As this volume demonstrates, the prospect of global climate change raises profound questions of international corrective and distributive justice. At the same time, individual nations must grapple with the ramifications of domestic policies for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This chapter concentrates on the distributive and participatory justice challenges posed by one prominent US climate mitigation strategy: a GHG cap-and-trade program. While carbon dioxide emissions themselves are not harmful and do not create direct distributional concerns, they are invariably accompanied by hazardous co-pollutants. Policies that affect GHG emissions, therefore, indirectly impact co-pollutant emissions, raising distributive justice concerns for impacted communities. GHG mitigation policies also raise issues of participatory justice: Who participates in regulatory decisions about how and when industrial sectors should reduce emissions? At the facility-specific level, who controls and participates in decisions about facility emissions?

The cap-and-trade programs that are emerging as a core strategy for addressing climate change at the state and federal levels have long been considered antithetical to the environmental justice movement's distributional and participatory goals. Rather than concluding that the conflict is unbridgeable, however, I propose a reconciliation. I argue that a cap-and-trade program that is one component of a much larger climate change strategy, and that includes limitations to improve the distribution of co-pollutants, could balance efficiency and distributive justice.

The first section of this chapter describes the environmental justice movement's central claims for distributive and participatory justice and the relevance of those claims to climate policy.

Over the last twenty years, the idea that climate change – and global environmental change more generally – is fundamentally a moral challenge has become mainstream. But most have supposed that the challenge is one of acting morally, rather than to our morality itself. Dale Jamieson is a notable exception to this trend. From the earliest days of climate ethics, he has argued that successfully addressing the problem will involve a fundamental paradigm shift in ethics.

In general, Jamieson believes that our current values evolved relatively recently in “low-population-density and low-technology societies, with seemingly unlimited access to land and other resources,” and so are ill-suited to a globalized world. More specifically, he asserts that these values include as a central component an account of responsibility which “presupposes that harms and their causes are individual, that they can be readily identified, and that they are local in time and space.” But, he claims, global environmental problems such as climate change fit none of these criteria, so that a new value system is needed, one which addresses “fundamental questions” about “how we ought to live, what kinds of societies we want, and how we should relate to nature and other forms of life.”

In this chapter, I assess the view that every person shares in a common property right to the Earth's atmosphere. This view is advocated by some environmental non-governmental organizations, which take it as the philosophical basis of the claim that every person has an equal entitlement to emit CO2. For the sake of simplicity I shall limit my focus in this chapter to CO2 emissions without assuming that CO2 is the only important greenhouse gas. The common atmospheric property rights view has received little careful scrutiny in the emerging philosophical debate on climate change and justice. I hope to contribute to remedying that.

In the next section, I discuss the relationship between the common atmospheric property rights view and three different traditions of liberalism that take rights seriously. I argue that the view is plausibly entailed by two versions of Lockean (libertarian) liberalism. Common property rights in the atmosphere have a weaker foundation in egalitarian liberalism despite the endorsement of an equal entitlement to emit CO2 by some egalitarian liberals. I then argue that the common atmospheric property rights claim is prima facie consistent with egalitarian liberalism.

The second section takes up CO2 emissions and intergenerational justice. It argues that avoiding intergenerational injustice, as understood according to the common atmospheric property rights view, requires either institutions that enforce emissions limits at a rate which is less than what the climate system can absorb without creating perturbations in the climate system or institutions that make appropriate compensatory intergenerational transfers for the failure to limit emissions sufficiently.

A core issue in the debate over what constitutes a fair response to climate change is the appropriate allocation of emission rights between the developed and the developing world. Various parties have defended equal emission rights per capita on grounds of equity. The atmosphere belongs to us all and everyone should be allocated an equal share. Others have defended higher emission rights per capita for developing countries on grounds of historical accountability. Developed countries are largely responsible for the threat of climate change due to their past emissions and, since they currently continue to enjoy the benefits thereof, they should be willing to accept lower emission targets.

However, in reality we see that developed countries currently have much higher emission rates per capita and will continue to have higher rates than developing countries for some time to come. There is talk of “grandfathering” – setting emission targets for developed countries in line with their present or past emission levels. What, if anything, can be said in defense of grandfathering?

In Chapter 4 of this book Caney discusses grandfathering and puts the matter very bluntly: “No moral and political philosopher (to my knowledge) defends grandfathering, presumably assuming that it is unjust.” Grandfathering can at best be defended by means of pragmatic arguments. In Realpolitik we need to make some concessions in order to get all the parties on board. But this is like making concessions in negotiations with the Mafia.

INTRODUCTION

Mandatory policies to reduce US greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions without full global participation – principally cap-and-trade systems, occasionally carbon taxes, and sometimes standards – are being seriously debated in the US Congress. However, even efficient market-based policies that effectively attach a price to GHG emissions will likely increase production costs for some domestic producers and give rise to competitiveness concerns where those producers compete against foreign suppliers operating in countries where emissions do not carry similar costs. These concerns are likely to be most acute in energy-intensive, trade-exposed manufacturing industries. While the impacts can be mitigated to some extent by the use of offsets or other flexibility mechanisms, it would be virtually impossible to eliminate the disproportionate burdens placed on certain sectors without undermining both the effectiveness and the cost-effectiveness of the policy. As Olson has eloquently argued, the more narrowly focused the adverse impacts of a policy, the more politically difficult it is to sustain.

One of the key questions being asked is this: Why should US firms be disadvantaged relative to overseas competitors to address a global problem? The difficulty, moreover, is not just political: if, in response to a mandatory policy, US production simply shifts abroad to unregulated foreign firms, the resulting emissions “leakage” could vitiate some of the environmental benefits expected from domestic action. As is widely recognized, limiting emissions from the USA and other developed countries will not prevent dangerous interference with the climate system unless key developing countries also control their emissions.

INTRODUCTION

The Earth is under our thumb. Global warming is the latest example of how human activity has reached every nook and cranny of the Earth's natural systems, but it is not the only one. The effects on the ozone layer, the collapse of fisheries throughout the world, and the accelerated species extinction rate, among many other phenomena, indicate the planetary scope of human impacts. As Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen has put it, we have entered the “Anthropocene,” the era of ubiquitous human influence on the Earth's geological systems.

The desultory, almost leisurely approach of most of the world's national states to climate change reflects no detectable sense of urgency. My question is what, if anything, is wrong with this persistent lack of urgency. My answer is that everything is wrong with it and, in particular, that it constitutes a violation of basic rights as well as a failure to seize a golden opportunity to protect rights. I criticized the outcome of the initial climate conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the Framework Convention on Climate Change, for establishing “no dates and no dollars: no dates are specified by which emissions are to be reduced by the wealthy states and no dollars are specified with which the wealthy states will assist the poor states to avoid an environmentally dirty development like our own. The convention is toothless.” The general response to such criticisms was that the convention outcome was a good start.

Nearly two decades later, the outcome of the 2009 Copenhagen Conference of the Parties to the Convention is equally toothless, once again containing no dates and no dollars. The New York Times described the twelve-paragraph Outcome Document as “a statement of intention, not a binding pledge to begin taking action.” It contains a vague commitment to the end of keeping the global temperature rise to no greater than 2°C beyond pre-industrial levels but no specification of, much less commitment to, the means necessary to that end.

This book is an interdisciplinary collection of mainly normative essays written by philosophers, scientists, legal scholars, and an economist. The complex intergenerational ethical issues that climate change raises have been the subjects of a significant body of recent scholarship. The original scholarship collected in this volume is distinctive in that this is the first second-generation collection of essays to appear on the ethics of climate change. The contributors to this volume engage and respond to the first-generation literature, and because climate change is perhaps the largest collective action problem ever confronted by humanity, several contributors argue for new ways of conceptualizing our ethical obligations in order to address a problem of this scope and difficulty. This volume is also the first in which a group of scholars critically engages the outcomes of the Copenhagen climate conference (Conference of the Parties 15) in which the nations of the world once again tried to reach an agreement about how to slow or stop anthropogenic climate change.

It is well understood that the Earth's climate is changing as a result of human activity. More specifically, the climate is changing because of the inefficient consumption of fossil fuels and rapid deforestation. A changing climate will place present and future human populations in jeopardy and the poor will be most adversely impacted. By climatologists, geologists, oceanographers, and other scientists working on problems related to climate change this is well understood.

The structure of the field

Ethical theory is conventionally divided into two major fields, meta-ethics and normative ethics. Meta-ethics concerns the meaning and status of moral language. Normative ethics is divided between moral theory and applied or practical ethics. Moral theory is concerned with what sorts of things are good, which acts are right, and what the relations are between the right and the good. Practical ethics is concerned with the evaluation of particular things as good and bad, and of various acts, practices, or institutions as right or wrong.

The distinctions between these fields can be illuminated by an example. Consider the sentence

1. (1) It is wrong to kill animals for food.

If we ask whether this sentence asserts a claim or only expresses an attitude, we are asking a meta-ethical question. If we wonder what sorts of theoretical considerations might give us reason to accept or reject such a sentence, we are concerned with moral theory. If we want to know whether the practice of killing animals for food is right or wrong, then we are concerned with a question in practical ethics.

While this account is not bad as a first approximation, there are many complications.

We might wonder how we know what counts as moral language. The occurrence of words such as ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘cruel’, ‘kind’, ‘arrogant’, ‘generous’, ‘liar’, ‘crook’, ‘hero’, ‘coward’ are often tell-tale signs of moral language.

Travails of the biosphere

Nature is in trouble: biodiversity is under siege, the climate is changing, and the ozone hole has not yet healed. The quality of human life is at risk from new infectious diseases, from pollution of air, food, and water, and from the loss of wildness and connection to nature.

While many people are aware of some or all of these problems, there is a tendency to see them in isolation. Environmental science texts give long lists of maladies, as if each entry were the name of a separate plague that is befalling us. Environmental organizations often specialize in a single issue while ignoring its neighbors. Government officials charged with protecting the environment issue reports and commission studies instead of writing regulations and enforcing laws, while their colleagues in other agencies do everything they can to encourage drilling and digging, as if these activities had no environmental consequences. Even the newspaper reinforces this separation among environmental problems and between environmental and other human concerns. While the science section tells us that fossilfuel- driven climate change threatens both nature and human societies, the business section treats modest increases in the price of oil as if they were the catastrophes. Meanwhile the opinion sections opine about the political fall out of climate change or higher oil prices, rather than educating us about how we should act as citizens. In such social and political circumstances, it is no wonder that it is difficult for us to think clearly about nature's future.

Environmental philosophy is a large subject that involves epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, and history of philosophy, as well as such obviously normative areas as ethics, aesthetics, and political philosophy. The main focus of this book is environmental ethics, but I discuss the normative dimensions of the subject generally, including issues in aesthetics and political philosophy. My hope is that this book will be used in classes in environmental philosophy, but I also hope that it finds a wider audience in courses in ethics proper or in environmental studies. In addition, I hope that it will be read by philosophers, environmental scientists, environmental policy specialists, and others who simply want a reliable and relatively sophisticated introduction to the field.

Over the past twenty-five years I have taught courses on environmental philosophy to thousands of students at six different colleges and universities on three continents. Ultimately, this book is the product of these courses. More proximately, it is based on lectures that I gave at Princeton University in spring, 2005. It is a pleasure to thank Princeton, and particularly the University Center for Human Values, for inviting me to spend the academic year 2004–5 as Laurence R. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching. I am especially grateful for the personal warmth and intellectual vigor of my colleagues, both in the Center and in the Princeton Environmental Institute. I expanded and rewrote the lectures the following summer while living in France.

Moral theories

As we pointed out in the previous chapter, normative ethics is typically divided into two subfields: moral theory and practical ethics. Moral theory is concerned with what sorts of things are good, which acts are right, and what the relations are between the right and the good. Practical ethics is concerned with the evaluation of particular things as good and bad, and various acts or practices as right or wrong. Moral theory and practical ethics have the same subject-matter, though their perspective is different. Moral theory takes the broad view; it is the telescope through which we view the phenomena. Practical ethics views a narrow band of the same terrain in greater detail; it is the microscope through which we examine our moral lives. Don't worry if you can't keep track of the differences. It is difficult to distinguish cleanly between these fields. In this chapter, however, we will focus on moral theory, and in the rest of the book we will primarily be concerned with questions of practical ethics.

Moral theories often have different starting points, and this leads them to ask different questions. Imagine a typical case that might provoke moral reflection. Suppose that John is changing the oil in his car, and pours the used motor oil down the storm drain on the street. One kind of moral theorist will begin her reflection by focusing on the consequences of John's action: we will call her a “consequentialist”.

Nature and the environment

What is the environment? In one sense the answer is obvious. The environment is those special places that we are concerned to protect: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the Lake District in Great Britain. But the environment is more than these special places. It is also Harlem and Brixton, as well as the Upper East Side of Manhattan and the leafy suburbs of Melbourne. It is even the strip malls of Southern California. The environment includes not just the natural environment, but also the built environment.

Indeed, we can even speak of the “social environment.” The term ‘environmentalism’ was coined in 1923, to refer not to the activities of John Muir and the Sierra Club, but to the idea that human behavior is largely a product of the social and physical conditions in which a person lives and develops. This view arose in opposition to the idea that a person's behavior is primarily determined by his or her biological endowment. These environmentalists championed the “nurture” side in the “nature versus nurture” debate that raged in the social sciences for much of the twentieth century. They advocated changing people by changing society, rather than changing society by changing people.

While the scope of the environment is very broad, contemporary environmentalists are especially concerned to protect nature. Often the ideas of nature and the environment are treated as if they were equivalent, but they have quite different origins and histories.

Biocentrism

Many philosophers who endorse an environmental ethic are uneasy with the philosophies of Singer and Regan. They see the central focus on animals as not much better than traditional moralists' obsession with humans. These critics agree that an environmental ethic will require better treatment of animals, but this concern for animals follows from a larger concern for nature. The trouble with Singer and Regan is that they have it the other way around: whatever concern they have for nature comes from their concern about animals. The preeminent value of nature is still not at the center of the big screen where it belongs.

According to the critics, Singer and Regan make the following mistake. They suppose that either sentience or being the subject of a life is a necessary condition for moral considerability (i.e., having intrinsic value in the second sense that we distinguished in 3.5). For biocentrists, sentience and being the subject of a life are only part of the story. The rest of the story is the value of life itself.

The view that all life is morally considerable goes back to the extraordinary Nobel Prize-winning humanitarian, theologian, missionary, organist, and medical doctor, Albert Schweitzer. In his 1923 book, Philosophy of Civilisation, he wrote: “True philosophy must start from the most immediate and comprehensive fact of consciousness: ‘I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live.’”