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Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

The planet is in crisis. Time is short, but it is still possible to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions before disaster overtakes us all.

Renowned philosopher Robin Attfield explains the moral reasons for urgent action based on current harms, threats to future generations, and to the species with which we share the planet. In compelling and student-friendly prose, he explores the science of climate change, biodiversity loss and air pollution, climate injustices, political implications of the crisis, and possible responses. Among other things, he argues that measures to introduce climate justice should be paid for by countries able to pay, and by the big polluters in particular. The recently agreed Loss and Damage fund can play a central part in climate funding. Related political measures, such as the introduction of Ecocide as an international crime alongside war crimes, also give cause for hope.

Attfield’s passionately argued twentieth book, The Ethics of the Climate Crisis, is crucial reading for our times.

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Leseprobe

Cover

Title Page

Acknowledgements

1 Introduction

Recommended reading

Further reading

2 The Science of Climate Change

The greenhouse effect

Extreme weather and related impacts of climate change

Tipping points

A biosphere commitment point?

Further impacts of climate change on humanity

Recommended reading

Further reading

3 Related Crises: Biodiversity Loss and Air Pollution

Tipping points and mass extinctions

Biodiversity loss: extent and examples

Pollinators under threat

Coral reefs

Deforestation

The crisis of air pollution

Belated legal recognition of air pollution in Britain

How the climate crisis, biodiversity loss and pollution comprise a single emergency

Recommended reading

Further reading

5 The Victims of Climate Injustice and the Shape of Climate Justice

Human victims of climate injustice: developing countries

Human victims of climate injustice: climate refugees

Non-human victims of climate injustice

Responsibility for climate justice

The shape of climate justice

Recommended reading

Further reading

6 Some Political Implications

Climate justice in a non-ideal world: international responsibilities

Some related policy issues

Climate engineering

Recognition of the crime of ecocide

The moral responsibilities of companies

Responsibilities of governments

Responsibilities of individuals and households

Recommended reading

Further reading

7 Responding to the Crises

Emotions can block or boost crisis resolution

Deselecting the model of the ‘tragedy of the commons’

Overcoming the obstacles

Recommended reading

Further reading

References

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

Pages

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The Ethics of the Climate Crisis

Robin Attfield

polity

Copyright Page

The right of Robin Attfield to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2024 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

111 River Street

Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5908-4

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5909-1(pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023945830

by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Brian Jackson for looking over chapter 2, to Anna Wienhues for her detailed comments on chapter 3, and to her and other members of the European Group of the International Society for Environmental Ethics for comments on a section of chapter 5. Thanks also go to Workineh Kelbessa, who has authorized me to refer to an unpublished chapter of his. The staff of Polity Press have once again served me well, and I am again grateful for their excellent support. I am also grateful to two anonymous referees and to an anonymous proofreader for rescuing me from various pitfalls.

Above all, thanks are due to my wife Leela. She has recently published two books herself, a collection of short stories, Fresh Beginnings (Bridge House, 2022), and the novel A Distant Voice in the Darkness (186 Publishing): good reads, both. Without her continual care, I would have been unable to begin, compose or complete this book.

1Introduction

Most people now accept that climate change is a genuine and serious threat both to our own generation and to coming ones. There is a scientific near-consensus to this effect (Houghton 2015). Yet it is far from being accepted that we are ethically obliged to take action, whether ‘we’ stands for citizens, for companies, for local authorities, or for national governments.

This book is written to present the ethical case for climate action: for action, that is, on the part of individuals and households, of companies and other non-governmental organizations, and of governments at all levels, from local government, via regional governments to national governments and to international organizations. It is inadequate if we applaud the policies agreed at conferences like COP26, the Glasgow international conference of 2021 (BBC 2021), but then forget and ignore what we are committed to. And it is a dereliction if citizens assume that our governments have these matters in hand, and focus on other issues to the effective exclusion of climate matters, leaving the drift towards climate catastrophe largely unaffected. (Peter Singer reaches similar conclusions: see Singer 2023: 295–6.) It is also insufficient if, as citizens, we focus only on one form of action (such as offsetting, as some ethicists do) and ignore other forms of household action and our potential role as campaigners, signers of petitions and lobbyists. It is also a dereliction if governments agree to contribute to international climate objectives but ignore them in their domestic and foreign policies.

The exact nature of the ethical case is to some extent controversial, particularly where the content and extent of climate justice are concerned. At the same time, the issues are urgent, as the phrase ‘climate crisis’ in the title of this book indicates. In this book, the ethical case will be examined, and related conclusions about the responsibilities of individuals, corporations and governments will be explicitly drawn. Ethicists have been applying ethical theory to practical issues for at least the last fifty years (as used to be done in the more distant past by philosophers like Plato and Spinoza). Readers who would like to see another short book on global ethics, maybe to get used to this kind of writing, may like to look at Singer’s admirable book One World (Singer 2002).

A crisis is a time of intense difficulty or danger (in the original Greek, a time of judgement). In medical situations, it is the turning point of a disease when an important change takes place, indicating either recovery or death. To develop the medical metaphor, but to return to the climate crisis, it is a time when a whole range of natural systems are on course to reach a tipping point, defined as ‘the point at which small changes become significant enough to cause a larger, more critical change that can be abrupt, irreversible and lead to cascading effects’ (Cho 2021: 2; Cho is cited several times in this and the next chapter, and has, it is worth adding, authored over 200 papers, the great majority of which will have successfully undergone peer review). Under sustained stress, systems ‘become increasingly likely to reach “a critical threshold beyond which a system reorganizes, often abruptly and/or irreversibly”’ (IPCC 2021: 28, cited in Caldecott 2022a: 3). Several natural systems could interact, as one or more reaches a tipping point, with a cascade of unpalatable yet unpredictable climatic events ensuing.

The Arctic ice cap has been melting, as also has the ice sheet that covers Greenland. Sea levels and ocean levels are rising, threatening small islands and coastal cities and communities. The permafrost of Siberia is at risk of melting enough to release large quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas much more potent than carbon dioxide. The West Antarctic ice sheet has lost trillions of tonnes of ice already this century, and is in danger of reducing or even disappearing. The circulation system of Atlantic currents is being weakened by meltwater flowing from adjacent ice sheets, affecting the global system of ocean currents, and possibly the climates of eastern North America and Western Europe. And the forest systems of the Amazon, of Indonesia and of central Africa are in danger of dieback and of morphing into savannahs, which risks the greenhouse effect intensifying beyond control (Cho 2021). Already extreme weather events, such as floods, droughts, hurricanes, heatwaves and wildfires, are becoming more frequent and more extreme, each of them causing increased fatalities; and climate change is leading to migrations of the vectors of diseases such as malaria and dengue fever to higher altitudes and higher latitudes, and to the migration of environmental refugees who can no longer support themselves in their traditional homes to more benign regions, often by crossing international borders.

These alarming trends present ethical problems in themselves, and also indicate that regional and global systems are under strain, and are some way towards the stage at which tipping points are bound to be reached. Meanwhile, scientists have increasing confidence (and increasing unanimity) in ascribing these trends and tendencies to the global heating that results from human activity of the period since 1850, or, in other words, to anthropogenic climate change.

The reality of climate change needs first to be squarely presented in greater detail, through making clear the problems of global heating and of climate change and related problems. In chapter 2, the findings of climate scientists (including John Houghton) will be presented, which disclose both the comprehensiveness and the urgency of the climate crisis. Two related crises will be presented in chapter 3, those of air pollution and of biodiversity loss. These are problems which share some of the same causes and underline the far-reaching extent of the crisis and at the same time its current impact, particularly on the inhabitants of Earth’s towns and cities. These chapters will also serve to show that these problems are in large part anthropogenic, problems (that is) caused by humanity.

The following two chapters concern the ethics of our treatment of contemporary human societies, of future generations, and of fellow species. There is a long tradition that studies ethical reasoning, and the resources of this tradition are brought to bear on the issues (and the options) disclosed by scientific findings, as was attempted ten years ago by John Broome (Broome 2012). Relevant issues concern the nature of environmental justice, what difference we can and should make to generations not yet born or conceived, and whether we have duties in the matter of preserving non-human species and their habitats for their future generations and for our own.

As has been mentioned, ‘we’, the holders of these duties, include both individuals and governments (among others). So these duties have political implications (presented in chapter 6), involving international collaboration and intergovernmental assistance, as well as implications for domestic policies. Climate engineering is another field where political considerations rest ultimately on ethical ones. Ethics will be found to relate to such household matters as installation of solar panels and frequency of flying, and such intergovernmental ones as support for infrastructure adaptation and concerted plans for greenhouse gas mitigation. Nothing less is involved when climate ethics is investigated.

The severity of the problems does not authorize people to despair in face of apparent collapse, as is shown in chapter 7. The crises should generate neither apathy nor terror, but proportionate concern, combined with hope that, through concerted action, they can be addressed and ameliorated. The well-being of our contemporaries, of our successors, and of the other species with which we share planet Earth can still be retrieved and secured, if this generation heeds its responsibilities and participates in ethical solutions.

2The Science of Climate Change

The greenhouse effect

The Earth is warmed by radiation from the sun. Some of this radiation is absorbed, but much is radiated back. The atmosphere prevents some of this radiation from escaping (infrared radiation included), acting like a blanket. If there were no atmosphere, the Earth would be much colder. This entrapment of radiation is known as ‘the greenhouse effect’.

Within a greenhouse, some of the radiation from the plants and their surroundings is trapped and reflected back by the glass. This makes the greenhouse warmer than the ambient environment. The Earth’s atmosphere acts in a similar way, trapping heat and making our planet warm enough to be hospitable to life.

But the greenhouse effect is getting stronger, and the atmosphere is becoming warmer in consequence. This change is associated with an increase of various ‘greenhouse gases’, of which carbon dioxide is the foremost by volume. For the period 1000–1750 ce (and for much of the time since the last ice age), the concentration of carbon dioxide remained at around 280 parts per million (ppm). But by 2000 ce, it had reached 368 ppm, and it currently stands at well over 400 ppm (Houghton 2015: 70; according to Caldecott and his distinguished sources, at 421 ppm in 2022 (Caldecott 2022a: 3: UCSD and SIO 2022). Across the same period (since the year 1750), average temperatures have risen by over 1°C (Caldecott 2022a: 72, Fig. 4.4), most of this increase being attributable to human activity. That may not sound much, but superficially small increases can have huge impacts, as will shortly be seen. (A shorter version of Caldecott’s essay was published later in 2022: see Caldecott 2022b.)

Nor is carbon dioxide the only greenhouse gas. Methane (a gas generated by the decay of organic matter) is another, and one that is much more potent, volume for volume, at that. The average concentration of methane from 1000 to 1750 ce was 700 parts per billion (ppb), but this had increased to 1,750 ppb in the year 2000, and to 1,809 ppb in 2012 (Houghton 2015: 70). According to Caldecott and Tollefson, this average level reached over 1,900 ppb in 2022 (Caldecott 2022a: 3; Tollefson 2022), after a record increase during 2020–2021; this total amounts to 262 per cent of the pre-industrial level (Horton 2022). One human contribution to methane levels is made through the manufacture of plastics, for microplastics (the tiny fragments into which plastic bottles and wrappings are shredded by the action of seas and oceans) emit methane as they break down (Winters 2022: 11). Surprisingly, reservoirs contributed 5.2 per cent of global anthropogenic methane emissions in 2020 (Soued et al. 2022). Methane is particularly significant (among other reasons) because ‘vast amounts of methane . . . are trapped in permafrost on land and under the sea around the Arctic’ (Broome 2012: 75). If the warming of the atmosphere causes much of this methane to escape, then the greenhouse effect will be hugely accelerated.

A third significant greenhouse gas is nitrous oxide, generated through the use of nitrogen fertilizers and from the use of diesel in the engines of cars and lorries. From 1000 to 1750, its concentration in the atmosphere was 270 ppb; by 2012, this had risen to 325 ppb (Houghton 2015: 70), and, by 2022, to 335 ppb (Carrington 2022: 4). As we shall see in the next chapter, as well as being a potent greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide is also a source of air pollution and a widespread direct threat to human health.

Water vapour is also a greenhouse gas, but no one suggests that its presence is substantially due to human activity or significantly subject to human control. However, there are other greenhouse gases, such as CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) and HCFCs (hydrochlorofluorocarbons), used till recently as refrigerants, which are greenhouse gases and were found to be destroying stratospheric ozone. That layer of ozone is vital for preserving most life on Earth from ultraviolet radiation. So the world’s nations agreed to ban the sale and purchase of CFCs and HCFCs through the Montreal Protocol of 1987 and subsequent agreements (Broome 2012). Since then, the ozone layer has been recovering, although recent wildfires (of the 2020s) seem to be casting this recovery into question.

However, HFCs (hydrofluorocarbons), which were introduced as a substitute for these banned substances, were found to be another greenhouse gas and equally harmful to the ozone layer as well. So they too were banned in an agreement made at Kigali in 2016; if this is implemented, then HFCs will cease to be emitted, and, come to that, to be generated. The Montreal and Kigali agreements supply grounds for hope that international collaboration over environmental threats has proved achievable, and could prove so again, serving to rebut the view that planetary collapse is inevitable.

Ozone at low altitudes (largely a result of human-generated pollution) is yet another greenhouse gas itself, and has almost doubled since pre-industrial levels (Broome 2012: 24). It was estimated in 2012 that the combined impact of all the greenhouse gases, other than carbon dioxide (and water vapour), was equivalent to 11.5 per cent of the (then) level of carbon dioxide. That would bring the total of carbon-equivalent greenhouse gases now (2023) to around 450 ppm.

All the various greenhouse gases absorb warming infrared radiation, and this well explains the phenomenon of global warming, which is itself readily observable from rising average air temperatures and has been found to be affecting the oceans to a depth of at least 3 km (Broome 2012: 27). This warming also explains most of the melting of ice caps and glaciers. This in turn explains the observed rises in sea levels, which amounted to 17 cm in the twentieth century. Sea levels continue to rise at an average of 3 cm per decade (ibid.).

There is plenty of empirical evidence for all this. For example, the increases of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are evidenced by the proportions present in air bubbles trapped in ancient ice cores from Antarctica, and comparisons of these with average proportions in the current atmosphere. Nor is there significant room for doubt that these increases are due to human activity in the period from the Industrial Revolution onwards. The various greenhouse gases have resulted from emissions from domestic and industrial fires, and from the exhaust pipes of vehicles, ships and aircraft. As Broome adds, atmospheric carbon consists of a mixture of different carbon isotopes, and study of these isotopes shows that a sizeable proportion of this carbon comes from human sources (or is anthropogenic) (Broome 2012: 26).

Other theories have been advanced to explain global warming (as it used to be called), or global heating (an improved description). For example, sunspot activity has been presented as possibly explaining variations in average planetary temperatures across recent years. Perhaps this solar activity really makes a (very) small contribution. But scientific studies show that solar output since at least 1978 has been virtually constant, with fluctuations of only 0.1 per cent between its maximum and minimum extent (Houghton 2015: 158–9). The anthropogenic component turns out to be enormously larger, with sunspot activity playing a relatively tiny supporting role (see Houghton’s diagrams, ibid.: 72). The alternating southern Pacific weather systems of Il Niño and La Niña complicate matters, and have the effect that some years are not as hot as their predecessor; but this does not detract from the anthropogenic greenhouse gas theory being substantially vindicated. Indeed, no theory explains the data as well as the anthropogenic one (Broome 2012: 28).

Scientific knowledge of the climate is summarized every five or six years in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body which consults virtually the whole community of climate scientists. These reports give access to the latest scientific findings and conclusions to non-scientists such as Broome and myself. (Broome’s conclusion, expressed at the end of the last paragraph, was closely based on IPCC reports.) A reference is given in the full list of references for the section of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report that relates to Europe and its climate problems (Bednar-Friedl, Biesbroek and Schmidt 2022), and another to the IPCC report presented in March 2023, urging rapid action to counter increases in greenhouse gas emissions (IPCC 2023). Non-scientists are also fortunate to have previous IPCC findings explained and summarized in John Houghton’s Global Warming: The Complete Briefing (2015). Houghton is the retired chair of one of the IPCC panels, and his book supplies a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of this whole field of science. While there remains a theoretical possibility that the IPCC stance could be undermined (on climate scepticism, see Lejano and Nero 2020), the evidence that it adduces for global warming, its causes and its threats is close to conclusive.

It should be added that in 2009 a group of climate scientists published in Nature a paper showing that, for a 50 per cent chance of avoiding a 2°C rise in temperatures above pre-industrial levels, humanity is limited to emitting (from 1750, the dawn of the Industrial Revolution) just one trillion tonnes of carbon. But, by 2009, more than 55 per cent of this total had been emitted already, and at the rates of emission then current, this ‘carbon budget’ stood to be used up completely by February 2044 (Meinshausen et al. 2009). Yet if the goal is to avoid a rise of 1.5°C, as is argued below to be necessary, then this carbon budget is considerably reduced. How to share out the remaining carbon budget is both an ethical and a political issue, to which I shall be returning in later chapters.

Extreme weather and related impacts of climate change

While the impacts of global heating are likely to last for hundreds of thousands of years, many are being experienced already. There are widespread impacts on ecosystems, endangered species and their habitats (see chapter 3). But impacts of a more immediate kind are being felt in the form of far more frequent and far more intense storms and hurricanes, floods, droughts, wildfires and heatwaves.

In addition to these impacts, sea levels are continually rising. Across the twentieth century, they rose by around 17 cm, and they continue to rise (yet faster) by over 3 mm per year (Houghton 2015: 76: see also Bednar-Friedl, Biesbroek and Schmidt 2022). These rises put at risk all coastal cities and settlements, and endanger the very existence of many small island states such as Tuvalu, Kiribati and Mauritius, and many of the islands of states like Fiji. Unless global heating is limited to 1.5°C, ice caps and glaciers will continue to melt, and the rise of ocean levels will mean that these states will lose all or most of their territories.

The increasing temperatures and carbon-based acidity of oceanic waters are also causing coral reefs to bleach, with the loss of myriads of creatures that depend on them. We return to this topic in chapter 3 in connection with biodiversity loss.

Yet it is not only the Pacific and Indian Oceans that are affected by climate change. The higher temperatures of the waters of the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean generate hurricanes of increased ferocity and frequency, wreaking destruction on Caribbean islands and the southern and eastern parts of the United States. New Orleans has already been put at risk, protected though it is by vulnerable levees to hold back flood water, while many other cities stand to be affected by flooding and storm damage.

Unprecedented floods have also affected Bangladesh (where the rivers Ganges and Brahmaputra converge and meet the sea). Quite apart from the resulting fatalities, recent flooding has increased the salinity of 53 per cent of farmland (McAllister 2022). Floods have also affected parts of Europe, resulting in over 200 deaths in July 2021 (Belcher 2022). In the United Kingdom, February 2020 was the wettest February on record, and storm Ciara brought a month’s worth of rainfall across parts of West Yorkshire in just 18 hours, leading to widespread flooding (Henderson 2022). Flooding along the middle reaches of the River Severn has been widely reported in the press in several recent years. But far worse has been the situation in Pakistan, where, according to BBC reports, one-third of the country was covered in flood waters in late August 2022.

Meanwhile, the spread of wildfires is threatening the lives as well as the properties of many, as was widely reported in 2021 from areas of western Canada and the United States. When hurricanes, wildfires and floods are taken into account, polling conducted by Data for Progress discloses that as many as 47 per cent of likely American voters are either ‘somewhat concerned’ or ‘very concerned’ about being displaced from their homes through an extreme weather event (Data for Progress 2022).

Other continents have also been affected by wildfires, with serious summer fires in late 2021 and early 2022 in Western Australia, South Australia and Victoria, and dozens killed in the larger fires of 2019–2020. These fires triggered algal blooms larger than Australia itself in the distant Southern Ocean, and sent smoke visible from space hundreds of miles out eastwards over the Pacific (Gramling 2021).

In May 2022, heatwaves struck India and Pakistan, with temperatures exceeding 50°C, and causing 90 deaths; these events are calculated to have become a hundred times more likely due to climate change. The same expert reports that in 2021, during another heatwave, a temperature of 49.6°C was recorded at Lytton in Canada (Belcher 2022), while 47°C was recorded in July 2022 in Portugal (Yaron 2022). Even in the normally temperate United Kingdom, the summer heatwave of 2020 was the most significant heatwave in the previous sixty years, and led to over 2,500 excess deaths across the country (Henderson 2022).

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