The warming limit of 2°C has been widely endorsed. The European Union and several prominent international NGOs, including Oxfam and Christian Aid, had advocated the limit for several years before the sixteenth Conference of the Parties (COP 16) to the UNFCCC formally adopted it in Cancun in 2010. The temperature goal is, however, to a large extent arbitrary. Because of cascading uncertainties associated with various feedbacks in the climate system, we are unable to predict if dire consequences owing to warming might befall us well before an equilibrium warming of 2°C. Moreover, whether it is reasonable for least-developed and developing countries to accept a mitigation plan designed to keep warming within that temperature target depends on whether the plan lays costs on them that are likely to prolong or deepen poverty by raising their energy costs. But because it seems possible to limit the warming to 2°C in a manner that would prevent heaping costs on the least-developed and developing countries, and because of the projected economic costs of trying to limit warming at a lower temperature, the 2°C limit has broad credibility. Despite this credibility, international negotiations have so far failed to produce an agreement that would limit emissions of greenhouse gases sufficiently to have a good chance of achieving the warming limit.

Derek Parfit sees a problem for moral theories comprising principles he calls “The Person-Affecting View,” or simply V, which holds that “it is bad if people are affected for the worse.” He is using “worse” here as he uses “worse-off,” which he takes to refer “either to someone's level of happiness, or more narrowly to his standard of living, or more broadly, to the quality of his life.” To claim that a person is affected for the worse requires a comparison between the person's well-being as she is affected by the action and as she might have been without the action.

Changes in some institutional frameworks affect who will live in the future. As we adjust our energy policy, we will affect an array of major components of modern society from transportation to industrial production to recreation. These affect the circumstances in which people meet, have romantic encounters, and conceive children. The non-identity problem arises for theories such as V in these cases because they cannot account for what is wrong (when there is a wrong) in cases where policies affect who will be brought into existence. These policies do not render actual future persons worse-off because without such policies these persons would not have existed. We can call that the argument the no worse-off argument. The non-identity problem is sometimes misunderstood as a kind of skepticism about whether there can be anything wrong with actions in which the identity of persons is contingent on what we do. It is not that. Rather, it is a claim about the limitations of certain moral theories in accounting for what is wrong. It is, in other words, a problem for normative ethics, not applied ethics.

There are costs in taking morally appropriate precautions against climate change–caused future catastrophes. These costs involve expenditures in the pursuit of climate change mitigation and savings to reduce future adaptation costs. Many of us need to consume energy generated by means other than burning fossil fuels. For some time at least, this will be more expensive than using coal, oil, and natural gas. If we divide all of our income into two broad categories – one directed toward consumption and another directed toward savings – spending more on electricity generated by, say, wind or solar cells will result in less money available to use for other kinds of consumption. This can be thought of as a kind of savings, but not primarily for ourselves. Most of the beneficiaries of climate change mitigation will live after we have died. Increased energy prices and tax-financed public investments in adaptation amount to savings programs for the future forced on us by current public policy. But for many people now alive – indeed, for most of them – savings for others would simply be a means by which their impoverishment would be deepened or prolonged or both.

Some readers of Genesis believe that in this passage, Jacob exploited the desperately hungry Esau. Others believe that Esau simply acted in a profoundly imprudent manner. The author of the passage seems to be in the latter camp because he judges Essau to have despised his birthright. If that is the case, this ancient story is but a vivid example of a familiar foible. There is considerable evidence that people generally prefer present benefits over greater future benefits. Economists have a word for this; they call it “imprudence.” That seems fair enough. Some economists have the view that such a preference should be reflected in the value attached to the future costs and benefits of public policy. But when those costs and benefits are enjoyed by other people, the preference for present goods is not imprudence, but a kind of partiality not obviously different from other kinds of pernicious favoritism, such as using public policy to benefit people to whom one feels especially close.

In this appendix I examine a model argument, invoking human rights in defense of the duties to future persons to mitigate – and provide adaptation to – climate change. I look at four challenges to the human rights argument. The first three have been pressed in the literature on conceptual grounds. The fourth I formulate on normative grounds. I present what I think are satisfactory responses to the three conceptual challenges. The fourth challenge shows, I think, the limits of the human rights approach for guiding policy. In defending that view I assume that there are important moral duties to mitigate climate change and to provide adaptation assistance, and I take human rights seriously. The issue is whether they alone can guide us in making the kinds of trade-offs that climate change policy seems to require. The antipoverty principle can, I think, do that job.

The Human Rights Argument

In the absence of additional mitigation, climate change is projected to have profound, often devastating, effects on hundreds of millions of people by the end of this century. Much of this has been discussed in the chapters of this book, but there are some reminders relevant to this appendix. First, human health is expected to suffer significantly. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “The health status of millions of people is projected to be affected through, for example, increases in malnutrition; increased deaths, diseases and injury due to extreme weather events; increased burden of diarrheal disease; increased frequency of cardio-respiratory diseases…and the altered spatial distribution of some infectious diseases.” Second, for hundreds of millions of people, access to water and food will become more difficult. By 2020, anywhere from 75 to 250 million Africans are expected to suffer increased water stress, and yields on rain-fed farms may be reduced by up to 50 percent. According to a United Nations Human Development Programme review of climate change projections, “Overall, climate change will lower the incomes and reduce the opportunities of vulnerable populations. By 2080, the number of people at risk of hunger could reach 600 million – twice the number of people living in poverty in sub-Saharan Africa today.”

Our world is beset with several pressing problems, including war, intolerance, poverty, and climate change. The theme of this book takes up the last two items on this bleak list. It should be scandalous that nearly half the world's population lives in desperate poverty, especially while many lavish in such plenty. And the fact that despite the formation of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (hereafter “UNFCCC” for the institution and “the Convention” for the treaty), globally we continue to emit more CO2 each year, even as we become more aware of the harmful effects of doing so, is evidence of an enormous collective failure. This book takes the problem of global poverty to be central to climate change policy. In so doing, it rejects the approach of many attempts that address the problem of climate change in isolation. Some even make a virtue out of doing so. I take that to be a grave moral mistake.

Some analysts of climate change policy contend that an international climate change agreement should be oriented only around the values of efficacy and efficiency. Claims of equity, fairness, and poverty eradication are sometimes rejected as redistributive and as poison to the process of reaching a climate change agreement, because redistribution would render an agreement counter to the interests of highly developed states. Two considerations tell against this view. First, from the beginning of the international discussions on climate change it has been clear that climate change mitigation was one important aim, but not the only one. That aim has always been accompanied by a concern that poverty-eradicating human development be continued – that a climate change regime not establish hurdles to this developmental aim. International climate negotiations are not simply about climate change; they are also about a fair framework for energy consumption, which is necessary for states seeking to eradicate poverty within their borders. This point is too often missed, and not only by writers who cannot see beyond the value of efficiency. Even writers who take the negotiations to be concerned with multiple problems can be blind to the importance that regulating access to energy for poverty-eradication purposes plays in the negotiations.

This chapter expands on some themes from the previous chapter and examines several different issues related to the production and consumption of food. Food ethics is much broader than issues related to the use of pesticides and fertilizers, and encompasses such topics as genetic engineering, meat eating, hunting and fishing, and growing food locally. As in the previous chapter, the discussion will include a description of some facts relevant to the ethical and policy issues.

GENETIC ENGINEERING

Heredity is controlled by an organism’s genes, made up of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and located in the chromosomes of every cell. DNA is a long, double-stranded molecule that carries genetic information in the form of linear sequences of four chemical compounds termed nucleotides linked together into long stretches. The four nucleotides (also called bases) are: adenine (A), which pairs with thymine (T), and cytosine (C), which pairs with guanine (G). Because of this unique base-pairing rule, DNA is capable of self-replication because either strand can serve as a template for synthesis of the other strand.

Rachel Carson launched the modern environmental movement in 1962 when she published Silent Spring, a book that documented the harmful effects of pesticides on birds and other nonhuman species. The book was serialized in the New Yorker prior to its full publication and was widely read after it was placed in the Book of the Month Club and became a best seller on the New York Times list. Carson had been aware of the potential hazards of pesticide use since the 1940s, but she became especially concerned when one of her friends had published a letter reporting the deaths of numerous birds on her property after aerial dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) spraying. In Silent Spring, Carson argued that DDT can cause reproductive problems, such as sterility, weak eggs shells, and embryo death in a variety of bird species, which leads to population decline (Carson 1962). She warned that, one day, the world would have a silent spring (i.e., no birdsongs) if steps were not taken to restrict the use of DDT and other pesticides. Carson discussed several examples of how pesticides can harm human beings, including a case in which farm workers had suffered toxic reactions from pesticide exposures. She also claimed that the chemical industry had spread false or misleading information about pesticide safety and that government agencies had not carefully examined industry claims.

As we have seen throughout this book, justice is an important concern in environmental health because health risks related to the environment are often distributed unequally. Risks are distributed unequally because people face different types of health hazards depending on where they live, work, attend school, shop, travel, or recreate (Shrader-Frechette 2002, 2007a). Though we have touched briefly on some justice concerns in earlier chapters, in this chapter we explore ethical and policy issues related to the distribution of health risks in the environment in greater depth.

HEALTH INEQUALITIES AND THE ENVIRONMENT

To better understand the relationship between the environment and justice, it will be useful to reflect upon how different aspects of the environment can contribute to health inequalities (often referred to as health disparities). A large body of literature has documented demographic differences in mortality, morbidity, and disease burden among people living in the same nation as well as differences among nations (Barr 2008). Life expectancy in the United States is higher for whites than for blacks (U.S. Census Bureau 2010b). Among these two groups, white females have the highest life expectancy (80.8 years), followed by black females (76.8 years), white males (75.9 years), and black males (70.0 years) (Xu et al. 2010). Latinos have a higher life expectancy than whites. Latino women have a life expectancy of 83.1 years, and Latino males have a life expectancy of 77.9 years (Arias 2010). Infant mortality rates vary considerably by race and ethnicity in the United States. Blacks have an infant mortality rate of 13.6 deaths per 1,000 live births, followed by Puerto Ricans (8.3), Native Americans (8.1), whites (5.8), Mexicans (5.5), Asians (4.9), and Cubans (4.4) (MacDorman and Mathews 2008).

As noted in Chapter 2, research with human participants plays an essential role in understanding the health impacts of the environment. This chapter will focus on human participant issues that create unique or especially challenging problems in environmental health research. Before exploring these issues, it will be useful to review some of the important historical developments, ethics codes, regulations, and ethical principles pertaining to research with human participants. (Environmental health research with human and animal participants raises a number of ethical and policy issues that will not be discussed here. For a review, see Emanuel et al. 2008; Shamoo and Resnik 2009.)

BACKGROUND

Prior to World War II, there were no well-recognized international codes or guidelines concerning research with human participants. The American Medical Association had discussed drafts of potential guidelines, and a few countries, such as Germany, had developed some rules, but there was very little substantive guidance on the ethical conduct of research with human participants. Many experiments were conducted on vulnerable groups (i.e., individuals who have difficulty providing consent), such as mentally ill people, racial minorities, children, and prisoners (Lederer 1995). Informed consent was not a widely recognized principle of medical research, and doctors often experimented on their patients without their consent (Lederer 1995).

As we have seen in previous chapters, location has a significant impact on exposure to environmental health risks. Where one lives or works can affect one’s exposure to air and water pollutants, pesticides, solid waste, and industrial chemicals. In this chapter, we will focus on health risks related to the built environment, which includes all of the structures that people create to support different functions and activities, such as work, recreation, education, transportation, habitation, agriculture, and industry. The built environment includes houses, apartments, office buildings, factories, schools, malls, roads, levies, dams, mines, sidewalks, fields, waste disposal sites, and many more structures (Frumkin et al. 2004). In the last 10,000 years, human beings have radically transformed the landscape of the planet by clearing land, erecting buildings, creating cities, and damming rivers.

In thinking about the built environment, three trends are worth noting. First, the human population has grown from about 125,000 people at 1 million years BCE, to 5 million people in 10,000 BCE, to about 7 billion people today. The human population is expected to grow to 9 billion people by 2050 (United Nations 2009). As the population continues to increase, more houses, schools, roads, dams, and other structures will need to be built to accommodate more people, which will increase humanity’s impacts on the environment.

The previous chapter gave an overview of ethical theories, concepts, and principles. In this chapter, I will develop a method for ethical decision making that can be used to deal with questions concerning the relationship between human health and the environment. To do this, I need to first say a bit more about environmental ethics, because the theories and traditions discussed in the previous chapter have little to say about man’s relationship to the environment, and it is important to incorporate environmental values into ethical decision making. I also will discuss health as a distinct value.

ETHICS AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Environmental ethics emerged as a distinct discipline in the 1970s as philosophers, theologians, attorneys, scientists, and political activists raised awareness about environmental issues such as pollution, species preservation, urban development, pesticide use, and hazardous waste disposal (Cochrane 2007; Brennan 2008). Many argued that traditional ethical theories did not have the conceptual tools to adequately deal with environmental problems because these theories are human centered (anthropocentric) and do not give adequate consideration to the value of other organisms, nonhuman species, ecosystems, and the biosphere (Attfield 2003). As we saw in the last chapter, traditional ethical theories emphasize the value of human happiness, virtue, dignity, rights, and justice, and address human moral obligations, duties, decisions, and rules. However, these theories do not explicitly mention the value of the environment or our obligations to the environment. Many argued that a radically new ethic was needed to deal with environmental issues (Johnson 1984).

This chapter will discuss issues related to the dispersal of pollutants and wastes into the environment. It will describe common types of pollution and waste, and how they impact human health and the environment. It will also discuss pollution issues related to nanotechnology.

AIR POLLUTION

Air pollution has caused health problems for urban populations for hundreds of years. In the 1200s, a commission established in London to deal with pollution emitted from kilns, furnaces, and fireplaces recommended restrictions on coal burning, which were largely ignored. As noted in Chapter 2, pollution from coal-burning factories and steam engines during the Industrial Revolution in nineteenth-century England did not trigger any air quality legislation. Several events in the twentieth century led many countries to adopt air pollution regulations. A severe air pollution episode killed sixty people in Meuse Valley, Belgium in 1930, and, in 1948, an industrial air pollution event killed twenty people in Sonora, Pennsylvania. In December 1952, a dense cloud of air pollution from the burning of coal to heat homes settled over London. The cloud, known as the London Fog, contained sulfur dioxide and particulate matter. During a two-week period in which sulfur dioxide levels tripled, the mortality rate tripled. It is estimated that as many as 12,000 people died as a direct result of the London Fog (Bell and Davis 2001; Bell and Samet 2010).

Having explored the foundations of environmental health ethics in Chapters 2 through 4, I will examine some particular topics and controversies in Chapters 5 through 11, making use of the method for ethical decision making described in the previous chapter. This chapter will focus on the use of chemicals and other substances to control pests. I will give an overview of some of the salient facts before addressing ethical and policy issues. Other chapters will follow a similar pattern.

PESTICIDES

As noted in Chapter 2, a pesticide is a substance used to control, repel, or kill pest species. The term “pest” is anthropocentric: A species is considered to be a pest if it threatens human health and well-being (Robson et al. 2010). There are a variety of ways that pests harm human beings or human interests (Robson et al. 2010):

• Bacteria, fungi, and protozoa cause human, animal, and plant diseases.

• Mosquitoes, lice, flies, ticks, fleas, and pigeons serve as vectors for disease.

• Worms and flies infect humans and animals.

• Cockroaches can trigger allergies, exacerbate asthma, and contaminate food.

• Ants contaminate food, damage wood structures, and harm crops.

• Termites damage wood structures.

• Rats and mice serve as vectors for disease and contaminate food.

• Aphids, locusts, corn borers, Japanese beetles, Mediterranean fruits flies, corn earworms, and many other insects damage crops.

• Many different weeds interfere with the germination, growth and fruition of crops, and some, such as poison ivy, are harmful to humans.

• Coyotes, wolves, foxes, and snakes kill livestock and farm animals.

• Some species of spiders, insects, and venomous snakes have poisonous bites or stings that can cause pain, disability, or death.

To understand the ethical issues in environmental health, it is necessary to have a good grasp of environmental health and ethics. Chapter 2 presented an overview of environmental health, and the next two chapters will focus on ethics. This chapter will provide the reader with some background in ethical theory, and Chapter 4 will develop a procedure for ethical decision making.

WHAT IS ETHICS?

Ethics can be defined as: 1) a set of standards (or norms) for distinguishing between right and wrong actions, or 2) the study of ethical standards. Ethical (or moral) concepts include such notions as obligation (or duty), virtue, justice, rights, happiness, value, and goodness. The study of ethics can be divided into four different areas: normative ethics, which examines general concepts and principles of ethics; applied ethics, which investigates ethical decision making in particular domains, such as medicine, science, or law; meta-ethics, which analyzes the meaning and justification of ethical concepts and principles; and empirical ethics, which studies moral reasoning, judgment, behavior, learning, and development. For many years, ethics has been predominantly the domain of humanistic disciplines, such as philosophy and theology, but now many empirical disciplines study ethics, including psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, and sociobiology (Pojman 2005).