climate change must be guided by ethical, justice, and human rights considerations. Unlike previous years, the agenda in Copenhagen has included dozens of meetings and side-events expressly devoted to the ethical dimensions of climate change. In addition claims that climate change raises ethical issues have also been frequently heard in other Copenhagen meetings and events devoted to other topics. Clearly, developing countries and NGOs have been successful in turning up the volume on the ethical dimensions of climate change.

Of course, one occasionally heard that climate change triggers ethical issues at prior climate change COPs, yet here in Copenhagen it is as if the ethical, justice, and human rights dimensions of climate change has become the central organizing principle for resolving climate change disputes. As we shall see, this development has important practical consequences.

However, despite the apparent growing recognition that climate change is an ethical, justice, and human rights issue, many nations continue to negotiate as if national economic interest alone is a sufficient justification for domestic climate change policies on the slate of Copenhagen issues under consideration including greenhouse gas emissions reduction commitments, and funding adaptation, technological transfer, and programs that will prevent deforestation. Yet, if climate change is an ethical issue, several practical consequences follow.
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Editor’s Note: The Collaborative Program on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change (EDCC), a program comprised of 17 ethics institutions whose secretariat is Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State University, held several events at the United Nations 15th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, (COP-15). At a press conference on December 11, EDCC issued the following statement about the ethical dimensions of issues on the Copenhagen negotiating agenda and the failure of some nations to approach the Copenhagen negotiating agenda as an ethical issue.

Ethics: Crucial Missing Element in Negotiations: Duties and Responsibilities, Not Just Narrow National Economic Interest

Preamble
Climate justice is a welcome theme at the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its related instruments, including those being discussed at Copenhagen, include ethical principles that are meant to guide the implementation of the treaty framework. What we see instead is that too many Parties are ignoring climate justice, and even the ethical principles embedded in the treaty and acting instead out of narrow self interest.

If parties recognized and acted on their ethical duties, obligations, and responsibilities when negotiating the Copenhagen text certain issues still under negotiation could be more easily resolved.

Long-term vision and national commitments
If parties acted on ethical principles in the negotiations on long-term vision and national commitments, we contend they would:
• Take a position based not only on their domestic economic interests, but acknowledge their duties and obligations to those most vulnerable to climate change including future generations. Given this, nations that do not support limiting additional warming to the lowest achievable target should be required to justify their position.
• Acknowledge that the principles of common but differentiated responsibilities and protection of the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations should guide mitigation commitments.
• Recognize that an atmospheric stabilization goal will affect not only health and the environment but also, the availability of natural resources on which life depends, and the very existence of some counties. Given this, national economic interest alone is an ethically bankrupt justification for national positions on long-term vision and national emissions reduction targets.
• Make commitments on national emissions targets that would represent their fair share of total global emissions necessary to achieve the atmospheric concentration goals mindful of the fact that scientists now believe that global emissions must peak in the next few years and be reduced by 25% to 40% by 2020.
• Furthermore, mitigation commitments must consider the biosphere as a whole – what has been called the commonwealth of life.

Adaptation
Ethical considerations should also guide the way adaptation issues are being debated. For example:
• Ethical considerations argue for the development of a process for overseeing adaptation efforts that is participatory, that is, represented by individuals from all geographic areas, and include the active input from all interested parties, especially the most vulnerable parties experiencing the most severe impacts of climate change, as well as transparent. Furthermore, distributive justice concerns must structure decisions as to which countries are eligible for funding for adaptation projects and how much funding can be so requested.
• The current text being negotiated leaves unresolved the status of ethical principles that are well established in the UNFCCC such as the precautionary principle; the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities; and the polluter pays principle, leaving it uncertain whether the obligations are binding (shall) or voluntary (should). Also included in this section and still up for negotiation is the status of the claims that the adaptation decisions be guided by the best available science and traditional knowledge, and include all relevant stakeholders in a participatory and gender-sensitive manner. Ethical considerations would require that all of these principles become binding obligations.
• Also currently up for debate is the strength of the commitment that financial support for adaptation be in addition to resources provided by developed country parties to meet their official development assistance (ODA) targets. Ethics would demand that the adaptation funds are in addition to the ODA funding.
• We commend the ethical integrity of the negotiating text for adaptation in upholding the polluter pays principle. This principle implies distinct and essential duties and responsibilities for both mitigation and adaptation. In regard to adaptation, it maintains that polluters compensate those affected by unavoidable and unavoided harms and. However, the fact that adaptation has been elevated to the position of importance that it has in the current negotiations is an indication of the failure to date to mitigate climate change as well as a clear expression of the fact that developing nations have demanded that justice concerns be an essential element of the negotiating text and taken on such importance.

REDD
Negotiations on REDD should also be guided by the demands of justice. For example:
• REDD protects forests in order to reduce greenhouse gases. Justice demands that developed countries support programs that effectively reduce deforestation.
• The draft REDD text contains promising ethical language, including obligations to “respect the knowledge and rights of indigenous peoples and members of local communities” and promote “the full and effective participation of all relevant stakeholders.” Some positions on REDD could lead to practices that endanger the livelihoods and traditions of indigenous peoples who depend upon forest resources. Procedural justice therefore requires that the REDD process be participatory and transparent and equitable in terms of how burdens and benefits are distributed.
• Some positions on REDD could undermine biodiversity though the support of such practices as monoculture plantations. This raises ethical issues regarding our duties to future generations as well as to the biosphere as a whole.
• Many ethical questions remain about accountability, implementation, measurements, and funding. In addition, timely and appropriate support for capacity building is essential to ensuring that a broad range of developing countries can participate in the REDD mechanism. These principles need to be articulated in a clearer and more compelling fashion if they are to inspire the trust and confidence of the peoples of the world and help to propel the changes in behaviour that all citizens must embrace. Difficult as the necessary ethical choices may be, a consensus can be achieved if principles that have already been agreed to are strengthened and deepened.

Conclusion

Although there is growing acceptance that the issues issue being debated in Copenhagen must be understood as raising profound moral and ethical issues, it is clear that some parties continue to base their decisions on national economic interest.

The time has come to demand that nations be required to formulate policies in response to the climate change crisis on the basis of what justice requires. Therefore, we call on citizens around the world to demand that all nations accept their obligations and responsibilities to not harm others or the natural resources on which they depend. The press can play an important role in transforming how issues such as these we have discussed today are debated by asking those nations who appear to support their position based on national economic interest to justify their failure to accept their duties and responsibilities to others.

The Collaborative Program on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change (EDCC) is comprised of seventeen institutions around the world working on climate change ethics, with secretariat at the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State University. For further information contact Don Brown dab57@psu.edu or Nancy Tuana ntuana@psu.edu

Over the next few weeks ClimateEthics.org will be reporting on ethical issues at the center of the Copenhagen climate change negotiations as they unfold. ClimateEthics.org has already published several articles on these issues that have arisen as the world prepared for Copenhagen. See, for instance, Recommendations for Strengthening the Ethical Dimensions of the UNFCCC Negotiating Text Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and Ethical Failures of National GHG Emissions Reduction Proposals Approaching Copenhagen, Uncertainty and REDD: an Ethical Approach to this Nagging Problem, Contraction & Convergence and Greenhouse Development Rights: A Critical Comparison Between Two Salient Climate-Ethical Concepts

A few days before Copenhagen, ClimateEthics.org sees the following civilization challenging ethical issues raised by the Copenhagen Agenda.  References to “non-papers” in the following are documents that have been developed by preparatory meetings leading up to Copenhagen.

ClimateEthics.org will be expanding on this preliminary analysis as the Copenhagen agenda moves along in the next two weeks.

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I. Introduction
Several prior ClimateEthics posts have examined the ethical obligations of nations to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in considerable detail. See, for example, “Ethical Failures of National GHG Emissions Reduction Proposals Approaching Copenhagen,” “Ethical Principles Governing the Basic Foundations on Climate Change Policies,” and “Minimum Ethical Criteria For All Post-Kyoto Regime Proposals: What Does Ethics Require of A Copenhagen Outcome.” As we have seen, under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), nations are duty-holders and as such have responsibilities to reduce GHG emissions within their jurisdiction. Consequently, as we have also seen in many prior ClimateEthics posts, all nations have duties to reduce their GHG emissions to their fair share of safe global emissions as quickly as possible.
Prior posts have looked at the ethical duties and responsibilities of nations. This post, for the first time, reviews what can be said about the duties of regional and local governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals. Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: Several articles in ClimateEthics have argued that nations have an immediate duty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to each nation’s fair share of safe global emissions although noting that what is “fair” is a question about which different theories of distributive justice would reach different conclusions. See for instance, Ethical Failures of National GHG Emissions Reduction Proposals Approaching Copenhagen, http://climateethics.org/?p=147, ClimateEthics has also frequently commented that some proposed formula for allocating greenhouse gas targets among nations would not pass ethical scrutiny under any respectable justice theory. However, a few proposed frameworks for international action after Kyoto have earned the respect of many commentators interested in a just climate change regime. This post compares two proposed international frameworks on equitable national GHG emissions allocation that are getting significant attention around the world as serious attempts to deal with the question of what is each nation’s fair share of safe global greenhouse gas emissions. These frameworks are: (a) Contraction and Convergence (C&C) and Greenhouse Development Rights (GDR). This post is a summary of a much longer paper on the topic written by Katrin Kraus, a graduate student at Greifswald University. Future posts on ClimateEthics will examine other GHG allocation national targets frameworks under discussion around the world.

I. Introduction
Currently two frameworks for allocation of greenhouse gas targets among nations are supported by different proponents of an equitable post-2012 agreement: Contraction & Convergence (C&C) and Greenhouse Development Rights (GDRs). Proponents of these frameworks claim that their concept more realistically captures the structure of the climate change problem and provides a better way to solve it. The main points of contention between these two frameworks concern the questions of whether the two frameworks are “fair or feasible?” and “how fair is fair enough?” Given that there are no other national greenhouse gas allocation frameworks likely to secure support of most nations and achieve global greenhouse gas emissions reductions at a rate consistent with the urgency of the global climate change threat, it has been argued that failure to adopt one of two frameworks is ethically unacceptable (Attfield, 2008).

This post describes the advantages and disadvantages of both frameworks. Section II briefly describes the main features of both concepts. Then in Section III, this post identifies four criteria for evaluating these frameworks. Then, in Section IV both concepts are contrasted by reference to the criteria identified in Section III. Given this, the conclusion identifies the most preferable framework for solving the climate change problem.
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Editor’s Note: The following post is a summary of a paper written by Stephen Gardiner on how the complexity of climate change issues leads to failure to accept this civilization challenging problem’s full moral dimensions. ClimateEthics frequently summarizes important papers on climate change ethics. The Gardiner paper raises important issues not previously considered by ClimateEthics.

I. A Perfect Moral Storm.
In his recent article “A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics and the Problem of Moral Corruption,” Stephen Gardiner shows that the complexity of climate change contributes to the underestimation of its moral significance. To illustrate the difficulties of comprehending the ethical duties invoked by climate change, Gardiner uses the image of a “perfect storm.” This image allows him to examine the problem in the distinct but related dimensions of its global impact, its intergenerational or historical impact and the theoretical complexity produced by the interaction of these distinct dimensions. While analyzing moral responsibility in each separate dimension poses its own set of challenges, combining both dimensions and gauging the impact of their collusion plainly exceeds the sophistication of current theoretical models, thereby inviting convenient delusions that alternately exaggerate or undervalue climate change. Instead of allowing us to evaluate climate change in terms of its complex reality, the combination of global, temporal and theoretical “storms” threatens to compromise the moral integrity of would-be respondents, thereby compounding rather than elucidating the problem.
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Editors Note: This post is a summary of a paper on distributive justice and climate change policy by Klinsky and Dowlatabadi. ClimateEthics occasionally summarizes papers written by others that raise or examine important ethical questions related to climate change. The paper summarized below reviews the distributive justice literature on climate change and compares it to how climate change policies have been formed or proposed. One of the more important, though contested, ethical issues entailed by climate change concerns ethical duties when allocating emissions targets among nations. Although, as frequently noted in ClimateEthics, all nations have a duty to immediately reduce their emissions to their fair share of safe global emissions, what fairness requires is a matter about which different ethical theories reach different conclusions. Although discussions of fairness in the climate change context occur in both ethics and policy communities, the two communities remain isolated due to lack of communication. By looking at understandings of fairness underlying proposals for international climate policy architecture, the following paper argues that many climate change policy proposals overlook important distributive justice issues. If this is true, making climate change policy proposals consistent with theories of distributive justice will require that policy-makers and ethicists examine issues overlooked by policy formation and identify policy proposals that effectively respond to those oversights.

I. Introduction.

In their article, “Conceptualizations of Justice in Climate Policy,” researchers Sonja Klinsky and Hadi Dowlatabadi, demonstrate divergence among climate change ethics and policy communities about the role of distributive justice in policy making. (Klinsky, S., H. Dowlatabadi, 2009) The authors of this paper observe that policy-makers construct solutions to climate change that rely on implicit normative claims that affect the ways policy assigns responsibility, assesses need, provides access to entitlements, distributes impacts and addresses concerns of procedural justice. Focusing primarily on the ways specific policy proposals unintentionally affect those areas of distributive justice, Klinsky and Dowlatabadi argue that policy making could be improved by inquiring more deliberately into the broad array of distributive justice concerns raised by climate ethicists. At the same time, several issues emerge that could be examined in more depth by those focusing on climate ethics.

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