Download Debating Climate Change David Weisbach

Debating Climate Change
David Weisbach

Walter J. Blum Professor of Law, University of Chicago.
C HAPTER 1: THE P ROBLEM :
Everyday activities such as heating and cooling one’s home, taking a
shower, and driving to work we now know cause harms to other people. These
activities require energy and therefore result in emissions of greenhouse gases,
ultimately causing climate change. The resulting harms will range from mild to
possibly catastrophic. Many people’s livelihood, food supply, or place of living
will be altered or destroyed. Moreover, many of the people causing the harms
are wealthy or live in wealthy nations and many of the future victims will be
poor.
Notwithstanding these harms, and notwithstanding more than 20 years of
international negotiations to establish limits, emissions of greenhouse gases
continue to rise. Since the first major climate treaty, the 1992 Framework
Convention on Climate Change, annual emissions have gone up 50 percent.
They show no sign of abating. Developed nations overall have reduced
emissions but the reductions are modest at best. Many developed countries have
increased rather than reduced their emissions. Moreover, fast developing
economies have rapidly increased their energy use and their emissions have
skyrocketed. Repeated attempts at negotiations have only managed to produce
agreements to agree in the future.
How much should ethics or claims of justice help us evaluate these activities
and help us to decide what to do about climate change? One view is that climate
change is primarily an ethical problem or a problem of justice, and solutions can
be found through philosophical analysis. Climate change seems to raise many
standard questions of justice, such as what are our duties to people who live in
other countries or in the future, what is the just distribution of wealth, how
should we divide global resources, and when it is permissible to harm others.
Answers to these philosophical questions might help us determine the best
climate change policy.
Stephen Gardiner, writing in 2004 in a widely-cited review of the
philosophical literature on climate change, reflected the consensus view of
philosophers on these questions. Not only does philosophy help to frame broad
approaches to answering these questions. It provides an answer with respect to
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specific climate change policies. There is, Gardiner says, “a surprising
convergence of philosophical writers on the subject: they are virtually
unanimous in their conclusion that the developed countries should take the lead
in bearing the costs of climate change, while the less developed countries should
be allowed to increase emissions for the foreseeable future.”1
These philosophers are mistaken. This policy recommendation a bad one,
but that is the least of the problems. The core problem is that ethics and
philosophy more generally is not the right tool for answering the sorts of policy
questions that climate change raises. Climate change is a difficult policy problem
which requires replacing a large global energy infrastructure and requires
coordinating hundreds of nations and thousands of actors, each with their own
self-interest. Philosophy lacks the tools for analyzing this sort of problem, such
as the tools to understand the incentives, the equilibrium effects, the empirics,
the cost structures, and the wide variety of other effects of climate change
policy. Because it is ill-equipped for the task, trying use philosophy to design
climate change policy will, except by sheer happenstance, lead to bad policies.
I will break this argument into two steps. The first step, described in detail
in Chapter 2, argues that there are significant physical and economic constraints
on our policy choices which leave little room for ethical considerations. The
policy recommended by Gardiner, for example, violates these constraints. The
climate cannot be stabilized if less developed countries are allowed to increase
their emissions for the foreseeable future. Emissions in less developed countries
now dominate, and they promise to be the overwhelming source of emissions
over the next several decades. Moreover, delay in controlling emissions in those
countries locks in fossil fuel infrastructure that will be expensive or impossible
to change. As of 2012, there are 1,199 new coal-fired power plants which are
planned to be built or are in construction.2 Almost all of these are in China,
India, and other developing nations. If these plants are built, there is very little
chance that harmful, possibly disastrous, climate change can be stopped. It is a
fantasy to believe that we can stop climate change without participation of the
fast developing countries in the immediate future.
A sober examination of the problem shows that we need to start reducing
emissions and investing in clean energy technology now or in the very near
future and to do so on a global basis. In particular, basic physics and economics
show that emissions must go to zero in the relatively near future, such as in the
next 50 to 100 years. Moreover, the pace of emissions reductions is constrained
by the size of the existing energy infrastructure, which is the source of the vast
majority of emissions and which must be replaced. There is far less choice for
1
2
Gardiner (2004), p 579.
Cite WRI report
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sensible climate policy than is often realized. Theories of justice which violate
these constraints are not useful. Moreover, we do not need a theory of justice
tell us that we need to comply with these constraints: we do not need a theory of
justice to tell us to get out of the way of a moving train.
The second step, detailed in Chapter 3, focuses on the problems of trying to
apply philosophical considerations to design climate change policy. Ethical
considerations and philosophy generally can be helpful in determining values,
but jumping directly from these values to policies without the (massive)
intermediate step of understanding the science of policy design risks wellintended disaster.
There are a large number of potential mistakes. I will highlight two. The
first is what I will call climate change blinders. The virtually unanimous
recommendation of philosophers is an example. The suggested policy of
reducing emissions in developed countries while allowing them to increase in
less-developed countries seems to be designed to achieve two goals: stabilize the
climate and achieve a just distribution of resources or wealth. There is, however,
no reason, philosophical or otherwise, that these two goals need to be pursued
using the same policy lever, a climate change treaty. By trying to redistribute
within a climate change treaty, we may be choosing a way of helping the poor
that is more expensive and less effective than other forms of meeting
distributive obligations. Moreover, by trying to redistribute within a climate
change treaty, we risk failing to achieve core climate change goals. Climate
change blinders prevent us from seeing that other tools are available and that we
should pick the combination of policies that best achieves our goals. Once one
sees that the overall goal is, say, improving the global distribution of resources, it
is clear that ethical arguments are not well suited to the difficult policy analysis
and implementation choices needed to move toward that goal. The same holds
for other goals that ethical considerations might establish.
The other pitfall is violating basic feasibility constraints. An example is the
commonly made proposal to divide the atmosphere into equal portions and to
distribute those portions, in the form of rights to emit carbon dioxide, equally
among the world’s population – creating equal per capita emissions rights. This
seems ethically appealing because it treats all humans equally. Surely a U.S.
citizen should not have the right to emit more than an Indian because of the
mere happenstance of birth.
The same logic, that all humans are equal and have equal rights, applies
equally to all of the world’s resources, however. If the climate is to be divided
equally, why not land, minerals, forests, and all other forms of natural wealth?
Dividing everything equally is, of course, infeasible, which is why few advocate
for such a policy. But dividing the atmosphere equally is just as infeasible given
the size of the immediate wealth transfers it would involve: nations with large
energy infrastructures would have to transfer trillions of dollars to poor nations
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to purchase the right to use their own infrastructures. These transfers would be
orders of magnitude larger than we have seen in the past and would be made in
the context of a climate treaty without the controls currently placed on transfers.
The policy recommendation is utopian in the bad sense of the word. Policy
proposals have to comply with basic feasibility constraints or they are simply idle
chatter.
Solving the problem of climate change is, I will argue, a problem of finding
a way to produce energy that does not result in emissions of carbon dioxide.
Energy is, unfortunately, both the primary source of emissions and the primary
underpinning of wealth. Switching our energy system to clean sources will
require large and global investments in infrastructure, technology, and
engineering. These investments need to be made for our own self-interest.
Unless we start this transformation soon, we may face an unpalatable choice of
being hot or being poor.
Philosophy and claims of justice can help us understand overall goals, such
as how much we should care about people in other nations or how much the
rich should care about the poor. Good philosophy can clarify our thinking and
help prevent moral blind spots. But actual policies must be decided based on
what works to meet these goals, and this question, what works, is a question of
science, economics, politics, and similar disciplines.
I will establish these claims in the following chapters. Chapter 2 discusses
the physical and economic constraints on climate policy and argues that it is in
our own self-interest to begin reducing emissions immediately and globally.
Chapter 3 considers the claims of justice made about climate change. Here, I
consider several preliminary issues to help frame the discussion.
1.1 A potted history of ethics and climate change policy.
To understand the role that ethics should play in climate change policy, it is
helpful to know something of the history of the role that it has played. Ethical
considerations have had a considerable impact on climate change policy. At the
same time, climate change policy has largely failed. Emissions have gone up 50%
since the first major climate agreement, and one possible reason is that the
ethical considerations are not well suited for designing a workable policy.
We can sort the ethical claims made about climate change into three
categories based on the underlying theory of justice. One set of claims is based
on theories of distributive justice. There are many theories of distributive justice
and important differences among them. At their core, however, they are
concerned with the distribution of things of value, such as individual well-being
or particular types of goods (such as goods that are primary or central to well-
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being).3 The theories focus on the unequal distribution of these goods or
perhaps that some individuals are below a minimal acceptable level of these
goods.
In the climate change context, philosophers use theories of distributive
justice to argue that wealthy nations should engage in mitigation efforts, sparing
developing nations this burden.4 This, it is argued, follows from theories of
distributive justice: The people of the world have to jointly contribute to creating
a public good – a clean and usable atmosphere that all can enjoy – and it is
appropriate that those with a greater ability to contribute should contribute
more. It would be unjust to ask someone at a subsistence level to sacrifice when
individuals in wealthy nations can do so far more easily, perhaps by simply
reducing what some have called luxury emissions.5
The second set of theories is based in notions of corrective justice. These
theories argue that justice demands that people not impose harms on others. If
someone harm others, (depending the theory, on purpose, negligently, or
entirely by accident), he must make amends. It is unjust for me to kick you in the
shin or to destroy your property. If I do so, I owe you compensation to make
you whole.
In the climate change context, philosophers use theories of corrective
justice to argue that wealthy nations have an obligation to undertake most if not
all of the mitigation efforts in the near future, sparing developing nations this
burden.6 The reason is that most of the past emissions were from wealthy
nations. These emissions effectively harm people in developing nations (and
everyone else) by destroying the atmosphere. Past emitters have an obligation to
make amends by agreeing to stringent reductions in the future. In the simplest
terms, the theory is the Pottery Barn theory: you broke it, you own it.
The final set of theories are based on equality. These theories argue that all
humans are fundamentally equal and have a right to share certain goods equally
with everyone else. Often these goods are freedom, dignity, opportunity, and
other core human values. Property is rarely if ever shared equally.
In the climate change context, philosophers use this theory to argue that
everyone has equal rights to use the atmosphere. Under one version of the
argument, we should determine a total amount of CO2 that the atmosphere can
safely absorb and give each individual their pro rata share. Individuals currently
emitting more than their share would have to either stop or pay someone
cite
cites
5 Shue.
6 cites
3
4
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emitting less than their share for their rights. Another version would look
backwards, determining the total CO2 that can be absorbed and allocate that
amount equally. If individuals, their parents, or their ancestors have already used
up their allocation, they would not be able to emit any more unless they
purchased the rights from someone else.
All three theories point in the same direction, which is that the majority and
possibly all of the obligation to reduce emissions should be on the wealthy,
developed nations. The quote from Stephen Gardiner above illustrates the
consensus view.
This view is reflected in the ongoing negotiations over a climate change
agreement and in past agreements. The first and most important global climate
change treaty is the Framework Convention on Climate Change, negotiated in
1992.7 Virtually all nations, including the United States, are signatories. The
Framework Convention is, to a great extent, aspirational. It does not impose
specific obligations to reduce emissions. Nevertheless, the first principle adopted
in the framework holds as follows:
The Parties should protect the climate system for the benefit of present
and future generations of humankind, on the basis of equity and in
accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and
respective capabilities. Accordingly, the developed country Parties
should take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse
effects thereof.8
The developed country Parties, listed in Annex I of the Convention, includes
members of the OECD and most of the countries in Eastern Europe and the
former Soviet Union.
The Framework Convention gives reasons for this approach based on both
corrective justice and distributive justice. It notes that “the largest share of
historical and current global emissions of greenhouse gases has originated in
developed countries, that per capita emissions in developing countries are still
relatively low and that the share of global emissions in developing countries will
grow to meet their social and development needs.”9 The Convention also
affirmed that “responses to climate change should be coordinated with social
and economic development in an integrated manner with a view to avoiding
adverse impacts on the latter, taking into full account the legitimate priority
Framework Convention (1992)
Framework Convention (1992), Article 3, paragraph 1.
9 Framework Convention (1992) at
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needs of developing countries for the achievement of sustained economic
growth and the eradication of poverty.”10
The notion of common but differentiated responsibilities was central to
subsequent negotiations. The first negotiation following the Framework
Convention was in Berlin in 1995. It led to an agreement known as the Berlin
Mandate. The Berlin Mandate took a strong view of meaning of common but
differentiated responsibilities. Under the Berlin Mandate, Annex I countries
were to agree to specific reductions in emissions while other countries would
have no obligations whatsoever, an approach which has been called the
dichotomous distinction.11
The dichotomous distinction was formally adopted into a treaty, the 1997
Kyoto Protocol. Under the Kyoto Protocol, Annex I countries (relabeled as
Annex B under the Protocol but largely the same list of countries) agreed to
specific obligations to reduce emissions and timetables for meeting the
obligations. Non-Annex I countries were free to continue to increase emissions
without restriction.
The United States Senate responded (to the Berlin Mandate) by passing a
resolution unconditionally rejecting this approach. Known as the Byrd-Hagel,
the Senate stated:
It is the sense of the Senate that the United States should not be a
signatory to any protocol to, or other agreement . . . which would
mandate new commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas
emissions for the Annex I Parties, unless the protocol or other
agreement also mandates new specific scheduled commitments to limit
or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for Developing Country Parties
within the same compliance period.12
The Byrd-Hagel resolution passed by a vote of 95-0. Every member of the
Senate who voted that day, regardless of their commitment to the environment
and regardless of their party, voted for the resolution. As a result, the Clinton
Administration did not submit the Kyoto Protocol to the Senate for ratification.
Had Vice President Gore been elected, he would not have submitted the
Protocol to the Senate. The Kyoto approach had no chance of being adopted in
the United States, at the time the world’s largest emitter.
Notwithstanding the failure of the United States to ratify the Kyoto
Protocol, the Protocol did eventually receive enough support to go into effect. It
remains the only treaty which limits emissions. Its primary effect has been in the
Framework Convention (1992) at
Aldy and Stavins (2012)
12 Cite.
10
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EU which has enacted policies to reduce emissions, policies which have met
with some success. EU emissions by some measures are down modestly since
the Protocol took effect, and the EU is clearly the world’s leader in climate
change policy.
The initial period for the Kyoto Protocol expired in 2012, but as part of the
negotiations in Durban, South Africa, signatories agreed to a second five-year
commitment period. The Durban negotiations and a handful of meetings prior
to those negotiations, however, represented a dramatic break with the past.
It was relatively clear to most that the Kyoto approach failed. There was no
chance that the United States would agree to it. Canada had ratified the treaty
but eventually dropped out. Australia ____. More centrally, the world has
changed dramatically since 1992 when the common but differentiated
responsibilities approach was formulated and since 1995 when it was interpreted
as establishing a dichotomous distinction. China went from a modest emitter to
the world’s dominant emitter. Countries such as Brazil and India have grown
rapidly and their emissions have correspondingly increased. Most of the global
emissions now come from developing countries and an approach that lets them
continue to increase emissions without restrictions holds no hope of stabilizing
the atmosphere. Moreover, the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are now much
higher, leaving less room for emissions increases by anyone.
The negotiators in Durban, therefore, took a different approach. Durban is
aspirational. It is an agreement to agree. Its aspirations, however, at to ensure the
highest possible mitigation efforts by all Parties.”13 If a future agreement follows
the Durban approach, there will no longer be a sharp distinction between
developed and developing countries. While countries may be allowed to take
different paths to emissions reductions, no country with more than modest
emissions will be exempt from reduction obligations.
Durban represents a break from an approach based on distributive justice
or corrective justice, at least as those theories have been interpreted by the
consensus of philosophers. It is an auspicious time, therefore, to examine the
roles of these theories in climate change. Should we follow the dichotomous
distinction or another approach that attempts to ground the agreement in ethical
theories or should we follow the real politic of the Durban Platform? The world
seems to be moving away from the distributive or corrective justice approach,
but this could be temporary. Chapters 2 and 3 provide my answer: Durban is a
move in the right direction.
13
Cite – Durban, paragraph 7 (emphasis added).
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1.2 The role of philosophy
My basic thesis is that climate policy should follow a pragmatic approach.
We need global emissions reductions. There is no global government, so nations
must agree to reduce emissions whether in a treaty or through coordinated
actions. Nations, therefore, must believe that reducing emissions is in their selfinterest, however that is defined. If a theory of justice demands that a nation act
contrary to its self-interest, it is unlikely to be helpful and may be
counterproductive.
In a sense, this claim about the need for a pragmatic and workable approach
to climate change, is based on philosophy. Pragmatism is a theory of philosophy
so even on the surface level, it is a philosophically-grounded approach, but the
problem with a claim that philosophy is not relevant is deeper. The choice of
what goals we have, as individuals and as nations, and the choice of how we
perceive our national self-interest, will ultimately be based to some extent on
philosophy because these choices involve views about what is to be valued and
how we understand our relationship to others. As John Maynard Keynes said:
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are
right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly
understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who
believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence,
are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.14
I cannot deny this. Ideas shape the course of history.15 A pragmatic approach
based on finding an agreement consistent with the perceived self-interest of
nations is an approach based on philosophy.
My focus is narrower. I focus on the claim that philosophical considerations
can tell us the particular shape of climate treaty, such as the claim made by
Gardiner, and apparently almost all other philosophers that justice demands that
less developed countries should be allowed to increase emissions for the
foreseeable future. I focus on the claims from distributive justice, corrective
justice, and equality mentioned above. It is these arguments that I believe are
wrong, not that philosophy has a role to play in helping us understand goals and
ends.
1.3 Obligations to people in other nations
A central problem in thinking about ethical obligations with respect to
climate change is that anything we do, continuing to emit or reducing emissions,
mostly affects people who live in other nations. Climate change is truly a global
14
15
Cite – The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1935) Chapter 24, p.383.
Attributed to Keynes, as quoted in The Peter Plan: A Proposal for Survival, (1976) by Laurence Peter. 97.
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problem. Someone who denies that we have obligations to people who live in
other nations might argue that ethics cannot possibly have anything to say about
climate change.16 That is, any claim that we have an ethical obligation to reduce
emissions is implicitly cosmopolitan.
The extent of one’s obligations to people who live in other nations is the
subject of a long and contested philosophical literature. Some believe that there
is no such obligation,17 others that it is limited to standard international law
norms,18 and others that we must treat people in other nations exactly as we treat
people in our own nation.19 I do not intend to address that literature here.
Instead, I will assume that our ethical obligations extend to all people regardless
of where they live. At the same time, and as will be discussed in Chapter 3,
nations are the primary actors in the international arena, and to a great extent
they act to promote their perceived self-interest, so methods of fulfilling
obligations to others have to work within this basic structure. While I believe we
do have obligations to people wherever they live, I make this assumption here
without defending it because it creates a bias against the arguments I make here.
That is, by assuming a cosmopolitan view, I assume the strongest possible case
against my arguments.
1.4 A Perfect Moral storm
My co-author and debating partner, Stephen Gardiner, wrote a significant
book on climate change, A Perfect Moral Storm.20 The arguments in the book are
complex and detailed. At the risk of doing great injustice to him, the core claim,
if it can be reduce to a single sentence, is that we are not living up to our moral
duties regarding climate change. Much of the book devoted to understanding
why not and why it is so hard to do so. To a great extent, arguments here not
directly addressed at this claim. We both believe that we need significant changes
to our climate change policies (or lack thereof), and that we are failing to do
what is necessary. Instead, my focus is on claims made by philosophers more
generally (and by Gardiner in other writings).
Nevertheless, there is some tension between the approach I take and the
approach in A Perfect Moral Storm. I believe that it is in our own self-interest to
act to reduce emissions, to do so on a global basis, and to begin immediately. We
See Nagel.
Nagel
18 Rawls
19 Singer
20 Gardiner (2011)
16
17
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are behaving in a way that is contrary to our own self-interest and need to
change our behavior. We do not need ethics to tell us what to do.
Suppose we live around a plot of land that everyone can use without charge.
Because it is free to use, everyone throws their garbage there, and we expect that
soon the land will be unusable. We can say that throwing the garbage on the land
is immoral because it hurts other users of the land or because some throw in
more than others. I would instead say that we are acting against our self-interest
by failing to get together to jointly govern the resource wisely. Perhaps, one
might say, that ethical arguments help us achieve what is in our self-interest, but
in that case, the ethical arguments are merely instrumental to self-interest and it
is simply a pragmatic question what combination of policies – ethical arguments,
a better assignment of property rights, or something else – best helps us achieve
our self-interest. Self-interest tells us that we need to manage the resource wisely.
Perhaps there is little difference in how one frames it if the end result is the
same: we stop throwing our garbage on the common land. If this is the case,
there is little tension between the approach I take and that in A Perfect Moral
Storm. Framing the problem primarily as a moral or ethical problem, however,
might limit the tools use to solve the problem, so I suspect that there is real
tension between the approach taken here and the approach in A Perfect Moral
Storm. My core disagreement, however, is with those philosophers who claim
that we must, because of ethical considerations, agree to a climate policy that
takes a particular shape or form that is not determined by self-interest.
A more difficult objection that Gardiner makes to the argument here is that
perhaps only modest reductions are in our own self-interest and more
substantial reductions need to be based on moral concern for others. We cannot
negotiate with future people and with other species so the story of the common
plot of land is not analogous.21 So far, I have elided these issues by being vague
about what I mean by “our” self-interest. If our self-interest does not include a
concern for people living in the future, then perhaps it is only ethics that tells us
that we should care about helping them.
People, however, care about their children and grandchildren. Perhaps this
is motivated by ethics but I suspect it is something like self-interest. If we
include the interests of our children and grandchildren at the negotiating table,
this brings us to all current people and something like people living up to 100
years from now. If we include one or two more generations before out
descendants are too far distant, that pushes out the time horizon further. Even if
our self-interest extended only to the next 100 to 150 years, we would want to
21
Gardiner (2011), p. 11.
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do a lot about climate change. As I will discuss in Chapter 2, we will face many
of the problems from climate change in the not-too-distant future.
The real force of the criticism is the long-dated future: we might do more
about climate change because of the harms to the long-distant future than we
would if we only cared about the next 100 years. Moreover, perhaps the only
reason to help people living in say 250 years or 500 years is ethical.
There is a response but it is somewhat technical and the details will have to
wait until Chapter 3. The core of the argument is that the claim suffers from
climate change blinders, just like the other ethical arguments about climate
change. Take whatever amount people care about, or should care about, the
distant future as fixed and call what we leave or should leave for that time period
our legacy. If climate change is going to reduce our legacy, we will want to
increase it so that we meet our desired goals. Like with distribution across
countries, increasing the amount given to the future should be done in the best
way possible. Whether this is best done through emissions reductions or some
other means, or some combination, is a pure policy problem, not a problem of
ethics.
1.5 Plan of the book
We face a serious global problem. There is some time and some room for
maneuvering but in the long run, the constraints on the problem will bind. We
need to move toward zero emissions while supplying the energy needs of
everyone, the developed world and, one hopes, the soon-to-be-developed world.
The key problems seem to be ones of finding appropriate technology and
finding a way to achieve universal or near universal agreement on emissions
reductions strategies. The rest of the book will go through the argument made
above in more detail.
The target audience is informed and curious readers but not PhD
philosophers. I am looking for a common core of claims about climate change
but will avoid formal arguments and technical language. Citations to the formal
literature in philosophy will be limited. Apologies where needed. My arguments
also rely to some extent on the economics of climate change, and I will similarly
avoid the technical language used by economists.
One issue that I will not discuss here is the validity of the basic science. If
one is certain that there is no such thing as human-caused climate change, there
is little to discuss. This seems like an entirely implausible position to take given
how uncertain we are about almost everything. I am not a scientist, however,
and others are far better equipped to discuss the nuances of the science. There
are numerous well-written sources one can turn to. If you are certain the science
is a hoax, then you can stop reading here.
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For the overwhelming majority of us who are not 100 percent sure, the
most that we can do is put odds on the possibilities. There is some possibility
that the scientists are wrong and that global warming will not happen or that it
will happen but its effects will be small and benign. There is also some
possibility that the scientists are right and that global warming will happen as
expected, and also a possibility that it will happen quickly and will be terrible.
Different people will put different odds on these possibilities, but other
than the true experts, the scientists who spend their lives studying the issues, we
are all in the same boat, skeptics and others alike. We have to decide what to do
when faced with basic uncertainties and information that is technical and
difficult to understand. The most we can do is put odds on the outcomes. While
skeptics and non-skeptics may put different odds on the possibilities, at the end
of the day, this is about the most we can do given our best attempt to inform
ourselves.
At this point, I think the decision is not all that hard. If we do nothing and
the skeptics are wrong, we will have made a very bad decision. We could end up
in a world that is far less hospitable than our current world. That train that
looked like it wasn’t moving is actually bearing down fast and our car, with our
family aboard, is stuck on the tracks. If, alternatively, we act to reduce emissions
and the scientists are wrong, we will have spent a portion of GDP moving to
clean energy. We would be worse off by a handful of years – we might, for
example, reach a GDP in the year 2100 that would otherwise have reached by
the year 2090 or 2080. Which side of the bet do you want? What would the odds
have to be to convince you that the right choice is not to act and how sure are
you that those odds are correct? The conservative course of action is to be prudent.
We could, of course, wait for the scientists to collect more data and develop
better models. Why not find out more before committing? Prudence dictates
caution. The problem is that we cannot remove greenhouse gases from the
atmosphere, at least using any known or foreseeable technology. A decision to
wait, at least to wait for very long, is effectively a decision not to act. It is a
decision to take a bet that the scientists are wrong. Let’s hope they are wrong,
but let’s not stake our future on it.
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CHAPTER 2: THE BOUNDS ON ETHICS
Any application of ethics to climate change must be consistent with the
core physical and economic constraints facing the actors. Ethical
recommendations outside of these constraints are not helpful for setting polices.
For example, an ethical requirement that we both stabilize carbon
concentrations in the atmosphere and allow developing countries to increase
their emissions without limit – the approach taken in the Kyoto Protocol and
recommended by most philosophers – violates basic physics. It is not possible to
achieve both goals. An ethical requirement that we do both does not help
inform policy. It is a fantasy rather than advice.
A requirement that ethics be realistic should not be without controversy.
Some may believe that we should determine what ought to be done entirely
separately from what is or will be done. While ethics in a vacuum may be an
important exercise, the goal here is to consider whether or how ethics can
inform climate change policy. To inform policy, the relevant ethical
considerations need to fall within basic constraints. It is of course, a balance.
One might want an ethics that is aspirational but not one that is entirely
infeasible. Different people may have different views on where the best line is.
In this chapter I will argue that there are relatively tight bounds on our
actions and, therefore, on our ethics. In particular, under almost any plausible
assumptions about climate change, we need to start reducing emissions now, on
a global basis, and reduce emissions to near zero in the not-too distant future.
Ethical prescriptions to the contrary, such as a claim that emissions reductions
should not be global, should be disregarded.
This conclusion is robust to broad range of assumptions about the science
and the economics of climate change, and it does not rely on contested ethical
views about long-term sustainability, duties to future generations, and so forth.
The conclusion follows solely from the self-interest of people who are alive
today, their children and grandchildren.22 This of course does not mean we will
22 Adding views about sustainability and similar values only strengthen the conclusion, so by ignoring these,
I consider the weakest case.
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follow the prescription – and indeed we appear to be headed in the opposite
direction – only that we would be better off if we did so.
While I believe the conclusion is consistent with plausible assumptions
about the science and economics of climate change, I will also highlight
assumptions one can make under which the claim does not hold. This allows us
to test the strength of the proposition and lets us know what one has to believe
to come to a different conclusion.
There are five main points which together establish the conclusion.





Emissions must eventually be reduced to zero or near zero. This is because
temperatures keep on increasing as long as emissions are positive, and because
there is a limit to tolerable temperature increases.
The limit is not too far off in time. While there is great uncertainty about the
best limit on temperature increases, given the existing concentrations of
greenhouse gases and the current rate of emissions, most mid-range targets will
be reached by the middle or end of this century, during the lives of our children
and grandchildren, not distant generations.
Near zero emissions in the not-too-distant future means we have to start
reducing emissions now. Reducing emissions to zero or near zero means
replacing the global energy system, which is vast. Costs will be far lower the
sooner we start.
Reductions have to be global. All three above points apply to all countries; zero
emissions means nobody can emit. Developing countries are installing a vast
new fossil fuel infrastructure. If these installations continue, it will make
moving toward zero emissions difficult or impossible. Developing countries
have to start reducing emissions now just as much as developed countries do.
Uncertainty about the effects of climate change strengthens these conclusions
because the uncertainty is not symmetric: if we do nothing or act too slowly,
the bad cases are far more bad than the good cases are good.
These conclusions sound stark, almost extreme, particularly compared to the
pace of global climate change negotiations which have failed to contain
emissions, not to speak of reducing them to zero. The discussion below will
show that they are not based on unsupported apocalyptic visions of extreme
environmentalism. They are based on plausible and conservative assumptions.
2.1. Emissions must go to zero
We can think of greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide (CO2) and a number of
other gases – as acting like a blanket. They cover the Earth and keep the warmth
in, heating up the surface where we live. The higher the concentration of
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the thicker the blanket, and the warmer we
are. Until the Industrial Revolution, humans had little impact on the climate.
15
Debating Climate Change, Chapter _
Average temperatures varied somewhat over the centuries, but within the last
10,000 years – since the beginning of agricultural civilization, they have been a
relatively constant 15°. Anthropogenic greenhouse gases, mostly CO2, threaten
to increase global average temperatures anywhere from around 2° to as much as
6° or even more. These are global averages. Many places, such as northern land
masses, may heat up far more, and other places, such as the area over the ocean,
may heat up less.
There are three key features of the CO2 blanket which lead to the
conclusion that we must eventually reduce emissions to zero. The first is that the
CO2 in the atmosphere is effectively permanent. The CO2 we emit today will
continue to influence the climate for tens or even hundreds of thousands of
years.23 There is, moreover, no way to remove it, at least using any technology
that we have now or that is foreseeable.24
The second feature is that temperatures continue to go up when we emit
more. We can think of it simply as increasing the thickness of the blanket. The
relationship between emissions and temperature increases is the core subject of
climate science, and is, notwithstanding massive efforts, is complex and subject
to great uncertainty. We know that additional CO2 will lead to additional
warming but establishing the extent of the additional warming turns out to be
difficult because of the complexity of the climate system.
While the amount of warming we will get is uncertain, there is a simple way
to understand the core relationship between emissions and temperatures.
Temperatures go up linearly with the total amount of CO2 emitted in the past.
All we need to know is the cumulative emissions of carbon to know what the
likely temperature increase will be.
Figure 1 illustrates. The x-axis shows cumulative emissions of carbon, the
sum of all emissions in the past, regardless of when they occurred and without
adjusting for time.25 The y-axis shows the expected increase in global average
Archer, The Long Thaw
Because of the second law of thermodynamics, removing atmospheric CO2 requires energy and energy is
the very source of emissions. It might be possible to capture CO2 before it enters the atmosphere, through
carbon capture and storage at the flue of power plants. The advantage of this technique is that emissions
are concentrated at the flue, reducing the energy requirements. When I refer to emissions, I mean CO2 that
has entered the atmosphere.
25 Figure 1 shows the relationship between expected temperature increases and cumulative emissions of
carbon, not carbon dioxide. The greenhouse effect comes from the carbon, not the oxygen in CO2. To
translate this to CO2, we simply multiply the numbers on the x-axis by 3.67, which is how much more CO2
weighs than carbon. To have a less than 50/50 chance of keeping temperature increases less than 2°, we
must emit less than about 4 trillion tons of CO2.
23
24
16
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temperatures. Figure 1 is drawn so that the central black line reflects the current
best estimate of how sensitive temperatures are to emissions, a value known as
climate sensitivity. Using this estimate, there is a 50/50 chance of the specified
temperature increases for a given level of cumulative emissions. For example, for
cumulative emissions of 1 trillion tons of carbon (or around 3.7 trillion tons of
carbon dioxide, which weighs more), we have a 50/50 chance of a 2°
temperature increase. For cumulative emission of 1.5 trillion tons, there is a
50/50 chance of a 3° temperature increase.
Expected temperature increase (°C )
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
0
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
Cumulative Emissions (in trillion tons of carbon)
Figure 1: Temperature as a function of cumulative emissions
As noted, we do not know how much temperatures will increase for a given
level of emissions, a value known as the climate sensitivity. We can estimate a
likely range, but within that range, there is great uncertainty. The light gray lines
reflect the IPCC’s range of uncertainty regarding climate sensitivity.26 If the
climate is relatively insensitive (the bottom gray line), we can emit 1.5 trillion
tons of carbon before we high a 50/50 chance of a 2° temperature increase. If
26 The climate could be even more sensitive or less sensitive than the gray lines – these lines represent the
95/5 degrees of confidence.
17
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Debating Climate Change, Chapter _
the upper-gray line represents the true climate sensitivity, we can emit only about
800 billion tons before increasing temperatures by 2°.
Figure 1 points to a key conclusion. Whatever limit we set on temperature
increases, emissions have to go to zero to meet this target. For example, if the
target is 2°, we can only emit 1 trillion tons of carbon. Any more than that
would lead to a likely temperature increase greater than 2°. The same holds for
any other limit we set. A 4° limit means we can emit at most 2 trillion tons.
Said another way, on human timescales, the atmosphere is a nonrenewable
resource. For a given temperature increase, it can hold a fixed amount of carbon
and no more. The atmosphere is not like agricultural land, which can be
replenished, or fisheries, which if left alone, regrow. It is a strictly limited
resource. As a result, unless we decide to let temperatures increase indefinitely,
emissions have to go zero. This is true even given uncertainty about the climate
sensitivity. Regardless of which line we are on – the upper or lower gray line or
somewhere in the middle, emissions have to go to zero to stop temperature
increases.
The conclusion summarized at the beginning of this chapter was slightly
different than the above statement. The conclusion was that we emissions need
only be near zero rather than zero. The reason for this hedge is that there is
likely some natural floor of emissions. Nitrous oxide, for example, is a potent
greenhouse and it comes from disturbing the soil in agriculture. It is not clear
whether we will ever have a way of eliminating these emissions while still feeding
ourselves. If there is a floor on emissions, the total cap still holds, but we have to
leave room for emissions at that floor for a long period of time. That is,
emissions can be near zero rather than zero as long as we leave room in our
cumulative budget.27 Eventually even that room will run out, but if we leave
sufficient room, this would be in the very distant future.
The third feature of climate change which ensures that we need to
eventually have near zero emissions is that the harms from temperature increases
will go up faster than temperatures. The expected harms from temperature
increases are, if anything, even more uncertain than the expected temperature
increases from emissions. We do not, however, have to parse precisely the level
of harm for a given temperature increase. We are relatively certain that marginal
harms from temperature increases increase rapidly and this fact is what ensures
that emissions must be reduced to zero or near zero.
27 Eventually, if emissions stay at the floor, we will exceed whatever cap is set, so the hope has to be that
with enough time, the floor can be reduced. For a discussion of emissions floors in the context of
cumulative emissions, see Bowerman, Frame, Huntingford, Lowe and Allen (2011).
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In particular, with a 1° temperature increase, harms are likely modest. We
have already experienced just under a 1° increase since the late-19th century.
There have been some harms but it has not been extreme. Economic growth has
continued. At the other end of the spectrum, a temperature increase of 5° or 6°
would almost certainly be catastrophic. The last time temperatures were 6°
warmer was around 55 million years ago. There was no ice anywhere on Earth
and sea levels were __ degrees higher. [fill in]. Many ecosystems that depend on
the current climate would collapse. To get a sense of the magnitude of a 6°
temperature increase, the last ice age, when much of North America and Europe
were covered with mile high glaciers, was only 6° colder than today. The level of
disruption from such a change is unimaginable. There is no possibility that
policies that would lead to this sort of warming are desirable.
There is great uncertainty about the types of harms we would face from a 5°
or 6° temperature increase. Nobody has ever lived in such a world. We do not
know what it would be like and how well humans could adapt. I used “will”
above, however, because it is certain that the problems will increase quickly as
temperatures go up. There is a fixed limit to tolerable temperature increases.
These facts – that temperatures continue to increase as we emit more and
that the harms from temperature increases will go up rapidly as temperature
increases go up – mean that we eventually have to reduce emissions to zero or
near zero. This is true even if the temperature turns out to be relatively
insensitive to greenhouse gases and even if the harms turn out to be on the
lower end of the possibilities. The only thing that varies with these factors is the
total allowable emissions before we must stop.
This conclusion, which is based on the simplest facts about climate change,
calls for far stronger climate action than any treaty or treaty proposal that I am
aware of. While many call for target temperature limits, none explicitly state that
emissions must be zero. Instead, they tend to aim for limits on the atmospheric
concentration of CO2 by a given date, such as limiting CO2 to 450 parts per
million in 2050. These sorts of targets must be viewed as interim targets.
Stabilization of temperatures requires zero emissions.
Before moving on, we should consider how the conclusion might be wrong.
One set of possibilities is that the assumptions I made about temperature
increases and harms are wrong. If temperatures do not continue to increase with
emissions or if the harms from temperature increases stop going up as
temperatures increase more, we might want to continue to have some emissions
of CO2. In either case, the harms from additional emissions might be small and
the benefits in terms of avoiding some of the costs of reducing emissions all the
way to zero might be large.
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Debating Climate Change, Chapter _
Both assumptions, however, are dubious. Temperatures might not continue
to increase with emissions if the Earth has some sort of built-in stabilizers, such
as an increase in clouds that reflect incoming sunlight. Unfortunately, the greater
risk seems to be in the opposite direction, which is that enough emissions might
destabilize temperatures, leading to a rapid acceleration of warming, such as
through the release of methane currently frozen in permafrost. While the
scientists could be wrong, the current view is that the uncertainty about
temperature increases is asymmetric: there is a possibility that climate sensitivity
is very low but the possibility of no increase regardless of the concentrations of
greenhouse gases is vanishingly small. The possibility of run-away temperature
increases, however, while small, is real.
As for harms, there seems to be little argument that harms would not
become very large at extreme temperature increases. Indeed, at extreme
temperatures, many biological processes stop, essentially guaranteeing very bad
harms.28 It could be the case that we can tolerate higher temperature increases
than one might have guessed, but at some point, there is no doubt that the
harms will increase quickly.
An alternative way out of the box is to hope for technology that allows us
to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. We would continue to emit and then
subsequently remove the emissions through a CO2 capture technology, perhaps
storing the CO2 underground. The problem with this approach is that it runs
counter to the second law of thermodynamics. It will take more energy to
capture the dispersed CO2 than we get from burning fossil fuels in the first
place, and all of this additional energy would have to be from clean sources or
the capture technology will just make things worse. This possibility, clean
capture technology, cannot be ruled out – perhaps something like algae getting
clean energy from sunlight can be used. To take this possibility into account, we
should think of zero emissions to mean net zero – emissions minus capture has
to be zero.
Finally, perhaps the harms from emissions can be avoided through geoengineering, which is engaging in some sort of manipulation of the atmosphere
to prevent temperature increases. We might, for example, put mirrors in space
around the Earth to reflect incoming sunlight, reducing the warming the Earth
receives from the Sun. The possibility of geo-engineering is beyond my scope,
but the general view is that it is a last resort because of numerous potentially
very bad problems with it. Views vary on how likely we are to need it and
28
Cite paper on wet bulb temperatures and heat stress.
20
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therefore, the extent to which we should be researching it. If one is confident
that some form of geo-engineering will be a workable technology and that its
costs will be lower than reducing emissions to zero, then emissions do not have
to go to zero. I do not, however, see how one could be confident of this.
2.2
Emissions must be zero soon
Reducing emissions to zero might not be that big a problem if we had
hundreds of years to do so. Fossil fuels are nonrenewable so they will run out in
the future regardless. The problem is that we must reduce emissions to zero in
the near future. We cannot put a precise date on this because the assumptions
needed to establish a date are speculative. Nevertheless, under a broad range of
assumptions, emissions must be at zero sometime this century and perhaps as
early as the middle of this century. As I will discuss in section 2.3 below, dates
around the middle to end of this century for zero emissions are very soon once
one understands the engineering challenge.
How soon emissions must be near zero depends on what temperature
increases we are willing to tolerate. This is difficult to determine because there is
massive uncertainty about the harms from temperature increases and the costs
of reductions. No human has ever lived in a world where temperatures are on
average, say, 3° or 4° warmer than they are today, so we have little ability to
predict what such a world would be like. Moreover, there is little precedent for
as fast an increase in temperatures as we may see. Picking a precise number is
not possible. In addition, as discussed, there is substantial uncertainty about the
temperature increase we can expect for any given level of emissions, so picking a
precise level of emissions is even more difficult.
Notwithstanding the vast uncertainties, I am not aware of anyone who
believes that the right target is greater than 4°. It seems likely that the harm from
temperature increases will start to go up rapidly at some point and almost
certainly by the time we get to 4°. Studies of the possible effects of a 4°
temperature change show the possibility that agricultural systems may collapse in
warm areas, for example.29 Moreover, while we do not know the costs of
reducing emissions to zero or near zero, we can put some bounds on the cost
because we know the current price of clean energy and the amount that is
needed.
29
Cite papers from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (2011).
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Debating Climate Change, Chapter _
Current global agreements call for a temperature limit of 2°.30 This may be
unrealistic (as explained in section 2.3 below) and perhaps a more realistic,
although perhaps unfortunate, goal is 2.5° or 3°. Targets in this range, however,
are not very far away. Consider Figure 1 again. Suppose our target is 2°, we use
the central estimate of climate sensitivity, and we accept policies that give us
only a 50% chance of meeting this target. This means that we can emit at most
one trillion tons of carbon. We have already emitted about 560 billion tons of
carbon and are emitting about 9 billion tons per year.31 Even if the pace of
emissions does not increase (and it has been increasing rapidly), we would hit the
trillion ton limit sometime between 2050 and 2060. If emissions rates increase,
as they are likely to do without a change in policies, we will hit it even sooner
with estimates showing that we hit the trillion ton limit sometime in the 2040’s.32
This timescale is based on accepting a 50/50 chance of exceeding a 2°
target. If we want to have higher odds of staying under the target, there is less
time still. For example, if we want to have a 75% chance of staying under 2°, we
can only emit 750 billion tons. Even with no further increases we hit this limit in
about 20 years, which in terms of climate policy and the necessary emissions
reductions, is tomorrow.
The timescales are correspondingly longer for higher temperature limits,
lower climate sensitivity, and worse odds of meeting the target. The emissions
limit for 3°, using the central estimate of climate sensitivity, is 1.5 trillion tons.
At current emissions levels, we would have about 100 years before reaching this
limit, assuming no increases in emissions, contrary to recent history.
One way to continue to emit for a long time is to space out emissions so
that we use our fixed budget of emissions more slowly. The numbers above
calculated target dates by assuming emissions continue at current levels until
they stopped. If we reduce emissions over time, those dates stretch out. For
example, if we adopt an emission reductions policy with the goal of keeping
cumulative emissions below 1 trillion tons, the date for zero emissions would
not be 2060. If we reduce emissions rapidly, we could perhaps stretch out the
time until we must have zero emissions for a reasonable period. The precise date
would depend on the policies chosen. The key lesson, however, is unaffected,
which is because of the high levels of past emissions and the high levels of
current emissions, the problem is imminent, not distant. Stretching out the time
until zero emissions means reducing emissions now; not stretching out this date
Cite.
CDIAC, http://cdiac.ornl.gov/CO2_Emission/timeseries/global
32 http://trillionthtonne.org/
30
31
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means drastically reducing emissions in the near future. There is no way around
the immediacy of the problem.
Climate change is often portrayed as a very long term problem, but our
children and grandchildren will be alive near the end of the century and into the
next, the time when emissions must be reduced to zero. While climate change is
a long-term problem because it will continue to affect people centuries in the
future, it is also a surprisingly near-term problem. It is about people alive today,
their children, and their grandchildren.
Once again, we should consider what assumptions I’ve made in reaching
this conclusion and how they might be wrong. I’ve made assumptions about the
harms from temperature changes (and in section 2.1, about the climate
sensitivity) and the costs of reducing emissions to zero. These are surely wrong
given the vast uncertainties in these estimates, but I tried to use the conservative
(best) case so that if the assumptions are wrong, it means that we have to act
even sooner than I have suggested. It is possible that the right target is a much
higher temperature, say 4° or even 5°, but this seems unlikely. It also might be
the case that eliminating emissions is very expensive but we can estimate the
costs of replacing most of the existing infrastructure so we can put some bounds
on the problem.
We can find assumptions that extend the time until emissions have to be
reduced to zero – if we have low climate sensitivity, low harms from
temperature increases, and high costs of emissions reductions perhaps the time
until we must have zero emissions is further away. If, however, we are willing to
consider the possibility of getting very lucky, we must consider the possibility of
being very unlucky. The very uncertainty that might allow one to hope we have a
reasonable amount of time also forces us to recognize the possibility that time is
even shorter than I have estimated.
2.3
We need to start reducing emissions now.
So far, we know that emissions have to be reduced to zero and that the
timescale for this is probably sometime this century. To some extent, the third
point, that we need to start reducing emissions now, is clear once one sees the
closeness of the endpoint. If, at current emissions rates, we need to be at zero
by, say, 2075, we do not have very long to get there. Going full steam until 2074
and cold turkey in 2075 is unlikely to be the best approach. Instead, more
gradual changes are likely best because they will lower overall costs and push
back the time when we have to have zero emissions. In fact, once one examines
the details of transition to zero emissions, it is clear that the pace of reduction is
tightly constrained and this is largely true even if one uses the most optimistic
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Debating Climate Change, Chapter _
assumptions about when we have to reduce emissions to zero. I develop this
argument in detail here.
Climate change is an energy problem
The place to start is with the source of emissions. Determining the source
of emissions is more difficult than it might seem at first because there are a
number of gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect. The most important is
CO2 but methane and nitrous oxide are also greenhouse gases. Nitrous oxide is
in the soil and is released when the soil is disturbed in agriculture. Methane is
released from livestock, landfills, sometimes from oil extraction (if the methane
is not flared or captured) and from leakage from natural gas pipelines. Different
gases have different effects, both in terms of the strength of the warming that
they cause and for how long. Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for a very
long time – I will treat it as permanent. Methane creates a strong warming effect
but only stays in the atmosphere for 12 years. Comparing methane to carbon
dioxide requires a value judgment on how we much we care about the harms
from strong short-term warming compared to weaker permanent effects.
Nitrous oxide stays in the atmosphere for over 100 years and has strong
warming effects during that time.
The discussion below will only consider CO2, for two reasons. The first is
that shorter-lived gases are not as important for the long-term stabilization of
temperatures. They do not cause permanent effects, so the choices we make
about them may be quite different than for CO2. The second reason is that the
base level of emissions of nitrous oxide and, to a lesser extent, methane may be
hard to reduce. Emissions of these gases primarily arise from agriculture and it is
not clear that there are any available, or foreseeable, agricultural methods which
eliminate these emissions. These emissions might be thought of as a floor and
CO2 emissions have to leave room for this floor.
There are two primary sources of CO2 emissions: fossil fuels and
deforestation.33 The overwhelming source of CO2 emissions is fossil fuels.34
Fossil fuels consist of carbon molecules (plus many other things) stored
underground. When we burn fossil fuels to create energy to use for
transportation, heat, electricity, or commercial or industrial production, we take
the carbon that had been underground and put it in the atmosphere.
Discuss cement.
Deforestation is about 15% of total missions (counting methane and nitrous oxide using the IPCC
measure of relative weights.
33
34
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Solving the problem of climate change means not doing this, not taking
carbon from underground and putting it in the atmosphere. It might be possible
to prevent the carbon from entering the atmosphere by capturing it when we
burn it and then storing it underground. So far this technology has proven
expensive and implementing it at scale appears to face possibly insurmountable
problems because of the difficulties of transporting the CO2 and of finding safe
places to store it. Absent feasible capture technology, solving the problem of
climate change means eliminating the use of fossil fuels.
Unfortunately, eliminating or even substantially reducing the use of fossil
fuels is going to be difficult. The reason is that energy is central to the economy
and fossil fuels are the central source of energy. Energy’s sheer pervasiveness
and reliability makes it easy to ignore, but almost everything we do relies on
energy. We take it for granted that our homes are heated, cooled, and lit, and we
can get to work, take hot showers, refrigerate our food, have concrete and steel
to use for construction, and can obtain products from far away. All of these
activities rely on energy. It is not too far from the truth to say that the Industrial
Revolution and the basis of modern living arose from new ways to transform
energy into useful products.
Figure 2 shows the tight connection between wealth and energy. The
horizontal axis shows per capita income for 167 countries. The vertical axis
shows energy use per person, using a standard unit known as oil equivalents
(effectively, it takes energy from other sources such as coal and natural gas and
converts it to the amount of oil with that same energy). Both scales are
logarithmic.
The graph shows what we might call the iron law of wealth: increased
wealth means increased energy use. While there is some dispersion at the low
end (we can be poor with different amounts of energy use), and some rich
countries manage to be particularly inefficient, nobody escapes the ironclad
relationship between energy and wealth. No nation, regardless of its political
system, culture, or fantastic environmental values, has discovered a way to be
wealthy without energy use. There is nobody in the bottom right hand corner.
25
Debating Climate Change, Chapter _
US
Kg OE/person
5000
Germany
China,
India
500
50
100
1000
10000
100000
GDP per capita
Figure 2. Income v. energy use (log scales) 2007. Source: author’s calculation based on
World Bank data
The bad news is that almost all of this energy comes from fossil fuels.
Globally, 87% of energy comes from fossil fuels.35 Nuclear energy is about 5%
and hydroelectric energy is 6.4%. Only 1.6% of energy comes from renewable
sources, such as wind or solar.
The central dilemma of climate change is straightforward: emissions have to
go to zero while energy use has to remain high. We have to find a way to replace
87% of the global energy supply with clean energy. This is not just a developed
world problem. If developing countries are to have a standard of living the same
as the developed world, something we should hope for, everyone will need
carbon-free sources of energy.
Energy transitions are slow
This problem – replacing 87% of the global energy supply with clean energy
– is the reason we have to start now. It involves a massive change in
infrastructure. It is not going to happen fast. Even a 100 year horizon, which is
about what we get with optimistic assumptions about the climate and the harms
from climate change, is not that long in terms of the needed transformation. If
35
Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy, June 2012, p. 41.
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we are to meet reasonable emissions targets, there is little choice but to start
now.
Unfortunately, many strong advocates of action on climate change fail to
recognize the problem and indeed, seem to view the needed transformation as
relatively easy if only we had the willpower. For example, Al Gore, in a 2008
address on climate change stated as follows:
Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our
electricity from renewal energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within
10 years.36
Gore is not alone. ___.
This is sheer fantasy. Actually it is worse than fantasy because it perpetuates
the myth that the necessary energy transition can be accomplished in a short
time period. It gives hope to those who want to wait. If we can switch to clean
energy in just 10 years, there is less need to act now given that we may have as
long as 100 years to make the transformation. Gore claimed that he was
purposefully being ambitious, expanding the set of possibilities and challenging
us. Perhaps a bit of realism is in order.
We can get a sense of the size of the problem by understanding the size of
the installed fossil fuel system. In the United States alone, there is $3.4 trillion of
fossil fuel infrastructure which will have to be replaced, not counting short-lived
assets such as vehicles and residential furnaces.37 Power generation ($1.6 trillion)
and extraction ($1.2 trillion) are by far the largest components of this
infrastructure.38 In 2008 in the US alone there were 6,413 powerplants,
generating 1,075 gigawatts of power, 525,000 crude oil wells, 51,000 miles of
crude oil pipelines, and 116,000 miles of refined product pipelines.39 There were
478,562 gas wells, 20,215 gas gathers, 500 gas processors, 319,208 miles of gas
pipeline, and 1.2 million miles of LNG distribution pipelines. All of this has to be
replaced. The replacement costs will be higher than the $3.4 trillion value of this
infrastructure because renewable energy is more expensive than fossil fuels. And
Address at D.A.R. Constitution Hall: A Generational Challenge to Repower America
BEA estimates.
38 This number is limited to durable assets because assets with short lives such as automobiles and home
furnaces or water heaters will have to be replaced in any event. It does not include the value of transmission
lines because they can be used for electricity that comes from renewables so they do not have to be
replaced (although they will have to be upgraded, so ignoring them underestimates costs). Combined, this
means I will ignore much of the transportation system because vehicles have short lives, home and
commercial heating and cooling, and the transmission grid because this can be used for renewables.
39 Source – NIPP – get exact cite.
36
37
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the United States, although large, is just one country. The global figures are likely
to be four or five times as large.
Vaclav Smil, one of the foremost experts on energy put the point as
follows:
[T]urning around the world’s fossil-fuel-based energy system is truly a
gargantuan task. That system now has an annual throughput of more
than 7 billion metric tons of hard coal and lignite, about 4 billion
metric tons of crude oil and more than 3 trillion cubic meters of natural
gas. This adds up to 14 trillion watts of power. And its infrastructure –
coal mines, oil and gas fields, refineries, pipelines, trains, trucks,
tankers, filling stations, power plants, transformers, transmission and
distribution lines, and hundreds of millions of gasoline, kerosene,
diesel, and fuel oil engines – constitutes the costliest and most
extensive set of installations, networks, and machines that the world
has ever built, one that has taken generations and tens of trillions of
dollars to put in place.40
To get a sense of how long the process of replacing the fossil fuel
infrastructure will take, we can look to the history of energy transitions. The two
major energy technology transitions so far have been the transition from
traditional biomass to coal and steam and the transition from coal and steam to
oil, gas, and electricity. The process of transition was slow. It took about 130
years from the first use of coal until it became the dominant source and it took
about 80 years for other energy sources – petroleum and gas – to displace coal.
Lest one think that energy transitions now can be done more quickly than in the
past, since 1975 the relative energy sources in the economy have been essentially
stable. The pace of transition, if anything, might be slower in the future than it
was in the past.41 The system is more built up, there are more people that will be
displaced, and people are more dependent on energy so they are less tolerant of
disruptions. The history of energy transitions may not tell us what the future will
bring, but there is little reason given this history to be optimistic.
The accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, which advises businesses on
climate change issues, put the change into perspective. They estimate that if we
start now, we need to cut the carbon intensity of energy use by 5.1% every year
from now until 2050 just to stay under the 50/50 chance of the 2° limit in that
Cite Energy Transitions.
Smil, V. (2010). Energy Transitions. Santa Barbara, CA, Praeger. provides a general review of the (slow)
pace of energy transitions.
40
41
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year.42 (Note that this does not lead to zero emissions in 2050, so it falls short of
stabilization.) This decline has not been seen even for a single year since the
mid-20th century when records of this sort were first kept. We have to maintain
this unprecedented pace every year for the next four decades, just to avoid going
above the 2° line in 2050, not to stabilize the atmosphere. A claim that we can
go faster is simply not connected to reality.
We have to start now
The massive size of the transition also means we have to start now. The
fossil fuel infrastructure has a very long life (power plants for example, can be
used for between 50 and 100 years) and it gradually wears out. Replacing this
infrastructure as it wears out will be far less expensive than continuing to build
new fossil fuel infrastructure than either scrapping it or trying to retrofit it. The
longer we wait and the more fossil fuel infrastructure we allow to be built, the
more expensive the inevitable transition will be.
The International Energy Agency estimated that 80% of the cumulative
CO2 emissions between 2009 and 2035 will come from existing capital stock.43
We have power stations, building, factories, refineries, vehicles, furnaces, and the
like that exist now or are under construction. Unless we scrap usable
infrastructure, these facilities will emit almost all of the allowable emissions
under the 1 trillion ton cap. That is, if we simply replace this infrastructure as it
wears out with clean energy sources, we still will have used up almost all of the
global carbon budget.
Delay only allows more infrastructure to be built, locking in more
emissions. The same estimate showed that if we delay emissions reductions until
just 2015, around 45% of the global fossil fuel capacity would have to be retired
early or refurbished. According to the IEA, for every $1 of investment in the
power sector that we do not make before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need
to be spent later to compensate for the higher emissions.
In short, if we are to reduce emissions to zero this century, there is little
choice but to begin the transition now. Delay only makes it more expensive and
more difficult.
Once again, before we move on, we should ask where the central
weaknesses are in this argument. I can only think of one. Delaying emissions
reductions might lower costs rather than raise them if technology prices go
42
43
Cite: pwc, Too late for two degrees? Low carbon economy index 2012.
IEA, World Energy Outlook 2011 Factsheet.
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Debating Climate Change, Chapter _
down sufficiently fast.44 If we are going to invent table-top cold fusion in 2030,
there is no need to reduce emissions now, and any expenditures on reducing
now would be wasted. The best policy would, under this argument, be to
increase research in clean energy and hold off on actual emissions reductions.
While table-top cold fusion is unlikely, it could be the case that installing solar
PV now will be more expensive than in the future and that the cost savings from
waiting outweigh the additional costs of scrapping fossil fuel infrastructure.
The problem with this argument is that we cannot know how fast clean
energy costs will go down. If they do not go down quickly enough, delay could
increase costs because emissions would then have to be reduced at a very fast
pace. Moreover, given how near in time we need to reduce emissions to zero
and the massive size of the installed base, there is little time for costs to go
down. The history of energy transitions shows that even good new technologies
take time to penetrate the market.
2.4. Everyone must start now
To review the bidding so far, temperatures keep on increasing as long as we
keep on emitting carbon dioxide. Harms from temperature increases will start to
go up quickly once we get above modest level. These two facts combine to mean
that we eventually have to reduce emissions to zero. Given the level of past
emissions and the current pace of emissions, we are on a schedule to hit
plausible temperature targets around the middle or perhaps the end of this
century. Under optimistic assumptions, this deadline might be extended into the
early part of the next century. And finally, if emissions are to go to zero on this
timescale, there is little choice to start now because of the size of the needed
transition in our energy infrastructure.
All of these arguments apply globally and, therefore, to developing as well
as developed countries. Zero emissions mean zero global emissions, so all
countries, developed and developing countries alike, will have to stop emitting
CO2 in the not-too-distant future.
The consensus of philosophers quoted in Chapter 1 would allow developing
countries to increase emissions without limit, a conclusion clearly at odds with
the necessary emissions reductions. A weaker version of the argument might
allow developing countries to increase emissions in the medium run, say for the
next 50 years, before they too have to reduce their emissions, eventually to zero.
A delay of this sort would allow developing countries to achieve a reasonable
44
Cite options literature
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level of wealth and allow them the same sort of access to the atmosphere the
developed countries had as they grew. This version, while better, is unrealistic as
well.
The key reason is that fossil fuel infrastructure is durable. Installing new
fossil fuel infrastructure effectively commits a country to the emissions from
that infrastructure for its lifetime, which can easily be 50 or even 100 years.
Increasing the size of the fossil fuel infrastructure anywhere makes it more
difficult to reach reasonable climate goals. If the increase in fossil infrastructure
is large enough – and the planned increases in China and India seem to be – they
may make it impossible to reach reasonable climate goals. It is, of course,
possible to build a new coal-fired power plant and then shut it down after 10
years even though it has 40 or 50 years of remaining use, but it is extremely
unlikely this would happen. How do leaders of a country explain that they are
shutting down a plant that was just built and that is providing inexpensive and
reliable energy to people who need it? New energy infrastructure instead needs
to be clean.
To be sure, there is going to be some new fossil fuel infrastructure,
particularly in developing nations. If we – people or nations concerned about
climate change – tell India, China, or other fast-developing nations to scrap
plans for new fossil fuel energy which they need for their economies to grow, we
will simply be ignored. Feasibility concerns run both ways. The more such
infrastructure is installed, however, the more difficult it will be to reduce
emissions and to hold temperature increases to modest levels.
To get a sense of the need to control emissions in developing countries, we
can focus on coal, which is the most important fuel for climate change policy
because it is the dirtiest and the most abundant. We can make similar estimates
for oil, which is mostly used for transportation.
Emissions from burning coal are the single large source of emissions,
making up 43% of emissions from energy. It is the most polluting of the three
fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, and petroleum), with about twice the emissions per
unit of energy than gas. It is used primarily to generate electricity. It is massively
abundant and generally easy to mine. There is enough coal at current rates of use
to last for well over 100 years. Reserves of coal potentially hold up to 3.5 trillion
tons of carbon.45 If these reserves are all burned, the implied temperature
IPCC Mitigation, page 265 – 12,800 GtCO2 = 3.5 trillion tons of C. This is a high estimate. The WEC
2010 report lists proven coal reserves at 860 billion tons. Kharecha and Hansen (2008), (using the 2008
report) estimate that this is about half of the IP CC estimate but I don’t understand why. Need to check
calculations.
45
31
Debating Climate Change, Chapter _
increase, (using a climate sensitivity of 3°), is 7° above than today’s temperatures
(which already represent almost a 1° temperature increase). Even if only half of
those reserves are recovered and burned, coal alone would produce a
temperature increase of 3.5°. If only a quarter of the total coal were burned and
75% of it were left in the ground, we would still greatly exceed the 2° limit (prior
temperature increases of 0.8° plus 1.75° more from new emissions from coal).
Climate stabilization requires that most of the world’s remaining coal remain in
the ground.46
The US is the world’s second largest emitter after China. Among the
world’s top ten emitters, it has the highest per-capita emissions.47 To stabilize the
climate, emissions in the US have to go down drastically. The largest source of
emissions in the US is from petroleum, most of which is used for transportation.
We drive big vehicles a long way. Coal makes up about 34% of US emissions
from fossil fuel.48 Essentially all US emissions from coal come from electricity
production; a small amount is used directly by industry.
US emissions from coal are declining dramatically. They peaked in 2007 and
are down 14% since then. The reason has little or nothing to do with climate
polices. 49 Instead the decline is due to the new supplies of natural gas which can
substitute for coal in electricity production. The US coal problem is to a great
extent one of winding down existing plants, not one of stopping the building
new infrastructure.50
The problem of new infrastructure and growth in emissions comes largely
from China and to a lesser extent India. The growth of Chinese emissions is
simply staggering, and the projections even more so. The problem with
46 Alternatively, it can be burned and the resulting emissions captured and stored underground. This
technology is currently expensive and might not be feasible at scale because of the problems of transporting
the captured CO2 and ensuring that it is stored permanently (disaster ensues if the stored carbon dioxide
escapes).
47 There are a number of relatively small countries with higher emissions per capita, but none of these
countries also has substantial total emissions.
48 EIA 2011 Annual Energy Review p. 303.
49 Climate change regulation through the Clean Air Act may also be contributing to the decline of coal,
although the effects of these regulations are likely to be felt in the future. There are 36 proposed coal-fired
plants but it is not clear whether they will receive approval due to new environmental constraints. See WRI,
Global Coal Risk Assessment: Data Analysis and Market Research, Working Paper, November 2012.
50 Should not be read as excusing US emissions. Very high emissions from transportation and difficult to
reduce these. Also very high per capita emissions. These two facts will make the necessary reductions in the
US painful.
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understanding Chinese emissions is finding the right comparison to get a sense
of the scale. 51 None suffice.
Chinese emissions have grown with their economy, more than tripling since
1990.52 More than 80% of China’s emissions come from coal. China’s emissions
from coal alone are greater than the total emissions in the US, the emissions
from entire set of OECD countries in Europe, or those of any other nation in
the world. China’s share of coal production is roughly four times Saudi Arabia’s
share of oil, yet it now imports coal from Indonesia, Australia, and Vietnam
because its domestic production cannot meet demand.
Dieter Helm, a climate change scholar at Oxford, estimated the proposed
additions to China’s coal infrastructure. He estimates that under the current
expansion plans for this decade China will be adding two additional large coal
power plants per week.53 Each year China adds new capacity equal to the entire
installed electricity capacity of the British electricity system. China’s energy is far
more reliant in coal than Britain’s, so this addition electricity capacity will
produce more than double all of Britain’s emissions each year.
The World Resources Institute did an inventory of proposed coal-fired
power plants (i.e., plants where construction has not yet begun but permits have
been applied for).54 They identified 1,199 proposed plants with a total installed
capacity of 1,400 gigawatts. Of these 560 gigawatts are in China, or 40% of the
global total.55
Helm produced similar estimates for India. About 70% of India’s electricity
is from coal. About one-quarter of India’s population is without regular access
to electricity and in part to supply these people with power, and India plans a
30% increase in its use of coal by 2016. This amounts to about one new power
plant each week.
Combined, China and India could be adding three new large coal-fired
power plants each week for the coming decade. This makes up 77% of the
proposed new coal power capacity for the entire world.56 The implications for
climate change cannot be overstated. These power plants will have useful lives
The following [2] paragraphs crib liberally from Deiter Helm, The Carbon Crunch (2012), pp. 40-48.
IES CO2 Highlights 2012 (Excel spreadsheet). Emissions from fossil fuels in 1990 were 2,244 gigatons,
1,831 of which were from coal. In 2010, they were 7,259 gigatons, 5,988 from coal.
53 Helm,p. 42
54 WRI, cite.
55 Alternative calculation: emissions from China annual coal burn in, say 2015 x years = cum committed
emissions from Chinese fossil infrastructure. Or same thing from projected increase
56 Source. WRI.
51
52
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of 50 years or more and would essentially lock in emissions for that time period.
It is not realistic to believe both that developing countries should be able to
install this sort of fossil fuel infrastructure over the coming decades and that we
can keep global temperature increases to modest levels. An ethical claim that
developing nations have a right to install this sort of coal infrastructure is an
admission that climate change should not be contained because both cannot
happen.
2.5
Uncertainty mostly strengthens these conclusions
The conclusions above were stated with without hedges for the vast
uncertainty surrounding the effects of climate change. Climate change science
and climate change policy are plagued by uncertainty. We do not know how
much temperatures will go up with emissions. The possible range for climate
sensitivity goes from mild to catastrophic. We know even less about the harms
of temperature increases. Major issues such as the extent and speed of the
melting of Greenland’s and the Antarctic ice sheets defy understanding. And we
do not know the costs of reducing emissions. It is not wrong to say that the core
problem of climate change is one of making choices in the face of deep
uncertainty.
To develop relatively firm conclusions, I tried to consider the best and the
worse cases given what we know and see what conclusions follow. If, for
example, even under the best case (i.e., low climate sensitivity) temperatures
continue to increase with emissions and that at some point the resulting harms
will be intolerable, we know that emissions must eventually be reduced to zero.
It is important, however, to understand whether and how our uncertainty
about what the effects of climate change will be might affect these conclusions.
Perhaps if we really do not know what is going to happen, we should be cautious
about spending the substantial resources needed to transform our currently wellfunctioning energy system. We have plenty of other problems to solve in the
meantime.
The problem of decision making under deep uncertainty goes well beyond
my scope. One needs to think about how to build sufficient flexibility into the
system that it can react to new information while at the same time sufficient
predictability and direction that bad outcomes can be avoided. One might want
to take precautions to avoid bad outcomes but at the same time take precautions
to prevent wasting resources on a problem that may not occur.
Without getting too far into these problems, we can say two things about
climate change. The first is that the uncertainties are not symmetric. The
possible (but unknown) downsides are almost unbounded. If we do nothing and
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get unlucky – temperatures are highly sensitive to carbon dioxide, the harms
from temperature increases turn out to be worse than expected, and so forth –
the costs may be very high. The possible downsides from reducing emissions
too much, however, are bounded. We can estimate the cost of replacing our
fossil infrastructure with clean energy assuming the worst case, highest possible
replacement costs, so we know, within some bounds, what the worst case is for
doing too much.57 That is, if we do too little and we get unlucky – climate
change is far worse than expected, the effects will be very bad. If we do too
much and climate change turns out not to be much of a problem, the effects are
limited. Moreover, the fossil fuels we will have kept in the ground are still there
to be used.
Uncertainty, therefore, should make us more cautious than otherwise. The
core uncertainty is that climate change may be far worse than we expect, so we
should be willing to spend more to avoid these very bad cases. That is, the
conclusions above, which did not consider uncertain but very bad outcomes,
were (intentionally) conservative. If anything, we should be doing more than was
suggested.
Second, as mentioned, there is uncertainty about the costs of clean energy
technology. We might invent much less expensive energy sources or, perhaps,
ways of capturing atmospheric CO2 and storing it in a safe place, so if we spend
resources today to reduce emissions, those expenditures will have been wasted.
We would have sunk resources into a useless project. This type of uncertainty
does not suggest we should not reduce emissions to zero. Instead, it suggests
that we might make us want to wait to start the reductions. We should not sink
costs into a project when waiting might reduce those costs or reveal more
information about the best way to meet our goals.
This uncertainty, however, is counter-balanced by uncertainty about harms.
Carbon emissions are effectively permanent, so they are effectively sunk as well.
We have the choice of two sunk costs: the costs of clean energy infrastructure or
the costs of atmospheric CO2. Waiting might reveal that either one is cheaper or
more expensive than we expect. Whether these offsetting uncertainties make us
want to speed up or slow down reductions is hard to say.58
The problem of deep uncertainty deserves far more attention than I can
give it here. I do not, however, think a resolution of the problem would alter the
57
58
Cite papers estimating these costs.
Real options literature.
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Debating Climate Change, Chapter _
conclusions except possibly to strengthen them, to argue for faster reductions in
emissions than I have suggested.
2.6
Conclusions
We face tight bounds on our choices regarding climate change. Given the
level of past emissions and likely limits on temperature increases, we have used
up most of the flexibility that we might have once had. Keeping temperatures
below reasonable limits requires transforming our energy system, a process
which is likely to be slow because of the sheer size of the system. If we start now
and go as quickly as possible, we will still have a hard time keeping temperature
increases to a reasonable level. This applies on a global basis. Emissions have to
be reduced to zero or near zero in the not too distant future which means that
all countries have to reduce. One of the keys is installing clean energy in the
developing world in the first place rather than locking in a fossil fuel
infrastructure which will then either lead to excessive temperature increases or
have to be scrapped.
Ethical prescriptions to the contrary must be discarded. In particular, the
consensus of philosophers that developing countries should be able to increase
emissions without limit should be discarded. It is not possible to limit climate
change will following this prescription. Even a milder approach which allows
developing countries to continue on their current path for a fixed time period, is
perilous because of the vast new fossil fuel infrastructure that will be installed in
the near future.
36
CHAPTER 3: THE ROLE OF CLAIMS OF JUSTICE IN CLIMATE CHANGE POLICY
In this chapter, I consider three major types of theories of justice and the
role they should play in making decisions about climate change. The three
classes of theories are theories of distributive justice, theories of corrective
justice, and theories based on equality. While the specifics are different, they all
suffer from the same two types of faults: they suffer from climate change
blinders and they fail basic tests of feasibility.59
Each of these classes of theories has a long and complex history, often
dating back thousands of years. Within each class, there are disagreements and
nuances. Many well-worked out theories may take elements from different
classes: a theory may draw from views about equality and notions of distributive
justice. And the three classes of theories I consider here are not exhaustive, by
any means. Even a short survey of the theories of justice which might apply to
climate change would be well beyond the scope of this book.
At the risk of doing great injustice to these theories of justice, I will try to
focus on core elements of each class of theories, and particularly those elements
that have been used by philosophers to make arguments about climate change.
This means that I will, of necessity, not describe any theory of justice in detail.
Advocates of particular theories may complain that I have left out important
elements.
Without discussing each and every theory, I cannot claim that theories of
justice have little to say about climate change policy. There could always be some
theory or element of a theory which does.60 It is impossible to rule out the
possibility that there is a theory of justice that I have not considered and which
does help us determine how to address climate change. The best I can say is that
this invites a response explaining why a particular theory or element of a theory
plausibly changes my core conclusions.
In chapter 1, I noted that I generally take a cosmopolitan stance: I assume
that people and nations have duties to people who live in other nations. This
59
60
Much of the material in this chapter is taken from Posner and Weisbach (2010).
Commentators criticized Posner and Weisbach (2010) on this basis.
Debating Climate Change, Chapter _
obligation, moreover, goes beyond charitable impulses and is a matter of justice.
This assumption rules out the claim that theories of justice have nothing to say
about climate change because there is no obligation to care about people who
live elsewhere. I take the cosmopolitan view both because I believe it to be
correct and because doing so makes my task more difficult. Nuances about
exactly what our obligations are to people who live in other nations may affect
the conclusions. In particular, to the extent that these nuances weaken the
overall cosmopolitan approach I take, they would strengthen my conclusions.
3.1 Distributive Justice
Theories of distributive justice are concerned with the distribution of
benefits and burdens in a society. Versions of the theory can focus solely on the
bottom – eliminating poverty or other forms of need – or on differences
between the top and the bottom – reducing inequality – or some mix. Different
versions of the theory use a wide variety of measures of well-being, focusing on
particular goods or a set of goods, objective well-being or subjective well-being.
They vary in the extent to which luck and desert should be taken into account.
They vary about the extent to which distributive justice applies globally or just
within a nation. They differ on whether the obligations to reduce poverty or
inequality apply to individuals or to governments.
While acknowledging the important differences, for our purposes, we can
crudely lump theories of distributive justice together as theories focused on the
distribution of a measure of well-being. The theories argue that actions or
policies that help the badly-off because they are badly off, however defined, are
required as a matter of justice.61
Theories of distributive justice are distinct from theories based on
corrective justice, explored in part 3.2. Corrective justice focuses on correcting
past wrongs. Distributive justice is forward looking.62 They look at the existing
distribution of well-being and suggest actions which improve it even if the
existing distribution did not arise because of a past wrong.
Distributive justice theories are also distinct from theories of equality,
explored in section 3.3. Theories of equality demand equality for its own sake.
Distributive justice focuses on a measure of well-being and do not necessarily
require equality (except insofar as it improves the measure of well-being).
For a brief overview of this vast subject, see Lamont and Favor (2008)
Distributive justice might lead to punishment for past wrongs in ways that look similar to corrective
justice, but it does only to create incentives for future behavior, not solely to make up for past wrongs.
61
62
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Distributive justice arguments have been applied in the climate change
context to conclude that wealthy nations should bear most or all of the costs of
reducing emissions. Wealthy nations have the capacity to pay for emissions
reductions with far fewer, perhaps even minor, adjustments to lifestyles. Asking
poor nations to reduce or not increase emissions condemns them to staying
poor and ignores the vastly unequal distribution of resources. How can we ask
300 million rural poor in India to continue to live without electric power when
Americans are choosing to live in massive air-conditioned homes in Phoenix,
driving SUVs through the suburban sprawl to play golf on grass in the dessert or
swim in a heated pool? Any reasonably fair approach to climate change would
ask that the wealthy sacrifice first and sacrifice more.
The argument was put forcefully by Professor Henry Shue, (who uses
methane from ruminants as his example, but the point is completely general):
The central point about equity is that it is not equitable to ask some
people to surrender necessities so that other people can retain luxuries.
It would be unfair to the point of being outrageous to ask that some
(poor) people spend more on better feed for their ruminants in order
to reduce methane emissions so that other (affluent) people do not
have to pay more for steak from less crowded feedlots in order to
reduce their methane and nitrous oxide emissions, even if less crowded
feedlots for fattening luxury beef for the affluent would cost
considerably more than a better quality of feed for maintaining the
subsistence herds of the poor.63
Note that Shue is proposing to increase the overall cost of emissions
reductions in the name of justice. The feedlot changes for luxury beef, he
assumes, cost considerably more than the feed changes for the subsistence
ruminants. Shue would increase the overall cost of emissions reductions to
promote equity. This is a fairly general property of theories of distributive
justice. A core feature is that they demand a balance of efficiency considerations,
such as minimizing the costs of reducing emissions, with equity concerns.
Note also that if distributive justice is to have any bite in this context, it has
to mean that wealthy countries agree to obligations to reduce emissions or to
pay for others to reduce emissions that go beyond their perceived self-interest
(including their self-interesting in pursuing altruistic goals). Otherwise, wealthy
63 Shue (1993). Shue unfortunately injects concerns about animal cruelty into the discussion, arguably
confounding the appeal of the pure distributive argument with the appeal of concerns about the treatment
of animals. Shue (1999) pp. 537-540, Singer (2002) pp. __, Garvey (2008) pp. 81-83, Harris (2010) pp. 131132 provide similar arguments.
39
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nations would have an incentive to engage in the prescribed behavior regardless,
and we do not need distributive justice to tell them to behavior that way.
More specifically, as discussed in Chapter 2, emissions must eventually be
reduced to zero to avoid intolerable harms from climate change. Said another
way, the benefits costs of emissions reductions exceed the costs. This means that
a treaty in which everyone agrees to reductions can make everyone better off,
relative to not having reductions. Moreover, it might even be in their selfinterest for wealthy nations to do a large portion of the initial reductions
because, say, starting early reduces the present value cost of their expenditures
on reductions or because wealthy nations are better off when poor nations
experience economic growth. A treaty based on distributive justice would have
to go beyond this to shift additional costs to wealthy countries and away from
poor countries, so that the wealthy countries no longer perceive themselves to
be better off because of the treaty. While Shue is not explicit about this, I take
him and others making similar arguments to be assuming that distributive justice
demands that wealthy nations make commitments that go beyond their
perceived self-interest.
Distributive justice arguments have been used not just by philosophers.
During every climate negotiation so far, developing nations have argued that
they should not have to reduce their emissions or face significant restrictions on
increases in emissions because they are poor. They argue that at least for the
foreseeable future, developed nations should take on obligations to reduce
emissions and developing nations should be unconstrained.
The major climate agreements to date reflect this approach. The first major
climate treaty, the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change, introduced
the notion of common but differentiated responsibilities, under which
developed nations – the Annex I nations – agreed to take on greater obligations
than poor or middle-income nations.64 One of the justifications for this
approach was distributive. The Convention noted that “responses to climate
change should be coordinated with social and economic development in an
integrated manner with a view to avoiding adverse impacts on the latter, taking
into full account the legitimate priority needs of developing countries for the
achievement of sustained economic growth and the eradication of poverty.”65
64 Annex I does not perfectly distinguish between wealthy and middle-income nations. Some middleincome nations, such as Russia and many of the eastern European nations are in Annex I while South
Korea is not. This partly reflects historical contingencies, the list of Annex I nations as determined in 1992,
and party reflects concerns other than distributive concerns.
65 Framework Convention (1992), (unnumbered paragraph in preamble)
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As noted in Chapter 1, the approach was continued and solidified in the
1995 Berlin Mandate and ultimately in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. These
agreements were strongly distributive. Only developed nations had obligations
to reduce emissions; other nations were free to emit as much as they want under
an approach sometimes called the dichotomous distinction.
The argument that climate change policy should be based on distributive
concerns is unconvincing. It suffers from the problems of climate change
blinders and of feasibility. To the extent that existing treaties and ongoing
negotiations are based on distributive concerns, their failure illustrates the
problems.
Before considering why, it is helpful to consider different ways that climate
policy can be redistributive. There are three basic mechanisms. In no particular
order, one is that the policy can be more aggressive than otherwise on the theory
that poor nations are likely to suffer more from climate change than rich
nations, so a more aggressive policy helps the poor. Another is that poor nations
can be exempt from (or subject to less restrictive) obligations to reduce
emissions so that their energy costs are lower than the energy costs in wealthy
nations. Finally, obligations to reduce emissions can be assigned purely on other
grounds, such as cost minimization, but wealthy nations can transfer cash or
other valuable items to poor nations to help them meet their obligations.
All three mechanisms are invoked in climate negotiations. Poor nations that
are likely to suffer greatly from climate change, such as small island states whose
very existence is threatened, argue for large reductions in emissions. The
principle of common but differentiated responsibilities imposes greater
obligations on wealthy nations than on poor nations. And existing treaties as
well as most proposals include a transfer of funds or technology to poor nations
to help them adapt to climate change or to help them reduce emissions.
Although all three approaches are considered, the core approach in climate
negotiations and the approach recommended by philosophers is to shift which
nations have obligations to reduce emissions because of distributive concerns.
The Kyoto Protocol, for example, only imposes obligations to reduce emissions
on developed nations. Adaptation funds, so far, are relatively modest. And there
seems to be no hope that to help poor nations, the world will agree to reduce
emissions more than it otherwise needs to. An agreement that does even the
minimal amount seems almost out of reach. Therefore, my central target is the
Kyoto approach, as endorsed by philosophers, but the core logic applies to all
three.
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Climate change blinders
Suppose we agree that based on an obligation to help the poor or to reduce
inequality, people living in wealthy countries need to transfer another $100x to
(poor) people living a poor country. They might send the cash to the
governments of poor countries but this may not be the best course of action.
There may be little reason to believe that those governments will spend the cash
in a way that will help their citizens given that in many cases at least one possible
reason for their poverty is the actions of their own government. Wealthy
countries may provide cash conditional on certain behaviors or only send cash
to places where it is likely to be well spent.66 They may alternatively send the
governments or poor people themselves various goods or services that will help
them. For example, they may provide free insecticide-treated mosquito nets,
vaccines, medicines, schools and education supply, technology, or any number
of other things. Wealthy countries might also change their trade, patent, farming
or other policies in ways that hurt themselves but help poor countries by $100x.
Or wealthy countries might agree as part of a climate treaty to bear $100x more
of the burden of emissions reductions than they would otherwise agree to.
The question is whether distributive justice demands that this last action be
taken, that a climate treaty be the mechanism for transferring the $100x to the
poor instead of any of the other actions? One could of course argue that all of
these actions should be taken cumulatively so that even more is done to help the
poor, but I’ve assumed that we’ve used our distributive justice theory to
conclude that the obligation wealthy nations owe to the poor is $100x.
Transferring more than that is not required by the theory of distributive justice.
The answer is, I believe, straightforward: distributive justice demands that
wealthy countries choose the option or set of options that provides the most
bang for the buck. If the amount poor people are to receive is $100x, we should
want wealthy countries to choose the option or combination of options that
costs the least for that amount of transfer.
Theories of distributive justice care about some measure of well-being.
Given a choice between, say, changing trade policies, cash transfers, mosquito
nets, and designing a climate change treaty, distributive justice demands a choice
based on which one or which combination best promotes well-being. Choosing
a less effective policy reduces overall well-being by reducing available resources.
If there are two policies, one which costs $130x and one which costs $120x, and
both transfer $100x to the poor, distributive justice demands that we choose the
66
E.g., the Millennium Challenge Corporation.
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policy that costs $120x as this best promotes overall well-being. By choosing the
policy that costs only $120x, there is an extra $10x of resources that can be
shared.
At this point, the work of philosophers and of theories of distributive
justice is done. The choice of which policies or combination of policies is most
effective is a matter of economics, political science, international relations, and
related fields that try to measure and describe the effectiveness of policies.
Theories of justice are not going to tell us whether reducing subsidies for
farmers in wealthy countries is a better way of helping the poor than setting
emissions reduction goals with distributive effects in mind, or whether debt
forgiveness, patent policy, technology transfers, mosquito nets, vaccines, or
simply leaving poor countries alone is better still.67
Theories that argue that we must design a climate policy based on
distributive justice give a different and wrong answer. They require that wealthy
nations make transfers to poor nations within the context of climate policy
rather than considering how best to make transfers. They completely fail to
consider alternatives. They operate with climate change blinders. They see a
problem in front of us to be solved – climate change – and assume that the
solution must take distributive considerations into account.
One response is that some theories of distributive justice demand a just
distribution of a particular good, so we cannot simply substitute for a
redistributive climate treaty the combination of a non-distributive climate treaty
and a policy that transfers a different good to the less-well-off. Giving someone
money may not substitute for the unequal distribution of a good which is central
to the idea of justice or to human dignity.
We can see this type of claim in Henry Shue’s argument about the
obligation to contribute to the creation of a public good.68 He proposes that
“[a]mong a number of parties, all of whom are bound to contribute to some
common endeavor, the parties who have the most resources normally should
contribute the most to the endeavor.” One may view this as a standard
distributive argument. The welfare costs of funding the endeavor to a rich
person are lower than for a poor person. If this is the case, the arguments above
67 [previously in text – keep or delete?] While this argument has a whiff of the separation of means and
ends, I do not mean this in a broad sense. If the means are inappropriate, they should be ruled out so ethics
does have something to say about means. Moreover, the ends may be complex and involve more than just
money. Inequality may arise in many domains. But within the normal and acceptable range of policy choices
– say choosing between cash transfers, in-kind transfers, trade policies, and climate change policies – we
need careful empirical analysis and should choose based on effectiveness.
68 Shue (date).
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apply. We should care about the outcome of the overall set of policies, not the
creation of this common endeavor taken in isolation.
Nevertheless some have read the Shue’s argument to require the funding
for each particular good to take distributive concerns into account with no
possibility of trading off across policies.69 It is hard to see why we would want to
take this approach if, in the end, it reduces the resources available to the poor.
There would have to be some particular justification for refusing to allow tradeoffs among policies.
Outside of the climate change context, arguments against trading off one
good for another are common. Rawls, for example, argued for concern about
primary goods. Sen and Nussbaum argue that the poor are due
incommensurable capabilities.70 Many people have the intuition that we cannot
take away someone’s dignity or self-respect and then simply compensate them
with cash. Under many theories of justice, we are not free to remove someone’s
arm and then hand them a check. Certain goods are incommensurable.71 Perhaps
climate change is like this. We cannot simply enter into a climate treaty based on
efficiency considerations or raw self-interest and then make it up elsewhere,
with, say, a change in farming or patent policies.
We do not have to address the merits of these sorts of arguments to see
that they do not apply here. What we are talking about when we consider a
redistributive climate treaty is, in the end, just money, not some sort of
fundamental and incommensurable good, such as dignity. A treaty that imposes
larger emissions reductions obligations on wealthy nations than on poor nations
(as compared to a treaty that looked for the lowest cost reductions) is effectively
just a way of keeping energy prices low in poor nations. Energy systems have to
become clean and with current technology, this will mean energy will cost more.
Which energy systems must become clean and when is simply a matter of who
bears this monetary cost and that is all it means.
The better version of the incommensurability argument is that if climate
policies are insufficiently aggressive at reducing emissions, the harms cannot be
compensated. People’s ways of life might be altered due to the resulting climate
change. Coastal areas might be flooded, forcing migration. Ocean acidification
See Frisch (2012).
Cites. See also Wolff and De-Shalit (2007).
71 I tend not to believe the incommensurability arguments because they are counter-factual. We make these
sorts of trade-offs all the time. Nevertheless, I assume they are good arguments here because even if they
are good arguments, they do not apply in this context so one does not need to address the more difficult
issue of if goods are ever incommensurable and if so, which ones.
69
70
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and increases in water temperatures may force people reliant on the oceans to
find other ways of living. Weather patterns may change so that agricultural
productivity may decline in many areas again forcing people to change how they
live. These changes may be incommensurable with offsetting transfers. Giving
tens of millions of Bangladeshis money to relocate from their now flooded
homes may not meet the demands of justice.
If one really believes the incommensurability argument, that the ways of
living that will be lost because of climate change are inviolate, then the rest of
the world must do whatever is necessary to prevent these harms. For example, if
necessary, justice would demand an immediate cessation of all emissions,
globally.
Perhaps some believe that this is what is required because of the potential
loss of incommensurable goods. Few advocate for such policies, however, and
those that do are ignored. The strong claims of incommensurability have little
purchase.
Instead, suppose that we have reached, by one method or another, a target
for cumulative emissions such as one trillion tons of carbon. The distributive
justice argument at this point no longer concerns potentially incommensurable
goods because the target sets the expected amount of harm we will bear. The
argument is merely about who should bear the costs of reaching that target. It is
just about money. We can and should, and may even be required to, find the
least cost ways of meeting our obligations.
Feasibility.
Chapter 2 already discussed the feasibility problems with attempting to
achieve distributive goals through an approach that exempts a large portion of
the world from obligations to reduce emissions. It not possible to stabilize the
climate with emissions controls everywhere. Regardless of the justice-related
merits of this policy, it is not feasible as policy to stabilize the climate.
Allowing substantial delays by developing countries may allow us to
eventually stabilize the climate but at either higher levels of CO2 concentrations
or at much higher costs. This sort of policy might be feasible.72 Achieving
distributive goals almost always involves costs, so perhaps these costs are worth
absorbing.
72 I say might be feasible because wealthy nations, particularly the United States, worry that such policies
will be self-defeating as energy-intensive industry will simply move to countries without emissions controls.
This worry might prevent those nations from entering into such a treaty in the first place. They may,
however, be mechanisms to alleviate these worries, such as what are called border-tax adjustments. See
Elliott et al (2013) for a discussion.
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The room for this sort of flexibility, however, is limited. If poor nations
install new fossil fuel infrastructure, unless they are willing to scrap it in the
future, an unlikely possibility, they will have locked in emissions. Given the
limited room under the carbon budget, there is little room for this. Stabilization
of the climate requires reductions by everyone, if not now, then in the near
future. Feasibility tightly constrains the room for distributive concerns to require
that poor nations be allowed to increase their emissions.
The world has recognized this problem. The dichotomous distinction
approach taken in Kyoto has now been replaced with the Durban approach,
which requires all nations to reduce emissions. The Durban approach has yet to
been translated into actual targets, but if we are to achieve reasonable emissions
reductions goals, it is the only feasible approach.
Perhaps a climate treaty would be feasible if it required all nations to reduce
(or not increase) emissions, but it asked wealthy nations to pay for the
reductions. If a poor nation has to, say, put in wind power instead of natural gas,
wealthy nations should pay for the higher costs. Climate change goals would be
met so the only feasibility question is whether wealthy nations would plausibly
agree to this.
We cannot answer this question without knowing the size of the transfers
and even if we knew this, we would still have trouble predicting the outcomes of
negotiations. Regardless of the answer, however, the feasibility concern dissolves
into the climate change blinders problem. Transfers from wealthy nations to
poor nations can help improve distributive justice but we need to ask how best
those transfers should be made and not assume that they need to be made in the
context of a climate change treaty.
Overall, the arguments that a climate treaty should be based on distributive
justice fail. They are based on a vision that wears climate change blinders, one
that fails to consider the myriad ways that obligations stemming from
distributive justice can be met. They produce climate treaties that by their design
fail to achieve the necessary reductions. Thankfully, in the most recent
negotiations in Durban, the world has begun to abandon this approach in favor
more alternatives that have a better chance of reducing emissions at a reasonable
cost.
3.2
Corrective Justice
Arguments based on theories of corrective justice view emissions of CO2 in
the past as a wrongful act and demand that emitters, whether nations or
individuals, make compensatory payments to those who are harmed by these
emissions. They are rooted in theories of responsibility for actions going back to
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Aristotle. The Pottery Barn motto – you broke it, you own it – captures the
intuition. The philosopher Peter Singer argues that even a child can understand
this basic principle.73
Many other philosophers endorse this approach. Henry Shue treats it as his
first principle of equity:
When a party has in the past taken an unfair advantage of others by
imposing costs upon them without their consent, those who have been
unilaterally put at a disadvantage are entitled to demand that in the
future the offending party should burdens that are unequal at least to
the extent of the unfair advantage previously taken, in order to restore
equality.74
Stephen Gardiner (p. 15-16 of Ethics Book (not PMS)) concurs:
The arguments in favor of ignoring past emission are, then,
unconvincing. Hence, contrary to many writers on this subject, I
conclude that we should not ignore the presumption that past
emissions pose an issue of justice that is both practically and
theoretically important.75
There is also a legal basis for this approach. The Framework Convention in its
introduction notes:
That the largest share of historical and current global emissions of
greenhouse gases has originated in developed countries, that per capita
emissions in developing countries are still relatively low and that the
share of global emissions originating in developing countries will grow
to meet their social and development needs.
More generally, some countries use what is known as the polluters pay
principle, at least in some circumstances. It means what it says: polluters must
pay for any harms that they cause. This is by no means universal and in its
general form is largely unknown because most countries only make polluters pay
if they are negligent. Nevertheless, the polluters pay principle is often seen as a
widely accepted principle.
Before discussing the problems with this argument, we need to pause to
understand exactly who it applies to. The basic claim is that those who have
emitted greenhouse gases in the past owe compensation to those who did not.
For the most port, wealthy nations would owe money to poor nations on this
Singer (2002), pp. 33-34.
Shue (1999), pp. 533-537.
75 Gardiner (2004), pp. 583.
73
74
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basis but there are many poor nations who would also owe money. Trinidad and
Tobago is a top 20 historical per capita emitter. Almost all of the nations that
were part of the Soviet Union would owe money. It is not uniformly true that a
system of obligations based on corrective justice would line up with a system
based on distributive justice.76 In theory there is no connection between the two
approaches and in actual fact, it works out that there is some overlap but in
many cases they would recommend different obligations.
Second, within each nation there is an intergenerational problem. Many
emissions were by people who are no longer alive or who are old enough that
they will not bear the costs of emissions reductions. There is no way to make
these individuals pay. The standard response is that members of the current
generation have an obligation on behalf of their parents or grandparents. While
the current generation could not have wrongfully emitted CO2 before they were
alive, they most likely received the benefits of those emissions.
The benefit theory is actually quite different than the polluter’s pay or
wrong-doer theory. It is a theory of ill-gotten gains. The amount owed would be
different, relating to the gains rather than the wrongs. It is a much more tenuous
theory and has been criticized by a number of authors.77 I will gloss over this
issue here because I think there are far larger problems with using corrective
justice in connection with climate change. A deeper exploration of the corrective
justice would have to grapple with whether a benefit principle can be justified
and what it means for the particular obligations imposed on each nation.
Instead, I focus here on the problems of climate change blinders and feasibility.
Climate change blinders:
The claim based corrective justice suffers from the problem of climate
change blinders. To understand why, we first need to clarify the logic of the
claim. The claim is not about the harm from the climate change that has
happened so far. In the last century, temperatures have increased a little less than
1° due to human caused climate change.78 While there likely have been harms
from this increase, they have been mild and hard to distinguish from harms due
to natural variations in the weather. If the demand were for compensation for
these harms, the amounts would not be large and would not significantly affect
the allocation of obligations under a climate change agreement.
See Weisbach (2012) for details.
For example, Caney (2005) criticizes this idea.
78 Source
76
77
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The real claim lies elsewhere. It is that some nations or individuals have
used more than their share of the limited ability of the atmosphere to absorb
CO2. If the atmosphere has a fixed capacity (and it does) and a large portion of it
has been used by one set of nations or individuals, other nations or individuals
cannot use that capacity. The “you broke it” clam is that you used up a limited
resource, not that the climate in 2012 is already broken in the sense of causing
terrible harms. For example, if the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb carbon
is 1 trillion tons before the harm becomes too large, we have used up more than
half of that already. The corrective justice claim is that this use of the limited
capacity of the atmosphere creates an obligation to compensate.
The climate change blinders problem is that the argument from corrective
justice is completely general. It applies to any resource anywhere in the globe
that is not shared equally. Anytime one nation or set of individuals uses more
than their share of a resource, others are harmed because they cannot use that
resource and, therefore, those who exploited the resource would owe
compensation to others.
Few if any resources are shared equally. Nations and individuals have
differing amounts of land, good agricultural soils, and fresh water. Some nations
have vast oil, gas, or coal reserves. Others have forests, rare minerals, or
diamonds and gold. Some are warm, others brutally cold. Any unequal sharing
of these scarce resources would create an obligation under corrective justice
using precisely the same logic as for the atmosphere. One can take the very same
sentences and substitute in any of these the resources as long as the resource is
reasonably fixed in supply and important to people.
The problem goes to the core of the corrective justice argument. If you
believe that argument, you either have to be able to distinguish these other cases.
The problem arose even within the narrow confines of climate change. As
part of ongoing climate negotiations, the IPCC attempted to calculate
responsibility for past emissions. If we try to calculate each country’s share of
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we have to take into account the natural
sinks, such as forests: gross emissions by each country do not add up to the
actual greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as roughly 50 percent of emissions
are quickly reabsorbed.79 The 50 percent that is reabsorbed, however, is not
reabsorbed uniformly across all countries because natural sinks are not
uniformly distributed. Some countries have vast sinks while others have few
79
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007), p. 26.
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sinks. To determine a country’s emissions, we have to determine how to allocate
the sinks.
There is no obvious approach to take for allocating sinks. We could assign
the sinks to the country where they are located but this is directly contrary to the
claim that resources are owned by all. We could assign them on a per capita basis
but this is actually contrary to the basic physics of sinks because the rate of
absorption depends on the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We
could assign them on the prorated to gross emissions but this assigns more to
wealthy nations. Different research groups took different approaches. The IPCC
had no way of deciding which approach made sense and ultimately decided that
there was no reasonable solution.80
The same problem applies generally. An allocation of the atmosphere
requires a prior view about the allocation of resources generally. Most authors
make the corrective justice claim without recognizing its scope, operating with
climate change blinders. If we remove the blinders and try to find a way to apply
the corrective justice argument only to climate change, we see that it is difficult
or impossible. Consider some possibilities.
On possibility is to invoke a principle of territory or physical possession. If
you are on top of the resource – the forest is on your sovereign land, the oil is
under your ground and so forth – it is not a violation of corrective justice to
exploit more than a pro rata portion of it. A related possibility would be to
invoke international norms or international law, which say that a nation owns
resources within its territory. The atmosphere is not solely within any nation’s
territory, so perhaps, like the sea, it is owned by all. This, however, assumes its
conclusion. We would need a reason, based in corrective justice, why territorial
possession is fine while possession through use (as the developed countries have
done to the atmosphere) is not. The theory could not be based on the claim that
territories were acquired on a just basis because many were not.
Another alternative might be a principle of legacy. If you have possessed
something long enough, theories of corrective justice will not question the
validity of owning it. Thus, current residents properly possess all of the
Americas even though there are good arguments that they unjustly took it from
prior possessors simply because they took it so very long ago. The claim would
have to be that corrective justice applies differently to the atmosphere because
rich nations recently took an unfair portion but it does not apply to other
80
Banuri et al. (1995), p. 93.
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resources because the unfairness took place long ago. This argument seems
untenable. It is hard to see why old wrongs are better than new wrongs.
Peter Singer is one of the few philosophers who recognizes that there is a
climate change blinders problem with the corrective justice argument. He
devotes a number of pages to distinguishing the atmosphere from other
resources.81 He relies on an argument about private property put forth by John
Locke. Locke argued that private property is just only if, when one claims it,
there is enough (or possibly more) left for others (say because you use the
property to produce goods which improve overall welfare). Singer says this
distinguishes land from the atmosphere. This is false – there are limited amounts
of good land and ownership by a select few may not leave enough for others.
Moreover, it fails to distinguish the atmosphere from numerous other
nonrenewable resources which are not fairly shared, including most fossil fuels
and valuable minerals.
I suspect most advocates of the corrective justice claim will try to dismiss
the problem as theoretical. We can fix the problem with unfair use of the
atmosphere without fixing the unequal distribution of other resources or trying
to correct every other type of injustice. We do not have to solve all problems
just to solve one. As Stephen Gardiner argued, we do not need a “complete
background understanding of international justice” to (my words, not his) realize
that the rich countries’ seizure of the atmosphere is unjust.82
This argument is not correct simply as a matter of mathematics. To
determine how much each nation is owned, we cannot ignore cross-cutting
claims or we risk increasing rather than reducing injustice. A nation or individual
who is actually a net wrong-doer might receive payments if we base them only
on CO2 emissions, or a nation that should be a net recipient might have to make
payments.
Even if we leave this problem aside, the argument that we can fix this
problem and ignore others is, at its core, an argument based on feasibility. “We
cannot really give back the United States to Native Americans. South Africa is
going to keep its diamonds, Russia its gas, and Saudi Arabia its oil. But we can
negotiate a just climate treaty. Not correcting these other injustices, if that is
what they are, should not be an excuse for failing to negotiate a just climate
treaty.” This is an argument from solely feasibility, so let us turn to feasibility.
Feasibility
81
82
Singer (2002)
Gardiner (2004), p. 582.
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Feasibility arguments are a slim reed on which to base corrective justice
claims. Even a cursory examination of the feasibility of compensation in the
climate context shows that it is as unrealistic as asking for compensation for the
unequal allocation of oil, diamonds, rare minerals, forests and most other
resources.
A back of the envelop calculation shows the problem. Assume that each
nation has to make payments or has the right to receive payments based on any
difference between its per capita emissions and the global average per capita
emissions. The payment would be the excess use (over per capita) multiplied by
a price per ton of CO2, and the receipt would be the opposite.83 If the price of
CO2 is $50/ton, the United States would owe just under $1.5 trillion. This is
about 35 times the total (non-military) foreign aid the US gave in 2005.84
The EU with an average of 253 tons/person would owe around $2.3
trillion. India would have a right to receive $3.2 trillion and China would have a
right to receive $2.4 trillion. Brazil would come in quite a bit lower, receiving
only $440 billion and Indonesia would be in the same range, receiving $570
billion. Needless to say, transfers of this size or anywhere within spitting
distance of this size are not feasible.
The response might be that poor nations will not agree to a climate treaty
unless it is fair, so in fact feasibility concerns cut the other way: only a treaty that
addresses the prior unjust use of the atmosphere is feasible. Crudely, India could
say that it will not agree to a climate treaty unless it receives the payment of $3.2
trillion that is owed under the theory of corrective justice.
This possibility is borne out in what are known as ultimatum games. In
these games, one person is given an amount of money. He can keep as much as
he likes and give the rest to a second person. The second person has the choice
of accepting the money or refusing it. If the second person refuses it, nobody
gets anything. From a purely rational standpoint, the second person is better off
even if he only gets one penny, so he ought to accept any amount other than
zero. What actually happens is that the second person most often rejects the
83 Note that we do not have to account for the time value of money in this calculation. The price of carbon
in most models rises with the interest rate. If we set a price today we discount to determine the price in
prior years. If that amount is due in the prior year and we adjust for the time value of money, the forward
factor and the discount factor exactly offset. Therefore, we can just take the excess of cumulative emissions
over the desired time period and multiply by a carbon price.
84 Source Statistical Abstract of the United States, p. 802. Details: Used CDIAC data on emissions (link)
going back to 1800 and UN population data. For each year, calculated the difference between US and
global per capita emissions, and multiplied this by the number of people in the US and a price of CO2. The
total is the unweighted sum.
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offer unless the split is reasonably fair. Poor nations may similarly reject a
climate treaty that is otherwise in their interest if they do not perceive it to be
fair.
If this is the case, then we are in a very bad spot because payments of the
sort demanded by corrective justice are not going to be forthcoming. It is hard
to imagine that rich nations would agree to payments of this magnitude,
particularly if the reason is a climate treaty is being held hostage to by a poor
nation in order to get the payment. The resulting stand-off would mean that
emissions go uncontrolled, hurting everyone. Poor nations would suffer from
climate change and would not get the payments they hope for. Let us hope that
such an outcome does not occur.
There are two possible implications for corrective justice. One is that a
claim by a country that it must receive a payment to agree to enter into a climate
treaty is just a claim about its own self-interest, even if that self-interest arises
from a desire to be treated fairly. Negotiations would involve each country
getting what it can based on each country’s perceived self-interest, however that
arises.
An alternative is that corrective justice drives the negotiation because it
helps inform nations about what their self-interest is. If this latter version is
correct, then corrective justice will play a role (and sadly perhaps, the role of
making a climate treaty infeasible). I tend to see it as the former – people’s and
nation’s perceived self-interest come from a wide variety of sources and a
negotiation in which nations vie for a larger share of the pie is not particularly
informed by ethics regardless of where those perceived self-interests come from.
Nevertheless, I cannot rule out the latter.
The only hope for the corrective justice argument is based on distinguishing
the atmosphere from other valuable resources based on the feasibility of
demanding payment for excess use of the atmosphere and the infeasibility of
similar payments for excess use of other resources. It seems unlikely that the
sort of payments that would be required are feasible. The influence of the
corrective justice argument, therefore, is at most to inform nations what they
think is fair and therefore, what they may demand when negotiating. The
ultimate outcome in this case, however, would simply be the outcome of hard
bargaining rather than something that is determined by a theory of justice.
3.3
Equality
The final claim about justice that I will examine is the claim stemming from
equality. The arguments are almost identical to those concerning corrective
justice, so the discussion will be short.
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The claim from equality is that everyone has an equal right to the
atmosphere. Proposals based on equity often to take the remaining absorptive
capacity of the atmosphere and divide it equally among the population. Each
person, or perhaps each nation where a person lives, would get a right to emit a
pro rata share. That right could be sold or retained.85
The difference between equality claims and claims of corrective justice is
that equality claims tend to be about going forward rather than looking back. We
might allocate future emissions rights, for example, entirely without regard to
prior use of the atmosphere, which is what a pure per capita approach would do.
We can also combine the two by allocating emissions rights based on past
emissions and the future size of the atmospheric sink.
The problem with the equality approach is the same as the problem with
corrective justice. It requires a view about the correct and prior ownership of
natural resources. As with corrective justice, we cannot distinguish the
atmosphere from other limited resources.
The feasibility problem is similar to that with corrective justice but precise
numbers are different because equality approaches are forward looking while
corrective justice approaches are backward looking. Again, a back of the envelop
calculation gives a sense of the magnitudes. The global average emissions are
about 5.5 tons per person. The average person in the United States emits about
22.8 tons, so each American would have to purchase permits for around 17 tons
(or otherwise reduce emissions). There are about 300 million people living in the
United States. If permits cost $50/ton, the total outflow from the United States
to the rest of the world would be $255 billion per year in the early years of the
treaty. It is more difficult to calculate the payments in future years as the per
capita amounts would go down as we slowly reduce allowable emissions but US
emissions would also go down. Even if the number goes down over time, it is
easy to see that the United States would not agree to such an approach.
The rest of the equality argument plays out in pretty much the same way as
the corrective justice argument. One difference, which is important to note, is
that if emissions eventually go to zero or even to a very low number, emission
will automatically be equal. If nobody has a right to emit, then everyone is
treated perfectly equally. It is only in the intervening years, when emissions are
positive that per capita allocation has any effects. Per capita allocation therefore
is not about the long term. It is about who pays for transition to zero emissions.
85
Cites. Grubb quote from page 120 in PW.
54
Chapter _
3.4
Debating Climate Change, David Weisbach
Conclusions
55
Debating Climate Change, Chapter _
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