scholarly journals The Relevance of Motivations to Wrongdoing for Contributing to Climate Change

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Bowman
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Side Effect ◽  
Individual Contributions ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Do So

This paper makes progress towards an account of moral wrongdoing for individual contributions to collectively-caused harms and substantial risks of harm, like the harms and risks stemming from climate change. To do so, this paper argues that an agent’s motivations can be relevant to whether an agent’s contribution to a collectively-caused harm or risk is morally wrong. Specifically, this paper argues that an agent’s contribution to a collectively caused harm or risk can be wrong in virtue of her motivations even when she does not intend to contribute to the harm or risk, but rather contributes to the harm or risk as a foreseeable but unintended side-effect of her otherwise good end.

Protecting Natural Resources

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jérémie Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Human Rights Law ◽  
International Environmental Law ◽  
Conservation Of Natural Resources ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Do So

This chapter focuses on the connection between the international legal framework governing the conservation of natural resources and human rights law. The objective is to examine the potential synergies between international environmental law and human rights when it comes to the protection of natural resources. To do so, it concentrates on three main areas of potential convergence. It first focuses on the pollution of natural resources and analyses how human rights law offers a potential platform to seek remedies for the victims of pollution. It next concentrates on the conservation of natural resources, particularly on the interconnection between protected areas, biodiversity, and human rights law. Finally, it examines the relationship between climate change and human rights law, focusing on the role that human rights law can play in the development of the current climate change adaptation and mitigation frameworks.

The Anti-Inflammatory Basis of Equality

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grant J. Rozeboom
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Moral Standing ◽  
Moral Equality ◽  
Anti Inflammatory ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Do So

We are moral equals, but in virtue of what? The most plausible answers to this question have pointed to our higher agential capacities, but we vary in the degrees to which we possess those capacities. How could they ground our equal moral standing, then? This chapter argues that they do so only indirectly. Our moral equality is most directly grounded in a social practice of equality, a practice that serves the purpose of mitigating our tendencies toward control and domination that interpreters of Rousseau call “inflamed amour-propre.” We qualify as participants in this practice of equality by possessing certain agential capacities, but it is our participation in the practice, and not the capacities themselves, that makes us moral equals. Thus, in contrast with recent accounts that simply posit a threshold above which capacity-variations are ignored, this chapter proposes moving from a capacity-based to a practice-based view of moral equality.

Labor Migration and Climate Change Adaptation

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
JAMIE DRAPER
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Labor Migration ◽  
Climate Adaptation ◽  
Scientific Evidence ◽  
Migration Policy ◽  
Labor Migrants ◽  
Acceptable Alternative ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The Normative Question ◽  
Do So

Social scientific evidence suggests that labor migration can increase resilience to climate change. For that reason, some have recently advocated using labor migration policy as a tool for climate adaptation. This paper engages with the normative question of whether, and under what conditions, states may permissibly use labor migration policy as a tool for climate adaptation. I argue that states may use labor migration policy as a tool for climate adaptation and may even have a duty to do so, subject to two moral constraints. First, states must also provide acceptable alternative options for adaptation so that the vulnerable are not forced to sacrifice their morally important interests in being able to remain where they are. Second, states may not impose restrictive terms on labor migrants to make accepting greater numbers less costly for themselves because doing so unfairly shifts the costs of adaptation onto the most vulnerable.

Econometrics for Modelling Climate Change

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer L. Castle ◽  
David F. Hendry
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Time Series ◽  
Econometric Modeling ◽  
Complex Data ◽  
Explanatory Variables ◽  
Stochastic Trends ◽  
Trend Breaks ◽  
Abrupt Shifts ◽  
Climate Time Series ◽  
Do So

Shared features of economic and climate time series imply that tools for empirically modeling nonstationary economic outcomes are also appropriate for studying many aspects of observational climate-change data. Greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane, are a major cause of climate change as they cumulate in the atmosphere and reradiate the sun’s energy. As these emissions are currently mainly due to economic activity, economic and climate time series have commonalities, including considerable inertia, stochastic trends, and distributional shifts, and hence the same econometric modeling approaches can be applied to analyze both phenomena. Moreover, both disciplines lack complete knowledge of their respective data-generating processes (DGPs), so model search retaining viable theory but allowing for shifting distributions is important. Reliable modeling of both climate and economic-related time series requires finding an unknown DGP (or close approximation thereto) to represent multivariate evolving processes subject to abrupt shifts. Consequently, to ensure that DGP is nested within a much larger set of candidate determinants, model formulations to search over should comprise all potentially relevant variables, their dynamics, indicators for perturbing outliers, shifts, trend breaks, and nonlinear functions, while retaining well-established theoretical insights. Econometric modeling of climate-change data requires a sufficiently general model selection approach to handle all these aspects. Machine learning with multipath block searches commencing from very general specifications, usually with more candidate explanatory variables than observations, to discover well-specified and undominated models of the nonstationary processes under analysis, offers a rigorous route to analyzing such complex data. To do so requires applying appropriate indicator saturation estimators (ISEs), a class that includes impulse indicators for outliers, step indicators for location shifts, multiplicative indicators for parameter changes, and trend indicators for trend breaks. All ISEs entail more candidate variables than observations, often by a large margin when implementing combinations, yet can detect the impacts of shifts and policy interventions to avoid nonconstant parameters in models, as well as improve forecasts. To characterize nonstationary observational data, one must handle all substantively relevant features jointly: A failure to do so leads to nonconstant and mis-specified models and hence incorrect theory evaluation and policy analyses.

Climate Change — A Natural Hazard

2003 ◽  
Vol 14 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 215-232
Author(s):  
William Kininmonth
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Developing Countries ◽  
Natural Hazard ◽  
Climate Extremes ◽  
Future Climate Change ◽  
Loss Of Life ◽  
Natural Processes ◽  
Weather And Climate ◽  
Do So

The impacts of weather and climate extremes (floods, storms, drought, etc) have historically set back development and will continue to do so into the future, especially in developing countries. It is essential to understand how future climate change will be manifest as weather and climate extremes in order to implement policies of sustainable development. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that natural processes have caused the climate to change and it is unlikely that human influences will dominate the natural processes. Any suggestion that implementation of the Kyoto Protocol will avoid future infrastructure damage, environmental degradation and loss of life from weather and climate extremes is a grand delusion.

scholarly journals Climate governance in an international system under conservative hegemony: the role of major powers

2012 ◽  
Vol 55 (spe) ◽  
pp. 9-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eduardo Viola ◽  
Matías Franchini ◽  
Thaís Lemos Ribeiro
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
International System ◽  
Exploratory Research ◽  
Climate Governance ◽  
Major Powers ◽  
Common Character ◽  
Do So

In the last five years, climate change has been established as a central civilizational driver of our time. As a result of this development, the most diversified social processes - as well as the fields of science which study them - have had their dynamics altered. In International Relations, this double challenge could be explained as follows: 1) in empirical terms, climate change imposes a deepening of cooperation levels on the international community, considering the global common character of the atmosphere; and 2) to International Relations as a discipline, climate change demands from the scientific community a conceptual review of the categories designed to approach the development of global climate governance. The goal of this article is to discuss in both conceptual and empirical terms the structure of global climate change governance, through an exploratory research, aiming at identifying the key elements that allow understanding its dynamics. To do so, we rely on the concept of climate powers. This discussion is grounded in the following framework: we now live in an international system under conservative hegemony that is unable to properly respond to the problems of interdependence, among which - and mainly -, the climate issue.

Canadian Federalism and the Political Economy of Energy and the Environment

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
James Meadowcroft
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Newfoundland And Labrador ◽  
Academic Publishing ◽  
Regional Energy ◽  
Canadian Federalism ◽  
Political Economies ◽  
Energy Environment ◽  
Energy And Climate Policy ◽  
Do So

These two books draw attention to the role of Canada's oil-producing provinces—“petro-provinces” for Angela Carter and “carbon provinces” for Douglas Macdonald—in the politics of energy, environment and climate change, but they do so in very different ways. Carter's volume examines the erosion of environmental protections in the oil-rich provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland and Labrador, while Macdonald's focuses on the way interest-based conflicts rooted in regional energy political economies have driven federal/provincial dynamics around energy and climate policy. Both books are well written (not always a given in academic publishing), and they should interest anyone concerned with the politics of energy, environment and climate change in Canada.

Posthuman New York: Ground Zero of the Anthropocene

Animalities ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neel Ahuja
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
New York ◽  
Ground Zero ◽  
Environmental Destruction ◽  
The Future ◽  
Do So

Ahuja calls our attention to the ways that environmentalists, artists, writers, and ecocritics have deployed the idea of “the Anthropocene” in order to critique human-caused climate change and environmental destruction. While this critique might be urgently needed, Ahuja reveals how it also tends to rely upon a universalized and essentialized construction of “the human” that glosses over major differences between various human groups, in which less privileged people are both less culpable and more vulnerable in relation to the dramatic effects that climate change will increasingly have on the planet. Exloring a range of texts emerging after 9/11, from the paintings of Alexis Rockman to Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow, Junot Diaz’s “Monstro”, and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, Ahuja calls for paying more attention to what he calls “the human of precarious futures,” a figure that seems necessary for dramatizing the dangerous coming results of climate change, but one that also risks flattening out all the ways that racism and inequality and injustice distinguish human groups today and might continue to do so into the future.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Matthew Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Future Study ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
The World ◽  
Individual Contributions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Narrative Thread ◽  
The Relationship

This introduction considers the ‘environmental turn’ taken in the humanities, and particularly in historical study, suggesting ways in which these developments might animate the future study of nineteenth-century Ireland. Question of agency and the relationship between human and non-human nature are addressed. Also considered is how current environmental concerns, and climate change in particular, should lead us to think anew about the past, rendering familiar subjects unfamiliar. Particular attention is paid to how Ireland’s past might be located within larger global processes, attracting the interest of scholars from throughout the world. It then introduces the individual contributions in the volume, tracing a narrative thread through them in order to demonstrate how a change in optic can significantly change how we think about Ireland’s recent past.

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