Three times in his movie Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore asserts that climate change is a moral issue. Yet, the US response to climate change has often failed to take seriously the implications of the claim that climate change raises moral issues. Although statements of President-elect Obama indicate a new willingness to assure that US climate change policy is consistent with global obligations, a recent report raises the question of whether the failure to understand the moral and ethical dimensions of climate change policy remains a problem among members of the Obama team.
Category Archives: Atmospheric Targets
Minimum Ethical Criteria For All Post-Kyoto Regime Proposals: What Does Ethics Require of A Copenhagen Outcome
I. Introduction
During the first two weeks of December of 2008 in Poznan, Poland, international negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) considered various proposals for replacing the Kyoto Protocol with a new climate change regime. This was done because the Kyoto Protocol ends by its own terms in 2012. The Kyoto regime is often referred to as the first commitment period under the UNFCCC. In Bali, Indonesia last year, the international community agreed to negotiate a climate change regime that will constitute the second commitment period under the UNFCCC in two negotiating sessions. The first of these took place in Poznan last month and the second will take place December, 2009 in Copenhagen.
Although little progress was made in Poznan on the architecture of a new second commitment period, various proposals were considered by the international community in discussions about a vision statement to guide future negotiations and in Poznan side-events sponsored by governments and NGOs.
Local and Regional Governments’ Ethical Responsibility to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions: the Case of Pennsylvania
I. Introduction
The nations of the world have express responsibility under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on the basis of equity to prevent dangerous interference with the climate system. For this reason among others, as stated in an earlier post, no nation can deny its responsibility to reduce emissions to its fair share of safe global emissions (See: Nations Must Follow Climate Change Justice, Climateethics.org, http://climateethics.org/?p=20)
This post reviews the responsibility of state, regional, and local governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and looks at one US state, Pennsylvania, as a case study to examine these issues. Unlike many other US states, Pennsylvania has no climate change strategy. This post will make the claim that this is a moral and ethical failure even though Pennsylvania is taking some steps toward improving its energy mix in regard to greenhouse gas emissions. If a case can be made that Pennsylvania is failing to live up to its ethical responsibilities, stronger cases can be made about other US states and regional and local governments.
The Stern Report Acknowledges Certain Potential Ethical Issues Created By Standard Economic Analyses Of Climate Change Policies
On October 30, 2006, Sir Nicholas Stern, Head of the United Kingdom Government Economics Service and adviser to the UK government on the economics of climate change and development, issued a report on the economics of climate change that has received world-wide attention. (Stern 2006). The 700-page report is the most comprehensive economic analyses of climate change yet and is widely being cited for its claim that climate change could push the world into a deep global economic recession. According to the report, the costs of stabilizing climate change, although not trivial, are significantly less than the costs of delay in taking action.
The report found that unchecked climate change could lead to losing at least 5 percent of global gross domestic product each year (Stern 2006, vi). According the Stern analysis, if we take into consideration the reasonable possibility that there could be unexpected abrupt climate changes, the loss to the global economy could be as much as 20 percent of GDP (Stern 2006, vi). Yet, taking action now would cost just 1 percent of global gross domestic product (Stern 2006, vi).