Climate Change Ethics for an Endangered World

Thom Brooks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367622855
• eBook ISBN: 9781000223026
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Climate change confronts us with our most pressing challenges today. The global consensus is clear that human activity is mostly to blame for its harmful effects, but there is disagreement about what should be done. While no shortage of proposals from ecological footprints and the polluter pays principle to adaptation technology and economic reforms, each offers a solution – but is climate change a problem we can solve?

In this provocative new book, these popular proposals for ending or overcoming the threat of climate change are shown to offer no easy escape and each rest on an important mistake. Thom Brooks argues that a future environmental catastrophe is an event we can only delay or endure, but not avoid. This raises new ethical questions about how we should think about climate change. How should we reconceive sustainability without a status quo? Why is action more urgent and necessary than previously thought? What can we do to motivate and inspire hope? Many have misunderstood the kind of problem that climate change presents – as well as the daunting challenges we must face and overcome. Climate Change Ethics for an Endangered World is a critical guide on how we can better understand the fragile world around us before it is too late.

This innovative book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, climate justice, environmental policy and environmental ethics.

1
Mitigation

The ecological footprint

“The Earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it.”

– Chief Joseph

Mitigation as a broad tent approach

Climate change is already happening. We cannot choose how we might avoid this scientific fact and its consequences. It’s too late for that. However, this does not mean we lack choices: we have no excuse to do nothing. Indeed, there is much that we can do. But is any available option able to prevent any further climate change? – these first three chapters address this question from different perspectives that claim we can.

The most common approach to thinking about climate change ethics is mitigation. This approach is about reducing our environmental impact. We are changing our climate already through human activities like burning fossil fuels. Mitigation approaches seek to prevent further changes through conservationism, such as significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, pro-mitigation advocates differ on how to bring such changes about.

Mitigation approaches encompass a wide tent covering a diversity of policy proposals. I will examine the two most popular proposals: this chapter will consider the idea of the ecological footprint and the following chapter will look at the polluter pays principle. It is not my claim that all pro-mitigation (and pro-conservationist) advocates endorse, or should endorse, both proposals. Most of these advocates do support one or the other. My aim is to show how each such policy proposals aims to provide a solution to the problem of climate change – and to highlight the difficulties each faces in attempting to achieve its aims.

To summarize, we can accept the global scientific consensus that the problem of climate change is real, caused by human activity and leads to several significant consequences ranging from threatening coastal communities and more severe weather patterns to drought and risk of extinction for plant and animal species. But my point in this and following chapters is that the proposed “solutions” do not altogether solve this very real and grave problem. We will later consider an alternative approach that can help us make progress.

The ecological footprint

One of the most popular and powerful pro-mitigation proposals is the idea of an ecological footprint.¹ This footprint is a measure of our planet’s human carrying capacity: it is the maximum amount of resource consumption that can be sustained by every individual indefinitely.² It is best described by Mathis Wackernagel and William E. Rees:

The Ecological Footprint concept is simple, yet potentially comprehensive. … It is about humanity’s continuing dependence on nature and what we can do to secure Earth’s capacity to support a humane existence for all in the future. Understanding our ecological constraints will make our sustainability strategies more effective and livable.³

The idea is that establishing the size of our ecological footprint is critically important for making concrete our full impact on nature – and when all such impacts from every individual is added together it makes clear that such impact is unsustainable. The ecological footprint clarifies this problem and provides the consumption threshold that we should aim to fall under if we desire a sustainable forevermore.

The ecological footprint provides us with a powerful tool for making us more aware how damaging our impact on the planet can be serving a pedagogical function. Climate change is a global phenomenon. It is a problem caused by human activities everywhere. It can be very difficult for even the more environmentally aware to understand how everyday routines taken for granted add up to an unsustainable lifestyle. By measuring our impact in terms of a footprint, we can see how our local actions have global implications. “Think locally, act globally” has been an effective message for many decades in raising awareness of our environmental impact. The footprint demarcates a safe space, but only if we live within its strict boundaries.

Every individual has an ecological footprint. Our footprint is not separate from ourselves because we are not separate from the environment. We eat, drink and breathe the natural world – and our consumption habits have consequences for it.⁴ Nor could we survive independently from nature. Our sustenance and wastes do not come and go from nowhere, but a somewhere in our natural world.⁵

The ecological footprint is about more than what share of the land to sustain us, but rather the proportion of the ecosystem, incorporating the bioproductive land and sea required.⁶ Somewhat confusingly, carving up a sustainable slice of the Earth’s ecosystem is not the same as drawing lines on a map where we might divide people across equal plots each with the same share of food, water and resources. Instead, our equally sized footprint slices of the ecosystem are a generic, ideal-like space found nowhere in particular. The ecological footprint is a measure and not a place.⁷

Some of us consume more resources than others. The greater an individual’s consumption, the larger his or her ecological footprint. A benefit of the ecological footprint is it provides us with a measure of when our consumption of natural resources has grown too large for it to be sustainable indefinitely. If we do not collectively live within the confines of our individual footprint, our total consumption may breach a sustainable level – and we would contribute to climate change and its damaging consequences.

The ecological footprint is conservationist in its aims. This is because it will require significant reductions in human consumption, including greenhouse gas emissions and so limiting our reliance on nonrenewable natural resources. Anything less would leave a great many of us where we are – namely, living far beyond our ecological footprint and continue contributing to climate change with its potentially dangerous consequences.

The ecological footprint is also egalitarian at its core. Each individual must live within an equally sized ecological footprint. All people are treated equally. This perspective informs how we determine exactly how large we should establish our footprints. We consider what size could be equal for all while guaranteeing human sustainability. Therefore, we are not permitted to consume and pollute more than others. If we did do so, we would live beyond our sustainable means taken collectively. We share global conservation equally as equal partners with equal shares.⁸

This egalitarian commitment is also seen as an integral part of the ecological footprint’s broader appeal. It places everyone on an equal footing in relation to our morally and pragmatically permissible ecological impact. We have equal moral claims to the same ecological space for sustainable survival. No one has a natural right to use or enjoy more than others. The footprint is also pragmatic in setting a global cap that the collective footprints of all individuals across the world cannot breach.

Equal footprints as fair shares

There is a second, related way to determine the size of our ecological footprint. This is to consider what is the correct size of equal, fair shares of the absorption capacity for the atmosphere’s sink.⁹ This is not an appeal to consider only climate change-related impacts in the sky while neglecting the land. The atmosphere is a source of oxygen making our planet inhabitable, but the wider atmospheric sink refers to a broader capacity to absorb pollutants like greenhouse gas emissions – largely achieved through plants, the ocean and the soil.

There is a limit to how much greenhouse gas emissions our atmospheric sink can absorb safely. For example, drinking water can have trace amounts of elements like lead or sodium while remaining safe for consumption even if, in large quantities, these same elements would render the water dangerous. Burning a wood fire produces emissions that might pose little, if any, harm in small quantities and irreparable damage in large amounts.¹⁰ Our planet is not separate from us. Polluting our air, land and water damages our environment and the wider ecology impacting on animals, fish and plants – and it imposes harms on us. If we were to make planet inhospitable for human life, it would be an environmental catastrophe with genocidal consequences. So we must live within the limits of what our atmospheric sink can absorb. Or so the argument goes.

The motivating core ideas from the ecological footprint – of equality and pragmatism – remain. But instead of claiming every individual has an equal ecological footprint, the argument here is about equal rights to shares of the atmospheric sink. For instance, the philosopher Peter Singer, who is the most compelling defender of this view, argues the atmospheric sink belongs to all of us in common. No one has any right to a greater share of this space than anybody else. He says: “The atmosphere’s capacity to absorb our gases has become a finite resource on which various parties have competing claims. The problem is to allocate those claims justly.”¹¹

Restricting every individual to no more than their fair share is enormously important. If you were to use more than your fair share, then this would wrongly deprive me of my share, should we ensure that collectively we do not consume more than the atmosphere can safely and sustainably absorb. If we did not ensure our global consumption was restricted, then those using more than their fair share contribute to a situation far more grave whereby my right to a safe and sustainable future is threatened. This is because the unfairly large consumption of others breaching safe limits for our atmospheric sink’s capacity to absorb emissions contributes to further climate change and its damaging consequences.

It is very clear that individuals living in affluent countries are consuming far more than their fair share – and beyond any equally sized ecological footprint. Singer powerfully illustrates this problem:

The average Americans, by driving a car, eating a diet rich in the products of industrialized farming, keeping cool in summer and warm in winter, and consuming products at a hitherto unknown rate, uses more than fifteen times as much of the global atmospheric sink as the average Indian.¹²

The problem is easily misunderstood. The example can give the impression that driving and the like are wrongs in themselves to be avoided at all costs. But this is not strictly correct. Singer’s argument is more nuanced, or so it seems to me. If the atmospheric sink had greater capacity, then the climate’s tolerance level would be higher. The size of a “fair share” is relative to the global population and the capacity of the atmospheric sink to absorb any emissions. A smaller population and more expansive sink would allow for a larger-sized fair share than is permissible under current circumstances. And if driving, a rich diet and the like could be used or consumed with less impact through improved technology, then it would be less problematic. End of story.¹³

The problems identified by Singer above are twofold. First, the average American is using a far larger – and unfair – share of the atmospheric sink than others. So the first problem is every individual has equal rights to a fair share, but some are consuming far more than others. Secondly, the amount of these unequal shares contributes to humanity’s breaching the atmosphere’s total carrying capacity. In other words, far mor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Mitigation: the ecological footprint
• 2 Mitigation: the polluter pays principle
• 3 Adaptation
• 4 Climate change and catastrophe
• 5 Possible objections
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index