Dale Jamieson. Chicago Journal of International Law. Volume 13, Issue 2, Winter 2013.
I. Introduction
Since the signing of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, abating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions has been regarded as an urgent global responsibility. GHGs linger in the atmosphere for decades, centuries, and even longer. When this is coupled with the fact that their impacts are mediated through various complex systems, the result is that climate change is practically irreversible on time scales that most of us care about. However, abatement matters because the nature and severity of the impacts are affected both by the absolute levels of GHG concentrations in the atmosphere and their rates of increase. Since abating greenhouse gas emissions imposes costs on emitters, the question of how to allocate these costs fairly has been at the center of climate ethics. Questions about the fairness of various abatement strategies are complicated by the fact that land use changes such as deforestation can also dramatically impact atmospheric concentrations of GHGs both by directly affecting emissions and by changing the biosphere’s ability to sequester carbon. Unfortunately, these processes are difficult to characterize and measure.
As it has become increasingly clear that we are in the early stages of a climate change that is likely to continue for centuries even if we pursue aggressive abatement policies, questions about the fair distribution of the costs of adaptation have also begun to receive attention. Since the resources that can be brought to bear on adaptation are limited, questions about setting priorities are also becoming increasingly important. How do we decide what to save and what to give up when we cannot protect everything?
Adaptation is motivated by a concern to avoid damages. However, climate change damages have already occurred and will continue, though it is difficult to tell exactly what damages can be attributed to climate change and to assess their extent. Research in this area is ongoing and especially active regarding climate change impacts on human health. The World Health Organization estimates that climate change is already causing more than 150,000 deaths per year. This estimate is controversial but there is little doubt that climate change will cause millions of deaths or even orders of magnitude more. Compensating for loss of life raises special problems, but there is a range of other climate change damages (for example, property losses) that are straightforwardly compensable. This raises questions about whether compensation should be paid and, if so, who should pay whom and how the required compensation should be determined and delivered.
There are also difficult and neglected questions of participatory justice and how it interacts with distributive concerns. Climate change will remake the world in which we live and bequeath to our descendants. Generally, the impacts will be greater on those who contribute litde to the problem than on those who contribute a lot. The forty-two members of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) emit about 0.5 percent of global GHG emissions and, on a per capita basis, emit one-quarter as much carbon dioxide as the global average. Yet many of them will disappear under rising seas. Sub-Saharan Africans emit about onetwelfth as much carbon per capita as Europeans, who in turn emit about onehalf as much carbon as North Americans, yet sub-Saharan Africans will suffer disproportionately from climate change and have less capacity to adapt than Americans or Europeans. While 194 nations are parties to die UNFCCC and their diplomats fly around the world in a seemingly endless series of talkathons, most of these nations have very litde power over the forces that actually affect the global climate, and billions of their citizens have even less voice.9 Eighty percent of global carbon emissions come from only ten countries. Their leaders, along with the executives of the world’s most powerful corporations, have disproportionate influence on the decisions that affect emissions and the resources available for adaptation. While this disparity in the ability of various nations and their peoples to effectively participate in climate change negotiations is decried by some academics and NGOs, American academics and policymakers increasingly seem to want less inclusive regimes.
Finally, there are impacts on non-human nature. Climate change is occurring against a background in which human activities have already diminished populations and fragmented landscapes in ways that will reduce dispersal rates and block range shifts for many species. The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report documented that climate change has already shifted the geographic ranges of plants, animals, and biomes around the world. The ability of many species to migrate, even if dispersal corridors are available, will be slow relative to the pace of future climate change. Moreover, since many species engage in mutualistic interactions, the dispersal dynamics of multiple species can affect the viability of any single species. These and other considerations have led conservation biologists to generally agree that climate change will raise extinction rates. The polar bear has already become the popular symbol of climate change-caused extinction.
Given the depth and difficulty of these issues, it seems reasonable to think that part of why it is difficult to build an effective international climate regime is because of moral disagreements and differing perceptions of justice. Yet many commentators, especially those broadly in the tradition of “realism” in international relations theory, tend to minimize such concerns in favor of such notions as economic efficiency or self-interest. In this Article I claim that ethics matters, but the foundations of any particular ethical theory are relatively unimportant to the decisions we face. Morality matters, but history, context, and circumstance matter more than abstract principle.
In Section II, I fill in some of the details regarding the evolution of the climate change regime that are relevant to understanding its current status. In Section III, I discuss Eric A. Posner and David Weisbach’s International Paretianism (IP), a principle that they seem to believe effectively limits the influence of moral ideals in international affairs. I go on in Section IV to discuss the foundations of Posner and Weisbach’s views regarding climate justice, arguing that the most reasonable versions of their favored theoretical views would not lead to some of the conclusions that they embrace. Finally, in Section V, I return to the climate regime and make some observations about the road ahead.
II. The Dream of Rio
On December 6, 1988, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 43/53 on the “Conservation of climate as part of the common heritage of mankind.” This resolution formally recognized the IPCC, set a timeline for its first report, and provided a framework for moving to a convention.
A) The Run-up to Rio
The stage had been set by a series of events that contributed both to a sense of urgency about environmental challenges and the feeling that this was a moment in which decisive, even transformative, action was possible. In 1968, we were able to see the Earth from space for the first time, and many people around the world were moved by its lack of borders and apparent vulnerability. In 1972 in Stockholm, the UN held its first conference on the environment, which led to the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The same year, Nixon went to China, and in the following year, the Paris Accords were signed, ending American involvement in Vietnam. Détente with the Soviet Union was growing. In 1977, World Bank President Robert McNamara, who had been the US secretary of defense during most of the Vietnam War, announced the creation of a commission that would make recommendations regarding North-South relations. The resulting Brandt Commission issued reports in 1980 and 1983 with proposals focusing on food, agricultural development, aid, energy, trade, and international monetary and financial reform. The report also discussed the global environment, the arms race, and population growth. In 1983, the UN General Assembly created the World Commission on Environment and Development, which popularized the phrase “sustainable development” in its 1987 report. The resulting book, Our Common Future, was influential around the world.
In Europe especially, environmental consciousness was rapidly growing, partly in response to concerns about acid rain and fears generated by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Green political parties were forming all over. Since most European countries have some system of proportional representation, these parties were gaining parliamentary seats. The European Union (EU) was becoming progressively stronger and acting increasingly independently of individual states. The Greens made their influence felt at both the EU and national levels. In 1984 they entered the European Parliament and since then have been continuously represented. Greens were also becoming increasingly influential in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union through the emerging social movements that challenged the power of the state and the Communist Party. Gorbachev’s rise to power in the Soviet Union in 1985 seemed to create new political possibilities for addressing global environmental problems. In his bold and wide-ranging 1988 speech to the UN, Gorbachev indicated that the reformed Soviet Union would play an aggressive role in protecting the global environment. It seemed there was a real possibility that the East and West would join in trying to heal the North-South division and address the linked problems of global environmental destruction, poverty, and underdevelopment.
In 1987 the Montreal Protocol was signed, becoming the first in a series of international agreements leading to the phasing out of ozone-depleting chemicals. While the possibility that human action could deplete stratospheric ozone had been discussed and debated since the early 1970s, the 1985 discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole, which no model had predicted, shocked people around the world. This discovery showed how subtle changes in the atmosphere can produce surprising, unintended consequences that can threaten the prospects for life on Earth. The next year UNEP and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) joined to produce an international scientific assessment of the threat posed by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other compounds while expeditions led by Susan Solomon showed that CFCs were indeed implicated in causing the Antarctic ozone hole. The adoption of the Montreal Protocol, which embodied a system of targets and timetables, was a great achievement that occurred very quickly by the standards of international diplomacy. This led to a sense of optimism that, with the help of the scientific community, the nations of the world could successfully address the problem of climate change.
In 1988 climate change moved from an issue of public concern to a global project. Much of the US spent the summer in the grip of extreme heat and serious drought. Fires raged in Yellowstone National Park, agricultural production declined dramatically, and water levels in the Mississippi River system dropped precariously, resulting in channel closings and ship groundings. On the Eastern seaboard, demand for electricity hit an all-time high and air conditioners were even in short supply. On June 23, 1988, a sweltering day in Washington, DC, climate modeler James Hansen testified before a US Senate Committee that it was 99 percent probable that global warming had begun. Hansen’s testimony was front-page news in The New York Times and was extensively covered in other media as well. One week after Hansen’s testimony, a WMO-sponsored conference in Toronto called for a 20 percent reduction in GHG emissions by 2005. On July 28, Senator Tim Wirth of Colorado, along with eighteen co-sponsors from both political parties, introduced the National Energy Policy Act of 1988 calling for a 20 percent reduction in US carbon dioxide emissions from 1988 levels by the year 2000. In a September speech to the Royal Society, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher expressed concern about climate change, ozone depletion, and acid rain, noting that the five warmest years in a century were all in the 1980s, and reminded her audience of the vulnerability of the Maldives to sea level rise. 1988 was an election year in the United States and the Democratic Party promised in its platform to “address … the ‘greenhouse effect.” George H.W. Bush, the Republican candidate, promised to counter die greenhouse effect with “the White House Effect” and declared that he would be the “environmental president.” What seemed like a bidding war over emissions reductions continued in November in Hamburg, Germany, when the World Congress on Climate and Development called for a 30 percent reduction in emissions by 2000. The year ended with Time Magatane forgoing its usual “man of the year” in favor of the “planet of the year,” with the “Endangered Earth” depicted as wrapped in plastic and bound in rope.
Resolution 43/53 left the IPCC only about eighteen months to produce its first report. Initially its work was supported and cheered on by virtually every country in the world. In January 1989 newly appointed US Secretary of State James Baker spoke at die first meeting of Working Group III, declaring that the time had come for political action. In February 1990 President George H.W. Bush told the IPCC that “[t]he United States is strongly committed to the IPCC process of international cooperation on global climate change.” However, in August 1990 at the IPCC meeting in Sundsvall, Sweden, which had been called to approve the texts of the three working group reports along with a synthesis statement, competing political interests and ideologies were on display. Greenpeace International was present, and so were climate change denial NGOs such as the Global Climate Coalition and the Global Climate Council, as well as various fossil fuel interest groups. Under pressure for revisions from the US, Saudi Arabia, the Soviet Union and some developing countries, the meeting nearly collapsed. Finally, however, a text was accepted and after one more round of ministerial review it was submitted to the UN General Assembly in October 1990.
B) The Framework Convention on Climate Change
In response, the General Assembly created the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC), whose charge was to prepare a proposal for a framework convention on climate change that would be acted on at the UN Conference on Environment and Development, which was to convene in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. Remarkably, with only eighteen months to act, the INC was able to agree on a text. The UNFCCC was opened for signature in Rio on May 9, 1992, and entered into force on March 21, 1994.
Despite the conflicts, the UNFCCC has won nearly universal acceptance; there are 194 parties to the convention while the UN has 192 member states. The parties to the UNFCCC committed themselves to the following:
The ultimate objective of this Convention … is to achieve … stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.
They would achieve this objective by assuming “common but differentiated responsibilities.” The developed countries would lead the way by reducing their own emissions and transferring technology and financial assistance to developing countries. Instead of the mandatory targets and timetables favored by the EU, AOSIS, and most developing countries but opposed by the US and the oil-producing states, the UNFCCC incorporated highly ambiguous language regarding the responsibilities of developed countries to reduce their emissions. In Article 4.2.a of the convention, each developed country committed itself to:
[A]dopt national policies and take corresponding measures on the mitigation of climate change, by limiting its anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and protecting and enhancing its greenhouse gas sinks and reservoirs. These policies and measures will demonstrate that developed countries are taking the lead in modifying longer-term trends in anthropogenic emissions … recognizing that the return by the end of the present decade to earlier levels of anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases … would contribute to such modification …
In 4.2.C this commitment is referred to as developed countries having “the aim of returning individually or jointly to their 1990 levels these anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.” The ambiguity of the language is indicated by the fact that shortly after the United States signed the convention in Rio, a Bush policy advisor wrote to a US congressman that “there is nothing in any of the language which constitutes a commitment to any specific level of emissions at any time,” while the chief British negotiator was quoted as saying about the same provision that it is “indistinguishable” from an absolute guarantee.
The UNFCCC is a framework convention. What mattered was the way forward and from the beginning, there were two distinct visions about how it ought to go. The Europeans and environmentalists were willing to accept the UNFCCC because they saw this as the first step in a process in which the parties would take mutually reinforcing positive actions. Developed countries, which were responsible for 75 percent of C02 emissions from 1860-1990 despite having only 20 percent of the world population, would demonstrate the seriousness of their commitment by voluntarily stabilizing their emissions at 1990 levels by 2000. They would also transfer technology and other resources in order to enable developing countries to produce greenhouse gas inventories, take climate change into account in their planning processes, educate their citizens about climate change, and promote sustainable management. These initial steps would begin to bend the curve on C02 emissions and build confidence among the parties. During the next period, all countries would share the burdens of emissions reductions according to the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities.”
The problem with this approach is that it assumed goodwill and a common purpose on all sides. However, not everyone wanted global action on climate change. Most of the oil-producing states were opposed and so were many influential actors in the US who were motivated by ideology, self-interest, or the calculus of political advantage. The policies of some nations were unstable (for example, Canada and Australia), while other important actors were not committed to either scenario but instead poised to follow a pragmatic or opportunistic policy. The logic of the optimistic scenario was such that it was extremely vulnerable to those who were opposed to taking action. If the naysayers could prevent developed countries from acting in a way that inspired confidence and trust on the part of developing countries (for example, by casting doubt on the fairness of the bargain or the willingness of developing countries ever to do their part), then they would be able to prevent the virtuous circle of mutually reinforcing positive actions from ever taking hold. Even if die transition to a carbon-free economy could not be prevented but only delayed, this would still result in enormous economic benefits for some of the interest groups involved.
In January 2009, a new American administration took office. It was committed both to engaging constructively in the international negotiations to establish a post-Kyoto climate regime and to reducing emissions domestically through various policy interventions including the establishment of a cap-and-trade system. However, the lesson that it took from the Clinton administration’s failure with the Kyoto Protocol was the importance of linking international and domestic policy. The Obama administration was not going to make international commitments that it could not ratify or keep.
C) The Copenhagen Climate Change Conference
The American administration went to Copenhagen in December 2009 with several disadvantages. First, the Americans had done little to convince the rest of the world that the US was serious about climate change besides electing a new president who spoke a different language about climate change and international cooperation. Second, there was little time for the new administration to engage meaningfully with the international process prior to Copenhagen. Third, the negotiations that did occur appear to have been badly managed. Discussions went forward on two tracks, one that did not include the US regarding post 2012 emissions reductions under the Kyoto Protocol, and a second track that did include the US that discussed long-term cooperative action under the UNFCCC.
Moreover, the climate change denial campaign escalated once again. Less than three weeks before the opening of the Copenhagen meeting, emails were hacked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK and posted on a climate change denial website. The New York Times quoted prominent climate change deniers including Patrick Michaels who said “this is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud.” The story was picked up by all the major media and was quickly dubbed “Climategate.” Prominent climate scientists were charged with fabricating research results, misrepresenting data, and trying to destroy the careers of scientists who disagreed with them. Death threats spiked against climate scientists. Even some advocates for aggressive action on climate change expressed disappointment and endorsed some of the charges that were being made. Finally, months later, after nine separate investigations, the scientists were exonerated. No one who was involved in stealing the emails, making them public, or threatening the scientists has been brought to justice. Some in the media acknowledged that this was a “highly orchestrated, manufactured scandal,” but the damage had already been done. Climategate was not the wound that killed Copenhagen but it was one of a thousand cuts.
The divisions that have haunted climate change negotiations from the beginning hardened and fractured even further in Copenhagen. The United States was at odds with the EU, and the North was in conflict with the South. AOSIS led by Tuvalu demanded rigorous, legally binding commitments mat almost no one was willing to make. Rifts occurred between large developing countries such as China and Brazil, and others in the G-77. Countries such as Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Sudan became increasingly rejectionist. The two negotiating tracks were never successfully brought together. Many developing countries demanded that any agreement had to be within the purview of the Kyoto Protocol, a condition that could not be satisfied by any US government since the Kyoto Protocol was politically dead in the US and beyond resurrection. New disputes broke out over how to verify national claims about emission reductions and about the transparency and inclusiveness of the negotiating process.
President Obama remained non-committal about whether he would go to Copenhagen until November 25, when the White House issued a statement confirming his attendance and stating the US position. The US would reduce emissions 17 percent by 2020 from a 2005 baseline and also affirm as “goals” and “provisional targets” reductions of 30 percent by 2025, 42 percent by 2030, and 83 percent by 2050.
The President arrived on the morning of the final day of the conference, going immediately into negotiations with a select group of world leaders and then emerging for a plenary address. His speech seemed mainly addressed to Americans rather than to the conference delegates who remained skeptical about America’s good faith. Obama began by acknowledging American responsibility but in a way that seemed grudgingly tautological: “As the world’s largest economy and the world’s second largest emitter, America bears our share of responsibility in addressing climate change.” He went on to boast of a record that many find altogether lacking if not downright pathetic, mentioning “our leadership within international climate negotiations” and claiming that “bold action” had been taken at home. All this, he said, was “ambitious” and he went on to restate the commitment to the emissions reductions that had been made in the White House statement. The speech was not well received. A 17 percent emissions reduction by 2020 from a 2005 baseline is equivalent to a 4 percent reduction from the 1990 baseline, by far the weakest offer of any developed country (except for Canada, which offered a 3 percent reduction). By contrast, the EU was offering a 20 percent to 30 percent reduction.
After his speech, Obama went back to negotiations and shortly before midnight the Copenhagen Accord was unveiled. Draft texts of hundreds of pages negotiated over two years were replaced with a new declaration of two and a half pages that went through several drafts, each thinner and vaguer than the one before. References to emission cuts in developed countries of 50 percent by 2050 and 80 percent were dropped, reportedly at the insistence of China. The final text was an agreement negotiated behind closed doors by the US, China, Brazil, South Africa, and India, and supported by about twenty other parties including Ethiopia and the European Union.
After a press conference, Obama flew back to the US while the accord received a tumultuous reception from angry delegates. Rather than adopting or rejecting the accord, the convention finally agreed to “take note” of it. Most environmental organizations denounced the accord except for those based in the US. The executive director of Greenpeace UK declared that “the city of Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport.”
After twenty years of climate diplomacy, the plain fact is that the main forces that have successfully dampened greenhouse gas emissions have been, in order of increasing importance: global recession, the collapse of communism, and China’s one child policy.
III. International Paretianism
From the beginning, some American international relations scholars saw the Rio approach as misguided. Even before the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, they objected to the idea of a comprehensive global treaty with binding national targets. They saw it as a moralistic approach that was doomed to failure. What was needed was realpolitik and the cold calculus of national interest. To some extent their predictions of failure were (self) fulfilled.
It is true that the Rio dream was founded on a moral vision. It was intended to bring some justice to an unjust world. Mutual respect among nations was supposed to spawn the cooperation that would lead to addressing the twin problems of environment and development. While this vision might seem Utopian in retrospect, it is difficult to imagine a “realistic” approach to climate change that does not take justice seriously. It is a fact that climate change negotiations do not occur in an ethics-free zone. When entertaining fantasies of technocratic solutions it is good to be reminded that Lumumba Stanislaus -Kaw Di-Aping, the chief negotiator for the G-77, compared the Copenhagen Accord to the Holocaust. He was not the only moralist in attendance nor were all the moralists from developing countries.
A) A Realist Approach to Moralism
Posner and Weisbach are sensitive to the views of both the realists and the dreamers. They formulate a principle, International Paretianism (IP), that they think governs state behavior with respect to climate negotiations. They characterize IP as “a rough attempt to solve the tension between realism and idealism” and formulate it in this way: “[A]ll states must believe themselves to be better off by their lights as a result of a climate treaty.”
Putting aside the question of what it is for states to have propositional attitudes such as beliefs, it is clear that this is a weak subjective principle. For IP to be satisfied, a climate treaty does not have to actually make states better off by their own lights nor do they even have to be generally perceived to be better off by their own lights. States could be wrong about thinking that a climate treaty makes them better off and IP would still be satisfied. Moreover, in this formulation IP does not restrict what states may regard as making themselves better off. A state could have an eccentric or weird idea of what makes it better off (for example, a large military, large numbers of hedge fund managers, or a vast number of religious scholars). Or a state could be highly moralistic, believing that its own welfare is a function of everyone’s welfare. For example, a state might actually believe what John F. Kennedy said at the Berlin Wall in June 1963, that “[fjreedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free.” IP would be satisfied so long as states believed that a climate treaty would produce favorable results for them whatever these favorable results might consist in. In this formulation, IP is so weak that it comes close to saying nothing more than that if there is to be a climate treaty then states must desire what they take to be the results of such a treaty.
However, Posner and Weisbach are not consistent in their interpretation of IP. In other passages they seem to take IP to be an objective principle about economic welfare. They talk about a climate treaty “redistributing wealth” and claim that “a climate treaty that produces net costs … violates the condition of International Paretianism.” But it does not follow from the original formulation of IP that a treaty that produces net economic costs violates IP. If nations construct their interests in terms other than wealth (for example, the triumphal march of democracy, capitalism, socialism, or whatever), then IP may be satisfied even if a treaty produces net economic costs. Indeed, Posner and Weisbach go on to say that behaving altruistically can be part of a nation’s interest and so an agreement with some degree of altruism can in principle satisfy IP. In practice, however, they think that IP “probably requires that all states that participate in a climate treaty are economically better off.”
B) A Dilemma for IP
Posner and Weisbach think that IP is a “pragmatic starting point for negotiations,” but it is difficult to see why. A weak reading of IP does not significantly restrict the domain of possible climate treaties. A strong reading of IP in which welfare is conceived as objective economic welfare would be empirically false. Nations often seem to take actions that are against their economic interests. They fight wars against drugs and terrorism, and in favor of human rights or democracy in remote parts of the world. Of course, it can be said that there are subtle arguments that show that such actions are in the economic interests of a state; that in supposing otherwise, we are not correctly pricing the economic importance of intimidating demonstrations of state power deterrence, or whatever. Consider a small example. Over the past thirty-four years the state of California has spent $4 billion executing thirteen prisoners for capital crimes. Even in this case someone could say that the executions pass some cost-benefit analysis (what a grisly thought!). However, at some point it becomes clear that such claims are vacuous. States can act contrary to their interests perhaps even by signing up to a climate treaty (isn’t that what some of the critics thought the US did in Kyoto?). To suppose otherwise is to treat IP as an axiom rather than as an empirical claim open to falsification, and it is difficult to see how such an axiom can function as a “pragmatic starting point.”
In their contribution to this issue Posner and Weisbach agree that IP should not be treated as an axiom. What they want is for IP to function as a feasibility constraint. They think we should focus not only on what is ethically acceptable but also on what is politically feasible, and they think that proposed climate treaties that are extremely redistributive are not feasible. However, the real work in supporting this claim is done not by IP but by Posner’s and Weisbach’s empirical beliefs about the economics of various possible climate treaties, what different countries believe about the economics, and how economic considerations are traded off against other values in various countries. All of this is very dark, and Posner and Weisbach mobilize little empirical support for their substantive claims. There is serious disagreement about the economics of climate change which turns in part on various normative commitments (for example, about pure time preference), and certain empirical assumptions for which there is little evidence (for example, the growth rate over the next few centuries). Moreover, nations have different attitudes toward the importance of economic considerations and how to trade them off against other values. No doubt there are practical limits on how economically redistributive a treaty can be and still gain universal acceptance, but IP in its various formulations does little to illuminate them. The question that repays investigation is not whether there is some set of feasibility constraints on the space of universally acceptable climate treaties, but rather, what are the considerations that can motivate diverse agents to cooperate in addressing the problems we face here and now. As we saw in the previous section, it is difficult to understand the behavior of the European Union in the climate negotiations without recognizing that green ideas are more widely and intensely shared in many European countries than in the United States. Similarly, it is difficult to understand American behavior without recognizing the suspicion of treaties and international organizations that is characteristic of many Americans. It is considerations such as these that help us to understand what is possible in the climate negotiations.
IV. Welfarism as a Foundation
The general philosophical outlook that motivates Posner and Weisbach is what they call “welfarism,” which they contrast with what they call “deontological approaches,” which “focus on the tightness or wrongness of particular acts independent of their consequences … [while t]he welfarist approach approves of acts that increase the welfare of relevant people (and perhaps animals).” They go on to say that welfare can consist of a “subjective sense of well-being, satisfaction of desires or preferences, or satisfaction of certain objective parameters.”
A) Welfarism, Consequentialism, and Utilitarianism
Posner and Weisbach’s notion of welfarism is a confusing hybrid of a deontic theory (consequentialism) and an axiological theory.88 The passage quoted above embodies a false contrast between a deontic view about what makes acts right and an axiological view about what is morally valuable. A proper deontic contrast is between consequentialism and non-consequentialist views such as deontology; a correct axiological contrast is between views such as welfarism and non-welfarist views that count other kinds of goods as morally valuable instead or in addition. Matters are further confused by Posner and Weisbach’s willingness to count a non-welfarist axiology (“satisfaction of certain objective parameters”) as an instance of welfarism.
Consequentialism is the view that acts are right, wrong, or indifferent solely in virtue of their consequences. Since consequentialism is consistent with a broad range of theories of value, and since part of what Posner and Weisbach mean by “welfarism” is consequentialism, it is not surprising that their understanding of welfare is quite broad.
However, there are limits on what theories of value can reasonably be called welfarist. For example, Hastings Rashdall, one of the ideal utilitarians who flourished in the first half of the twentieth century, held that virtue and veracity are among the goods that we ought to promote. There is no guarantee that bringing about such goods will contribute to welfare in any reasonable sense of the term. Promoting veracity and virtue may result in misery and early death. Rather than thinking of philosophers such as Rashdall as welfarists, it is more reasonable to think of them as non-welfarist consequentialists.
In addition to being consistent with a broad range of axiological theories, consequentialism is also consistent with a broad range of deontic principles including both maximizing and satisficing principles. Posner and Weisbach seem to endorse this when they write that “[m]any different forms of aggregation are consistent with welfarism” and state that utilitarianism is only one such version. Yet they also say that “[wjelfarists seek policies that maximize people’s well-being,” thus effectively identifying welfarism with utilitarianism.
While pointing out these inconsistencies may seem like philosophical nitpicking (which is worth doing for its own sake anyway), some of Posner and Weisbach’s conclusions regarding climate justice rely on specific views in ethical theory that are obscured by their use of the term “welfarism.” It is not a general commitment to welfarism or consequentialism that leads Posner and Weisbach to minimize the roles of distributive justice, corrective justice, and equality in climate justice, but rather their de facto commitment to a crude version of utilitarianism that reduces value to money. While they do not explicitly endorse such a view or even consistently presuppose it, it is difficult to make sense of some of their arguments without attributing some such view to them.
B) Putting the Justice into Climate Justice
The role that is played by Posner and Weisbach’s utilitarianism can be seen in their rejection of proposals to create an international system of emissions trading, based on an initial equal per capita allocation of permits among countries. Both Peter Singer and I have advocated such a system but neither of us has feit any tension between these views and broadly consequentialist (and welfarist in the proper sense) convictions.
Posner and Weisbach consider two bases for the view that emissions permissions should be allocated on an equal per capita basis: one founded on welfarism and another founded on fairness.
Posner and Weisbach assume that a welfarist argument for an equal per capita allocation must rest on two factors: distribution and efficiency. While they are not completely clear about why a welfarist would argue on the basis of distribution, it appears that the reason concerns diminishing marginal utility. Generally, a unit of a resource produces more utility when allocated to someone who has less of the resource than to someone who has more. Posner and Weisbach point out that a system of equal per capita allocation is at best “only indirectly connected to the underlying normative goal” of increasing global welfare and that it “would be much better to redistribute all resources than to redistribute shares of the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb greenhouse gases.” They go on to claim that equal per capita allocations would be inefficient because “[governments would be rewarded for pursuing fertility policies that maximize the size of the population” and that such a system “punishes states that do well, while rewarding states that do poorly… . From an efficiency perspective, the best use of the surplus [generated by any climate treaty that satisfies IP] would be to reward the states that had taken steps in advance of the treaty to abate the greenhouse gases.” While granting that “there are complexities here,” they go on to stay that “[t]hese states would probably be the European states that accepted binding reductions under the Kyoto Protocol.”
While these arguments have some force, quite a lot can be said in response to them, though I cannot do full justice to the details here. In my 2001 presentation of the equal per capita allocation proposal, I anticipated the objection regarding perverse incentives for fertility rates and suggested that the per capita allocation be indexed to a particular year. Singer took up this suggestion in his presentation. While there have been objections to such indexing as a solution, the problem has not been ignored. Second, while it is important from an efficiency perspective to consider the incentive effects of various institutional arrangements, it is far from clear that the most efficiencyconducive allocation of a climate treaty surplus would be to reward those who have acted well in the past. It is an entirely open empirical question as to whether allocating resources in this way would do the most to incentivize efficiency-producing behavior in the future.
The most important point is keyed by Posner and Weisbach’s observation that a system of equal per capita allocation is at best “only indirectly connected to the underlying normative goal.” They are right about this. Utilitarianism is highly context-sensitive, and the level at which its guiding principle should be applied is always a question worth asking. As I have said elsewhere, utilitarianism is a universal emulator: it implies that people should lie, cheat, steal, even appropriate Aristotle, when that is what brings about the best outcomes. Something like this thought has been central to utilitarian thinking since at least Jeremy Bentham and has figured in the development of many different versions of indirect consequentialism, including rule consequentialism, virtue consequentialism, global consequentialism, and so on. It has also led particular utilitarians to endorse actions and policies that perhaps would not be countenanced in a utilitarian utopia. Most utilitarians consider the indirectness of the relations between principles and policies to be a feature, a consequence of applying their views to the world in which we live rather than as an objection to their theory.
For these reasons (and others), it is important not to exaggerate the practical and middle-level differences between consequentialism and other moral theories. Consequentialists can appeal to such notions of fairness as part of the good (a view I haven’t discussed), and insofar as these notions are important to people and motivate their behavior it would be a mistake for consequentialists to ignore them. What consequentialists cannot say is that such notions figure at the foundations of morality as independent deontic considerations. This is where the clash of moral theories really occurs. However, since Posner, Weisbach, and I agree that the best climate policy is one that is both ethically acceptable and politically feasible, it should not be surprising that the best climate policy might be one that incorporates values that do not occur at the very foundations of the best moral theory.
Whatever the best moral theory, it is clear that perceptions of fairness matter to people.106 There is a large body of empirical evidence that shows that we will inflict costs on ourselves in order to punish those who violate norms. It should thus not be surprising that concerns about fairness loom very large in the climate change debate, perhaps especially outside the US. In light of such considerations, both Singer and I appeal to fairness as well as welfare in arguing for an equal per capita allocation. We do not see ourselves as having to choose between these considerations. We can care about fairness because we care about welfare.
However, Posner and Weisbach do not think that arguments from fairness work any better than welfarist arguments in supporting equal per capita allocations. To a great extent the difference between us turns on what we think fairness implies with respect to the atmosphere.
Many climate ethicists think that people have equal rights to use the atmosphere as a sink for greenhouse gases and that the extent of these rights is determined in part by some threshold such that the consequences would be close to universally unacceptable if it were exceeded. They believe this because they can find no morally relevant reason for supposing that some people have rights to use the atmosphere that are not available to others. However this view is filled in, it leads naturally to the conclusion that many of those currently alive in rich industrial countries are exploiting the atmosphere beyond their entitlements.
Posner and Weisbach disagree with this conception of rights to the atmosphere. They think that emitters who on equal per capita allocation would not receive emissions permissions equal to their current emissions “should be compensated for the lost investment that they made in the reasonable expectation that their rights would continue as in the past.”
I can imagine why someone might hold such a view with respect to a renewable resource. If a resource is not threatened by exhaustion and I have built my economy and way of life around exploiting this resource to a greater extent than other people, I can understand why someone might think that this entities me to continue my exploitation at the same level. However, if the resource is exhaustible and I have already exploited it to a greater extent than others then I can see no reason why the fact that I have overexploited this resource in the past should give me a right to continue overexploiting it in the future. Suppose that mother gives us ten cookies and I eat four of the first five and then claim that this entitles me to eat four of the last five cookies as well. You might think that I am a good candidate for law school but you are unlikely to be persuaded by my argument.
Many scholars think that in order to avoid climatic disruption humans must cumulatively emit less than a trillion tonnes of carbon. On this view there are about 440 billion tonnes that can still be emitted. It is difficult to see why anyone would think that some countries (or people) are entitled to emit a disproportionate share of the last 440 billion tonnes on the grounds that they emitted a disproportionate share of the first 560 billion tons.
The only other argument that I can imagine in support of Posner and Weisbach’s claim would be one that holds that the present allocation of emissions is economically efficient, at least compared to an equal per capita allocation, and that this consideration has sufficient moral weight to trump other considerations. This view is not only implausible in its own right but the concern with initial allocation is not in the spirit of those who highly value efficient outcomes. They often defend unequal initial allocations by drawing on the Coase Theorem to show that efficient outcomes are distribution-insensitive under certain ideal conditions. Indeed, the only moral theorists I know who would endorse the argument that I am imagining would be a certain kind of utilitarian with a quite reductive theory of value. These are scarce on the ground, at least in philosophy departments.
In this section I have claimed that Posner and Weisbach do not clearly develop and defend their foundational moral views and that in any case much of what is in dispute in the domain of climate justice does not turn on such foundational questions. Welfarist consequentialists as well as deontologists can defend trading schemes that allocate emissions permissions on an equal per capita basis.
V. Conclusion: Slouching Toward the Future
Posner and Weisbach see the fundamental challenge of climate justice as one of achieving an optimal climate treaty and then deciding how to allocate the surplus. Some international relations theorists see the challenge in similar but less economistic terms, as one of producing the benefits of international cooperation while respecting national interests. However, we are now in a situation in which there appear to be few benefits to allocate and many costs to avoid.
The problem of how to allocate future greenhouse gas emissions was once perhaps the most salient question about climate justice, but its importance has receded as it has become increasingly likely that tolerable emissions limits will be breached before any such system can be put in place. Other issues concerning adaptation and compensation are now of more immediate concern. I see the main challenge of climate change as involving all of the following:
- Slowing or reducing the build-up of GHG concentrations in the atmosphere;
- Adapting to climate change in a world characterized by radical inequality, mutual suspicion, and diverse values;
- Living with an awareness that there is some chance that increasing GHG concentrations in the atmosphere could be catastrophic;
- All this while protecting what we value, which includes features of nonhuman nature as well as economic welfare.
There is no general or abstract solution to this problem. What we should do next is path-dependent. The economics of climate change (for example) are extremely policy-sensitive. Innovations that internalize externalities or create cooperative arrangements among countries and other actors can contribute to economic welfare, which in turn would ramify into the future. If key nations had behaved in the way envisioned by the Rio dream, would these nations or the world be better or worse off than they are today? This is a good question that I don’t know how to answer. It is made even more difficult by the considerations adduced earlier regarding the value-ladenness of economic calculations and the difficulty of valuing non-market impacts of climate change that will unfold over centuries.
Some would say that whatever the truth about climate economics, the Rio dream was bound to fail because key nations were not going to cooperate given the world as it is. But how do we know this? Could anything else have worked better? Some theorists today talk about the importance of broadening the negotiations beyond climate so that every party to the negotiation will find something from which to benefit.120 But the Rio dream did involve broad negotiations on topics including forestry and biological resources as well as climate and the infrastructure of development. Telling the story as one that was doomed to failure may simply transform the contingent political success of some interest groups (for example, the US Chamber of Commerce, Exxon, the right wing of the Republican party) into necessary truths about international relations. My hunch is that the Rio dream could have succeeded but I have no way of proving it.
What is clear is that our world would be quite different if the Clinton administration had acted to reduce US emissions rather than sitting on its hands after its failure to enact a BTU tax. Perhaps in order to do this, the Clinton administration would have had to succeed on health care reform and then used its accrued political capital on climate change. Or perhaps it would have been enough had Clinton not had to admit to an “improper physical relationship” with an intern after denying that he had “sexual relations with that woman.” In any case, the world is where it is and it matters how it got here. The bruises that the world wears as a result matter, too. History is important.
The dream of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit came to an end in Copenhagen in 2009. That the dream is over does not mean that everyone is awake. The UN will continue to hold successful meetings since UN meetings never fail. Diplomats will continue to diplomatize, talking heads will keep talking, and all of this will seem Very Important to Very Important People. However, all of this toing and fro-ing will be in the service of a zombie negotiation. While bodies and mouths continue to move, it is increasingly obvious that the action is elsewhere. The international climate negotiations are now part of a broader effort at global regulation involving trade, immigration, human rights, currency, capital flows, and other issues. Efforts to control the forces that give rise to these problems will continue. “Clubs” that take climate change seriously will eventually form. There will be discussions, decisions, and perhaps even agreements, some of which may actually be kept. Someday, perhaps, these efforts will result in an international regime that is responsive to the anthropogenic destabilization of the climate system. But don’t hold your breath.
In the interim, climate politics and policy will continue to be practiced. Motivation, not feasibility, will be the most important challenge (we are not ambitious enough for feasibility to be a major obstacle). The ongoing problem is how to get anybody to do anything together in a sustained way that will be effective. Rather than based on a global deal, for the foreseeable future climate policy will largely reflect the motley collection of policies and practices adopted by particular countries. It will be driven by national and regional efforts rather than by large schemes and big dreams. In every country there are political divisions about how to respond to climate change, and domestic politics will become increasingly important in determining the global response. This will all seem rather drunk and disorderly. What countries do (and fail to do) will reflect their internal politics, values, fears, ambitions, and national priorities. There will be climate-relevant action, but it will be different in different countries and it will be pursued under different descriptions and with different objectives. Some countries will adopt emissions trading, others carbon taxes, and still others technology forcing policies. Some countries will alter their energy mix, others their transportation systems, and others their buildings. Some countries will do a lot and others will do a little. An election may change a leader into a laggard or a laggard into a leader. Urban sustainability and resilience will become increasingly important everywhere. In some countries there will be a great deal of sub-national variation, while other countries will have nationalized and even to some extent internationalized their policies. These policies, in different proportions depending on the country, will reflect a mix of self-interest and ethical ideals. These notions of self-interest and ethical ideals will be constructed in different ways in different countries. Any international agreement will be a matter of an overlapping consensus. No comprehensive doctrine has a chance in this fragmented world.
While the global environmental movement has not succeeded in motivating the countries of the world to adopt an effective global climate regime, it has succeeded in insinuating itself into the political fabric of virtually every country, even those such as the US that are the most recalcitrant on climate change. In the sober light of these new realities, old stereotypes about northern environmentalism in conflict with southern development priorities should be discarded or refigured. In elections held in 2010, the Green Party candidate for president of Brazil received nearly 20 percent of the vote, while the Green Party in Great Britain captured only about 1 percent of the vote. Of course, much can be said to show why these numbers do not really mean what they seem to mean. Nevertheless, it is clear that seismic changes are underway in the configuration of global environmentalism. The site of the global struggle to stabilize climate is now primarily within countries rather than among them.
US policy in the next several years will be driven by the effectiveness and resiliency of state laws and policies such as those in place in California, and regional institutions such as the East Coast’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). In addition, attempts to regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act and the vast amount of litigation slowly working its way through the courts will also be extremely influential, perhaps mainly for its political effects. Ongoing attempts to reframe climate change are also important. Thus far, none of these attempts to reframe climate change as an issue about energy, green jobs, or concern for our children has had much traction. A narrative may come along in the future that will move people and organize our thoughts and feelings about climate change in a way that will be effective. Perhaps geoengineering will catch the popular imagination. In the meantime we live in the wreckage of the old story.
So we will have to live with climate change. We will have to find meaning and joy in a world that increasingly fails to resemble the one in which we came to consciousness. The biota will change, diversity will diminish, weather will be less stable, skies will be different, and it will become increasingly difficult to relate to the old stories and tales. We will have to live in the knowledge that this is not like “an asteroid from space,” but the result of patterns of human action in which we persist. For some, this will mean grief and guilt. For others, it will mean suffering. For still others, it will be just another day at the office. This will be life in the anthropocene. Climate change will trouble us but there is no magic bullet solution. John Wayne is dead and there is no Colt .45 peacemaker in sight.