Climate Change Winter 2019

Question 1

What is Climate Change?

Answer 1

The increase in average global temperatures
Accelerated by human agency: Carbon is released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and instead of being released into the atmosphere, it sits above us. And it traps the earth’s rays that we need to make life on earth possible. (similar claims hold for methane, Nitrous Oxide, and water vapor)

Climate change is characterized by a number of known (and potentially not yet recognized features):

• Severe weather events
• Increases in volume of weather events
• Ocean acidification
• Melting of polar ice caps (and massive release of CO2 and methane)

Question 2

Climate Change why is it controversial?

Answer 2

The technical issues raised have to do with historic periods of weather events. Some who doubt climate change, doubt we are causing it. And assume that we’re in a warming trend that will then be followed by a cooling trend

Question 3

Climate Change why is it interesting?

Answer 3

And politicians are loathe to spend the monies adapting and mitigating climate change ($140 to $300 Billion for developing nations by 2030), and not everyone is prepared to make the necessary changes (diet, modes of production, number of children, etc.)

We don’t know precisely the numerous ways in which climate change affects the ways our planet is being changed, and Carbon dioxide takes about 100 years to naturally break down.

Climate change is a massive coordination and collective action problem! We all contribute to it, but quite unequally!

Worst case scenario, the human race could become extinct!

Question 4

What are the Philosophical Issues?

Answer 4

Moral and political wrongs associated with climate change:

• Who should pay? (a responsibility issue and actor issue – persons, government, firms)
• For what should be paid?
• Who should have a say in how the prior questions are answered?

Question 5

Potential Moral wrongs:

Answer 5

Individual persons are harmed by climate change:

• Rising temperatures will affect food systems, causing more food shortages, acidification
• Health care delivery systems: an intensification of malaria in countries with already vulnerable health care systems.
• The effects on areas may intensify strife, causing direct harms to the victims of aggression

Exposure to weather related climate events causes significant suffering (e.g. the recent fires in California, Fort McMurray, the flooding in Houston, heat stroke, coastal areas being inundated etc.); leading to loss of non-human animal life and their habitats.

Loss of an ability to experience the natural environment (e.g. coral reefs) is a wrong that the environment suffers, but one we suffer too.

Loss of or significantly diminished opportunities for future generations

Question 6

Political Wrong: A Distributive Failure

Answer 6

Distributive Justice: The process and actual allocations of a good (say a pie)

Developing nations were allowed to develop their major industries without regard for the ways in which they exploited the environment.

They developed and externalized the environmental effects onto the global south (and onto the poor and marginalized at home)

Developing and undeveloped nations have to account for climate change and spend vast sums of money that we didn’t spend industrializing. The rich stay rich, the poor stay poor.

The playing field isn’t equal either: the Rich countries have vast resources to respond to the future challenges posed by climate change, the poor countries do not have those resources, so their equality of opportunity seems compromised.

Question 7

Political Wrong: A Compensatory Failure

Answer 7

Compensatory justice, a backward looking form of justice in which we seek to restore the victims of bad luck to a state the were prior to being visited by misfortune.

If climate change is primarily caused by developed nations lifestyles in consumption and the developing nations experience the harms associated by climate change, then developing nations have a duty to repair the past wrongs they have caused.

If democracy involves the ability to be self-determining in the processes and policies that affect everyone
Those most vulnerable to climate change, (women and children in developing nations, but the poor) lack a say in the production of GHG’s
-We should want all those affected by a policy to have a say in its application
-The developing nations, and especially the poor, then, are owed a robust ability to participate in discussions and policies to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

Question 8

What Should We Make of These Claims?

Answer 8

One could try to rebut the justice worries by arguing that:
States are charged with the welfare of its citizens and if a state isn’t wealthy or doesn’t prosper, it’s the responsibility of its leaders or its culture

We don’t know the precise ways in which Canada effects the environment, nor can we disentangle it from the contributions of other states, like China and India (within Canada distributions as well)

So the developing countries may have more stringent obligations to help other developing nations, not wealthy states such as Canada

Against the claims of future generations: we don’t know what they’ll need in the future and we can’t have obligations to beings that don’t yet exist

We can admit duties but we have to be careful how they are discharged, if we expect people to make changes too radical for their lives, they won’t change, so the best we can hope for and do, amount to superficial changes to our lives and hope that our children and their children can figure out how to deal with the world that they inherit!

Question 9

Further Issues and a complication

Answer 9

Government policy should be more aggressive

• Firms should change behavior
• We should change behavior: transit, smaller homes, fewer children, use of renewable forms of energy, voting with our ballots and feet…