MIT Review: May-June 2013

Climate Change — Moral Choices

From the Book Reviews By David Rotman, MIT Technology Review, Volume 116, No. 3, May/June 2013.

One of the defining characteristics of climate change is poorly appreciated by most people: the higher temperatures and other effects induced by increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will persist for a very long time. Scientists have long realized that carbon dioxide emitted during the burning of fossil fuels tends to linger in the atmosphere for extended periods, even for centuries. Over the last few years, researchers have calculated that some of the resulting changes to the earth’s climate, including increased temperature, are more persistent still: even if emissions are abruptly ended and carbon dioxide levels gradually drop, the temperature will stubbornly remain elevated for a thousand years or more. The earth’s thermostat is essentially being turned up and there are no readily foreseeable ways to turn it back down; even risky geoengineering schemes would at best offset the higher temperatures only temporarily.

It’s a shocking realization, especially given how little progress has been made in slowing carbon dioxide emissions. But it is precisely the long-term nature of the problem that makes it so urgent for us to limit emissions as quickly and radically as possible. To have a decent chance of meeting the widely accepted international goal of keeping warming at or below 2 °C, emissions need to be cut substantially over the next few years. By 2050 they must be reduced by half or more from 2009 levels.

The mismatch between when we need to act and when many of the benefits will accrue helps to explain why climate change is such a politically and economically thorny problem. How do you convince people and governments to invest in a far-off future? Clearly, it is not a problem that can easily be addressed by most politicians, given the immediate and pressing needs of their constituents. Because it involves defining and understanding our responsibilities to future generations, our action (or inaction) on climate change falls squarely into the realm of moral and political philosophy.

Over the last few years a small but growing number of writers have begun to wrestle with some profound questions. What ethical guidelines should economists follow when evaluating today’s costs against future benefits? How should we weigh uncertainties, including the risks of catastrophic changes wrought by global warming? Would geoengineering be ethical? How does climate change affect our perception of the world and our future role in it? The conclusions they’ve reached are nuanced and can turn on esoteric definitions of terms such as “justice” and “moral good.” But their reasoning often provides keen insights into today’s most pressing policy questions.

Books Reviewed: (1) Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World, John Broome, W.W. Norton, 2012. (2) Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering, Clive Hamilton, 
Yale University Press, 2013. (3) A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change, Stephen M. Gardiner, Oxford University Press, 2011.

Future Value

# 1. In Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World, John Broome, a moral philosopher at the University of Oxford, explains the methods and arguments that help us understand the ethical implications of global warming, and he demonstrates why this reasoning can offer useful insights into how we should act. Trained in economics at MIT, Broome is particularly interested in assessing the ethical judgments made by economists. “Economists recognized, say, 50 years ago that economics is based on ethical assumptions,” he says. “But a number of them seem to have forgotten that in recent decades. They think what they do is somehow in an ‘ethic-free zone.’ And that plainly isn’t so. And climate change makes that obvious.”

Broome’s focus on the reasoning of economists is not arbitrary. Economists have “largely been in the driver’s seat” in guiding governments’ policies on climate change, he says. “But they don’t always get their ethical foundations right.” By not fully accounting for people’s future well-being and such difficult-to-quantify values as the beauty of nature, Broome says, many economists have seriously underestimated how much we should be spending now to address climate change.

# 2. In his 2010 book, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change, Clive Hamilton, a professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, Australia, argues that it is already too late to stop many of the dire consequences of global warming and that we’re almost sure to make it far, far worse.

After that book was published, ­Hamilton says, he became convinced that the “growing gap” between the widely accepted scientific evidence for the dangers of global warming and the lack of any political progress toward addressing the problem would increase the pressure to view geoengineering as a feasible option. He expects it to become “the dominant issue in climate-change discussions within the next five to 10 years.” So in his newest book, Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering, ­Hamilton takes a critical look at various geoengineering proposals, such as the use of sulfur particles or manmade materials to partially block the sun (see “A Cheap and Easy Plan to Stop Global Warming.”) He is highly skeptical of any such schemes to rejigger the earth’s atmosphere to fix climate change and deeply suspicious of the motivations of many of its advocates.

Broadly, Hamilton emphasizes the “astonishing ethical implications” of climate change over the long term—and of what would-be geoengineers are proposing. We’re at “a historical point,” he says. “We need to reopen the question of who we are as a species and what kind of a creature we have become.” Yet the attentive reader will note that Hamilton doesn’t rule out geoengineering in the future, if the situation becomes desperate. Rather, he calls on us to examine the economic and political motivations of geoengineering advocates and to understand that trying to engineer the climate reflects a misplaced faith in technology’s ability to solve political and social problems.

We have barely begun to grapple with the moral issues related to climate change.

# 3. In A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change, Stephen M. Gardiner reaches similar conclusions after a far different type of analysis. Unlike Hamilton, Gardiner, a professor of philosophy at the University of Washington, has little interest in the players and politics behind geoengineering. Instead, he rigorously analyzes the moral justifications for considering the technology.

In particular, he questions the simplistic reasoning that since geoengineering could turn out to be the “lesser evil” in some future climate emergency, we should be researching it now to understand the technology and its risks. That argument conceals many ethical challenges, he contends. Is it ethical of us to expect a future generation to take on the dangers and costs of geoengineering because we have failed to address climate change? And wouldn’t a large research push on geoengineering just increase the unfortunate possibility that it will be used?

Crosswinds

Though they reflect very different interests and objectives, these books, taken together, begin to shed light on why climate change has been such a difficult problem to address and even define. After all, if it is fundamentally a moral issue, then simple economic or technology-based solutions will understandably fall short.

What’s more, climate change poses particularly tough moral problems. The title of Gardiner’s book refers to the convergence of three separate moral “storms,” or “obstacles to our ability to behave ethically.” The biggest is the way future generations are at the mercy of current ones —what he sometimes calls generational buck-passing. The others involve the different impacts of climate change around the world and among different populations, and the prospect that theoretical uncertainties in areas such as intergenerational ethics and climate science will make it difficult for us to act. Gardiner spends nearly 500 pages trying to map the crosswinds of these storms, concluding that “it will not be easy for us to emerge morally unscathed.”

Still, a clear first step would be to acknowledge the moral issues associated with climate change and the likely need for some painful decisions. Gardiner rightly points out that much of the public debate is dominated by “technological and social optimists” who argue for “win-win” solutions that will allow us to address the problem without any economic sacrifices or hard ethical choices. Might green energy simply solve the problem, not only for us but for future generations? We’re beginning to know the answer; a clean-tech revolution hasn’t come close to happening, in part because it would necessarily mean making difficult choices. What’s more, says Gardiner, clinging to that hope obscures the real reasons we need to do something about climate change:

More generally, the current focus on the green energy revolution rationale puts pressure in the wrong place. The dominant reason for acting on climate change is not that it would make us better off. It is that not acting involves taking advantage of the poor, the future, and nature … The green revolution claim runs the risk of obscuring what is at stake in climate change, and in a way that undercuts motivation. The key point is that we should act on climate change even if doing so does not make us better off: indeed, even if it may make us significantly worse off. If we hide or dilute the moral issues, then this important truth is lost, and the prospects for ethically defensible action diminish.

We have barely begun to grapple with the moral issues related to climate change. Indeed, few are even likely to accept the basic role that ethical issues should play in our policy decisions, and certainly our responsibilities to the distant future are seldom part of the public debate. But given the convincing evidence climate scientists have presented that our actions over the next several decades will have direct consequences for generations who will live many years from now, we must consider the moral dimensions of our response. As Gardiner puts it at the end of his book: “The time to think seriously about the future of humanity is upon us.”

NOTE: David Rotman is the Editor of the MIT Technology Review.  This article was published on-line on April 11, 2013 and has already received 478 comments.