As Tristan rightly identifies, climate change is really depressing stuff. Largely, this is because of how an understanding of the consequences of emitting greenhouse gasses makes us re-evaluate things previously believed to be excellent: from world travel and the space program to road trips and tasty steaks. Many things that one might previously have aspired to do now require either indifference to the suffering of others or intentional ignorance to carry out.
It’s not that it’s manifestly impossible to do these things in a low-carbon way, it’s just that doing so is too difficult and expensive for the huge majority of people to do at this time. Continent-crossing electric bullet trains powered by renewable energy would be great, but they are not available to those trying to cross North America today.
Given the total capacity of the planet to absorb greenhouse gasses, it may be fundamentally impossible for the number of people alive today to ever do these kinds of things sustainably. As such, responding seriously to the threat of climate change requires pretty significant personal sacrifices and, to a considerable extent, a reduced expectation of how much energy-intensive stuff we can aspire to do in the course of our lives. Building a low-carbon society is a way of taking back the freedoms lent to us by hydrocarbon energy, but it definitely remains to be seen whether equivalent per-capita potential will be created by such means during the lifetime of anyone alive today.
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I absolutely agree we need to do all this. And I absolute agree that its a moral demand we do all this, that its actually right in the full blown sense.
However, I’ve just been trying to point out, in my various posts and arguments, that this moral demand cannot take the form: There is a moral demand to personally reduce your emissions on your own account. Simply because, if people actually did it, it would make transition to a low carbon economy impossible. This is an empirical claim which I might be wrong about, but which needs to be argued for and refuted on empirical grounds. If its true, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t reduce your own emissions and set a good example because in reality there is no danger that everyone would actually stop buying garbage, building new homes etc… However, we need to recognize that we can only reduce our emissions and set a good example for others precisely because others aren’t doing the same. It follows that there is no universal moral obligation to reduce your individual emissions by your own accord.
There may be, however, a moral obligation to, as someone who is in the possession of the requisite understanding, and who believes there is a moral imperative to “save the world” from climate change, to reduce their own emissions and encourage others to do the same. This isn’t contradictory because it applies only to a small minority, and would encourage that minority to grow at a reasonable rate.
It might also be a moral obligation to lobby the state to make laws, perhaps even a law which made it punishable by fines to exceed a determinate limit of emissions per person.
These moral obligations produce no such contradictions because if everyone did them, it would be good for everyone. (Including those not yet born yet).
So you see, I am not against the notion there being moral obligations concerning climate change, only that whenever we draft a moral obligation, we need to check to make sure we’re ok with what happens when everyone to whom the obligation applies, follows the obligation. Otherwise we aren’t drafting moral obligations but polemic claims, which merely appear to be moral obligations for reasons of persuadability.
This post of Tristan’s addresses similar issues:
Moral Universalizability and Climate Change: a Restatement
W. Somerset Maugham
“Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.”
“I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.”
E. B. White
“If kindness and comfort are, as I suspect, the results of an energy surplus, then, as the supply contracts, we could be expected to start fighting once again like cats in a sack.”
—George Monbiot
“My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet-plane. His son will ride a camel.”
—Saudi saying
A strong case can be made that nations who exceed their fair share of safe global greenhouse gas emissions violate the human rights of others. How a “fair share” is determined is an ethical question beyond the scope of this post but a matter that will be the subject of future posts. Yet, without doubt some large emitting nations are beyond their fair share of global emissions no matter what distributive justice theory is used to determine any nation’s fair share. This can be concluded with high degrees of confidence because global emissions need to be reduced by large amounts ( between 60 and 90 percent) to prevent catastrophic warming and some nations are emitting much higher levels of emissions than other both on a per capita and total tons of emissions basis.
According to human rights theory, if climate change caused harm violates human rights, all governments have duties take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions within their jurisdictions to that nation’s fair share of global emissions. Further, according to human rights theory, all persons whose rights are violated by climate change may demand protection from those nations who are exceeding their fair share of global emissions for as long as greenhouse gas emissions interfere with basic human rights.
If climate change can trigger human rights responsibilities, the duty to reduce national emissions to any nation’s fair share of global emission is not diminished because of justifications that have sometimes been used by some nations for not reducing their emissions such as cost-benefit analysis or the fact that not all nations have agreed to reduce their emissions.
For this reason, if climate change damages interfere with human rights, the international; debate about national responsibility should be limited to what is each nation’s fair share of safe global emissions. Therefore, understanding climate change as triggering human rights violations should transform the subject of future international climate change negotiations even if no existing human rights tribunal has jurisdiction to provide a remedy for climate change caused damages. This is so because very strong moral claims can be made that climate change interferes with human right enjoyment even if existing human rights regimes prove to not be viable remedies for climate change because of legal initiations of these regimes.