Editors Note: This post is a summary of a paper on distributive justice and climate change policy by Klinsky and Dowlatabadi. ClimateEthics occasionally summarizes papers written by others that raise or examine important ethical questions related to climate change. The paper summarized below reviews the distributive justice literature on climate change and compares it to how climate change policies have been formed or proposed. One of the more important, though contested, ethical issues entailed by climate change concerns ethical duties when allocating emissions targets among nations. Although, as frequently noted in ClimateEthics, all nations have a duty to immediately reduce their emissions to their fair share of safe global emissions, what fairness requires is a matter about which different ethical theories reach different conclusions. Although discussions of fairness in the climate change context occur in both ethics and policy communities, the two communities remain isolated due to lack of communication. By looking at understandings of fairness underlying proposals for international climate policy architecture, the following paper argues that many climate change policy proposals overlook important distributive justice issues. If this is true, making climate change policy proposals consistent with theories of distributive justice will require that policy-makers and ethicists examine issues overlooked by policy formation and identify policy proposals that effectively respond to those oversights.

I. Introduction.

In their article, “Conceptualizations of Justice in Climate Policy,” researchers Sonja Klinsky and Hadi Dowlatabadi, demonstrate divergence among climate change ethics and policy communities about the role of distributive justice in policy making. (Klinsky, S., H. Dowlatabadi, 2009) The authors of this paper observe that policy-makers construct solutions to climate change that rely on implicit normative claims that affect the ways policy assigns responsibility, assesses need, provides access to entitlements, distributes impacts and addresses concerns of procedural justice. Focusing primarily on the ways specific policy proposals unintentionally affect those areas of distributive justice, Klinsky and Dowlatabadi argue that policy making could be improved by inquiring more deliberately into the broad array of distributive justice concerns raised by climate ethicists. At the same time, several issues emerge that could be examined in more depth by those focusing on climate ethics.

II. Policy Initiatives and Distributive Justice.

Klinsky and Dowlatabadi analyze specific mechanisms included in policy proposals to highlight the underlying ethical assumptions behind policy architectures proposed by a wide range of policy analysts and advisors. Their analysis indicates that policy initiatives fall into three broad categories depending on whether they prioritize Equitable Burden Sharing, Fair Distribution of Costs and Impacts, or Justice for Costs, Impacts and Liabilities. Each approach rests on distinct ethical commitments. For instance, beliefs about the nature of causal responsibility for climate change influences whether responsibility is limited to the costs of stabilizing current emissions levels, encompasses human development costs and environmental damages in addition to economic factors or, finally, whether responsibility requires compensation for historical costs and damages. Because these implicit beliefs have profound effects on distributive justice, this work relies on specific policy mechanisms to uncover the ethical attitudes motivating policy-makers. Although rarely addressed explicitly in the policy proposals, effects on distributive justice become most conspicuous in disagreements regarding the ways policies define the problem of climate change, measure the extent of the problem and address the task of responding to the problem. The premise of the paper is that policy-makers cannot be expected to address these effects or the disagreements they entail until they understand the normative beliefs motivating policy and the subsequent mechanisms by which specific policies affect distributive justice.

The first group of climate change policy initiatives relies on the principle of Equitable Burden Sharing. Proposals embodying this principle argue that the costs of emissions reductions should be distributed equally in order to minimize economic and industrial impacts to individual states. Without directly addressing the environmental and human development impacts of climate change, such proposals rely on convictions that economic measurements and technological substitutes can effectively respond to current climate change impacts and threats of future harm. Accordingly, Equitable Burden Sharing policies represent climate change as fundamentally an economic and technological problem for which the most economically stable and technologically advanced countries both bear the greatest burden and possess the most efficient mechanisms to affect change. Such an approach downplays the importance of both non-economic impacts of climate change and the need to include the concerns of developing nations in policy formation.

A second larger and more diverse group of policies remedies some of the holes left by Equitable Burden Sharing initiatives by attempting to affect a fair, as opposed to an equal, distribution of costs and impacts. By considering non-economic, human development and environmental impacts along with traditional economic and emissions costs, these policies claim that a fair or equitable distribution of the costs and impacts of climate change policy may require an inequitable allocation of resources when remediation starts from a position of economic and resource inequality. Heavy emitters and healthy economies need to assume the lion’s share of burdens to ensure that heavily impacted developing and impoverished nations gain the same level of benefit from climate change remediation as their partners. The primary mechanism used to affect distributions involves per capita entitlements that allow populous, undercapitalized economies greater access to scarce fossil resources and emissions capacities. Moreover, since policies endorsing Fair Distribution of Costs and Impacts place greater emphasis on human development, including the preservation of local cultures, ecosystems and species, these policies have less faith that substituting clean resources through technological development can effectively respond to the variety of threats posed by climate change. Using resource transfer in addition to technological exchange, these policies conceive of climate change remediation as a partly technological task involving emissions reductions, but also a human development obligation aimed at improving the lives of those directly impacted by climate change.

Finally, by far the smallest group of policies embraces remediation tactics involving the costs of liability for climate change viewed from a compensatory justice perspective in addition to the burdens of mitigation costs and human development. According to these models, the causal responsibility for climate change applies to historical emitters rather than focusing solely on current heavy emitters. While approving the need to reduce current emissions in response to the human development needs of impoverished countries, these policies also demand that justice compensate for historical abuses regardless of current emissions levels and well-intentioned remediation efforts. In light of historical responsibility for climate change and a broader emphasis on human development that encompasses historical harms to development as well as contemporary impacts, proposals in this category advocate not only per capita resource entitlements but significant resource transfer mechanisms designed to compensate for historical resource extraction and depletion. Along with difficulties regarding the attribution of historical responsibility for climate change, critics cite these proposals for being overly punitive and failing to take into account transnational liability for climate change. Resource extraction, for example, is supposed to provide economic and industrial benefits to developing countries that complicate the picture of transnational liability. Advocates of the compensatory justice approach respond, however, that since greenhouse gas emissions deplete a resource without an assigned economic value, namely access to the atmosphere, the modest compensation provided by fossil fuel extraction has been inadequate. As this debate shows, issues of liability within compensatory justice become increasingly complex, illustrating a crucial need for information sharing regarding the demands of justice and the constraints of policy.

III. Final Remarks: Bridging the Ethics-Policy Divide.

While existing policies express a wide variety of ethical commitments, due to the lack of communication between ethics and policy communities, the full range of ethical questions implied by climate change and the crucial policy details raised by these concerns remains obscure to policy-makers and ethicists alike. Increased attention to four areas, including evaluative modeling, public ethics, sovereignty and technology, promise to foster the communication needed to bring these respective communities together.

Evaluative models of policy proposals begun within policy communities would benefit from closer collaboration with ethicists because the technical difficulties inherent in modeling typically discourage policy-makers from extending models to contentious disputes regarding distributive justice. Such omissions indicate a clear case where collaboration would benefit not only policy-makers, but ethicists who normally refrain from constructing the models needed to evaluate the policies required to achieve their distributive justice goals.

Similarly, neither ethics nor policy communities seriously explore public perceptions of ethics in the multi-dimensional, multi-scaled context of climate change although both communities make assumptions about what people find fair and unfair.

A third area both communities could explore in more depth is the question of sovereignty. Assumptions about the appropriate entity to be included and considered in climate policy also, but the multi-scaled nature of climate change raises difficult questions about how these entities should be dealt with.

Finally, although technology features prominently in many policy proposals, ethicists rarely address it directly and policy-makers almost never explore technology’s impact on distributive justice in their proposals. Because technology shapes not only the kinds of emissions reductions aimed for, but also the concrete costs and benefits of any policy direction, further investigation into the impacts of technology on the distributive justice elements of climate policy is essential.

This paper presents a plea for greater collaboration between the ethics and policy communities. Until policy analysts are able to include diverse justice impacts into their policy proposals, it is unlikely that the resulting policies will approach anything resembling the requirements of justice laid out in any ethical framework. Simultaneously, in order for ethical analysis to be useful, ethicists must address the full range of concrete policy mechanisms under consideration. If we are to get both fair and effective climate policies, it will be because policy-makers and ethicists make deliberate efforts to identify their overlapping interests in distributive justice.

By

Joshua Kurdys
Graduate Student in Philosophy
Penn State University,
jjk312@psu.edu

References:
Klinsky, Sonja, Hadi Dowlatabadi, Conceptualizations Of Justice In Climate Policy, Climate Policy, Volume 9, Number 1, 2009 , pp. 88-108

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of posts that examine ethical guidance that nations should follow in climate change negotiations in December in Copenhagen, Denmark at the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP-15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Other posts on this topic have included Ethical Failures of National GHG Emissions Reduction Proposals Approaching Copenhagen, http://climateethics.org/?p=147 and Minimum Ethical Criteria For All Post-Kyoto Regime Proposals: What Does Ethics Require of A Copenhagen Outcome, http://climateethics.org/?p=50. This post is different than previous posts on the Copenhagen agenda in that it does not follow a narrative format but makes specific recommendations on the negotiating text as it exists two months before Copenhagen followed by ethical justifications for these proposed changes. ClimateEthics will examine the Copenhagen negotiating text in more detail as we get closer to Copenhagen. This post examines part of the negotiating text relating to future cooperation of the parties under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This negotiating text can be found at:
http://maindb.unfccc.int/library/view_pdf.pl?url=http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2009/awglca7/eng/inf01a01.pdf. Subsequent posts will examine ethical issues that are also important elements of the negotiating agenda in Copenhagen, including extending emissions reductions targets under the Kyoto Protocol, adaptation funding issues, reducing GHG emissions from deforestation, and technical transfer issues, among others. The recommended changes in the negotiating text in this post are made by representatives of the Earth Charter Council. The mission of the Earth Charter initiative is to promote the transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework that includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. For more information on the Earth Charter Initiative, see, http://www.earthcharterinaction.org/content/pages/The-Earth-Charter.html.

I. Recommended Changes to Negotiating Text

The following recommended revisions are designed to strengthen the ethical dimension of the Negotiating Text prepared in May 2009 by the chair of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action (AWG-LCA) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and revised after the sixth session of the AWG-LCA and dated 22 June 2009.

1. In the Preamble, include the following two paragraphs:

a. “Recognizing that a successful global partnership requires a common faith in the ethical principles that are the foundation of the shared vision for long-term cooperative action called for in the Bali Action Plan, and that fulfillment of the Parties’ common but differentiated responsibilities will require on-going dialogue regarding how to address the ethical, as well as scientific, technological and financial, challenges presented by climate change.

b. “Recalling the affirmation of our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to our children in the Johannesburg Declaration of the World Summit on Sustainable Development.”

2. In Chapter I. A Shared Vision for Long-term Cooperative Action, paragraph #7, add a reference to “a strong ethical commitment” in the sentence that reads: “The urgent need to confront dangerous climate change requires a strong ethical commitment and political determination to continue building an inclusive, fair and effective climate regime….”

3. In Chapter I, paragraph #8, add a reference to “human rights.” This could be done, for example, by revising the second sentence to read: “It takes into account social and economic conditions and human rights.”

4. In Chapter I, paragraph #8, add a concluding sentence that reads: “It also recognizes that the common but differentiated responsibilities of the Parties includes the duty to protect and restore the integrity of Earth’s ecological systems, with special concern for biological diversity and the natural processes that sustain life.”

5. In Chapter I, paragraph #1, capitalize “Earth.” Throughout the document whenever the planet is referenced, the planet’s name, “Earth,” should be used and capitalized.

6. In Chapter I, paragraph #4, add a reference to gender equality in connection with the statement regarding “the need for gender equity”. The sentence will then read: “…addressing the need for gender equality and equity.”
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Editor’s Note: The following post is by Dr. John Lemons, an accomplished environmental scientist who has frequently written about issues that emerge at the environmental science-ethics interface. Dr. Lemons begins with a summary of recent scientific evidence that supports the conclusion that the world is running out of time to prevent catastrophic climate change. This is followed by observations that climate change ethics has failed to penetrate climate change decision-making. Because of this failure and the urgency of putting the world on a hard-to-imagine ambitious greenhouse gas emissions reduction trajectory, Dr. Lemons calls on ethicists to examine ethical issues entailed by those who choose to participate in non-violent civil disobedience as a way of bringing attention to the seriousness of the climate change crisis. Climateethics has frequently included articles that acknowledged strong scientific support for the dangerousness of the climate change crisis and recently has acknowledged the total failure of politicians and the media in the United States to acknowledge that the United States has duties and responsibilities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and not just economic interests in climate change policy. See, for example, Ethical Issues Raised By US Blue Dog Democratic Senators’ Opposition to Climate Legislation – When May a Nation Make Domestic GHG Reduction Commitments Contingent on Other Nations’ Actions, http://climateethics.org/?p=206, and, The Crucial Missing Element in Media Coverage of the US Climate Change Debate: the Ethical Duty to Reduce GHG Emissions, http://climateethics.org/?p=138. However, as recently noted in ClimateEthics, one government’s climate change policy appears to have been motivated by ethical responsibility to the rest of the world, motivation that seems to have led to significant commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. See, The Strong Scottish Moral Leadership On Climate Change Compared To The Absence Of Any Acknowledged Ethical Duty In The US Debate, http://climateethics.org/?p=214. However, as we will see in future posts, even though Scotland made a strong policy commitment to GHG reductions apparently motivated in part by ethical considerations, this does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that Scottish commitments equal their moral responsibilities. Therefore, Dr Lemons’ observation that ethical analyses of the climate change crisis has not yet led to policy change in most of the developed world is on target for the vast majority, if not all, developed countries. In addition, Dr. Lemons call for ethical analyses of responses to the climate change crisis that match the magnitude of the challenge is an appropriate new consideration for ClimateEthics. In this article, Dr. Lemons asks the appropriate question of climate change ethicists: “Given the lack of responsiveness to the climate change crisis by most developed countries, what should climate change ethicists be talking about?”

I. Introduction
The goal of this paper is twofold: (1)to briefly describe recent scientific information on global climate change that suggests a greater need for urgency of action than might have previously been thought, and (2)to suggest that philosophers develop ethical stances that support nonviolent civil disobedience action to mitigate the problem of global climate change given its urgency.

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A. Introduction.
This post examines the strong moral and ethical leadership of a number of Scottish Parliamentarians on climate change, leadership that is particularly striking when compared to how the US climate change debate is unfolding.

In a prior post, I discussed attending a meeting of the Scottish Parliament on behalf of the United States State Department to give a talk on climate change policies where I heard an argument made by a Scottish Parliamentarian in support of a tough climate change bill that was being debated. That post was “The Crucial Missing Element in Media Coverage of the US Climate Change Debate: the Ethical Duty to Reduce GHG Emissions, http://climateethics.org/?p=138/

The argument made by the Parliamentarian was that Scotland had a moral duty to the rest of the world to adopt the pending legislation despite the fact that it could impose significant costs on the Scottish economy.

This is an argument neither being made by American politicians on pending federal cap and trade legislation nor even faintly whispered about in US media coverage of the unfolding US climate change debate. Instead, opposition to climate change legislation stresses job loss while supporters often make appeals to economic rejuvenation from a new green economy. That the United States has duties and responsibilities to the rest of the world to reduce GHG emissions is not part of the US debate. As we will see, this absence of any acknowledgment of US obligations is striking when compared to how Scottish Parliamentarians approached the debate that preceded the recent passage of a very tough new Scottish climate change law in late June.

Although there are no ethical problems with seeking solutions to meet our ethical duties at lowest possible cost, as we explained in several previous posts, increased costs to the American economy alone, assuming for the sake of argument this would be the long-term effect of federal climate change legislation, is not an ethically acceptable justification for the United States refusing to reduce domestic greenhouse gas emissions to the US fair share of safe global emissions. See, http://climateethics.org/?p=138/ , http://climateethics.org/?p=206, and http://climateethics.org/?p=36. The United States has not just economic interests in climate change, it has duties and responsibilities.
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I. Introduction
Most Blue Dog Democratic and Republican senators have declared their opposition to cap and trade climate change legislation that has passed the US House of Representatives and is likely to be pending in the US Senate for two reasons.

First, they oppose the legislation because it will impose unacceptable costs on their constituents. In a recent post, we examined the duty of the United States to reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions even if costs are high. See, The Crucial Missing Element in Media Coverage of the US Climate Change Debate: the Ethical Duty to Reduce GHG Emissions, http://climateethics.org/?p=138.

Secondly, some US senators have indicated that they will oppose US federal legislation that does not make the US reductions commitments contingent on the action of other nations. (See. US Senators, 2009) More specifically, ten Democratic US Senators have said in a letter to President Obama that they will oppose legislation that does not require other countries to make emissions reductions in their manufacturing sector commensurate with US reductions. (US Senators, 2009) The authors of this letter want steep tariffs on goods from countries that do not agree to an international regime of carbon dioxide reductions. It is not clear from the letter whether these senators will refuse to support any legislation that does not require sanctions of any government that refuses to reduce its GHG emissions to levels agreed to by the US or only those governments that are already exceeding their fair share of safe global emissions. Moreover it is not clear from the letter, although it would appear to be the case, whether the senators would oppose any legislation that did not sanction any government that did not make reductions quantitatively consistent with reduction levels committed to by the US. Despite several ambiguities the senators’ letter, this post examines as a matter of ethics whether nations can make domestic GHG reductions’ commitments contingent upon other nations also reducing their emissions to levels acceptable to a nation making a commitment.

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Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of posts that examine ethical issues that nations need to be guided by as they engage in climate change negotiations in December in Copenhagen, Denmark at the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP-15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The last post looked at these issues over a year before the Copenhagen COP. http://climateethics.org/?p=50.   This and following posts will examine in more detail some of the issues written about in the earlier post in light of developments in the last year. This post examines ethical issues entailed by the need of nations to agree to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets.  Subsequent posts will examine ethical issues that are also important part of the negotiating agenda in Copenhagen, including adaptation funding issues, reducing GHG emissions from deforestation, and technical transfer issues, among others.

I. Introduction
The nations of the world will reconvene in December, 2009 to negotiate a replacement to the Kyoto Protocol which expires by its own terms in 2012.  This post examines the willingness of nations to commit to GHG atmospheric concentration goals and national GHG reduction targets in these negotiations compared to their ethical obligations in light of positions nations have taken as they approach Copenhagen.  First, this post examines the features of human-induced climate change that calls for classifying the issues to be negotiated in Copenhagen as ethical problems.  Next, the post looks at ethical guidance that nations should consider in regard to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions targets, an issue of huge significance on the Copenhagen agenda. The post then looks at the position of some governments on emission reduction targets in light of these ethical obligations.

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I. Introduction: Scottish Versus The US Climate Change Debate
In March, the U.S. State Department asked me to speak to the Scottish Parliament about climate-change policies as they were debating a new climate-change law.

Before I spoke, a Scottish Parliamentarian made an argument that I have never heard any US politician make. The topic of this speech is also curiously largely absent in US media climate change coverage.  The Parliamentarian argued that Scotland should adopt this tough new legislation even though it might be expensive because the Scotts had an obligation to the rest of the world to do so. In other words, those countries most responsible for causing climate change have ethical duties to reduce their emissions even if it costs are significant.  That is, high-emitting developed countries like the United States must reduce their greenhouse gas emissions as a matter of justice.

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