Climate Justice and Geoengineering

Ethics and Policy in the Atmospheric Anthropocene

Christopher J. Preston

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783486380
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Ética y filosofía moral

It is already clear that climate engineering raises numerous troubling ethical issues. The pertinent question yet to be addressed is how the ethical issues raised by climate engineering compare to those raised by alternative proposals for tackling climate change. This volume is the first to put the ethical issues raised by climate engineering into a comprehensive, comparative context so that the key ethical challenges of these technologies can be better measured against those of alternative climate policies. Addressing the topic specifically through the lens of justice, contributors include both advocates of climate intervention research and its sceptics. The volume includes a helpful blend of the theoretical and the practical, with contributions from authors in philosophy, engineering, public policy, social science, geography, sustainable development studies, economics, and climate studies. This cross-disciplinary collection provides the start of an important and more contextualized “second generation” analysis of climate engineering and the difficult public policy decisions that lie ahead.

Part I

Geoengineering Justice in Theory

Chapter 1

Solar Radiation Management and Comparative Climate Justice

Toby Svoboda

Solar radiation management (SRM)—that is, any climate engineering technique that would reduce the fraction of incoming solar radiation absorbed by the planet—is a very interesting subject for distributive justice, or the type of justice that concerns how benefits and burdens should be apportioned among various parties. On the one hand, SRM techniques carry risks of substantial injustice to present and future parties, and ethicists interested in climate engineering have tended to focus on these possible injustices. On the other hand, SRM has the potential to manage current and impending injustices due to anthropogenic climate change, including risks of unjust harm to the global poor. This points to the possibility that, for all its potential ethical problems, a climate policy involving deployment of some SRM technique might perform better than other available options in securing distributively just (or minimizing distributively unjust) outcomes, at least in certain future contexts.

In line with Christopher Preston’s argument in the introduction to this volume, I argue here that, although it is helpful to identify potential injustices associated with SRM, it is also crucial both to evaluate how SRM compares to other available options and to consider empirical conditions under which deployment might occur. In arguing for this view, I rely on a distinction between two types of questions: (1) whether SRM would produce just or unjust outcomes in some case and (2) whether it would be just to deploy SRM in that same case. The former question pertains to whether some distribution of benefits and burdens is morally good or bad, whereas the latter pertains to whether some action or policy is morally permissible, impermissible or obligatory. Although related, these two uses of justice do not come to the same thing. It may be that some climate policy involving SRM carries risks of substantial distributive injustice and yet is permissible or even obligatory. This is because, as I argue, considering what would be just to do should be comparative, taking into consideration both empirical conditions and the morally valuable and disvaluable features of alternative climate policies. To put this in a more intuitive manner, rightness and goodness can come apart—sometimes the right course of action produces bad outcomes. I will return to this distinction in greater detail below.

I consider a prima facie case that some climate policies involving SRM could come out well on such a comparative perspective, given that a commitment to dangerous climate change due to past emissions may limit the effectiveness of policies relying on mitigation and adaptation alone. Notwithstanding, the Paris agreement reached at COP 21, given the insufficient progress on cutting global emissions to this point, it is plausible to expect that, at some point in the future, all available climate policies will exhibit substantial inadequacies when it comes to securing just outcomes. In such cases, the morally disvaluable features of SRM might not be decisive in counting against the permissibility of deployment. In one sense of the term, we might think of this as a ‘lesser of two evils’ argument, for my claim is that SRM, despite serious problems, could be morally permissible in cases in which it compares favourably to all the alternatives. However, although not technically incorrect, using this language of ‘lesser evils’ potentially invites misunderstanding. Usually, ‘lesser of two evils’ arguments are broadly consequentialist in nature, claiming that some policy is to be favoured despite serious costs or harms, and this because its ratio of benefits to costs or harms is better than the ratios of the alternatives. My argument is quite different, because it does not involve merely weighing up the aggregate costs and benefits of various climate policies. Instead, my focus is on the distributions of such costs (or burdens) and benefits, and I argue that some policy involving SRM can be a just thing to do if its distribution of burdens and benefits is better than that of any alternative policy. In order to avoid the false impression that my argument hinges on aggregate costs and benefits, I will forego using the ‘lesser of two evils’ language.

Distributive Justice and Climate Change

Anthropogenic climate change raises important questions of distributive justice, because climate change will involve substantial benefits and burdens, as will any policy meant to deal with it. Importantly, these benefits and burdens will be differentially distributed on each policy, with some parties enjoying a greater share of benefits or suffering a greater share of burdens. Moreover, specific distributions will vary depending on what responses are adopted. Potential climate-related burdens are driven by many factors: an increased frequency of extreme weather events, sea-level rise, the spread of disease to new regions and so on. Potential benefits of various climate policies include curbing these burdens and perhaps avoiding them altogether. This could be achieved through mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions, adaptation to changing climatic conditions, climate engineering through either carbon dioxide removal (CDR) or SRM techniques or some combination of these responses.

Anthropogenic climate change and climate policy are matters of justice because, unlike natural phenomena, they are driven by human activity, such as the emission of greenhouse gases and the deliberate policy choices made by human societies. Those who suffer a disproportionate measure of the burdens of climate change are victims of injustice, for they have been wronged due to the actions or inaction of others. Such injustice can include actions that merely put others at risk of suffering climate-related burdens, even if those risks are not realized. In his recent work on climate change justice, Darrel Moellendorf relies on the following reasonable principle: ‘If a person is especially vulnerable to very bad things happening due to the actions and omission of others, that person has a prima facie claim to have the vulnerability reduced’ (Moellendorf 2015: 182). The idea is that imposing such vulnerability on others is unjust and that the victims of this injustice have a legitimate claim against other parties (e.g. high emitters) to reduce or eliminate the amount of vulnerability that has been imposed on them. By contrast, a victim of mere misfortune (e.g. a genuinely natural disaster) does not have the same type of legitimate claim, because no one has wronged her by either causing or culpably allowing the burden she suffers. Moellendorf argues that justice, therefore, requires cutting emissions, as doing so decreases the vulnerability of various parties to climate-related burdens. At the same time, justice requires that emissions continue to some extent, as they are currently necessary for the pursuit of many goods, including reducing global poverty via relatively affordable fossil fuels. As Moellendorf notes, how emissions entitlements get distributed is itself a matter of justice. For example, distributive justice might favour differential emission entitlements, with less-developed countries receiving larger entitlements than more-developed countries, the latter of whom have already benefitted from substantial historical emissions and can more readily afford large-scale transitions to renewable sources of energy.

Justice as a Value and Justice as a Duty

Considerations of distributive justice can help us think about potential climate policies in at least two ways, corresponding to the two uses of justice I noted earlier, which I will refer to as axiological justice and deontic justice. First, consideration of distributive justice can highlight morally valuable and disvaluable features of such policies. This is what I call the ‘axiological’ (from the Greek axiā, meaning ‘value’) use of distributive justice, for it identifies morally good and bad aspects of such policies. On this use, justice is treated as a moral value. Second, considerations of distributive justice can help us determine whether certain climate policies are permissible, impermissible or obligatory. This is what I call the ‘deontic’ (from the Greek deon, meaning ‘duty’) use of distributive justice. On this use, justice is treated as a moral obligation, and we may speak of duties of justice as distinct from other types of duty (e.g. duties of beneficence). These two uses of justice are not entirely separable. Whether some policy is morally permissible, for example, will depend in part on whether that policy delivers morally valuable or disvaluable distributions of burdens and benefits. Nonetheless, these two uses of justice are distinct. To see why, consider a policy that involves some distributive injustice. Axiologically, this injustice is a bad thing. Deontically, however, the policy could be permissible in some scenarios and impermissible in others, because it is plausible to suppose that the permissibility of this policy will hinge on how it compares to other available policies, and this will differ across scenarios. For instance, in some cases there might not be a feasible policy that avoids distributive injustice altogether, and so it might be permissible to adopt the policy in question despite its (morally disvaluable) distribution. On the other hand, there may be cases in which there are policy options for securing distributively just outcomes, and in such cases a policy involving some degree of distributive injustice would be impermissible.

This indicates that a purely axiological use of justice is not enough to determine whether some climate policy ought to be pursued. To answer that question, we also need to compare the distributions likely to be entailed by competing policies while acknowledging that some of these will be more feasible than others (technically, economically and politically), and we should consider these policies as being pursued under conditions likely to hold in the future (Morrow and Svoboda 2016). While thinking about climate policy under idealized conditions might be useful for a variety of purposes, some policies might be infeasible or impossible to implement in the real world, such as extremely rapid emissions mitigation. As atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations increase, we may lock ourselves into a future scenario in which some degree of distributive injustice is unavoidable, regardless of the policies pursued. In that case, it would be a mistake to suppose that any policy involving unjust distributions is impermissible, for that would entail that no policy is permissible in that context. Instead, in a bad situation like the one envisioned, a policy may be unjust in the axiological sense while being just in the deontic sense, and the latter because that policy involves less axiological injustice than any other option. I will discuss potential examples of this below, particularly in the case of hybrid climate policies that include SRM.

Most research on distributive justice and SRM has relied on the axiological use of justice, usually highlighting potentially disvaluable features of SRM deployment, such as disproportionately harming the global poor through precipitation change, shifting the costs and risks of SRM maintenance to future generations or undermining the moral solidarity needed for a long-term solution to climate change (Hourdequin 2012; Svoboda et al. 2011; Tuana et al. 2012). This is an important exercise, but it is not sufficient to tell us whether it is permissible to deploy SRM. To address that issue, we also need to know how an SRM policy compares to other feasible options. Now some might think that certain SRM policies are simply impermissible in and of themselves, regardless of how they compare to other options. For example, perhaps something about SRM deployment necessarily entails moral wrongdoing, such as its dramatic interference with natural processes (Jamieson 1996). But taking this view can quickly lead us into implausible territory. Most serious proponents of researching and testing SRM see it as a potential means to reduce risk associated with greenhouse gas emissions. If it turns out that, all things considered, some SRM policy likely would alleviate such risk, and supposing it would do so to a greater extent than other options not involving SRM, it may be a mistake to view SRM as impermissible, even if it violates some important moral norm, and even if violating that norm is ordinarily wrong. The problem is that anthropogenic emissions could create a future situation in which no feasible course of action manages to comply with such norms. This would certainly be a regr...