Abstract
The integrity of religious ethics in the twenty-first century may depend on the extent to which we (in this field) seek to: (1) frame climate change in ways that expose rather than hide the brutal realities of social inequity that are hidden by the blinders of climate privilege, (2) foreground climate justice in the public discourse, (3) advocate for change at all levels of society to address the stark moral challenge of climate injustice, and (4) generate moral agency and hope. This essay first sketches the moral crisis of climate change as climate debt and climate colonialism. It then asks what will cultivate moral agency for building climate justice, and notes that response requires posing a prior question: “What are the roots of this moral inertia?” The essay then explores six ingredients of moral oblivion linked to hopelessness as roots of moral inertia. The essay closes by pointing to a crucial role of religion in generating the subversive truth-telling, action, and hope required if we are to transition into ways of being human that Earth can sustain and that build equity within and between human societies.
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Notes
- 1.
The National Council of Churches of India declares: “Climate change and global warming are caused by the colonization of the atmospheric commons. The subaltern communities are denied of their right to atmospheric commons and the powerful nations and the powerful within the developing nations continue to extract from the atmospheric common disproportionately. In that process they have emitted and continue to emit greenhouse gases beyond the capacity of the planet to withstand. However the subaltern communities with almost zero footprint are forced to bear the brunt of the consequences of global warming.”
- 2.
The global religious community, through the World Council of Churches, was arguably one of the first voices in civil society to call attention in a sustained way to the social injustice impacts of climate change.
- 3.
“Climate vulnerable” refers to nations and sectors that are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. As defined by the IPCC, “vulnerability,” refers to “the degree to which a system is susceptible to, or unable to cope with, adverse effects of climate change….” IPCC Working Group 2 (2001). Third Assessment Report, Annex B: Glossary of Terms. I use “climate privilege” to indicate nations and sectors most able to adapt to or prevent those impacts, or less vulnerable to them.
- 4.
R. Bijoy, Soumya Dutta, Soumitra Ghosh, Shankar Gopalakrishnan, C., and Hadida Yasmin, Climate Change and India (New Delhi: Daanish Books, 2013. This study notes that climate change has “two sets of impacts” on vulnerable sectors. One is the actual impact of climate change. The “second set of impacts originates from actions that our governments and corporate/industrial bodies undertake in the name of mitigating climate change. This includes large-scale agro-fuel and energy plantations in the name of green fuel…extremely risky genetically modified plants (in the name of both mitigation and adaptation to climate change), more big dams for ‘carbon-free’ electricity,” and more.
- 5.
To illustrate: when asked in the mid-1940s about the “Negro problem” in America, James Baldwin responded: “There isn’t any Negro problem; there is only a white problem.” Cited in George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Philidelphia: Temple Press, 2006), 1. The history of white racism in the United States in housing, health care, law, education, exposure to toxic land use, and more would have been dramatically different had we recognized and addressed race as a “white problem” rather than as a black problem.
- 6.
A complementary proposal to these three is to “exchange” climate debt for the odious and illegitimate debt charged to many impoverished nations by the wealthier industrialized nations and their financial institutions.
- 7.
An example of a treaty mechanism for this aspect of CBDRC is the Kyoto Protocol not imposing binding emission reductions on Southern countries.
- 8.
Mitigation or decreasing the rate of climate change requires reducing emissions. Reducing emissions—for economically impoverished nations seeking economic development—could be achieved either by: (1) foregoing economic development opportunities because they cause emissions, or (2) continuing to seek economic development but, in doing so, bypassing the heavy use of fossil fuels, using instead clean renewable energy technologies. For the industrialized world to request the former would be morally outrageous and untenable. The first option is morally untenable. The latter option—so important to the global community for the sake of reducing emissions—is enormously costly for nations lacking financial and technological resources. Hence the call for wealthy nations to transfer financial and technological resources. (As noted by the WCC, mitigation funding may include “funding to keep petroleum in the ground in fragile environments.” WCC, “Statement on Ecological Justice and Ecological Debt,” 2009.)
- 9.
The last of these (payment for mitigation) is seen as compensation for the share of atmospheric space that countries of the Global South will not use if they are to reduce carbon emissions.
- 10.
Interpretations of the principle have varied dramatically from the beginning and are at the heart of disagreement and roadblocks in climate negotiations. Moreover, as detailed by Canadian law professor, Jutta Brunnee, the circumstances shaping nations positions vis-a-vis CBDRC have shifted since 1992. China and India, for example, have become major emitters, and some “developing countries” are emerging as economic powers. As a result of these and other factors the “previously united position of developing countries on the principle of CBDRC has been eroding.” Nevertheless, she argues, the principle and its call to “burden-sharing…has proven to be essential to the legitimacy and hence viability of a long-term, global regime….In short, the principle of CBDRC remains as relevant as ever.”
- 11.
By “blinders” I mean factors that enable those most responsible for climate change to ignore it and our responsibility for it.
- 12.
Charles C. Mann, “How-to-talk-about-climate-change-so-people-will-listen,” Atlantic Monthly Online, accessed Aug 13, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/09/how-to-talk-about-climate-change-so-people-will-listen/375067/.
- 13.
See 2013 World Bank report at http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2013/06/19/what-climate-change-means-africa-asia-coastal-poor.
- 14.
These factors are joined by other factors of a social structural nature. I examine one such factor—corporate investment in maintaining public moral oblivion—in Resisting Structural Evil. Another—the subordination of political power to economic power—is the subject of Healing a Broken World: Globalization and God., chapter two.
- 15.
See the 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for an account of what has been and will be destroyed by climate change. (http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/index.shtml).
- 16.
These I refer to respectively as the descriptive task of ethics and the transformative task of ethics.
References
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———. 2013. Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
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Moe-Lobeda, C. (2022). Climate Colonialism, Subversive Moral-Spiritual Power, and Religious Ethics. In: Sherma, R.D., Bilimoria, P. (eds) Religion and Sustainability: Interreligious Resources, Interdisciplinary Responses. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79301-2_10
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