Abstract
Climate change is happening, and the consequences are likely to be bad. If we—the people and nations of the world—fail to take action soon to address its causes and mitigate its effects, the consequences may be very bad. What should we do? Bill McKibben calls this “the most important question that there ever was,” and many of the scientists who study the issue have described it as one of the most difficult and important challenges that human civilization has confronted. (The quote comes from a tribute McKibben gave for James Hansen. See Justin Gillis, “Climate Maverick to Retire from NASA,” The New York Times, April 1, 2013.) My goal in this chapter is to examine some of the moral dimensions of the problem. These turn out to be philosophically complicated and challenging. As a practical matter, the causes and consequences of climate change have unprecedented spatial and temporal scope. Others who have written on climate change ethics have pointed out that these facts about scope make the problem difficult to think about clearly. I will describe these issues, but my goal is to try to explain how the spatial and temporal dimensions interact to create a unique moral dilemma. There are ample grounds in this analysis for pessimism, but I believe it also suggests how we can most usefully think about constructive responses to McKibben’s question.
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Notes
- 1.
For an account of the history of climate science, see Spencer Waert, The discovery of Global Warming, Harvard University Press, 2003.
- 2.
Waert, op. cit.
- 3.
Climate Change: Evidence & Causes: An Overview from the Royal Society and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, April 2014, available at http://dels.nas.edu/resourcese/static-assets/exec-office-other/climate-change-full.pdf, p. 5.
- 4.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Fifth Assessment Report, http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/
- 5.
U.S. Global Research Program, “The National Climate Assessment,” 2014, http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/
- 6.
According to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, oil and gas interests contributed more than $70 million in the U.S. to federal candidates in the 2012 election, and they have spent more than $100 million each year since 2008 in lobbying expenses. The leading five recipients of campaign contributions in the current Congress include both the Speaker of the House of Representatives and majority leader of the Senate. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), author of The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, recently became the ranking majority member and chair of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee. After being sworn into office on Jan. 6, 2015, he released a statement announcing, as one of his primary goals, to “rein in EPA’s job-killing regulations.”
- 7.
Climate Change: Evidence and Causes, op. cit., p. 5.
- 8.
Justin Gillis, “Climate Efforts Falling Short, U.N. Panel Says,” The New York Times, April 14, 2014.
- 9.
Justin Gillis, Ibid.
- 10.
For a good discussion of the history and failures of efforts to reach and implement international agreements to control climate change, see Stephen Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change, Oxford University Press, 2011.
- 11.
John Broome, Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World (Norton 2012).
- 12.
These issues are discussed in detail in Stephen M. Gardiner, op. cit.
- 13.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. XIII.
- 14.
See Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1243–1248.
- 15.
See the discussion in Gardiner, op. cit.
- 16.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790.
- 17.
Samuel Scheffler, Death & the Afterlife, Oxford 2013. I have made a similar argument in “A Moral Requirement for Energy Policies,” in D. MacLean and P. G. Brown, eds., Energy and the Future, Rowman & Allenheld, 1983.
- 18.
These tensions are provocatively explored in a review of Gardiner, op. cit. See Malcolm Bull, “What is the Rational Response?” London Review of Books, vol. 34, May 24, 2012.
- 19.
Op. cit., p. B9.
- 20.
See Clive Hamilton, Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering, Yale University Press, 2013.
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MacLean, D. (2016). Climate Change and Natural Hazards. In: Gardoni, P., Murphy, C., Rowell, A. (eds) Risk Analysis of Natural Hazards. Risk, Governance and Society, vol 19. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22126-7_6
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