One Atmosphere

There can be no clearer illustration of the need for human beings to act globally than the issues raised by the impact of human activity on our atmosphere. That we all share the same planet came to our attention in a particularly pressing way in the 1970s when scientists discovered that the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) threatens the ozone layer shielding the surface of our planet from the full force of the sun's ultraviolet radiation. Damage to that protective shield would cause cancer rates to rise sharply and could have other effects, for example, on the growth of algae. The threat was especially acute to the world's southernmost cities, since a large hole in the ozone was found to be opening up each year over Antarctica, but in the long term, the entire ozone shield was imperiled. Once the science was accepted, concerted international action followed relatively rapidly with the signing of the Montreal Protocol in 1985. The developed countries phased out virtually all use of CFCs by 1999, and the developing countries, given a 10-year period of grace, are now moving toward the same goal. Getting rid of CFCs has turned out to be just the curtain raiser: the main event is climate change, or global warming. Without belittling the pioneering achievement of those who brought about the Montreal Protocol, the problem was not so difficult, for CFCs can be replaced in all their uses at relatively little cost, and the solution to the problem is simply to stop producing them. Climate change is a very different matter. The scientific evidence that human activities are changing the climate of our planet has been studied by a working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international scientific body intended to provide policy makers with an authoritative view of climate change and its causes. The group released its Third Assessment Report in 2001, building on earlier reports and incorporating new evidence accumulated over the previous five years. The report is the work of 122 lead authors and 515 contributing authors, and the research on which it was based was reviewed by 337 experts.

Deadly Delays, Saving Opportunities: Creating a More Dangerous World?

We now know that anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) are interfering with the planet’s climate system in ways that are likely to lead to dangerous threats to human life (not to mention nonhuman life) and that are likely to compromise the fundamental well-being of people who live at a later time. We have not understood this for very long—for most of my life, for example, we were basically clueless about climate. Our recently acquired knowledge means that decisions about climate policy are no longer properly understood as decisions entirely about preferences of ours but also crucially about the vulnerabilities of others—not about the question “How much would we like to spend to slow climate change?” but about “How little are we in decency permitted to spend in light of the difficulties and the risks of difficulties to which we are likely otherwise to expose people, people already living and people yet to live?” For we now realize that the carbon-centered energy regime under which we live is modifying the human habitat, creating a more dangerous world for the living and for posterity. Our technologically primitive energy regime based on setting fire to fossil fuels is storing up, in the planet’s radically altering atmosphere, sources of added threat for people who are vulnerable to us and cannot protect themselves against the consequences of our decisions for the circumstances in which they will have to live—most notably, whichever people inherit the worn-and-torn planet we vacate. As we academics love to note, matters are, of course, complicated. Let’s look at a few of the complications, concentrating on some concerning risk. Mostly, we are talking about risks because, although we know strikingly much more about the planetary climate system than we did a generation ago, much is still unknown and unpredictable. I will offer three comments about risk. The third comment is the crucial one and makes a strong claim about a specific type of risk, with three distinctive features.

Cosmopolitan Justice, Responsibility, and Global Climate Change

. . . It’s exciting to have a real crisis on your hands when you have spent half your political life dealing with humdrum things like the environment. . . . The world’s climate is undergoing dramatic and rapid changes. Most notably, the earth has been becoming markedly warmer, and its weather has, in addition to this, become increasingly unpredictable. These changes have had, and continue to have, important consequences for human life. In this chapter, I wish to examine what is the fairest way of dealing with the burdens created by global climate change. Who should bear the burdens? Should it be those who caused the problem? Should it be those best able to deal with the problem? Or should it be someone else? I defend a distinctive cosmopolitan theory of justice, criticize a key principle of international environmental law, and, moreover, challenge the “common but differentiated responsibility” approach that is affirmed in current international environmental law. Before considering different answers to the question of who should pay for the costs of global climate change, it is essential to be aware of both the distinct kind of theoretical challenge that global climate change raises and also the effects that climate change is having on people’s lives. Section 1 thus introduces some preliminary methodological observations on normative theorizing about global climate change. In addition, it outlines some basic background scientific claims about the impacts of climate change. Section 2 examines one common way of thinking about the duty to bear the burdens caused by climate change, namely the doctrine that those who have caused the problem are responsible for bearing the burden. It argues that this doctrine, while in many ways appealing, is more problematic than might first appear and is also incomplete in a number of different ways (sections 3 through 8). In particular, it needs to be grounded in a more general theory of justice and rights.

It’s Not My Fault: Global Warming and Individual Moral Obligations

To make the issue stark, let us begin with a few assumptions. I believe that these assumptions are probably roughly accurate, but none is certain, and I will not try to justify them here. Instead, I will simply take them for granted for the sake of argument. First, global warming has begun and is likely to increase over the next century. We cannot be sure exactly how much or how fast, but hot times are coming. Second, a significant amount of global warming is due to human activities. The main culprit is fossil fuels. Third, global warming will create serious problems for many people over the long term by causing climate changes, including violent storms, floods from sea-level rises, droughts, heat waves, and so on. Millions of people will probably be displaced or die. Fourth, the poor will be hurt most of all. The rich countries are causing most of the global warming, but they will be able to adapt to climate changes more easily. Poor countries that are close to sea level might be devastated. Fifth, governments, especially the biggest and richest ones, are able to mitigate global warming They can impose limits on emissions. They can require or give incentives for increased energy efficiency. They can stop deforestation and fund reforestation. They can develop ways to sequester carbon dioxide in oceans or underground. These steps will help, but the only long-run solution lies in alternatives to fossil fuels. These alternatives can be found soon if governments start massive research projects now. Sixth, it is too late to stop global warming. Because there is so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere already, because carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for so long, and because we will remain dependent on fossil fuels in the near future, governments can slow down global warming or reduce its severity, but they cannot prevent it. Hence, governments need to adapt. They need to build sea walls. They need to reinforce houses that cannot withstand storms. They need to move populations from low-lying areas.

When Utilitarians Should Be Virtue Theorists

1. I begin with an assumption that few would deny, but about which many are in denial: human beings are transforming earth in ways that are devastating for other forms of life, future human beings, and many of our human contemporaries. The epidemic of extinction now under way is an expression of this. So is the changing climate. Ozone depletion, which continues at a very high rate, is potentially the most lethal expression of these transformations, for without an ozone layer, no life on earth could exist. Call anthropogenic mass extinctions, climate change, and ozone depletion “the problem of global environmental change” (or “the problem” for short). 2. Philosophers in their professional roles have by and large remained silent about the problem. There are many reasons for this. I believe that one reason is that it is hard to know what to say from the perspective of the reigning moral theories: Kantianism, contractarianism, and commonsense pluralism. While I cannot fully justify this claim here, some background remarks may help to motivate my interest in exploring utilitarian approaches to the problem. 3. Consider first Kantianism. Christine Korsgaard writes that it is “nonaccidental” that utilitarians are “obsessed” with “population control” and “the preservation of the environment.” For “a basic feature of the consequentialist outlook still pervades and distorts our thinking: the view that the business of morality is to bring something about.” Korsgaard leaves the impression that a properly conceived moral theory would have little to say about the environment, for such a theory would reject this false picture of the “business of morality.” This impression is reinforced by the fact that her remark about the environmental obsessions of utilitarians is the only mention of the environment in a book of more than 400 pages. It is not surprising that a view that renounces as “the business of morality” the question of what we should bring about would be disabled when it comes to thinking about how to respond to global environmental change.

Adaptation to Climate Change: Who Pays Whom?

The problem of adaptation to climate change is complex and multifaceted. At its core, however, are two simple questions: what actions should be taken to prevent or reduce harm that will be caused by anthropogenic climate change, and who should pay for those actions that have costs? In this chapter I focus on the latter question, concerning liability for the funding of adaptation. I argue that obligations for funding adaptation are based on ethical principles governing just relationships between individuals in a “life-support commons,” which are essentially the same as the norms of justice governing other forms of harm. Simply, it is wrong to harm others by abusing a commons, and if one does, one owes compensation. In this view, ethics and justice address the rights and responsibilities of individuals; obligations between countries are derivative, based on the aggregate characteristics of their populations, and pragmatic, given the existing state system. Furthermore, liability can be disaggregated in other ways; as I argue, it is equally important that the distribution of liability can be differentiated between classes within nations. A simple quantitative exercise applying these principles of justice to the adaptation problem suggests net liability from the North to the South but also net liability for adaptation from wealthy classes in the South. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) devotes a small but significant amount of attention to adaptation to climate change. Only in the last few years, however, with the creation of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) Fund and the Special Climate Change Fund (SCCF) under the UNFCCC, the creation of an Adaptation Fund under the Kyoto Protocol, as well as the support for the development of National Adaptation Plans of Action (NAPAs), have delegates and advocates begun to focus seriously on the problems of adaptation and adaptation funding. Given the disproportionate share of current and past emissions from the industrialized countries of the North and the evidence that the developing countries of the South are more vulnerable to climate damages, almost any plausible interpretation of “common but differentiated responsibilities” implies that the North should shoulder the major part of the costs of adaptation.

Selling Environmental Indulgences

According to a common and currently influential diagnosis, the environmental crisis has essentially economic roots. The problem is not just that there are too many people, or even that they are on average enjoying too high a standard of living. All that is true, too, of course. More fundamentally, however, problems of environmental despoliation are said to derive from skewed incentives facing agents as they pursue their various goals. For some things, people must pay full price. For others, they pay only partially or indirectly or belatedly. To an economist, it goes without saying that the lower the costs, the more people will consume of any particular commodity. Where some of the costs of their activities will be borne by others, agents looking only to their own balance sheets will overengage in those activities. Because some of the costs are “external” (which is to say, are borne by others, rather than themselves), agents will undertake more of those activities than they would have done had they been forced to pay their full costs. They will do more of them than is socially optimal, taking due account of costs and benefits to everyone concerned (Pigou 1932). Environmental despoliation poses problems of economic externalities of just that sort. Environmental inputs are typically “common property resources.” Clean air and water, fisheries, the ozone layer, the climate are everyone’s business—and no one’s. No one “owns” those things. There is no one with standing to sue you if you take them without paying; nor is there anyone you could pay for permission to impinge on them, even if you wanted to do so. That fact inevitably gives rise to a divergence between the full social costs created by your actions and the portion of those costs sheeted back to you as private costs, to be entered on your own ledger. It is, of course, only the latter sorts of costs to which economically rational agents can be expected to respond (Freeman et al. 1973; Fisher 1981; Pearce et al. 1989, esp. p. 5).

Greenhouse Development Rights: A Framework for Climate Protection That Is “More Fair” Than Equal Per Capita Emissions Rights

There is a fairly broad consensus among both the philosophers who write about climate change and the majority of the climate-policy community that efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions—“mitigation” in the jargon—should not harm the ability of poor countries to grow economically and to reduce as rapidly as possible the widespread poverty their citizens suffer. Indeed, this principle of a “right to development” has been substantially embraced in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) itself. Yet as the evidence of the risks from climate change has continued to mount and calls have grown for more stringent mitigation targets, the need to give substance to this right has come into conflict with the evident unwillingness of already “developed” countries to pay the costs of adequately precautionary mitigation. The long and the short of it is that almost any reasonable ethical principles lead to the conclusion that, as Henry Shue (1999) put it straightforwardly, “the costs [of mitigation] should initially be borne by the wealthy industrialized states.” In the words of the UNFCCC, “the developed country Parties should take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof,” and this point is embodied in practical terms in the Kyoto Protocol itself, in which only the 40 developed “Annex I” countries have binding emissions limits. Yet particularly because of the rejection of Kyoto by the United States but also because of the weak efforts at mitigation that have taken place so far in Europe, Japan, and other industrialized countries, we find ourselves in a situation in which precaution requires that emissions be reduced extremely soon in poor countries, too, but the rich countries can’t yet be said to have fulfilled their obligations to “take the lead.” The delay in taking action so far, the increasing evidence of current climate-change impacts and greater risks than previously estimated, and the speed with which we must now move all imply substantially greater costs for adequately precautionary action than were previously estimated.

Subsistence Emissions and Luxury Emissions

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change adopted in Rio de Janeiro at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in June 1992 establishes no dates and no dollars. No dates are specified by which emissions are to be reduced by the wealthy states, and no dollars are specified with which the wealthy states will assist the poor states to avoid an environmentally dirty development like our own. The convention is toothless because throughout the negotiations in the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee during 1991 to 1992, the United States played the role of dentist: whenever virtually all the other states in the world (with the notable exceptions of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) agreed to convention language with teeth, the United States insisted that the teeth be pulled out. The Clinton administration now faces a strategic question: should the next step aim at a comprehensive treaty covering all greenhouse gases (GHGs) or at a narrower protocol covering only one, or a few, gases, for example, only fossil-fuel carbon dioxide (CO2)? Richard Stewart and Jonathan Wiener (1992) have argued for moving directly to a comprehensive treaty, while Thomas Drennen (1993) has argued for a more focused beginning. I will suggest that Drennen is essentially correct that we should not try to go straight to a comprehensive treaty, at least not of the kind advocated by Stewart and Wiener. First I would like to develop a framework into which to set issues of equity or justice of the kind introduced by Drennen. It would be easier if we faced only one question about justice, but several questions are not only unavoidable individually but are entangled with one another. In addition, each question can be given not simply alternative answers but answers of different kinds. In spite of this multiplicity of possible answers to the multiplicity of inevitable and interconnected questions, I think we can lay out the issues fairly clearly and establish that commonsense principles converge to a remarkable extent upon what ought to be done, at least for the next decade or so.

Energy Policy and the Further Future: The Identity Problem

I have assumed that our acts may have good or bad effects in the further future. Let us now examine this assumption. Consider first: . . . The Nuclear Technician: Some technician lazily chooses not to check some tank in which nuclear wastes are buried. As a result there is a catastrophe two centuries later. Leaked radiation kills and injures thousands of people. . . . We can plausibly assume that, whether or not this technician checks this tank, the same particular people would be born during the next two centuries. If he had chosen to check the tank, these same people would have later lived and escaped the catastrophe. Is it morally relevant that the people whom this technician harms do not yet exist when he makes his choice? I have assumed here that it is not. If we know that some choice either may or will harm future people, this is an objection to this choice even if the people harmed do not yet exist. (I am to blame if I leave a man-trap on my land, which ten years later maims a five-year-old child.) Consider next: . . . The Risky Policy: 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 the Risky Policy, the standard of living would be somewhat higher over the next two centuries. We do choose this policy. As a result there is a similar catastrophe two centuries later, which kills and injures thousands of people. . . . Unlike the Nuclear Technician’s choice, our choice between these policies affects who will be later born. This is not obvious but is on reflection clear. Our identity in fact depends partly on when we are conceived. This is so on both the main views about this subject. Consider some particular person, such as yourself. You are the nth child of your mother, and you were conceived at time t.