WHAT IS ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH?

There are a number of different ways of defining environmental health. Some describe it as a scientific field of study similar to biology or chemistry, while others refer to it as an applied discipline similar to medicine or public health, and still others include both characterizations (Fromkin 2010; World Health Organization 2010b). The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), a branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), describes environmental health as both a scientific field of study that attempts to understand “the complex relationship between environmental risk factors and human biology within affected individuals and populations” and as an applied discipline that “uses this knowledge to prevent illness, reduce disease, and promote health” (National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences 2006: 5).

Many different scientific disciplines develop knowledge related to environmental health, including: ecology, toxicology, epidemiology, exposure biology, environmental medicine, genetics and genomics, cell and reproductive biology, endocrinology, neurology, microbiology, environmental economics, climatology, and meteorology (Frumkin 2010a). Applied environmental health disciplines implement practices and policies that promote environmental health. These include: occupational health, industrial hygiene, solid and hazardous waste management, water management, public health, forestry management, urban planning, agriculture, environmental engineering, ergonomics, and environmental law and ethics (Frumkin 2010a). (See Table 2.1.)

This chapter will examine ethical and policy issues related to three global environmental health topics: climate change, energy use and production, and population. These issues are global in scope because they affect everyone on the planet and require international cooperation for their resolution. The issues are also fundamentally interconnected because increases in population lead to greater demands for energy, which can impact climate change.

CLIMATE CHANGE

We have already mentioned climate change due to global warming during the discussion of air pollution in Chapter 7, meat eating in Chapter 6, and urban sprawl in Chapter 8. In this chapter, we will explore the topic in greater depth. A primary mechanism for global warming is the greenhouse effect, which occurs when radiant heat entering an enclosed area through a transparent medium is trapped, which raises the temperature. A variety of gases present in the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, ozone, water, and nitrous oxide, trap the sun’s heat by absorbing infrared radiation reflected by the surface of the Earth and re-emitting it. Sources of greenhouse gases include volcanic activity, decaying vegetation, animal respiration and waste, combustion of biomass and fossils fuels, and industrial processes, such as cement manufacturing. Without any greenhouse gases, the Earth would be too cold to support life as we know it (National Aeronautics and Space Administration 2010a).

Environmental health research and scholarship have come a long way since Rachel Carson published Silent Spring more than four decades ago, but the ethical and policy issues raised in her book still have relevance today. Questions about the appropriate use of pesticides reflect the ongoing tension between protecting the environment and promoting human interests. But, as we have seen in this book, environmental health controversies go beyond the one-dimensional humanity versus environment theme, and are shaped by a rich array of values and interests, such as public health, individual autonomy, property rights, justice, utility, economic development, animal welfare, biodiversity preservation, and ecological sustainability. Although people often equate protecting the environment with promoting human health, these two values are sometimes at odds, as illustrated by debates about whether to spray DDT indoors to control malaria, build dams to provide water for communities, or grow GM crops to feed a growing population.

The scope of this book has ranged from local concerns, such as toxic waste site placement, housing standards, urban development, water resource use, and occupational safety, to national and global concerns, such as climate change, energy use, pollution, population control, and agriculture. The book has examined perennial topics, such as air and water quality, pesticide use, and solid waste disposal, as well as new and emerging ones, such as GM crops, nanotechnology, geoengineering, environmental justice, and protection of human subjects in environmental health research. The book has described some of the laws, regulations, and treaties relevant to environmental health, as well as moral concepts, theories, and principles.

INTRODUCTION

Domination takes many forms: tribe over tribe, faith over faith, nation over nation, class over class, race over race, gender over gender. This chapter concerns a novel form: the present generation's domination of posterity via the medium of greenhouse gas emissions. I contend that our emissions of greenhouse gases constitute unjust domination, analogous in many morally significant respects to certain historic instances of domination that are now almost universally condemned, and, further, that no benefits that we may bequeath to the future can nullify that injustice.

DEFINITION OF DOMINATION

There is a substantial literature on domination, much of it devoted to sociological or anthropological analyses of the forms of domination and resistance to it. When domination occurs among contemporaries, it often exhibits features that will be irrelevant to our discussion: the dominated are compelled to obey the dominators or are humiliated by them; the dominated resist with various subterfuges; the dominated may exhibit false consciousness; and so on. Such features, however prominent in certain contexts, are nevertheless inessential to domination itself.

Iris Marion Young (whose account of domination is concerned exclusively with its political and institutional forms) defines domination as “institutional conditions which inhibit or prevent people from participating in determining their actions or the conditions of their actions.” “Persons,” she adds, “live within structures of domination if other persons or groups can determine without reciprocation the conditions of their action.”

It was made clear at the December 2009 conference on climate change in Copenhagen (Conference of the Parties 15) that the nations of the world are only beginning to concede that they face a common threat. It was widely reported that there was a deep divide at Copenhagen between delegates from “developed” countries and delegates from “developing” countries, and that the depth of the anger of the delegates from developing countries surprised the delegates from developed countries. Should the anger have been surprising? Not only had some of the developed countries – most notably, the USA – failed to take significant steps prior to the meeting to reduce the impacts of their economies on the climate. In addition, the developed countries had come to the meeting to revise the global structure of climate change mitigation such that all countries (or at least all of the major economies) would share the task. This arrangement, all conceded, entailed a sharp departure from the previous structure, in place since the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which dealt with equity across nations by dividing the world into two groups of countries with “common but differentiated responsibilities.” Only the group of “Annex 1” countries (approximately, the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development plus Russia) was obligated to make legally binding mitigation commitments.

Historical, present, and future emissions of greenhouse gases, principally through energy use, are altering the climate. Hence they are imposing harm and will impose harm in the future. This volume concentrates, rightly, on the ethical issues of stewardship, responsibility, and precaution that are relevant to questions of reducing emissions and avoiding climate change. But the remit of ethical questions relevant to the climate change challenge is wider: the ethics of science, evidence, and foresight; the ethics of public discourse and media; and the ethics of representation of the future and nonhumans, to name but a few. Here we examine issues around how society will adapt to a changing climate and its related impacts and challenges.

The impacts of human-induced climate change are with us, and in anticipation of future risks, adaptation to those changes is under way. While individuals and societies have always adapted to risks associated with changing climates and environments, adaptation to human-induced climate change is categorically different in that it involves the avoidance of harm imposed by others. In this chapter we explore the ethical issues raised by imposed harm and the need for sustainable adaptation. In particular, we explore the landscape of issues around the governance process and procedures by which climate justice for adaptation could potentially be implemented. We focus on the three issues of (1) identifying climate change adaptation; (2) identifying vulnerability; and (3) managing the responsibility for action.

INTRODUCTION

Ethical discussion about climate change has focused on two highly significant sets of questions: questions about justice between existing peoples and nations, and questions concerning the moral responsibilities of existing people to future people. However, given the likely planetary effects of climate change, one might also expect to find a third area of ethical debate: questions about the impact of climate change on the nonhuman world directly. But on this subject, very little has so far been said. Of course, ecosystems and species have been important in existing political and ethical debate about climate, because climate change may affect them in ways that have serious implications for human beings. Floods and droughts may cause widespread human hunger; invasive species can spread human disease; loss of biodiversity may threaten ecosystem services. But in all these cases, the nonhuman world is understood to be of indirect moral concern; to use a distinction made by Jan Narveson, even though the object of the concern is ecosystems or species, the ground of the concern is human beings. Here, in contrast, I'm concerned with the ethical implications of climate change for species, ecosystems, organisms, and sentient animals directly, independently of the possible harms that such impacts might cause humans.

Certainly, concerns about the impact of climate change on the nonhuman world directly have been expressed, both by environmentalists and by ethicists. The Nature Conservancy, for instance, aims to “safeguard Nature from irreversible harm from a changing climate.”

Climate change is a complex problem that can be approached from many different perspectives: atmospheric science, global change biology, environmental economics, international law, environmental philosophy, and so on. It involves almost every sector of society from land use planning to forest management. One particularly productive way of framing the problem of climate change is as a problem of energy policy. This is the perspective that I will take in this paper. I begin with some brief remarks about the role of different energy sources in human history. I go on to claim that every currently available energy policy entails difficult trade-offs and that technology will not deliver us from the agony of choice, at least on the time-scale on which we must act to avoid “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” I then bring these observations to bear explicitly on the problem of climate change and discuss their implications for policies that are now under active consideration. Finally, I draw some conclusions.

ENERGY'S HISTORY

Energy use has been central to the development of human civilization, society, and economy. As a first approximation, we can say that the story of human development has been the story of increased use of energy. Indeed, we can even think of human history as falling into epochs marked by the human ability to exploit various sources of energy.

There is a curious disconnect in climate change discourse, between explanations of the causes of global climate change (GCC) and discussions of possible solutions. On the one hand, it is widely acknowledged that the primary causes of climate change are unremitting economic and demographic growth. As the Fourth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) succinctly puts it: “GDP/per capita and population growth were the main drivers of the increase in global emissions during the last three decades of the 20th century … At the global scale, declining carbon and energy intensities have been unable to offset income effects and population growth and, consequently, carbon emissions have risen.” On the other hand, most proposals for climate change mitigation take growth for granted and focus on technical means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate scientists speak of the “Kaya identity”: the four primary factors which determine overall greenhouse gas emissions. They are economic growth/per capita, population, energy used to generate each unit of GDP, and greenhouse gases generated per unit of energy. Over the past three and a half decades, improvements in energy and carbon efficiency have been overwhelmed by increases in population and wealth.

It is now widely recognized that the Earth's atmosphere is undergoing profound changes. The most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that temperatures have increased in the last hundred years. It writes, for example, that “[t]he total temperature increase from 1850–1899 to 2001–2005 is 0.76°C ± 0.19°C,” adding ominously that “[t]he rate of warming averaged over the last 50 years (0.13°C ± 0.03°C per decade) is nearly twice that for the last 100 years.” In addition to this, temperatures are projected to increase in the future. All of the six scenarios considered by the IPCC found that temperatures will rise by 2090–2099 as compared to the temperatures between 1980 and 1999. According to the best estimate of the B1 scenario, temperatures will increase by 1.8°C. If on the other hand we turn to the A1F1 scenario, its best estimate is that temperatures will increase by 4.0°C. And if we examine the “likely range,” then the lower limit is 1.1°C and the higher limit is 6.4°C.

Sea levels, too, are projected to increase. According to one scenario (the B1 scenario), sea levels are projected to rise by 0.18–0.38 meters and according to another (the A1FI scenario), the increase is projected to be 0.26–0.59 meters. These projections, it is important to add, do not include “future rapid dynamical changes in ice flow.” They omit, that is, the massive sea-level rises that might occur because of the melting of ice sheets.