Making Climate Change THE Political Issue

A recent poll illustrated the rapid turn-around in public opinion on the reality of human-caused climate change and the need for action (link). While the poll segregated respondents into their preferences for the 2012 Presidential election, it is clear that a majority of the American people are ready and willing for national leadership and action on climate change. While opponents (and frankly, supporters) of such action are keen to use climate change as a polarizing or "wedge" issue, I think there is a convergence of issues and national sentiment that can make addressing climate change a central policy theme for the next Congress and Presidential administrations. Here's why:

1. Building a 21st-century infrastructure.
The aging of America's infrastructure–roads, electricity generation and distribution, water and sewer, etc–has become well-publicized in the past few years. Upgrades and replacements are desperately needed, and state and local governments recognize the economic stimulus these projects generate. Coupling the need for infrastructure improvements with climate change and sustainable resource use is a no-brainer. It's not just taking care of present needs, it's building for the future. The economic, social, and environmental benefits (i.e. "sustainability") of past efforts to improve resource efficiency (energy, water, waste management) are undeniable. We need a national effort to remake America's infrastructure–from local to international–that links the needs of people and the planet together to achieve a sustainable and just future.

2.  Regaining leadership in exportable green technologies.
Renewable energy, organic agriculture, industrial ecology, green architecture, smart growth, and many others. These areas of sustainable R&D should be promoted as the future we want for ourselves and frankly the only future that will support a just and prosperous planet of 9+ billion people. The US is not the only or even the most important innovator or promoter of these technologies, but we are uniquely capable of developing, testing, and promoting these technologies for different purposes and situations, from dense urban cities to rural agricultural areas. We should bring the best minds and best innovators from around the world here to develop these technologies, then export them, through private enterprise and development projects. Given that China has recently surpassed the US as the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitter, this outward-looking approach is probably going to be more important than what we do to reduce our domestic GHG emissions.

3. National security and foreign relations.
Even those who support more domestic fossil fuel production recognize the fact that importing fossil fuels is a major contributor to our expensive (economically and socially) military adventures around the globe. While drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will have no discernible effect of gas prices (since oil prices are set by global production and trade), replacing fossil fuels with domestically produced renewable energy sources will improve our national security. It won't solve all our international disputes and entanglements, but it will help both in the short- and the long-run. Since countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia are heavily dependent upon oil exports, moving to renewable energy production globally will force economic and social transformations in these countries. It won't be easy or pretty in most cases, but the transformations will arise internally, taking away the rallying cry of "foreign devils" or meddling interventions that keep oppressive regimes in power. It will also transform US foreign policy and strategic interests, which is a major cause of US-directed terrorism. Terrorism as an instrument of rebellion and civil unrest is here to stay, but the justifications for our "war on terror", which does nothing but feed the hatred of our foreign policy and military adventurism, will largely evaporate. We will have the capacity to remake our global alliances based on peace, democracy, freedom, and justice rather than shared economic or military interests. This extends beyond countries that are fossil fuel producers to those whose export industries are reliant on cheap fossil fuels, such as agriculture and heavy manufacturing.

4. A future of our choosing
Notice I haven't mentioned sacrifices in consumption or standards of living. Achieving a sustainable future and ending anthropogenic climate change will require significant changes in our lifestyles, but if there's anything that is constant in the universe, it is change. In the past, such changes were driven by large economic and social forces, and we reacted to them. The Industrial Revolution, the Great Depression, two world wars, the rise of personal computing and the internet, the oil crisis of the 70's, the 9-11 attacks: these were all major events that forced us to undergo big changes in our lifestyles. Anthropogenic climate change is the next emerging major force, and we are going to have to adapt to it. If we are proactive, we can co-create a future that advances prosperity, justice, peace, and a greater quality of life for everyone on the planet. If we continue to be reactive, then we have little control over the outcomes and will find ourselves increasingly frustrated and powerless. Tea Party activists are promoting personal choice and freedoms. I agree, but real choice and freedom come from working together within communities to build the kind of society that allows us to make those choices. The message of politicians who want to address climate change should be that government can and should be a leader in helping to shape and build that future that allows us to enjoy the freedoms embodied in the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed in the Constitution. Continuing our dependence on a fossil fuel-driven economy and society not only is counter to the goals of freedom, it is undermining the sustainability of a prosperous and just future for people and the planet.

Peak Oil is the Least of our Worries

Bill McKibben has written another powerful and chilling piece on climate change, this time in Rolling Stone magazine (link). In it he highlights a few very important numbers concerning fossil fuels and climate change. The scariest one is the amount of carbon stored in known reserves of fossil fuels on the planet, 2795 Gigatons. That dwarfs the amount the atmosphere can handle and maintain any reasonable temperature increase due to global warming (which scientists set at about 2 degrees Celcius). Prior to the latest economic bubble bust, the concept of peak oil was getting a lot of coverage due to the concern about increasing demand and prices relative to known oil reserves. Now that frakking has made billions if not trillions of cubic feet of natural gas available for mining, no one much talks about peak oil anymore. Even if frakking hadn't opened up new natural gas reserves, the world has enough coal to keep polluting the skies and running Industrial Age economies for a century or more.

Economists often like to take a value-neutral stance when it comes to such issues as global warming, assuring us that human ingenuity, market forces, and advances in technology will cure what ails us. But what McKibben has made clear is that the no invisible and price-driven hand will be able to avert the global-scale catastrophes that global warming is already causing. With past progressive movements, such as the abolition of slavery, equal rights for women and minorities, and protection of the environment, economists may point to things like changing economic and technological forces that made slavery and suppression of women's full participation as workers and consumers inefficient and uneconomical and fouling of the environment counter-productive and unnecessary. While interesting, it assumes changing economics and technology are necessary (if not sufficient) for societies to take effective action. 

Regardless of what you think of that argument in general, global warming and climate change simply cannot wait for market forces or technological shifts to make the move away from fossil fuel use toward renewable energy production and sustainable economies inevitable or more efficient. Such changes must be spurred by the moral call to action and the political will to do what is right, not what is expedient. That is why people of faith cannot sit on the sidelines on this issue or urge patience and moderation, as southern ministers asked of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the fight for civil rights. The continuing struggle to overcome ingrained predjudice against minorities and women, e.g. unequal pay, home loan discrimination, and voter ID laws, all speak to the need for a strong moral foundation to ensure we uphold the ideals of the nation and the values we hold most dear as people of faith. Bill McKibben's latest essay not only reinforces the importance of global warming and energy use as moral issues but moreover the need for people of faith to speak out and take action to make it a personal, social, and political priority.

The Full Cost of Fossil Fuels

A new report from the Center for Health and the Human Environment demonstrates clearly that the low price of fossil fuels hides the true cost of the environmental and social damage they cause. The focus of the report is on coal, but the same analysis can be made for oil, natural gas, or other fossil fuels. The environmental, social, and economics costs are immense, as detailed in a 2009 report by Environment America. This does not include the costs to national security and foreign relations, where America's strategic interests are intimately tied to its fossil fuel dependence.

Economic arguments against a concerted and rapid move toward renewable energy sources essentially fall flat when we take these full costs into consideration. And these arguments are only half of the story: minimizing costs has never been and never should be the sole or overriding consideration for how we use energy. As people of faith, we are keenly aware of the moral and spiritual consequences and motivations of our decisions and behavior, and these considerations should weigh just as heavily as economics on our thinking and action. But as this new report shows, translating these considerations into the realm of economics shows just how expensive fossil fuels really are to our environment, our health, and frankly, to our souls.

Ethics Stronger than Self-Interest in Motivating Action on Climate Change Debate

...excerpts from the Climate Ethics blog...

Are Ethical Arguments for Climate Change Action Weaker Than Self-Interest Based Arguments? Why Taking Ethical Arguments Off the Table Is Like A Soccer Team Unilaterally Taking The Goalie Out of the Net.

By DONALD A BROWN on August 15, 2010 6:58 PM

I. Introduction

Many commentators to ClimateEthics argue that since people are self-interested beings, it is more important to make arguments in support of climate change based upon self-interest rather than ethical arguments. Some go so far to assert that people don't care about ethics and therefore only self-interest-based arguments should be used to convince people to enact domestic climate change legislation. In other words, they argue:"get real" only self-interest arguments matter.

This view has dominated much discussion of climate change policy in the United States. No U.S. politician known to ClimateEthics has been expressly making the ethical arguments that need to be made in response to objections to proposed climate change policies. As ClimateEthics has previously reported, this is not the case in at least a few other parts of the world. See [previous post].

Almost all arguments in the United States in support of climate change policies have been different self-interest based arguments such as climate change policies will protect the United States against adverse climate caused damages in the United States, create good green jobs, or are necessary to prevent national security risks to the United States that might be created if millions of people become refugees fleeing diminished water supplies or droughts that are adversely affecting food supplies. There are no known politically visible arguments being made in the United States that argue that the United States should reduce its greenhouse gas emissions because it has duties, obligations, and responsibilities to others. In particular, there has been no coverage of the specific ethical arguments for climate change legislation in the mainstream media except with a very few infrequent exceptions.

II. The Strength of Ethical Arguments In Support of Climate Change Policies.

We have explained many times in ClimateEthics why climate change not only creates issues of self-interest but also duties, responsibilities to others. In summary fashion, this is so because: (a) climate change is a problem caused by some people that most harshly harms others, (b) the harms to others are likely to be catastrophic under business-as-usual, (c) because of the global scope of the problem and the inability of victims of climate change to petition their own governments to protect them, only with successful appeals to the ethics of foreigners can the victims of climate change hope to get protective action, and, (d) obligations to future generations are part of the prescriptive calculus. Given that climate change raises not only self-interest questions but matters about which there are duties, obligations, and responsibilities to others ethical arguments are stronger than self-interest arguments in the following ways:

(a) Scientific Arguments Against Climate Change Policies.

Once one sees the ethical obligations to others one easily sees the duty to think about scientific uncertainty of climate change impacts through the lens of the victims. This is particularly important because it is those who will most harshly be harmed by climate change impacts that have the most to loose if the mainstream climate change view turns out to be correct. In fact, the victims of climate change have the strongest interest in seriously considering the possibility of potential but unproven catastrophic harms actually happening and have the most to loose by waiting until all uncertainties are resolved...The decision to do nothing in the face of uncertainty could have consequences and those consequences will most harshly be experienced by those most vulnerable, that is the poorest people in parts of the world most vulnerable to harsh climate change impacts.

(b) Economic and Cost Arguments

Particularly in response to cost arguments made in opposition to climate change policies ethical arguments have an important resonance and for some arguments are the only way of showing deficiencies with cost-based arguments in opposition to climate change policies. Examples of this are the following:

(1) Once one sees ethical duties to others it is easier to understand what is wrong with many cost arguments made against climate change policies. For instance, during the debate about the Kyoto Protocol, the United States governess only considered two cost-benefit analyses that looked only at costs and benefits to the United States alone. In other words, the United States acted as if only costs and benefits to the United States counted.

(3) Only an ethical appeal to duties of future generations can correct the usual approach followed in cost-benefit analyses to discount the value of benefits that are experienced in future in such away that the future benefits are virtually worthless in the present. Fort this reason, only an appeal to duties to future generations can demonstrate problems with disenfranchising future generations' interests in discounting methods commonly followed in cost-benefit analysis based arguments made in opposition to climate change policies.

(5) Because climate change impacts can interfere with the basic human rights of the victims of climate change, only an appeal to the ethical duty to avoid human rights violations can effectively deal with some of the arguments against climate change action based upon cost. It is well established in international law that increased cost to those who are responsible for human rights violations may not be used as a justification for continuing human rights violations.

(6) Only an appeal to ethics and justice can correct the tendency of many cost arguments to reduce the value of everything harmed to their market value...Cost arguments against climate change policies often determine the value of climate change harms avoided on the basis of market values alone, that is on the basis of "willingness-to-pay" alone. For instance, some cost-benefit analyses relied upon by some opponents of climate change action have assumed that the value of lives lost by foreigners to be the earning power in the remaining lives of the people who will be killed thus making the value of the lives of poor people less valuable that people in rich countries. Only an appeal to ethics can demonstrate why this may be unjust.

(d) Responsibility for Damages

Many principles of international law make polluting nations responsible for damages caused by harm they cause others in proportion to their contribution to the problem. For instance, in international law the "no-harm" and "polluter-pays" principles have been agreed to by the the United States in a variety of soft-law documents and in the case of the "no harm" principle in binding law under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, a treaty ratified by the United States under the George Bush the First in 1993...If the Untied States is worried about economic impacts of climate change it should be worried particularly about the implications of ethical rules that would allocate responsibility for damages. This is a matter of retributive justice, not self-interest.

III-Conclusion

Because the ethical arguments discussed above are the strongest arguments for climate change policy, it is both a practical mistake as well as an ethical failure to not frame climate change policy options through an ethical lens.

By:

Donald A. Brown
Associate Professor, Environmental Ethics, Science, and Law
Dab57@psu.edu

Economics of Climate Change Lacks a Human Dimension

Paul Krugman does a thorough job of summarizing the somewhat daunting economic complexities of climate change policies in a recent New York Times magazine article (nyti.ms/agKlpe). While he certainly does a nice job of encapsulating a lot of information and concepts, his truly global analysis misses the trees for the forest, if I can badly coin a phrase. The real possibility of increased weather extremes, coastal flooding and sea level rise, ocean acidification and coral reef decline, and regional changes in weather and climate in developing countries and vulnerable areas, such as the polar regions, are the missing moral argument for immediate and strong action on climate change policy. Farmers in Iowa might be able to switch to growing more subtropical varieties of corn, and urban dwellers can better insulate their homes and turn up the A/C, but it's people and places at the margins, with little flexibility and who are forecasted to bear the brunt of climate change impacts, who will be the real victims of our past transgressions and current inaction.

The human impacts of climate change introduce an important moral dimension that is needed in the largely economic debate over climate change policies. Conservatives and opponents of taking action have certainly used this tactic (harming small businesses and job creation) for their own purposes. It is time those of us who want aggressive action used those same arguments. Impacts of climate change on global GDP will likely be low because those who are generally most affected by socially disruptive actions are "the least of these" and do not generally contribute much to money-oriented economic calculations. A similar assessment was made for the regional economic impact of the 2004 South Asian tsunami (http://tinyurl.com/y3znu3y). From the article, "...despite the unprecedented scale of the loss of human life, homelessness and displaced populations, it seems that the macro economic impact of the disaster is marginal. The businesses affected were small, local and often part of local subsistence rather than global supply and this reflects, to a large degree, the economic mix of activities and companies in those coastal, often rural, areas."

Speaking up for the "human impact" has traditionally been the responsibility of the world's faith communities and religious leaders. So it should be with climate change.