Global Justice - Environment

Question 1

What, according to Blomfield (2013), are the two types of action involved in addressing climate change?

Answer 1

There are two types of action involved in addressing climate change and environmental degradation; first, mitigation, which involves taking actions “to prevent or reduce the progress of climate change”, and second, adaptation, which involves acting to counter the negative effects of the climate change which has not been/will not be avoided.

An important example of a duty that mitigation would involve would be cutting down emissions of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide. Citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Blomfield points out that CO2 emissions have been identified as being the biggest way in which human activity has contributed to climate change.

Question 2

What is the equal shares view and why does Blomfield (2013) have an issue with it?

Answer 2

The dominant view is that, because the atmosphere is a global common, rights to the atmosphere, and therefore emission quotas should be distributed to all human beings globally on an equal per capita basis (equal shares view).

According to Blomfield, this argument is built on a flawed foundation, namely, the conceptualization of the atmosphere as the global commons whose overuse has led to the problem of climate change.

This is because, whilst the atmosphere can indeed be understood as a global CPR, when individuals and collectives emit greenhouse gases, they do not just appropriate atmospheric capacity from the global common resource of the atmosphere but also appropriate global GHG assimilative capacity from the global common resource of the global GHG assimilative system, which encompasses not only the atmosphere, but also the ocean, soils, and vegetation. It is only when the climate system’s oceanic and terrestrial sinks are subjected to overuse that CO2 starts to accumulate in the atmosphere.

Unlike the atmosphere, many aspects of the global GHG assimilation system often fall within state territories. So, the ‘basic presupposition’ of equal shares cannot be straightforwardly applied and is much more controversial.

Question 3

What, according to Blomfield (2013), must the equal shares view do in order to redeem itself, and what are the problems with this?

Answer 3

Rescue commons arguments for equal shares by rejecting all territorial claims to GHG sink capacity
- However: there is a dynamic, bi-directional relationship between people and land, and since natural resources have not historically been allocated independently of territorial location, it would be unfair now to deny sink-rich states the ability to also benefit from the natural resources in their territory.

Accept that legitimate territorial claims to GHG sink capacity exist and provide an argument as to why emission quotas should nevertheless be distributed on an equal per capita basis
- Equal shares theorists are going to have to say more about exactly how and why emission quotas are so important.

Question 4

How does Blomfield (2013) argue responsibility should be distributed?

Answer 4

Since it is the global greenhouse gas assimilation system that is the global common pool resource that faces overuse, it is use of this resource system that has to be allocated fairly.

Because there are territorial claims to greenhouse gas sink capacity, it is not obvious that all human beings should have equal rights to the global greenhouse gas assimilation system even if it is true that ‘all human beings should have equal rights to the atmosphere’

Question 5

What are the two types of duty as described by Caney (2010)?

Answer 5

Two kinds of duty: mitigation and adaption

Mitigation: to cut back on activities which cause climate change, e.g., by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, by creating and protecting carbon sinks, etc.

Adaption: to devote resources to protect people from the ill effects of climate change e.g., by building seawalls to protect those near the coast from rising sea levels and supporting irrigation systems in drought prone areas

Question 6

What is the Polluter pays and principle and how does Caney (2010) respond to objections to it?

Answer 6

Principle says that those who contribute to climate change should make amends for this; Caney does not think this principle should be abandoned but does think it should be supplemented as it has limitations.

Objection 1: There is uncertainty in climate science; we do not always know the nature of the estimated ill effects and we do not know exactly what impact climate change has had compared to what would happen otherwise
- Response: This does not undermine the moral force of the principle, there is considerable process being made by climate modelers in developing the capacity for detection and attribution of climate change, and this problem does not only affect the polluter pays principle but rather all principles regarding the distribution of the burden of climate change.

Objection 2: Some people were excusably ignorant of the fact that their activities may lead to dangerous climate change
- Response: we should adopt a modified strict liability principle where this holds that if people engage in activities which jeopardize other people’s fundamental interests by emitting excessive amounts of greenhouse gases then (i) they should bear the costs of their actions even if they were excusably ignorant of the effects of their actions if they have benefited from those harmful activities and (ii) their costs should correspond to the benefits they have derived.

Question 7

What are the limitations of the Polluter pays principle according to Caney (2010)?

Answer 7

The Polluter Pays Principle cannot cope with the effects on the climate that result from the emissions of previous generations, such as during the industrial revolution.

An additional principle is required to attribute responsibilities to deal with non-human induced climate change.

There is not a perfect correlation between high emissions and wealth and in some cases making people pay in proportion to their emissions would perpetuate the poverty of some and reduce others to poverty. If we hold that people should not fall beneath a certain standard of living, the Polluter Pays principle should be qualified to prevent it being the case that people are made to pay for emissions needed for their fundamental survival.

Question 8

What is the Ability to Pay Principle and how does Caney (2010) respond to objections to it?

Answer 8

The remainder that cannot be dealt with by the polluter pays principle should be filled by an ‘ability to pay’ approach. The ability to pay approach states that the duty to address some problem should be borne by the wealthy and that the duty should increase in line with an agent’s wealth.

It may seem unfair for people to pay for what is not their fault
- Response: Whatever happens someone will be bearing a burden which is not their fault, whether that be paying or facing the consequence of climate change. The most advantaged are most able to pay the price without sacrificing any reasonable interests.

Counterintuitive to ignore the historical record
- Response: can accommodate the objection by giving greater responsibility to those whose wealth came about in ways which endangered the earth’s climate than to those whose wealth did not.

Why focus solely on previous climate injustice on not other unjust ways wealth could have come about
- Response: Can assign greater responsibility to bear the burden to those whose wealth came about in unjust ways

Question 9

What principles of distribution does Caney advocate for?

Answer 9

Principle 1: Persons should bear the burden of climate change that they have caused so long as doing so does not push them beneath a decent standard of living (the Poverty-Sensitive Polluter Pays Principle)

Principle 2: The duties to bear the Remainder should be borne by the wealthy but we should distinguish between two groups – (i) those whose wealth came about in unjust ways, and (ii) those whose wealth did not come about in unjust ways – and we should apportion greater responsibility to (i) than to (ii).

Question 10

Who according to Caney (2010) are the bearers of these duties?

Answer 10

Not just states as many actors other than national governments play a causal role in climate change. Other types of actors include individuals, firms, sub-state political authorities, and international financial institutions.

Question 11

What duty towards climate change does Cripps (2013) believe people should have?

Answer 11

The individual’s primary duty is to do what they can to bring about the necessary collective action to combat climate change.

I have defended a weakly collective duty to organize as necessary to act on mitigation, adaptation, and compensation, with a primary individual correlative duty to promote fair, effective collective action.

The Young have a weakly collective duty to mitigate climate change grounded in the principle of moralized collective self-interest. The Able have a duty to organize to act collectively on mitigation and adaptation, defended by appeal to a moderate version of the collectivized principle of beneficence. Polluters, who are required to act together on mitigation, adaptation, and compensation, must do so in compliance with the collectivized no-harm principle. This itself can be defended by appeal to an expanded understanding of collective responsibility for harm: weakly collective responsibility for harm resulting predictably from aggregated, avoidable individual acts.

Question 12

Why, according to Moellendorf (2022) is it important that climate change be addressed?

Answer 12

The climate consequences of somewhat more than a degree of warming have already been significant. For example, water resources have been affected by greater incidences of droughts in some regions, more precipitation in others, and the retreat of mountain glaciers. Sea levels have risen, and storm swells have become bigger problems.

More effects are confidently predicted if climate change continues; there is sure to be continued widespread loss of species and ecosystems, more frequent heatwaves and droughts in some locations, more and more extreme precipitation events and tropical storms, sea- level rise causing inundation in some areas, and glacial melting leading to flooding and later to water shortages. For humans, these effects are likely to bring significant threats to food security globally and regionally, increased risks from food- and water- borne illnesses and vector- borne diseases.

Limiting warming to well below 2°C, even to 1.5°C, is now a major policy goal of the international community.

One concern is that technological development is needed.

Another objection to the goal of substantial limits on warming comes from those who rightly remind us of the duty to eradicate global poverty. The criticism holds that we should spend less on mitigation, continue to promote human development even if it is carbon intensive, and address climate change later by means of adaptation policies once all societies are more prosperous. Let’s call this view Priority to Global Poverty Eradication.
- But rather than competing with climate change as a global priority, poverty eradication drives the concern about climate change in an especially important way. A few years ago, a report from the UN Human Development Programme emphasized the impact that climate change has on the poor of the world.

Question 13

What is the argument for the Anti-Poverty principle according to Moellendorf (2022)?

Answer 13

(1) A risky action or policy is dangerous, when, in light of the alternatives, on balance one has reason to avoid the action or policy because of the risks.

(2) To the extent that there are alternatives, everyone has good reasons to avoid actions and policies that result in involuntary poverty.

(3) Therefore, climate policy that imposes avoidable involuntary poverty is dangerous

Question 14

What is Moellendorf’s (2022) argument for why the Anti-Poverty Principle supports the view that warming should be limited to 1.5°C?

Answer 14

(1) Climate policy that imposes avoidable involuntary poverty is dangerous.

(2) Warming greater than 1.5°C would likely prolong or worsen poverty for several hundreds of million people.

(3) There are policy measures available that can avoid warming greater than 1.5°C.

(4) Therefore, policies that lead to warming beyond 1.5°C are dangerous.

Question 15

Why should responsibility to mitigate climate change fall disproportionately on developed countries according to Moellendorf?

Answer 15

We have good reason to value human development, and human development is an immensely energy-intensive affair. Human development uses electricity, and the primary means by which electricity has been generated throughout the twentieth century has been by burning fossil fuels.

The staggering negative health and security effects of energy poverty indicate the complex ways in which deprivation can be interconnected.

The liberty to pursue poverty- eradicating human development could be threatened by international agreements that have the effect of raising the costs of consuming energy, thereby rendering the pursuit of human development more expensive.

If the result is to increase the costs of development policies, reconciling the liberty to promote sustainable development with climate change mitigation would require subsidizing the transition to a zero- carbon economy. This could include various measures, including technology transfers, infrastructural development, or grants to subsidize energy generation and to preserve and expand forests.

If the right to promote sustainable development entails a liberty of states to pursue poverty- eradicating development within a broader aim of global sustainability, and if that liberty is vitally important, then the responsibility to ensure a transition to a zero- carbon global economy must fall disproportionately on those states that have already achieved a high level of development and that have the resources to eradicate poverty within their borders.

Responsibility to ensure the mitigation of climate change in the UNFCCC context must fall firstly and mainly on highly (human-) developed countries. This is due to their greater capacity to carry the burden without incurring poverty eradication losses. eradicating poverty in these countries is not prevented by taking responsibility for global climate change mitigation; it could be accomplished, given sufficient political will, by more egalitarian distributive institutions and policies.

Question 16

Why, according to Moellendorf should the right to promote sustainable development be respected?

Answer 16

First, the right protects morally mandatory human development efforts whose object is to eradicate poverty. States have internationally recognized human rights obligations to pursue poverty eradication. Additionally, individuals have an internationally recognized right to enjoy development.

Second, recognizing a state’s right to promote sustainable development is a matter of basic fairness. Ensuring a stable climate system by means of climate change mitigation would be a benefit to all states, but especially to low- and medium- income states because climate change threatens to exacerbate poverty. Ensuring such climatic stability requires international cooperation. The terms of cooperation would be grossly unfair if they unnecessarily required some states to assume costs that would threaten to outweigh the benefit gained by cooperative enterprise itself.

Third, respect for the right to promote sustainable development is a promissory obligation of states that derives from their ratification of the Framework Convention, which entered into force in 1994.

Question 17

What is Shue’s (1999) first principle of equity and why?

Answer 17

Once such an inequality has been created unilaterally by someone’s imposing costs upon other people, we are justified in reversing the inequality by imposing extra burdens upon the producer of the inequality. There are two separate points here. First, we are justified in assigning additional burdens to the party who has been inflicting costs upon us. Second, the minimum extent of the compensatory burden we are justified in assigning is enough to correct the inequality previously unilaterally imposed. The purpose of the extra burden is to restore an equality that was disrupted unilaterally and arbitrarily (or to reduce an inequality that was enlarged unilaterally and arbitrarily).

First principle of equity: When a party has in the past taken an unfair advantage of others by imposing costs upon them without their consent, those who have been unilaterally put at a disadvantage are entitled to demand that in the future the offending party shoulder burdens that are unequal at least to the extent of the unfair advantage previously taken, in order to restore equality.

Question 18

What is Shue (1999) response to counterarguments to his first principle of equality?

Answer 18

The environmental damage was unintentional
- This objection rests upon a confusion between punishment and responsibility. It is not fair to punish someone for producing effects that could not have been avoided, but it is common to hold people responsible for effects that were unforeseen and unavoidable.

Less developed countries have also benefitted from industrialization
- Poor countries have been charged for any benefits they received, and rich countries have had much greater benefits

It is not fair to hold people responsible for damage done before they were born.
- The industrial states’ contributions to global warming have continued unabated long since it became impossible to plead ignorance. Also, today’s generation in the industrial states is far from completely unrelated to the earlier generations, going back all the way to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Question 19

What is Shue’s (1999) second principle of equity and response to counterargument?

Answer 19

Second Principle of Equity: Among a number of parties, all of whom are bound to contribute to some common endeavour, the parties who have the most resources normally should contribute the most to the endeavour.

If there was a flat rate of contribution this would focus exclusively upon the contribution process and ignores the position in which, as a result of the process, the parties end up. Contribution according to ability to pay is much more sensitive both to concrete circumstance and to final outcome.

Objection: Disincentive effects. Responses:
- Being fair and providing incentives are two different matters
- Concerns about incentives often arise when it is assumed that maximum production and limitless growth are the best goal. It is increasingly clear that many current forms of production and growth are unsustainable and that the last thing we should do is to give people self-interested reasons to consume as many resources as they can, even where the resources are consumed productively.
- Some incentive does not mean unlimited incentive.

Question 20

What is Shue’s (1999) third principle of equity and response to objection?

Answer 20

Third Principle of equity: When some people have less than enough for a decent human life, other people have far more than enough, and the total resources available are so great that everyone could have at least enough without preventing some people from still retaining considerably more than others have, it is unfair not to guarantee everyone at least an adequate minimum

When radical inequalities exist, it is unfair for people in states with far more than enough to expect people in states with less than enough to turn their attention away from their own problems in order to cooperate with the much better-off in solving their problems (and all the more unfair—in light of the first principle of equity—when the problems that concern the much better-off were created by the much better-off themselves in the very process of becoming as well off as they are). The least that those below the minimum can reasonably demand in reciprocity for their attention to the problems that concern the best-off is that their own most vital problems be attended to: that they be guaranteed means of fulfilling their minimum needs.

Objection: it is not fair to expect members of one society to help to maintain a guarantee of a minimum for members of another society
- However, I am unconvinced that, in general, state political borders and national citizen ship are markers of such extraordinary and over-riding moral significance. Whatever may be the case in general, this second objection is especially unpersuasive if raised on behalf of citizens of the industrialized wealthy states in the context of international cooperation to deal with environmental problems primarily caused by their own states and of greatest concern in the medium term to those states.

Question 21

Why, according to Taiwo (2022), are the effects of climate change distributed unjustly?

Answer 21

The economic and political systems developed by global racial empire will mean that the negative effects of global environmental degradation will not be evenly distributed and will be distributed in a way that “compounds and locks in the distributional injustices we’ve inherited from history”.

As climate impacts accelerate, we can expect them to perversely distribute the costs and burdens of climate change, disproportionately impacting those who have been rendered most vulnerable given the accumulated weight of history. One reason that we can expect the costs of accelerated environmental catastrophe to be distributed in ways echoing the history of global racial empire is that this is already happening.

Harm to the environment threatens not only to cause significant damage to all humans, other animals, and ecosystems but also to reinforce and exacerbate existing injustices.

What matters from the standpoint of justice is how these ecological phenomena affect people’s capabilities— what lives they are or are not empowered to live. This is determined not just by what happens to the ecological systems, but by the interaction of those impacts with many other factors determined by our social and political systems. Some people who have to, say, retreat from a coastline will have access to money or credit to manage the financial costs of relocation, a passport or citizenship status that will widen the legal possibilities of their relocation, and a social status that will make the receptive communities in the places they are likely to move accepting of their presence. Others will lack some or all of these key advantages.

Question 22

What are some of the advantages given by Taiwo for how the effects of climate change have been distributed unjustly?

Answer 22

Táíwò describes how the effects of Hurricane Katrina were intensified not only by climate change, but also by political systems and by the accumulated weight of “history constructed by the global racial empire” which, for example, failed to construct floodgates to protect Black neighbourhoods from disaster and created insurance schemes and government protection which would ward off the worst of the impact from some and divert the destruction to others.

Climate change has already had a significant effect in the global south. For example, there has been decreased rainfall and increased amounts of droughts in Kenya.

The mortality rate from pollution in countries that were not colonised is half of that as in countries that were.

Question 23

What targets and tactics should we have regarding climate change, according to Taiwo?

Answer 23

Targets: Unconditional Cash Transfers, Global Climate Funding, Torch the Tax Havens, Community Control

Tactics: Divest-invest (from fossil fuels to communities), Knowledge is Power, Deciding Together

Question 24

Why can’t colonialism and capitalism be disaggregated from climate justice for indigenous peoples?

Answer 24

Important habitats are becoming further degraded from climatic and non-climatic factors, including warming waters, ocean acidification, and the ramped up shoreline development of U.S. settler populations.

Writing from a Potawatomi, North American perspective, I see Indigenous peoples as often perceiving the burdens of climate-related risks through their experiences of already having been deeply harmed by the economic, industrial, and military drivers behind anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. Historically, U.S. settlers widely displaced, terrorized and polluted Indigenous communities for the sake of profiting from oil and coal development.

It is no longshot to claim that the U.S.’ current treatment of the Band and other Indigenous peoples commits human rights violations. The United Nations (UN) Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples expresses rights to enjoy the types of goods threatened by climate change and extractive industries, including cultural integrity, economic development, high standards of physical and mental health and political self-determination.

Even strategies for lowering national carbon footprints pose risks to Indigenous peoples and put their human rights in peril, whether through programs of the World Bank, the United Nations or particular nations. Hydropower and forest conservation still involve displacement of Indigenous peoples.

Public discourses of Indigenous allies, including climate scientists and journalists, can also be problematic when they portray Indigenous vulnerability to climate change without reference to the larger struggles with colonialism and capitalism.