Category Archives: General Climate Ethics

Why Greta Thunberg is Still An Inspirational Hope in Very Dark Times

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When invited by UNESCO to Paris in 2019 to receive the Avicenna Award for my work on climate ethics, they introduced  me to 10 young people who like Greta not only spoke passionately to their governments about the injustices of the government’s position on climate change but had actually succeeded in getting their governments to change their positions. Ever since then when I am asked what gives me hope given the dire climate position the world is in, I mention the young people who are speaking out forcefully about  the injustices of their government’s climate positions.

Greta’s 2019 speech at the UN on climate change was a brilliant lesson both on the potential power of bringing attention to moral bankruptcy of arguments made by opponents of needed climate change policies, as well as a model for how to make moral and ethical arguments critical of reasons offered in opposition to needed climate policies.  Thunberg’s speech successfully demonstrated the power of moral arguments critical of claims made by opponents of climate change policies for two reasons.  First because of the  facts she relied upon to make her argument  Second on the rhetorical excellence of her speech.

See the 2019 video by tapping greta

A. The Speech’s Rhetorical Excellence

Aristotle claimed in his writing on rhetoric that speakers are effective in persuading their listeners of the injustice of they are speaking about if the speaker exhibits three qualities: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos.

  1. Ethos.  Speakers exhibit ethos if they convince listeners that the speaker is motivated by what is right or wrong, not by self-interest. Greta Thunberg effectively communicated by her choice of words, rhythm, and emotions that she was motivated by the moral indefenisibility of governments that have refused to do what is necessary to avoid climate harms,given the facts she stated in support of this conclusion.-
  2. Pathos. Effective speakers demonstrate some passion about the injustice that is motivating him or her.. Greta Thunberg’s display of anger was palpable and supported by the facts she relied upon.
  3. Logos. In an effective speech about injustice, the speaker’s claims and conclusions are clear and logical. The facts which motivated and supported the premise of her speech, namely that governments’ responses to climate change are morally repugnant, were clearly stated.

B. The Speech’s Foundational Facts

The facts the speech relied upon to support the claim that governments’ responses to climate change are morally indefensible were very persuasive. The speech made the following claims about governments’ inadequate response to climate change:

1, You have stolen my dreams. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.

2. The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50 % chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.

3. 50 % may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.

4. “So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences.

5. “To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise – the best odds given by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.

6. How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just ‘business as usual’ and some technical solutions? With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years.

7. “There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

She then invited listeners to reflect on the moral significance of these facts by repeating the words “How dare you” four times after stating the facts.

The facts that Greta Thunberg relied on to support her conclusion that governments’ inadequate responses to climate change are morally indefensible effectively supported this conclusion.

There are many other facts that proponents of climate change policies could also rely on to support the conclusion that governments’ inadequate responses to climate change are morally indefensible. For instance proponents of climate change policies could bring attention to the following facts which also support the conclusion that governments’ inadequate responses to climate change are morally indefensible:

  1. The staggering magnitude of percent reductions in GHG emissions needed to achieve any warming limit goal such as 1.5 C or 2.0 C become greater the longer governments wait to respond because current emissions are rapidly consuming any carbon budget that the world must live within to achieve any warming limit goal.
  2. The IPCC carbon budgets on which the quantity of reductions needed to achieve any warming limit goal have been calculated through the use of climate models which have ignored some of the positive feedbacks such as methane emissions from melting permafrost or rapid breakup of Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, both of which are already starting to happen.
  3. The percentage reductions needed to achieve any warming limit goal articulated by IPCC are for the entire world and ignore the legal, practical, and ethical obligations of developed countries to go faster than poor developed countries under the concept of “equity.”
  4.  Although skepticism in science is necessary for science to develop, sociologists have documented that fossil fuel companies have funded disinformation about climate science to undermine public confidence in the conclusions of the most prestigious scientific organizations in the world. See Why Climate Science Disinformation is So Ethically Abhorrent

This site has often commented negatively on the propensity of many proponents of climate change policies to justify climate action largely by making claims that simply counter the factual arguments of opponents of climate change such as that climate change policies are unjustified because they will impose unacceptable costs on the economy, to which most proponents of climate policies often respond  by claiming that policies will create new jobs. Such responses allow opponents of climate change to frame the problem in a way that ignores the moral problems with their arguments. Philosophers call this type of reasoning, which is reasoning exclusively based on facts that ignores ethical and justice issues “instrumental reasoning”and  sociologists have warned for several decades that economically powerful entities would accomplish their goals by tricking citizens to limit their arguments about public policy to instrumental reasons.  The mainstream media, at least in the United States, almost never brings attention when the fossil fuel industry and other opponents of climate policy make factual economic or scientific uncertainty arguments against climate policies to the strong ethical arguments that can be made in response to these claims. Nor more importantly that all of the countries in the world agreed to be bound by the  “precautionary principle” which both makes scientific uncertainty an unacceptable basis for a nation failing to abide by its legal obligations under the climate treaty.

The facts relied upon by Greta Thunberg and those above could help citizens understand the moral bankruptcy of governments’ inadequate responses to climate change. Armed with such facts and learning from Greta Thunberg’s excellent rhetorical techniques could make climate change activists more effective in getting governments to make the extraordinary urgent hard-to-imagine reductions in GHG emissions needed to prevent climate catastrophe.

Sociologists also claim that the most successful social movements are energized by a strong sense of unfairness or injustice of the status quo. For this reason, although appeals to the self-interest of citizens based upon identifying the harms from climate change that they will experience should continue, such an appeal to self-interest alone does not justify ignoring the strong moral problems with the arguments of those who oppose climate change policies. In fact, only responding to the factual scientific and economic arguments of climate change policy opponents by making counter “factual” economic and scientific claims has the ironic effect of justifying the notion that these instrumental reasons for opposing climate change policies are ethically legitimate. In addition, as we have explained in the recent website entry UNESCO Examines the Urgency of and Strategy for Getting Traction for Ethical Guidance in Climate Change Policy Formation at Bangkok Program.there is no hope of averting catastrophic climate impacts unless governments comply with their ethical obligations under the UNFCCC.

Moreover. not raising ethical problems with the arguments of those opposing climate change policies is a hugh practical mistake because most arguments made by opponents of climate policies fail to survive minimum ethical scrutiny.  That is because the world has already agreed on ethical principles which  They usually violate non-controversial, widely agreed-upon ethical principles such as human rights obligations, the “no-harm” principle of customary international law, or the “precautionary principle” expressly agreed to by all nations in the 1992 UNFCCC among many other ethical principles.We have learned that many technical experts are aware ot the policy significance of the precautionary principle which is very easy to get citizens to understand if it is explained to citizens.

For these reasons, Greta Thunberg’s UN speech should be honored and used as an inspiration by climate activists around the world while encouraging the media to cover the ethical issues raised by climate change formation controversies.

By:

Donald A. Brown

Scholar in Residence, Sustainability Ethics and Law

Widener University Commonwealth Law School

dabrown57@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

Part II. Why Developed Nations Should Support A Mechanisms For Financing Needed Adaptation and Loss and Damages From Climate Harms That Create Climate Change Refugees For

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This is part II of a series on: Why Nations Should Support Mechanisms For Financing Needed Adaptation and Loss and Damages From Climate Harms That Create Climate Change Refugees.

Part 1 explained that climate change is already creating millions of refugees and threatens to create many millions more.

Part 2 will cover why relevant international law on causation of trans-boundary harms is consistent with the creation of a mechanism for financing loss and damages from climate change induced harms and thus why developed nations should support  the creation of such a mechanism.

V.  International Law On Compensation for Loss and Damages (L & D)  Caused by Trans-boundary Caused Harms.

Nations agreed under the 1992 UNFCCC pro Preamble:

Recalling also that States have, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the principles of international law, the sovereign right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental and developmental policies, and the responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment of other States or areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction (UNFCCC, 1992, Preamble) .

Thus governments expressly agreed in the 1992 UNFCCC that they had a duty to abide by the “no harm” rule which required them to prevent activities within their jurisdiction from harming others beyond their borders. Yet they were already bound by the “no harm” principle because it is a principle of customary international law. In international law, customary law refers to the Law of Nations, or the legal norms that have developed through customary exchanges between states over time.

The history of L&D in climate negotiations dates back to 1991 when the Alliance of Small Island States called for a mechanism that would compensate countries affected by sea level rise. The concept of loss and damage made it into a climate decision coming out of a climate negotiations when in 2010 the so-called loss and damage work program was initiated at COP16, which finally lead to the establishment at COP19 in 2013 of a body to deal specifically with issues relating to loss and damage: the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage (or WIM for short). With the inclusion of Article 8 of the Paris Agreement in 2015, loss and damage has now become firmly installed as a thematic pillar under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Under Article 8 of the Paris Agreement, all nations agreed;

1. Parties recognize the importance of averting, minimizing and addressing loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change, including extreme weather events and slow onset events, and the role of sustainable development in reducing the risk of loss and damage.
2. The Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage associated with Climate Change Impacts shall be subject to the authority and guidance of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Agreement and may be enhanced and strengthened, as determined by the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Agreement.
3. Parties should enhance understanding, action and support, including through the Warsaw International Mechanism, as appropriate, on a cooperative and facilitative basis with respect to loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change.

UN Paris Agreement, 2015, Art 8

Determining a nation’s responsibility for specific climate change caused harms can be challenging because climate change damages are the result of a multitude emitters, emitting activities, and emitted gases. It is, thus, evident that the question of how to determine responsibility among nations when allocating responsibility for climate harms and damages is a challenge which cries for a negotiated set of rules that enable rational comparison among nations that failed to prevent activities in their nations from harming  others beyond their borders.

In common and civil law the principle of joint and several liability is recognized as a method for allocating responsibility among multiple defendants. But no such rule exists in international law.

Yet human induced climate change has scientific features that could provide the basis for negotiating rules for allocating responsibility for climate harms. The amount of harm caused by climate change is a function of atmospheric GHG concentrations and background climate conditions which change seasonally.  Atmospheric  CO2 has features that are different than other air polluting substances that have pofound policy implications. CO2 mixes well in the atmosphere and is very long lived. Although approximately 80% of CO2 emissions are removed by carbon sinks in 100 years, some stay in the atmosphere for tens of thousands of years contributing to climate change harms everywhere for a very long time.

As we have seen earlier in this discussion, climate change has features that other environmental problems  dont have which has profound implications for policy including the fact that all CO2e emissions contribute to atmospheric Co 2 concentrations globally and are long lived in the atmosphere thus contributing to harms everywhere.

See Seven Features of Climate Change That Citizens and the Media Need to Understand To Critically Evaluate a Government’s Response to This Existential Threat and the Arguments of Opponents of Climate Policies.

In determine whether climate harms are attributable to the failure of a nation to comply with its responsibility to prevent activities within its jurisdiction from harming  others, historical experience could be used to link projected climatic shifts with their probable physical, economic, social and human impacts (e.g., the probable impacts of temperature increase or excessive rainfall on ecosystems, populations and agricultural productivity, or probable impacts of sea level rise on coastal land area and infrastructure).

Baseline information might include, for example, average number of days of drought over a period of years, average annual or seasonal rainfall over a period of years, or average frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.

VI. National Legal Responsibility for Breach of the No Harm Rule

The no harm rule is understood to be an obligation of a nation to prevent foreseeable harm beyond a nation which has been interpreted to require nations to act to prevent harm when nations have;

(i) the opportunity to act to  prevent harm:
(ii) foreseeability or knowledge that a certain activity could lead to transboundary
damage; and
(iii)  have taken proportionate measures to prevent harm or minimize risk.,

WWF-UK-2008, Beyond Adaptation, (2008:18)

VII. The Opportunity to Act has Long Existed

A State can only fail to exercise due diligence with respect to a specific prevention duty if it does not act where it otherwise could have. In the framework of climate change damage, almost every State has had the opportunity to take measures to prevent damage or to minimize the risk of damage. Each ton of a GHG not emitted, and every carbon sink preserved in the long term reduces the risk of further damage.

IX. Proportionate Measures Were Not Taken

In order to determine whether any nation took proportionate measures to avoid climate caused harms that created refugees ideally. any critical analysis would have to consider the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases that triggered the harm and then consider whether that nation took steps to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to their “equitable” share of global missions that were responsible for the atmospheric concentrations that caused the harm. Such analysis would likely lead to the conclusion that zero global emissions were necessary to avoid the climate change induced har that caused the transboundary harm. . Yet as we have seen in this first part of this discussion zero greenhouse gas emissions have been necessary to achieve the Paris agreement’s warning limit goals of 1.5°C but no greater then 2°C. In addition, the world needs to reduce global emissions to net  zero to avoid destabilizing several climate “tipping points” several of which are already showing alarming signs of destabilization. Whatever the atmospheric concentration is deemed adequate to prevent the harms that will minimize the suffering of climate caused refugees, and to determine any nation’s equitable share, governments have to grapple with what “equity” requires of the nation.

Although reasonable people may disagree on what equity expressly requires of a nation to reduce its GHG emissions, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said its 5th Assessment report that despite some ambiguity about what equity means:

There is a basic set of shared ethical premises and precedents that apply to the climate problem that can facilitate impartial reasoning that can help put bounds on the plausible interpretations of ‘equity’ in the burden-sharing context. Even in the absence of a formal, globally agreed burden sharing framework, such principles are important in expectations of what may be reasonably required of different actors (IPCC, 2014, AR5, WGIII, Ch.4.pg 317).

The IPCC went on to say that;

(T)hese equity principles can be understood to comprise four key dimensions: responsibility, capacity, equality, and the right to sustainable development (IPCC, 2014, AR5, WGIII, Ch.4, pg 317).

Nations were already required under the Paris agreements “transparency” mechanism to explain periodically how they determined what equity requires of them when they established their NDC. Yet a 2015 study of 15 nations  NDCs revealed that nations nor their NGOs demonstrated an understanding of what “equity” required of them.. (IUCN, 2015).For this reason, any mechanism to fund loss and damages will have to grapple with what equity requires of it, a matter which will be raised in any mechanism for loss and damages.

X. Why Developed Nations Should Support A Mechanism for a Adaptation and Loss and Damages Funding For Harms that Affect and Cause Refugees .

Nations have not only agreed to be bound by the no harm principle, they have agreed that they have a duty to cooperate to develop rules regarding compensation and liability.

States shall develop national law regarding liability and compensation for the victims of pollution and other environmental damage. States shall also cooperate in an expeditious and more determined manner to develop further international law regarding liability and compensation for adverse effects of environmental damage caused by activities within their jurisdiction or control to areas beyond their jurisdiction. Rio Declaration, 1992` Principle 13, 

The harms suffered by refugees may require negotiations for recovery for both economic and non-economic damages including rights to adequate temporary housing, access to adequate health care, and food,

Why would Parties ratify liability and compensation schemes? Attaching clear liability and responsibility for the transboundary consequences of environmental pollution helps to enforce regulatory regimes established to protect the environment. Participation in liability and compensation regimes reduces uncertainty for States which might otherwise have to cover loss and damage caused by their citizens and incurred by citizens of other States when adequate compensation cannot be obtained from the responsible parties. These regimes also reduce uncertainty for potential victims, by ensuring the availability of a certain minimum level of compensation and elaborating procedures for making claims. Finally, these regimes reduce risk for those investing in business operations that engage in activities associated with risk, by defining limits of liability.

As the preceding Section V  explains, there is a sound legal basis under customary international law and the UNFCCC for States seeking compensation for damage and loss resulting from the impacts of climate change. Nevertheless, each individual case would meet with a number of challenges under existing law, among them the apportionment of responsibility between the various countries that have acted in breach of the no-harm rule. They would also be likely to require specially-commissioned scientific investigations with attendant costs, for in relation to causation and damage assessment. These cases could proceed in an forum, with good prospects of success, adding to the potential liability and litigation risk uncertainty that already exists with respect to private claims and possible tort actions.

Such individual cases should not, however, be the path of choice. International law is based on the notion of cooperation and the avoidance of adjudication – where possible – in favor of diplomatic solutions. Cumbersome individual cases should not be necessary, given that the climate regime is based on the notion of cooperation and good faith. The view has been expressed by international law scholars that States even have a legal duty to provide negotiated solutions where environmental damage is expected to occur, so that prompt and adequate compensation can be obtained in practice.

Although the issues of who pays what, to whom, and when, will be challenging to resolve, and ratification of such an instrument could face substantial domestic hurdles, a negotiated treaty to address the unavoided and unavoidable loss and damage is likely to be the only appropriate and practical solution to addressing climate change damage. The ‘AOSIS Proposal’ of 1991 provides a glimpse of what could be conceivable – not least as it only covers one type of damage.. International law principles and precedent provide support for the negotiation of a compensation instrument, as a necessary and appropriate response to this regulatory gap. The current negotiations leave room to begin this discussion.

Nations should also support financing adaptation and mechanisms to compensate those outside their borders for harms created by activities within their borders because, as the 2008 US Army War College report concluded, such harms are likely to cause social disruptions including violence against those who caused climate induced suffering. (Pumphery, 2008) The Army War College also concluded after describing in  detail the higher levels of conflict and chaos that expected increases in unplanned population movements will cause, the US support for a mechanism which deals with the human and political turbulence will be viewed as a public good that is necessary in order to cope with the looming consequences of climate change. (Pumphrey, 2008, 112)

XII. The Moral Case for a Loss and Damage Mechanism under International Law

Although some moral claims are controversial, a claim that nations who cause harm and suffering to places and people living beyond their boarders have a moral duty to compensate those that they have been harmed without their consent is consistent with the golden rule, a moral obligation acknowledged by almost all the world religions. This rule says that people cant harm others because of benefits to them. Furthermore, almost all nations agreed that they had a moral duty to compensate for damages if they harmed others when they adopted the 1992 Rio Declaration which provides:

National authorities should endeavor to promote the internalization of environmental costs and the use of economic instruments, taking into account the approach that the polluter should, in principle, bear the cost of pollution, with due regard to the public interest and without distorting international trade and investment. (Rio Declaration, 1992. Principle 16)

The creation o f a Loss and Damage mechanism will raise both tricky procedural and distributive justice issues.

Already some opposed to the mechanism are warning of the mischief that developing countries may do if the fund is created. For instance, opponents of the mechanism are claiming developing countries may seek compensation for comparatively trivial harms. All of these concerns can be minimized through negotiation of the rules.

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What the Media Should Learn From Its Intense Coverage of COVID-19 About How to Cure Its Failed Reporting On the More Devastating Threat of Climate Change

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 (L.Thieblemont)

I. Introduction

This article will explain how the US media’s recent intense focus on the scourge of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) provides many important lessons on how to cure the media’s dismal failure to provide adequate coverage of the more menacing crisis of climate change. While acknowledging a legitimate public interest in the media’s indispensable role in keeping citizens as well informed as possible on the status of the threat of COVID-19, this article examines the media’s consequential failure to adequately inform US citizens about a host of issues they need to understand to effectively evaluate any nation’s response to climate change and judge the argument’s that have been and continue to be made by opponents of climate change, a problem which we will explain is much more threatening than COVID -19.  This article also explains how the media’s coverage of COVID-19 provides lessons on how they could greatly improve their failing coverage of climate change.

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Madrid COP 25 Event on the Urgency of and Getting Traction for Ethical Principles to Guide National Responses to Climate Change

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Climate change has certain features that more than any other environmental problem scream for attention that it should be understood and responded to as an ethical problem. These features include that it is a problem that: (1) has mostly been caused by developed nations; (2) most threatens poor vulnerable people and nations which have done comparatively little to cause the problem; (3) creates harms to the most vulnerable that include potential catastrophic losses of life and damages to ecological systems on which life depends; (4) those people who are most vulnerable to it cannot depend on petitioning their governments for protection, their best hope is that those most responsible for raising atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations will respond to their ethical and moral duties to reduce their emissions to their fair share of safe global emissions; and, (5) because GHGs from any country mix well in the atmosphere, they thereby are contributing to rising atmospheric concentrations which are responsible for harming people and ecological systems far beyond their boarders.

Yet nations, and even most environmental NGOs have largely ignored evaluating nations’ responses to climate change through an ethical lens but have usually simply responded to the arguments of opponents of  climate change which largely have been claims that proposed policies on climate change are unsupportable because: (1) the policies would create  unacceptable costs to the national economy or a specific national industry; or, (2) the policies were not justifiable because of scientific uncertainty about alleged adverse climate change impacts. And so, when opponents of climate change argued in opposition to proposed climate change policies on the grounds of unacceptable costs that the policy would create,  proponents often responded by simply asserting responses to climate change would create jobs rather than helping citizens understand that behaviors that cause violations of human rights, kills others or destroys ecological systems on which life depends cant be justified on the grounds that the cessation of these destructive behaviors would impose costs on those engaged in the destructive behavior. In response to the scientific uncertainty arguments made by opponents of proposed climate change policies, proponents of climate policies usually simply make claims such as 97% of climate sciencentists support the consensus view while ignoring the fact that that every country in the world agreed in the 1992 climate threaty that scientific uncertainty should not be used as a excuse for taking protective action.

By not helping citizens see the morally indefensible problems with orguments made by opponents of climate change policies, proponents of climate change policies are failing to motivate those who are not motivated by the scientific and economic technical discoures which have dominated climate change policy controversies and which are not likely to mobilize public concern, strong emotion, or activism that fuel strong public social movements. (Wetts, 2019)

A recent paper by sociologist Rachel Wetts of Brown University found that of 1768 press releases about climate change issues only 3.4% attempted to motivate climate responses on the basis of moral obligations. (Wetts, 2019)

On December 12th at the Madrid COP 25 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNESCO, in cooperation with the Center for Environmental Ethics and Law, sponsored a panel on the urgency of getting nations to comply with their ethical obligations to respond to climate change. This panel On the Urgency of  and Getting Traction for Ethical Principles to Guide National Responses to Climate Change was part of a UNESCO event entitled Changing Minds, Not the Climate,  Science, Knowledge Systems, and Ethics for Enhanced Ambition and Resilience. 

The ethics panel discussed numerous specific policy decisions on climate issues that raised important ethical issues, yet tragically the ethical problems with the arguments made by opponents of climate policies were rarely identified. Despite the fact that arguments made in opposition to the proposed climate policy issues would not survive minimum ethical scrutiny if they were subjected to ethical critique, the ethical problems with the arguments made against climate policies are rarely identified. Furthermore, unless citizens spotted the ethical problems with their nation’s response to climate change they could not effectively critique their nation’s response to climate change.  For instance, every national GHG reduction target is implicitly a position of the national government on how much harm the government deems it is acceptable to impose on vulnerable people and nations because every ton of GHG emissions makes the harms worse, and every target is also implicitly a position on the nation’s fair share of a carbon budget that the entire world must live within to prevent a warming limit goal from being exceeded.  Yet these ethical problems with national climate change responses have been infrequently part of national climate debates.   The speakers on the Madrid COP 25 panel on the urgency of getting traction for ethics in climate change policy formation were

  • Donald A. Brown, Scholar In Residence, Sustainability Ethics and Law, Widener University Commonwealth Law School (USA) who explained the urgency of getting traction for ethical principles to guide government responses to climate change both to prevent climate catastophe and to critically evaluate the arguments of climate change policy opponents;
  • Kathryn Gwiazdon, J.D., Esq., Executive Director, Center for Environmental Ethics, and Law, Chicago (USA) who gave numerous examples of specific climate change policy controversies that raise obvious but often unacknowledged ethical issues;
  • Sébastien Duyck, Research Fellow, Institute of European and International Economic Law, University of Bern who explained efforts to get traction for human rights obligations in climate change policy formation; and,
  • Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, Professor of  Climatology and Environmental Sciences, “Université Catholique de Louvain” (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium), former IPCC Vice-Chair (2008-2015), member of the Royal Academy of Belgium who epained his experiences with getting the conclusions of IPCC which should trigger moral obligations accepted.

In December of 2017, UNESCO adopted the Declaration of Ethical Principles in relation to Climate Change, which sets out a number of important ethical principles to guide political decision-making and formulation of cross-cutting public policies around the world. Among the proclaimed six ethical principles, the Declaration emphasizes the links between justice, sustainability and solidarity that could support countries to scale their national commitments and coordinate action across cultures. The Madrid panel discussed why finding ways for getting nations to comply with their ethical obligations is indispensable to avoid catastrophic climate change, and explored strategies for getting traction for ethical principles in guiding national responses to climate change.  Furthermore, the panel discussed that although there are other important and binding sources of international law containing many well settled ethical principles which are relevant to national responses to climate change such as the “no harm,” “precautionary,” and “polluter pays” principles, duties of nations to protect human rights, and adopt emissions reduction targets at levels to prevent dangerous climate change on the basis of “equity,” and common but differentiated responsibilities, nations are ignoring these principles in formulating national policies.

The UNESCO Madrid COP 25 panel reviewed evidence that most nations are still ignoring these ethical principles in national climate change policy formation. The UNESCO panel concluded by inviting individuals to submit ideas about how to get traction for ethics in national responses to climate change.

Until UNESCO sets up a website on these issues, individuals with ideas about how to get traction for ethical guidance for climate policy formation should submit comments to dabrown57@gmail.com for the time being.

By; 

Donald A. Brown

Scholar in Residence,

Sustainability Ethics and Law

Widener University Commonwealth Law School 

dabrown57@gmail.com

References:

Wetts, Rachel, 2019. “Models and Morals: Elite-Oriented and Value-Neutral Discourse Dominates American Organizations’ Framings of Climate Change.” Social Forces. Published online: https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soz027

Climate Change Disinformation Comes to Pennsylvania

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One day in September1997, while serving as Program Manager for United Nations Organizations in the US EPA Office of International Activities, I was sitting at the microphone representing the United States during negotiations of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development when an agenda item arose about whether governments were willing to stipulate that the global warming then already discernible as had largely been predicted by the peer-reviewed science, was human-caused rather than the result of natural forces. These natural climate drivers include, among others, several cyclical changes in the sun’s energy output that reaches Earth, changes in ocean circulation and chemistry, movement of the Earth’s tectonic plates, and CO2 releases as the result of volcanic activity.

A few OPEC countries led by Saudi Arabia at the start of the negotiation on this matter balked at agreeing to language that concluded that human activities were responsible for the growing climate change threats. Yet when I pointed out that their scientific representatives had agreed to the very same language under discussion in a  meeting of climate scientists the year before, all countries finally agreed to stipulate that the growing global warming was human-caused. Thus, every country in the world, including the world’s petroleum states which have consistently blocked global action on climate change, agreed more than two decades ago that the ominous climate changes the world has been experiencing are largely caused by rising levels of GHGs in the atmosphere which are attributable to human activities.

The reason for the universal international agreement among nations that humans are responsible for the climate change the world is experiencing is that the evidence of human causation is extraordinarily compelling despite the fact that the Earth has experienced warming and cooling cycles during Earth’s history in responses to natural forces. The confidence of human causation is very high because scientists: (1) can predict how the Earth will warm up differently if a layer of GHGs in the atmosphere warms the Earth compared to how our planet warms if the natural forces that have caused warming in the Earth’s historical heating and cooling cycles, (2) have known precisely since the mid-1880s the amount of energy a molecule of CO2 generates in watts per square meter, (3) have known that the CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere is from fossil fuel combustion because of its chemical isotope, (4) have determined that the CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere is directly proportional to the timing and amount of fossil fuel combustion around the world, (5) tested these lines of evidence rigorously in computer model experiments since the 1960s.

Climate change is not only a terrifying future problem, it is already causing increasing devastation and human suffering to more and more parts of the world. Just in early March, Cyclone Idai devastated Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi killing over a 1000 people and displacing hundreds of thousands of others in Mozambique alone. The New York Times described the devastation as follows:

Nearly a week after southern Africa was hit by one of the worst natural disasters in decades, it was all rescue workers could do to try to reach the victims let alone count the dead. People were climbing to trees desperately waiting for some form of rescue. Around them, the remnants of homes sat in piles, collapsed as easily as if they had been houses of cards. Hundreds of thousands of people in Mozambique alone were displaced and everywhere there was a vast inland sea where once there had been land.

The 1.1 0C temperature rise the Earth has experienced since the beginning of the industrial revolution that the mainstream scientific community has attributed to human activities has already caused brutal suffering caused by increases in killer hurricanes, unprecedented flooding, droughts, forest fires, storm surges, climate refugees, increases in vector-borne and tropical diseases, killer heat stresses, loss of valued ecological systems including coral reefs around the world, and human conflict in Syria and parts of Africa.

Because even modest amounts of additional warming create the risk that certain thresholds, or “tipping points,” in the climate system may be exceeded causing much more abrupt climate change, human-induced climate change creates grave threats to life on Earth. These thresholds include ice sheet destabilization, methane leakage stored in permafrost and oceans, loss of the energy reflective properties of sea ice, and changes to the ocean heat circulation system among others. If some of these tipping points are triggered, the increased warming will subject some parts of the world, including many African states, large parts of the middle east, and hundreds of cities near oceans to multiple impacts including crop failures, deadly heat waves, expansion of tropical diseases, flooding, and drought. Thus, future devastation threatened by climate change is horrifying. For this reason, all the nations of the world in 2015 agreed to adopt policies that limited warming to as close as possible to 1.5 0C but no greater than 2.0 0C. Yet limiting the warming to these levels will require all nations and levels of government, including state and local governments, to act with a war-like coordinated effort to decarbonize the global economy.

Despite the universal agreement among nations that climate change is human-caused and very dangerous, the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania House Committee on Environmental Resources and Energy invited Gregory Wrightstone on March 27 to testify on climate change issues. Mr. Wrightstone’s only qualifications to testify as an expert on climate change are bachelors and masters degrees in geology and some published research on geology including the geology of the Marcellus shale. Although Mr. Wrightstone acknowledged that he has never published in the peer-reviewed climate science literature, Mr. Wrightstone took issue with the conclusions of 97% of climate scientists who publish in peer-reviewed climate science literature and who support the consensus view on human causation of climate change and its potentially catastrophic impacts to the human race from current climate change trends. The “consensus” view on climate science is also supported by 80 academies of science in the world, including the US Academy of Science, and at least 21 prestigious scientific organizations whose members engage in science relevant to climate change including the American Geophysical Union, the European Geosciences Union, the Geological Sciences of America and London, organizations whose members include geologists, Mr. Wrightstone’s discipline.

The consensus view of mainstream science has often been initially articulated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization created by the world’s governments and the United Nations at the suggestion of the United States in 1988 to synthesize the peer-reviewed climate change science and make recommendations to the world’s governments on climate change policies. IPCC does not do independent scientific research but approximately every five years examines the peer-reviewed scientific literature and draws conclusions which are further reviewed by climate scientists and approved by experts from the governments of the world. The IPCC has issued five comprehensive assessments starting with the first assessment report in 1990 and several special reports. The 5th assessment was published in 2014 and was written by 861 climate scientists whose nominations were reviewed to determine whether they had expert qualifications in climate science. (IPCC, 2014)

Mr. Writestone’s testimony began with a statement that he would “undercut the notion that our changing climate is primarily caused by human-caused increases in greenhouse gases and those changes are having negative impacts on Earth’s ecosystems and on humanity.”

Skepticism in science is a good thing, in fact, it is the oxygen that allows science to make contributions to human understanding of how the world works. But skeptics, to be taken seriously, must abide by the rules of science which require that scientific claims be subjected to peer-review. Mr. Wrightstone’s claims about climate change made during the March 31 hearing not only have never been peer-reviewed, but they were also either dramatically inconsistent with peer-reviewed climate change science or were cherry-picked facts that although true on their face do not undermine the conclusions of peer-reviewed science. “Cherry-picking” means picking from possible facts only those facts that support a predetermined conclusion while ignoring other facts.  Examples of Mr. Wrightstone’s cherry-picked arguments made in his testimony to undermine the scientific consensus view that human activities were responsible for raising atmospheric CO2 to dangerous levels included that:

  • The current concentration of CO2 is very low compared to other levels in the historical record, ignoring the strong scientific consensus that current elevated CO2 levels are human-caused and global catastrophe is likely unless there is an unprecedented international effort to rapidly reduce GHG emissions;
  • Earth’s ecosystems thrived when CO2 levels were much higher, ignoring the fact that when atmospheric CO2 levels got high enough, the resulting warming tripped dangerous positive feedbacks which led to abrupt warming increases that several times caused mass extinctions of much of life on Earth and mainstream scientists believe that the current rise in global temperatures is approaching levels which may trigger several of these positive feedback triggers which could cause abrupt very dangerous levels of warming;
  • CO2 is good because it promotes plant growth and prevents the Earth from getting too cold, ignoring the huge scientific literature that has identified enormous human suffering and damages that current levels of warming have already caused particularly harming the world’s poorest people and the potential to cause abrupt climate change which could cause mass extinction;
  • Current concentrations of CO2 are not unprecedented if one looks at the full history of the Earth’s atmosphere rather than the time span usually considered, ignoring the scientific evidence that that high CO2 levels in the Earth’s history were sometimes responsible for causing mass extinctions and conditions such as sea level rise which would now cause hard-to-imagine destruction especially to hundreds of the Earth’s most populated cities small island states, and poorest people and countries.

Several sociologists, including Dr. Robert Bruelle from Drexel University and  Riley Dunlap from Oklahoma State, among others, in many peer-reviewed sociological papers and in a recent book (Dunlap and McCright, 2015), have documented how some fossil fuel companies or their industrial organizations such as the American Petroleum Institute, and free-market fundamentalists foundations and think tanks have funded and supported efforts to undermine the public’s faith in the consensus view of climate science similar to the way the Tobacco Industry supported disinformation about the health threats of smoking tobacco. One of the tools in this effort has been to financially support or publicize the claims of climate skeptics whose claims frequently have not been subjected to peer review.

Mr. Wrightsone’s claims, like many of the arguments made by climate skeptics supported by the fossil fuel industry, not only have not been subjected to peer-review, they were dramatically inconsistent with the large body of peer-reviewed scientific evidence.

I have no evidence that Mr.Wrightstone’s testimony was orchestrated by any members of the Pennsylvania fossil fuel industry or politicians that frequently represent their interests, however, his testimony was similar to the problematic claims of the skeptics supported by the fossil fuel industry organized climate science disinformation campaign.

Mr. Wrightstone also took issue with the frequent claim that the consensus climate science is supported by 97% of climate scientists by stating he was one of the 97% while ignoring that the full claim is that 97% of scientists who engage in “peer-reviewed” climate change science, a group he does not belong to, support the consensus view along with every academy of science in the world, including the US Academy of Science.

Mr.Wrightstone’s testimony included arguments against two proposals under consideration in Pennsylvania that would lower GHG emissions from the state. One, a petition before the Pennsylvania Environmental Hearing Board to establish a Pennsylvania cap and trade program similar to programs in other states. The second proposal is known as the Transportation and Climate Initiative which is a proposed multi-state cooperative program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector.

His argument against these two programs was that the Governor and the House Committee should make recommendations on these two programs that were based on scientific facts, not on a politically driven narrative of coming planetary gloom. Yet the “facts” of science are established in constant testing through peer-review.

On May 1, the Senate Majority Policy Committee held a hearing about climate change at which Mr; Wrightstone along with climate change deniers David Legates (The Heartland Institute) and Joe Bastardi (WeatherBELL Analytics/frequent FOX News contributor) also testified making arguments that disagreed with the  enormous peer-reviewed science which has been synthesized by 861 climate scientists in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s and agreed to by every government in the world and every Academy of Science in the world. The testimony of all three of these skeptics took issue with elements of the scientific consensus view agreed to by every country in the world and their Academies of Science.

We have written extensively on this site under the category “disinformation” in the above index about why the fossil fuel disinformation campaign is some new heinous crime against humanity. (see index above under “disinformation”) Also see D. Brown, Is climate science disinformation a crime against humanity?

Yet, because the Pennsylvania state government has done little so far to adopt aggressive climate change policies, but Pennsylvania Governor Wolf has announced his intention to begin to adopt Pennsylvania climate change policies that will significantly reduce Pennsylvania’s GHG emissions, the legislative hearings discussed in this article which have been devoted to publicizing the views of climate skeptics who have not published the claims made in the hearings in peer-review journals are likely only the beginning of more intense efforts to undermine the public’s confidence in mainstream climate science.

Pennsylvania is the third largest emitter of GHGs among US states, behind only Texas and California. The Keystone state is responsible for 1 percent of global emissions yet has only 0.19 percent of the global population.

The Pennsylvania legislature and the Wolf administration have thus far failed to enact policies that will prevent activities in Pennsylvania from causing harsh climate impacts here and to hundreds of millions of the most vulnerable people around the world.  Although Governor Wolf in January took the welcome step of issuing Pennsylvania’s first executive order on climate change which included a goal of reducing GHGs by 26 percent reduction by 2025 and an 80 percent reduction by 2050, from 2005 levels, these targets are woefully short of Pennsylvania’s fair share of needed global action to achieve the 2015 Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting warming as close as possible to 1.5 0C and no greater than 2.0 o C and nothing has yet been done to decarbonize the Pennsylvania economy as required of the world to by the Paris Agreement.

IPCC said in an October special report that to limit warming to 1.5 0C, total global CO2 emissions would need to fall by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero by 2050.  (IPCC, 2018) If Governor Wolf takes climate change seriously, it is very likely that members of the fossil fuel industry in Pennsylvania will try and undermine Pennsylvania citizens’ support for the consensus climate science position by among other tactics making arguments similar to those made by Mr. Wrightstone.

References:

Brown, D. (2010) Is climate science disinformation a crime against humanity? The  Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/cif-green/2010/nov/01/climate-science-disinformation-crime

Dunlap, R., and McCright, A., (2015) Challenging Climate Change, The Denial Countermovement in Dunlap, R., and Brulle, R. (eds.) (2015). Climate Change and Society, Sociological Perspectives, New York, Oxford University Press

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (IPCC) AR5 (2014),https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar5/

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (IPCC) (2018), https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/

 

By:

Donald A. Brown

Scholar in Residence and Professor

Sustainability Ethics and Law

Widener University Commonwealth Law School

davbrown57@gmail.com

 

An American at the Bonn Climate Change Negotiations.

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To be an American at the Bonn 2017 climate negotiations felt very different than the 13 other times this writer has participated in the yearly efforts that almost every nation in the world has participated in with the hope of finding a global solution to climate change.

Shortly after entering the huge complex on the Rhine River at which every nation in the world was meeting to finalize the details of the 2015 Paris Accord, I ran into several acquaintances from other years who all remarked about the outrageousness of the US intention announced by President Trump of withdrawing from the global climate change deal.

The United States had a delegation at the Bonn talks that was telling other nations what they should do on an agreement about which the US president wants no part.  According to a representative from India, Dr. Vijeta Rattani, of the New Deli Center for Science and Environment, at the beginning of the Bonn talks the US was obstructing agreement on some issues that had wide support among most other nations.

The US’s main contribution was to host a panel which made a full-throated defense of coal while most of the rest of the world was trying to get an agreement that nations would phase out coal by 2030 because of the likely impossibility of keeping warming to non-catastrophic levels without phasing out of coal combustion.  According to a story in the New York Times before the Trump team could make its case on the benefits of fossil fuel, “the panel was disrupted for more than 10 minutes by scores of chanting and singing demonstrators. The protesters then walked out, leaving the room half empty. Throughout the remainder of the presentation, audience members shouted down and mocked White House officials who attempted to explain away President Trump’s stated view that global warming is a hoax.”

During the Bonn COP, 20 countries including  Angola, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Costa Rica, Denmark, El Salvador, Fiji, Finland, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Marshall Islands, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Niue, Portugal and Switzerland agreed to phase out of coal combustion by 2030.

Throughout the Bonn talks, representatives of some of the most vulnerable nations to climate change pleaded with high-emitting nations to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in light of the current suffering of their citizens. Among others I talked to early during the Bonn talks was a representative from Seychelles, a nation of 115 islands about 900 miles East of the East African coast in the Indian Ocean, who was strongly disturbed by the US lack of response to climate change given that people on her island were already suffering from rising sea levels and drought which was making it more difficult for her island nation’s citizens to grow food.

I also talked to Africans working on climate issues who claimed that massive human suffering from drought is now visible in the sub-Sahara countries of Mali, Chad, and Niger, suffering which is responsible for the creation of waves of refugees who have been attempting to enter Europe often through Libya, many of whom have drown at sea while those of have made it to Europe are destabilizing European politics.

Throughout the Bonn negotiation complex, most nations mounted pavilions which included displays of climate change impacts already being experienced in their countries, adaptation responses which are underway, and mitigation efforts which they are undertaking.  Walking through the Bonn complex, participants could not escape the conclusion that adverse climate change impacts are not just a future menace but a troubling current reality in much of the world.  Although ten years ago, one could participate in the yearly climate negotiations and conclude that most nations thought that human-induced climate change was mostly a future threat, in November 2017 it is clear that most nations are already experiencing some adverse climate change impacts that they realize they and other nations need to respond to now.

In several Bonn events, representatives of the global scientific community created a mood of gloom and urgency by discussing the magnitude and speed of GHG reductions now necessary to prevent catastrophic climate change harms. One program put on by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) described the enormous gap between the GHG emissions reductions pledged so far by nations under the Paris Agreement and those that are required to limit warming to the Paris Accord’s goals of 1.5  to 2.0 degrees C.  A report by UNEP concluded that if the international community fully complied with its GHG emissions reduction pledges made so far, the gap between the pledges and what is needed to achieve the warming limits is “alarmingly high.” The report goes on to say that even if national pledges are fully complied with, the remaining carbon budget that must constrain global GHG emissions to limit warming to 2.0 degrees C will be 80 % depleted by 2030 while by that year the remaining budget to achieve 1.5 degrees C warming limit goal will have been completely depleted. The report also says much more ambitious national pledges are now necessary by 2020, just over two years from now, to have any realistic hope of staying on a reduction pathway necessary to achieve the Paris Agreement’s warming limit goals.

Other scientists during the Bonn negotiations alarmingly warned of the more rapid loss of Arctic ice than what was expected, increasing yearly larger rises of atmospheric CO2 concentration levels perhaps because forest and ocean sinks are starting to decrease, and greater than expected sea level rise.

 Some of the great anger about the United States that I witnessed in Bonn was somewhat muted by the presence of 16 US States and numerous American cities and businesses who had been organized by California governor Jerry Brown and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg under the America’s Pledge Campaign. This group which accounted for almost half the US economy had a large presence in Bonn including a large pavilion which showcased what many US sub-national governments and private sector entities were doing to reduce US GHG emissions. One German participant said to me that he had hope that the United States would eventually do the right thing on climate change despite the Trump’s administration indefensible position because of the presence of the defiant US states and local governments. However, he said since these entities only represented about half of the US GHG emissions, the Trump administration’s unwillingness to cooperate with the rest of the world was a major global abomination.

During the last event I went to in Bonn, a UNEP representative discussed the fact that even if every nation fully achieved GHG reductions at levels they committed to, the world was headed toward over a 3 degree C warming in this Century, a level of warming that is extremely dangerous particularly for some parts of the world.  He then exhorted the audience to work tirelessly to get every national, state, regional, and local government to set ambitious GHG reduction targets. The situation is ominous he said, we need “all levels of government, that is nations, regions, and local governments,  to immediately work toward achieving zero carbon emissions.”

By:

Donald A. Brown

Scholar in Residence and Professor

Sustainability Ethics and Law,

Widener University Commonwealth Law School

dabrown57@gmail.com

 

Insights from a New Book on Sociology and Climate Change: The Heinous Denial Countermovement

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This is the second entry in a three part series on sociological insights about the social causes of climate change in a new book on sociology and climate change. The book is Climate Change and Society, Sociological Perspectives by Riley Dunlap and Robert Brulle, eds., Oxford University Press, 2015, New York.

In the first entry in this series, we described the new book’s contributions to understanding why a sociological understanding of the cause of climate change and reflection on the deep ethical and moral problems with the arguments of the opponents of climate change policies are mostly missing from the dominant climate change literature and the media coverage of global warming. This entry looks at the books conclusions of how mainstream climate change science has been undermined by opponents of climate change policies and thereby changed the cultural understanding of climate change, initially in the United States, and later, in other countries.

damage-done-by-republicans1

The above illustration depicts, in a very abbreviated and sketchy form, that as the scientific evidence of the threat from human-induced climate change became stronger over a 40-year period and as the US political opposition to climate change policies successfully fought to prevent the adoption of robust US climate policies, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 rose from below 320 ppm (parts per million) to current levels of over 400 ppm.  (For a much more rigorous analysis of the role of the climate change policy opposition in US climate policy formation see, Brown 2002, chap 2 and Brown 2012, chap 2 and numerous articles on this website under the category of “disinformation campaign” and Chapter 10 of Dunlap and Brulle, 2015)

Before reviewing the contributions of the new book to understanding how powerful interests undermined proposed national responses to climate change through the creation of a countermovement, we note the enormity of the damage that has been caused by the over three decade delay in responding to climate change which is attributable to the success of this climate denial countermovement.

Now that: (a) atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are in excess of 403 ppm, (b) the world agreed to try and limit warming to 1.5 degrees C in Paris at COP21 under the UNFCCC to prevent potentially catastrophic harm to hundreds of millions of poor, vulnerable people around the world and the ecosystems on which they depend,  (c) to stay within the 1.5 degrees C warming limit will require rapid civilization challenging GHG emissions reductions in most countries, and (d) these needed reductions are so steep that it may be impossible to stay within a carbon budget that must constrain global GHG emissions to prevent warming from exceeding the limit, the denial countermovement discussed in this the book is likely responsible for enormous amount of harm around the world particularly to those poor people who are most vulnerable to rising seas, storm damage, drought, floods, vector borne disease, killer heat waves and,acidifying oceans. For this reason, the denier countermovement is not just a morally and ethically reprehensible phenomenon, but a heinous global tragedy.

Although the new book on sociology and climate change contains many insights about how economically powerful entities have changed the cultural understanding of climate change and thereby prevented the United States and some other countries from responding to the growing threat of climate change, one chapter, in particular, titled Challenging Climate Change, The Denial Countermovement describes how some fossil fuel companies, corporations that depended on fossil fuel, business organizations, and free-market fundamentalist foundations successfully prevented government action on climate change (Dunlap, R., & McCright, A., 2015. p. 300).

Before describing this chapter’s contribution to understanding how the climate disinformation campaign accomplished its goals of preventing the regulation of fossil fuel, we note that this website includes 17 entries on the climate change disinformation campaign which both explain many aspects of this campaign and importantly distinguish the tactics of this campaign from legitimate climate skepticism (See, Start Here and Index Tab above under Disinformation Campaign and Climate Ethics).

On this website, we have consistently noted that scientific skepticism is the oxygen of the scientific method and should be encouraged even on climate change issues. On the other hand, the tactics of the climate change disinformation campaign are deeply morally reprehensible strategies designed to undermine mainstream climate change science. The tactics have included:

(a) lying about or acting with reckless disregard for the truth of climate change science,

(b) cherry-picking climate change science by highlighting a few climate science issues about which  there has been some uncertainty while ignoring enormous amounts of well-settled climate change science,

(c) using think tanks to manufacture claims about scientific uncertainty about climate science which have not been submitted to peer-review,

(d) hiring public relations firms to undermine the public’s confidence in mainstream climate change science,

(e) making specious claims about what constitutes “good” science,

(f) creating front groups and fake grass-roots organizations known as “Astroturf” groups that hide the real parties in interest behind opposition to climate change policies, and

(g) cyber-bullying scientists and journalists who get national attention for claiming that climate change is creating a great threat to people and ecological systems on which life depends.

As we have explained in many articles on this website, these tactics are not responsible skepticism but morally reprehensible disinformation. (See for instance, An Ethical Analysis of the Climate Change Disinformation Campaign: Is This A New Kind of Assault on Humanity?)

The Dunlap/Bruelle book refers to the climate change disinformation campaign as a countermovement. A countermovement is a sociological term for a social movement that arises in response to another social movement that threatens the interests of those who form the countermovement.  The climate change countermovement arose when those corporations and organizations who were threatened by calls for governments to take action to reduce the threat of climate change organized themselves to protect their economic interests that would be threatened by regulation of fossil fuels. The climate denial countermovement is often identified as an extention of an anti-environmental countermovement that began to form after Earth Day in 1970 when some corporations and free-market fundamentalists foundations reacted to the large number of environmental laws that were passed in the early 1970s at the beginning of the modern environmental movement.

The chapter in the new Dunlap/Brulle book on the climate denial countermovement both reviews some previously published sociological analyses of this countermovement and contains new information on how powerful economic interests have undermined government policy-making on climate change.

The Dunlap/Brulle book asserts that efforts to deny climate change began to get organized in the United States shortly after James Hansen testified in the US Senate in 1988 that climate change was already visible, testimony which put climate change squarely on the US public agenda (Dunlap, R. and McCright, A., 2015, p. 300). The book further claims that organized denial continued to grow and reached an unprecedented level in 2009 when the newly elected Obama administration and the Democratically controlled Congress increased the likelihood of US action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with the result that no climate change legislation was enacted. The book claims that these efforts have continued relatively unabated since then (Dunlap, R. and McCriight, A., 2015, p.300). Further, climate change denial has become a virtual “litmus test“ for Republican politicians, strongly enforced by elements of the conservative movement (Dunlap, R. and  McCriight, A., 2015, p. 300).

The book outlines the historical and cultural conditions that have provided fertile soil for the climate denial countermovement including the rise of the anti-government sentiment in the United States that grew with the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. This analysis attributes the displacement of Keynesian  economics from the late 1940s until the 1970s by the anti-regulatory economics of  neoliberalism as responsible for a fundamental shift in governing philosophy that significantly reduced constraints on capital accumulation and growth. This created a “global growth imperative” that was hostile to the kind of government regulation required to reduce the threat of climate change (Dunlap R., and McCright, A., 2015, p 303).The authors stress that an understanding of the success of the denial countermovement requires some understanding of the growth of the global economic system and its ideological grounding by conservative politicians (Dunlap, R. and McCright,  A., 2015, p. 303).

The chapter asserts that  leading fossil fuel corporations (most notably  ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal, industry associations (e.g. for example American Petroleum Institute and Western Fuels) initially led efforts to deny climate change. (Dunlap R. and McCright, A., 2015, p 310). These fossil fuel actors were joined by a wide range of other corporations and business associations to fund climate science deniers and Conservative Think Tanks and various groups promoting climate change science denial  (Dunlap R. and McCright, A., 2015, p. 310).

The book explains some corporations and their allies viewed the rise of the environmental movement in the1970s with alarm and as a result opposition to environmental programs developed particularly in the American West where battles over access to natural resources raged and became a component of a wider conservative countermovement that was born in the 1970s in reaction to the progressivism of the 1960 (Dunlap, R. and  McCright, A., 2015, p 304).

The chapter also notes that the international environmental policy agenda in the early 1990s, symbolized by the 1992 Rio “Earth Summit,” greatly threatened conservatives’ and industries’ neoliberal agenda and unfettered global markets (Dunlap. R. and  McCright, A., 2015, p. 305).

The book claims that conservatives in the United States learned from the Reagan administration’s experience that it was unwise to attack environmental protection directly, given that Americans were generally supportive environment protection (Dunlap, R. and  McCright, A., 2015, p.306). As a result, the book claims the conservatives and their industry allies learned to prevent the implementation of government policies that might threaten their political and economic interests by undermining the scientific foundations of environmental policy proposals (Dunlap R.and  McCriight, A., 2015, p.306). As result conservatives seized upon the strategy of “manufacturing uncertainty” that had been previously effectively employed for several decades by corporations and entire industries, most notably the tobacco industry in efforts to protect their products from regulations and lawsuits by questioning the scientific adequacy of claims that their products were hazardous (Dunlap, R. and  McCright, A., 2015, p.306).  As a result, conservatives began labeling  science supporting the need to regulate industry to protect the environment as “junk science.” This strategy became the favored tactic employed by conservatives and their industry allies when government showed interest in expanding environmental regulation and the major focus of attempts to prevent the adoption of climate change policies in the early 1990s (Dunlap, R. and McCright, A., 2015, p.306).

The book explains that participants in the denial movement undermined the public’s confidence in climate change science by attacking the validity of climate models, the use of paleoclimate data to establish climate trends, attacked individual climate scientists and scientific institutions, published  dubious non-peer reviewed climate science reports, funded self-proclaimed climate scientists exporters,  and many other tactics that manufactured scientific uncertainty.

The book explains why the complexity of climate change science made it particularly vulnerable to a strategy of manufacturing uncertainty designed to defeat proposed government regulation of industry and to create public controversies about the science (Dunlap, R. and McCriight, A., 2015, p.309).

The book also explains how the denial countermovement has evolved, changed, and expanded over the past quarter-century, changes that included new key actors, supporters, and tactics while the basic strategy of manufacturing uncertainty has expanded into manufacturing public controversy about climate science up until the present (Dunlap, R. and McCright, A., 2015, p.309).

The book also identifies the major participants in the denial countermovement which include portions of the fossil fuel industry and corporate America, conservative think tanks, a relatively small number of contrarian scientists, front groups and Astroturf organizations, conservative politicians and media, and the denial blogosphere (Dunlap, R. and  McCriight, A., 2015, p.309).

The book also describes how the denial countermovement which began in the United States was diffused internationally to countries including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia,  and recently into several European countries including France, Sweden, and the Netherlands (Dunlap R. &  McCriight, A., 2015, p.316)

The chapter on the denial countermovement ends with an acknowledgment that further sociological research is necessary to better study the evolving countermovement’s components, strategies, and tactics not only within individual nations but also across nations to better understand how this phenomenon has become a full-fledged global advocacy network.

The last post in this series will identify the importance of sociological insights about government responses to  climate change for advocates of climate change policies.

References:

Brown, D. (2002) American Heat: Ethical Problems With the United States Response to Global Warming, Roman and Littlefield.

Brown, D.  (2012) Navigating the Perfect Moral Storm, Climate Change Ethics, Routledge/Earthscan.

Dunlap, R., and McCright, A., (2015) Challenging Climate Change, The Denial Countermovement in Dunlap, R., and Brulle, R. (eds.) (2015). Climate Change and Society, Sociological Perspectives, New York, Oxford University Press

Dunlap, R., and Brulle, R, (eds.) (2015). Climate Change and Society, Sociological Perspectives, New York, Oxford University Press

By:

Donald A. Brown

Scholar in Residence and Professor

Widener University, Commonwealth Law School

dabrown57@gmail.com

Lessons Learned From Research on How 23 Nations Actually Considered Or Ignored Ethics and Justice in Formulating National Climate Commitments

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nationalclimatejustice

A joint research project of the University of Auckland and Widener University Commonwealth Law School has concluded that when most nations have formulated national climate change policies not only the nations, but also the NGOs and media in these nations, have failed to seriously consider equity, ethical, and justice considerations that should guide national climate change policy.

 

The project enlisted the support of 23 researchers from around the world to examine how 23 nations actually considered or ignored equity, ethics, and justice in formulating national climate change commitments. Each researcher answered the same 10 questions which sought to determine how equity, ethics, and justice considerations affected national policy formation on greenhouse gas emissions reductions targets and commitments and on funding adaptation, l,osses and damages in vulnerable developing countries. The nations studied in this project are: Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, China, Fiji , India, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mauritius, Netherlands, New Zealand, Peru, Russia, Samoa, South Africa, South Korea, Thailand, Uganda, United States of America, and Zimbabwe.

 

The reports on these countries are available on the project website, nationalclimatejustice.org.

 

The research project has been motivated by the fact that climate change is a threat that screams for attention to be understood essentially as a problem of ethics and justice, an understanding which has profound significance for national climate change policy development but a fact which our research has concluded is largely being ignored by most nations.

The research project seeks to help deepen reflection by nations and civil society on national responses to climate change by examining national climate change policies through an equity, ethical and justice lens.

If nations fail to base their climate change policies on what equity, ethics, and justice require of them on mitigation of their greenhouse gas emissions and funding for adaptation, losses, and damages, then the global response to climate change will not likely be ambitious enough to avoid catastrophic climate impacts while deepening existing injustices in the world.

Although several organizations have created metrics to evaluate the national voluntary climate commitments, known as Independent Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), on the basis of equity, ethics and justice, this research project, by examining what actually happened at the national level when nations formulated their INDCs has uniquely identified important lessons about how equity, ethics and justice were actually considered or ignored that are the basis of recommendation to improve national compliance with what equity, ethics, and justice require of them. For instance, by looking at what actually happened at the national level in formulating INDCs, the project concluded, among other things, that:

(a) Almost all nations have actually based their INDC at least in part on economic self-interest rather than global ethical responsibility.
(b) Not only have most nations ignored equity, ethics, and justice in domestic development of INDCs, national media and NGOs in most countries have not criticized inadequate INDCs on the basis of equity, ethics and justice.
(c) Even nations that have given lip service to the need to develop INDCs that represent the nation’s fair share of safe global emissions, these nations have not explained how ethics and justice quantitatively influenced the formulation of the INDC and in most cases the INDC has actually been based on national economic self-interest.
(d) National explanations of their INDC often hide the actual basis for the weakness of the INDC and to determine the actual basis for the INDC one must understand the domestic forces which opposed more ambitious INDCs.
(e) In most countries there appears to be little understanding among civil society about what equity, ethics, and justice would require of the country in formulating its INDC particularly in regard to the practical implications of living within a carbon budget that would constrain global emissions so that atmospheric ghg concentrations remain below dangerous levels, and the need for the nation to limit its ghg emissions to its fair share of a carbon budget.

These are only a few of the lessons learned from the project. Following is a complete list of the 37 lessons learned and 21 recommendations that have been derived from the research project:

Lessons Learned

The following lessons have been learned by the project so far.

1. Some high-emitting nations have expressly stated that they will not adopt climate change policies that harm their economy – thus ignoring their obligations to others as a matter of ethics, justice, and international law. These nations include Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.

2. Any national ghg emissions reduction commitment is implicitly a position on two ethical questions, namely, first, what safe atmospheric ghg concentration level the commitment aims to achieve and, second, what equity framework or principles of distributive justice the percent reduction is based on. Despite this, no nation has explained quantitatively how its commitment is related to an atmospheric carbon budget or an equity framework.

3. Although some nations acknowledge that their climate policies should be guided by ethical principles, for instance, South Africa and Japan, even these nations have not expressly explained quantitatively how their commitments were guided by ethical principles and appear to have based their commitments on economic self-interest at least in part.

4. A few nations have acknowledged that their ghg emissions commitments need to limit warming to 2°C and be derived from a fair and equitable framework, yet even these nations have not explained how their specific emissions reduction commitments can be understood to be consistent with an emissions reduction pathway that will limit warming to 2°C. In fact, despite the almost universal acceptance by nations of the 2°C warming limit, the actual ghg emission targets and timetables chosen by almost all nations do not meet the levels of emissions reductions specified by IPCC as necessary to keep atmospheric concentrations below 450 ppm and thereby achieve the 2°C warming limit. As a result the world is currently on target to hit warming of 3.7°C by 2100.

5. Those developed nations that have acknowledged that they should act to limit warming to 2°C have not adopted emissions reduction targets at levels the IPCC recently concluded would be necessary to limit warming to 2°C – namely, of 25% to 40% by 2020.

6. All nations, including those nations that acknowledge that their policies must be based upon a fair share of a safe global emissions, appear to have actually based their emissions reduction commitment at least in part on national economic self-interest rather than global responsibility.

7. In some nations it is not possible to determine the actual normative basis for the +government’s commitment simply by examining what the national government claims is its normative justification. Instead, one must understand the arguments made against stronger national climate change policies made by those who have successfully opposed stronger climate action. For instance, the United States commitment is based upon what is currently achievable under existing law. In Russia references to international obligations are mere lip service as the national INDC has been based almost exclusively on national economic interest. In the United States, because stronger laws have been successfully blocked by opponents of strong climate change policies on the basis that stronger laws will harm the US economy, destroy specific industries, and destroy jobs, the actual US climate change policies are based upon US economic interests, a fact not clear from examining the statements of the US federal government alone.

8. Some non-Annex 1 countries including China and Mauritius claim that their non-Annex 1 status is justification for making no binding commitments to reduce their ghg emissions even though a substantial percentage of their population has very high income and high per capita emissions. For instance, China per capita emissions are 7.1 tons while the US is 16.4 tons per capita. However, 10% of Chinese have ghg per capita are well above 10 % of US citizens ghg per capita. China has more than 1.1 million millionaires and more people with wealth over 50 million than any country except USA. By 2018 China is expected to have 2.1 million millionaires. There is a huge consuming class in China on which the government is creating no expectations. One of the ethical issues raised by these facts is whether nations which may have much smaller national emissions reductions commitment obligations for the nation derived from an acceptable equity framework should nevertheless be expected to limit activities of individuals causing high levels of ghg emissions.

9. Some nations, including Australia and New Zealand, have expressly made their commitments to reduce climate change policies contingent on the willingness of other nations to make commensurate commitments thus implicitly claiming they have no obligation to reduce their emissions to their fair share of safe global emissions unless other nations do so. The justification for this approach is not stated in the national commitments and is ethically dubious.

10. NGOs who support stronger climate change policies in many nations, including those in Australia, Canada, and the United States, are failing to frame climate change issues on the basis of ethics, justice, and equity.

11. Several developing nations, including Bolivia, have asserted that they have no obligation to make commitments to reduce ghg emissions unless the costs of reductions are funded by developed nations without identifying an equity framework which justifies this conclusion. South Africa and other developing nations have made commitments while also claiming that some of their commitments are contingent on funding from developed nations without explaining why some of the commitments should be funded according to an equity framework to justify which part of their climate change policies must be funded by developed nations. For this reason developing nations need to take a position on an equity framework that would apply to all developing countries.

12. Bolivia claims that funding for mitigation and adaptation in developing nations should be understood as the climate “debt” of developed countries in response to their historical, high-level per capita, and failure to fund adaptation but has not offered an equity framework to operationalize this claim. Bolivia draws strongly and explicitly upon ethical justifications for requiring deep cuts in national ghg emissions by other nations, together with financial contributions and holistic mitigation and adaptation measures, capable of both reducing poverty and vulnerability to climate change – yet has not identified an equity framework that could be applied at the global scale.

13. Several countries, including Bolivia, Fiji, South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda, have asserted that domestic justice issues need to be considered to reduce domestic poverty in setting national climate policies although they have not offered an equity framework to operationalize this idea at the global scale. Their positions appear to argue that domestic justice obligations can trump global responsibilities.

14. Several developing countries have primarily considered ethics and justice issues in regard to how climate policies affect domestic justice considerations rather than global justice issues.

15. Bolivia has claimed that 6% of GDP of developed nations should be devoted to funding climate change needs in developing nations but has not explained the equity framework that supports this conclusion.

16. Most developing countries, including Bolivia, strongly support a “loss and damages” mechanism while some developed nations oppose this mechanism. The United States denies any responsibility for losses and damages in other countries.

17. Several countries, including Canada have made commitments to reduce ghg emissions but not adopted the regulatory programs needed to achieve their commitments.

18. Several governments including Canada, have domestic legal obligations to protect vulnerable minorities from climate change which they are not fulfilling.

19. Although meaningful local and regional climate change programs and strategies can be found in many nations, many national governments have done little or nothing to encourage local or regional governments to adopt policies that will limit ghg emissions even though for some
activities that cause ghg emissions in the nation only regional and local governments have legal authority to require lower emissions. For instance in the United States, local and state governments regulate aspects of transportation and land use not regulated by the federal government. Some national governments including Australia that have made weak INDCs for the nation, nevertheless contain local governments that have made aggressive ghg emissions reductions commitments.

20. Most nations have not created programs to encourage individuals to greatly reduce their carbon footprint.

21. Some developing countries have set meaningful ghg emissions targets including Mauritius and South Africa but depend on funding from developed nations to achieve some of the climate goals. South Africa, despite being a non-Annex 1 developing country, has acknowledged its status as the highest ghg emitter on the African continent and announced a voluntary emissions reduction target, the objective of which is to make a ‘fair contribution’ to keep global concentrations within the range required to keep within the 2°C warming limit. South Africa openly acknowledges the need to voluntarily respond to climate change despite being a poor developing country. Yet the actual emissions reduction target identified by South Africa does not explain how it is quantitatively linked to an atmospheric concentration goal that will achieve a warming limit or why its emissions reduction target represents South Africa’s fair share of safe global emissions. In fact, the South African target, because it is a commitment only to reduce emissions below business as usual expansion, allows for large increases in South African ghg emissions by 2020 and 2025 without explaining how these increases are consistent with a specific understanding of what equity requires.

22. No developed country has explained how their contributions to the major climate funds relate in any quantitative way to their obligations under the UNFCCC for adaptation, mitigation, or losses and damages.

23. Almost all nations need to increase awareness among citizens and the press of the policy significance of the ethical and justice dimensions of climate change.

24. In some high-emitting developed nations, including the United States, the media is utterly failing to cover the ethics and justice dimensions of national climate change commitments.

25. In the case of EU member states, the collective decision making process of the EU does not seem to have led to any greater ethical analysis at the national level for individual EU nations, including the Netherlands and Italy, when these nations set their emissions reduction targets.

26. A few developing nations , including South Africa and Uganda, recognize the need to take positive action on climate change because they recognize the need and the responsibility toward their own nationals.

27. Two national reports revealed some reference to the concept of contraction and convergence, but no nation is implementing this approach.

28. No developed nations deny responsibility for funding adaptation and loses and damages in poor vulnerable nations, but no nation has made an express link between their ethical responsibility for supporting adaption and compensation for losses and damages and what funds have been committed`. Adaptation contributions seem to be left to the largess or interests of individual nations, leaving them free to withdraw. Including Australia, or determine the scale and nature of contributions. Even when a nation is a major contributor to adaptation (e.g., Japan), its activity is not explicitly linked to its own emissions targets.

29. There was a noticeable absence of explicit use of the concept of climate justice by developed nations. In contrast, Bolivia is using the concept of climate debt to mean liability for historic and continuing emissions and failure to take mitigation and adaptation actions. As the Bolivian report details, Bolivia is the champion on climate justice with a highly developed and multi-faceted concept that includes demands for a compensation mechanism beyond provision for adaptation of developing states.

30. Some developing nations, for instance, Brazil have committed to increase resilience and adaptation responses.

31. Some developing nations including Brazil have encouraged local and regional climate change plans and strategies.

32. Some developing countries including Bolivia, for instance, have made significant commitments to increase non-fossil energy.

33. Bolivia has advocated the ‘Climate Justice Index’ which calculates each country’s ‘fair share’ of atmospheric space according to their; 1) historical responsibility since 1750; 2) ecological footprint; 3) development capacity; and 4) technological capacity. According to this methodology, Bolivia asserts that non-Annex I (developing) countries should have 89% of the remaining atmospheric budget, leaving Annex I (developed) countries with just 11%. However, Bolivia does not go into details about how the 89% of atmospheric space reserved for non-Annex I countries should be divided, nor what types of commitments each country would be responsible for given their positioning on the index.

34. Some national level NGOs (including several in India) have expressly examined national INDCs on the basis of ethics and justice but most have not.

35. In some countries (e.g., Australia), even when media coverage of INDCs considers justice, this coverage misleads citizens by comparing commitments to other nations without any analyses of how equity and justice considerations would allow differences between national commitments.

36. Some countries (including Australia) argue for the need to take economic considerations into account by arguing about the future demand for coal without fully explaining why larger investments in non-fossil fuel sources are impossible.

37. Some nations’, including Australia’s, commitments to the Green Fund have been taken from existing foreign aid budgets – thus providing no new funds that would represent the nation’s satisfaction of it is obligations to fund adaptation and resilience in vulnerable developing countries.

Recommendations

Recommendations on how to improve consideration of ethics and justice in policy formation in light of these lessons learned include:

1. All nations should be required to explain quantitatively how their emissions reductions commitments will achieve an acceptable warming limit and on what equity framework or principles of distributive justice their percent emissions reductions is based. For this reason, Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) should identify: (1) tonnes of CO2eq emissions reduced rather than a percent reduction from a baseline year, (b) the temperature limit and associated carbon budget that the INDC is seeking to achieve, (c) the equity principles that the nation relied on to assure the justice of its INDC, and (d) For Annex 1 countries, ghg emissions in 1990, the common baseline year.

2. There is an urgent need in most nations to raise public awareness of the ethical and justice issues entailed by climate change policymaking in general and ghg emissions commitments in particular. Along this line there are several issues in particular about which greater awareness is needed including greater public understanding of the ethical implications of any nation’s ghg emissions reduction commitment in regard to an atmospheric stabilization goal the commitment is seeking to achieve and the coherence or lack there of the national commitment to an acceptable equity framework.

3. An international mechanism under the UNFCCC is urgently needed that helps other nations and civil society to understand the lack of conformity of national ghg emissions targets with principles of ethics and justice. This mechanism should provide that any government’s positions on their climate change commitments can be questioned by other governments and NGOs in regard to the adequacy of the commitment to achieve a warming limit and the fairness of the reductions. This mechanism must also require governments to respond to these questions.

4. The media, NGOs, education institutions, academia, businesses and other social actors must all become involved in lifting both public awareness of the ethical and justice implications of national climate policy. In this regard media coverage that compares national commitments with other nations’ commitments without acknowledging that equity and justice considerations could lead to morally different emissions reductions should be avoided because these comparisons are potentially misleading

5. NGOs should justify their policy analyses and action recommendations on ethical grounds.

6. Nations should be required to explain how their commitments to fund adaptation and losses and damages in poor vulnerable nations link to their ethical obligations to provide funding. A mechanism to fund losses and damages in vulnerable countries is necessary.

7. Training for policy-makers, national politicians, and NGOs on the ethical issues inherent in climate change policy is urgently needed. Training is particularly needed to help all engaged in climate change policy formation to understand the links between INDCs, a warming limit, and an equity framework

8. Developing nations should adopt programs that will create ghg emissions limitations for high-emitting individuals and organizations even if equity and justice considerations don’t require that nations significantly reduce national ghg emissions.

9. National media need to significantly increase their coverage of how ethics, justice, and equity considerations should affect national climate change policies.

10. Developing nations that make commitments based upon funding from developed nations should be required to explain the equity framework that led to the claim for the contribution.In this regard claims of ecological debt should include explanation of the equity framework on which the equitable debt claim is based.

11. Nations who claim that duties for domestic justice trump global responsibilities should explain quantitatively how they reached this conclusion.

12. Nations who make ghg emissions reduction commitments should identify (to the extent practical) the regulatory programs or policies that will achieve the reductions.

13. Nations should develop a program encouraging local and regional governments to adopt climate change emissions reductions programs.

14. All governments should adopt programs that encourage individuals to reduce their carbon footprints to fair levels.

15. Where national commitments have been deduced from collective decision making – such as the case in the EU – nations should be required to explain the equity and justice basis for its national commitment.

16. Nations should explain domestic programs they have adopted on adaptation and resilience.

17. Developing countries that claim certain amounts of atmospheric space should be allocated to developing countries should explain their reasoning.

18. All nations should provide transparent processes to consult with citizens on national climate policies

19. Nations should be required to explain the fairness of their current and projected per capita emissions levels.

20. Nations who justify lower INDCs on the inevitability of the need for continuing fossil fuel use (including coal) should be required to explain what economic or technical consideration were assumed in implicit claims that greater uses of non-fossil fuel is impossible.

21. If a developed nation’s contribution to climate funds such as the Green fund are simply a shift of money from existing foreign aid funds, they should expressly admit to this while explaining why they have no ethical obligations to increase funding for adaptation and response in vulnerable nations.

By
Donald A. Brow
Scholar In Residence and Professor Deputy Director
Widener University Commonwealth Law School

Dabrown57@gmail.co

 

Prue Taylor, Director

New Zealand Center for Environmental Law

Prue.taylor@auckland.ac.nz

Why “Shaming” Is An Important Tool That Could Lead to Climate Change Action In Paris And Beyond

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ashamedI. Introduction

This website has been dedicated to helping citizens spot, understand, and make arguments about ethical and moral issues that arise in public discussion of climate change policies. A major objective of this effort has been to help proponents of climate change programs to respond to many arguments made by opponents of government action on climate that fail to pass reasonable ethical scrutiny. Armed with these ethical arguments, we have expected that proponents of stronger climate change policies would seek to hold accountable those governments, politicians, and opponents of climate change programs who have taken morally indefensible positions on climate change issues. That is we expected that strong moral arguments would be used either to convince governments or climate policy opponents of the moral unacceptability of their positions, or be used to pressure governments or individuals that continued to hold morally and ethically indefensible positions through the use of public shaming.

In doing this work for over a decade, we have frequently encountered proponents of climate change policies who eschew tactics that seek to publicly shame opponents of climate change policies or governments even in cases where their positions are obviously ethically and morally indefensible. Instead of making ethical and moral arguments in response to the arguments of climate change policies opponents, climate change policy advocates have often focused on refuting the factual claims of the opponents’ arguments such as climate change policies will destroy the economy or are not warranted due to scientific uncertainty.  .

This article will (1) examine arguments that have sometimes been made against using shaming as a strategic tool to change the behavior of those who resist taking responsible action on climate change, and (2) identify features of an effective use of shaming that might lead to more responsible action on climate change,

II. Objections to the Use of Shaming Techniques to Enhance Climate Change Responses.

Some proponents of climate change policies have explained their aversion to moral arguments made in response to the positions of opponents of climate policies on the basis that moral judgements are subjective and thus there is often no clear way of resolving disagreements about what justice and ethics  requires. It is true that  not all ethical issues raised by climate change lead to a consensus among ethicists as to what ethics and morality requires. For instance, reasonable people can disagree on what principles of distributive justice should guide fair allocations of national ghg emissions reduction targets. Yet, as we have explained on this website many times, many of the most frequent arguments made by opponents of climate change policies violate widely accepted ethical principles including: (a) the Golden Rule that holds that people have a duty to treat others with respect, (b) widely accepted human rights principles, (c) non-controversial precepts of procedural justice such as people should not put other people at great risk of harm without obtaining permission from those most vulnerable to harm, and (d) widely accepted principles of international law such as the “polluter pays” principle, the “no harm principle” and the “precautionary principle,” the last two of which were  expressly agreed to by all nations when they agreed in 1992 to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Given that the most frequent arguments made against climate change programs clearly fail to pass minimum ethical scrutiny, unwillingness to publicly hold opponents of climate change policies for their morally indefensible positions is a huge mistake.particularly in regard to the most frequent arguments that have been made in opposition to climate change policies.   In the United States, opponents of climate change policies have most frequently argued that the United States should not adopt climate change policies because:

First, climate change programs will impose unacceptable costs on the economy or destroy jobs, or other economic reasons to oppose action on climate change.

Second, climate change emissions reductions programs are not warranted due to scientific uncertainty about whether humans are causing climate change and what the impacts will be.

Third, for a government such as the United States to act would be unfair or ineffective until other countries including China and India take similar action.

Citizens and environmental groups have unknowingly been tricked into responding to these arguments by making factual responses to these claims, such as climate change policies will increase jobs, despite the fact that each of these arguments contain hidden normative assumptions which clearly flunk minimum ethical scrutiny.

For example, as we have seen, opponents of climate change policies have frequently based their opposition on the claim that action on climate change will destroy jobs or the the national economy.

The response of NGOs and citizens to this argument has largely been to assert that climate change programs will create jobs and boost the economy. Yet this response unknowingly implicitly supports the very troublesome hidden normative assumption of the climate policy opponents’ argument, namely that the government should not adopt climate policies if the policies will hurt the government’s economic interests despite the fact that this argument is obviously wrong when viewed through an ethical lens because polluters not only have economic interests, they have moral responsibilities to not harm others.  This conclusion is supported by: (a) the universally accepted  Golden Rule which holds that someone should not be able to kill others because it would be costly to the killer to stop the killing behavior because people have duties to treat others as they wished to be treated, and (b) numerous widely accepted provisions of international law such as, among others, the “no harm” principle, the “polluter pays” principle Thus, the failure to respond to the arguments of the opponents of climate change policies  on moral grounds is an astonishing oversight in light of the fact that the moral objection is very strong to anyone who claims that they can seriously harm others if their economic interests are threatened if they are required to limit their harmful activities. History is replete with examples of justifications made by some on economic grounds for their morally unacceptable behavior about which moral reasoning eventually prevailed. For instance. proponents of slavery often defended slavery on economic grounds, a position that was eventually widely rejected on moral grounds.

Such a claim that nations may continue to engage in behavior that harms others as long as their economic interests will be affected by ceasing the behavior violates the most non-controversial ethical rules, not only the Golden Rule, but also many well accepted provisions of international law based on the Golden Rule such as a rule called the “no harm principle” which holds that all nations have a legal duty to prevent their citizens from harming people outside their jurisdiction.

If citizens who support climate policies ignore the ethical problems with the arguments made by opponents of climate policies on the grounds that climate policies will impose costs on those who are harming others, they are playing into the hands of those responsible for putting the planet and millions of poor people at risk from climate change.

There are also deeply problematic ethical assumptions that have remained largely unchallenged when the opponents of climate change policies argue the United States or other governments  should not adopt climate change policies due to scientific uncertainty (See, The Ethical Duty to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the Face of Scientific Uncertainty) and unfairness or ineffectiveness of US ghg reductions if the United States acts and China and India don’t act.(See May Any Nation Such as the United States or China Make Its Willingness to Reduce Its GHG Emissions Contingent On What Other Nations Do?)

And so, for 30 years, the opponents of climate change policies have succeeded in framing the climate debate in a way that has largely ignored obvious ethical and moral problems with their unwillingness to reduce the threat of climate change. A recent research project of Widener University Commonwealth Law School and the University of Auckland has revealed that surprisingly both environmental organizations and the press in many countries have failed to bring attention to the obvious moral problems with the arguments made by opponents of action on climate change.

Although there are ethical issues raised by climate change about which ethicists may disagree on what ethics requires, there are many ethical issues that policy-making on climate change must confront about which very strong, non-controversial ethical condemnation can be made of many of  the positions on these issues that opponents of climate change continue to make. These issues include, for  instance:

  • Can a nation justify its unwillingness to adopt climate change policies primarily on the basis of national economic interest alone?
  • When is scientific uncertainty an ethically acceptable excuse for non-action for a potentially catastrophic problem like climate change given that waiting until the uncertainties are resolved makes the problem worse and more difficult to solve?
  • Should proponents or opponents of climate change policies have the burden of proof to scientifically demonstrate that climate change is or is not a threat before climate change policies are in enacted?
  • What level of proof, such as, for instance, 95% confidence levels or the balance of the evidence, is needed to demonstrate climate change is a threat that warrants policy responses?
  • What amount of climate change harm is it ethically acceptable for a nation to impose on those nations or people outside their jurisdiction who will be harmed without their consent?
  • To what extent does a nation’s financial ability to reduce ghg emissions create an ethical obligation to do so?
  • What are the rights of potential victims of climate change to consent to a nation’s decision to delay national action on climate change pm the basis of national cost or scientific uncertainty?
  • Who gets to decide what amount of global warming is acceptable?
  • Do high emitting nations and individuals have a moral responsibility to pay for losses and damages caused climate change to people or nations who have done little to cause climate change?
  • How should national ghg targets consider the per capita or historical emissions of the nation in establishing national climate commitments?
  • Do poor, low-emitting nations have any moral responsibility to do something about climate change and what is it?
  • When should a nation be bound by provisions of international law relevant to climate change that they agreed to including provisions in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change such as the “no-harm,” and “precautionary principle” and the duty of developed nations to take the lead on climate change?

Although there are legitimate differences of opinion on some of these issues among ethicists as to what justice requires, very strong, non-controversial ethical criticisms can be made of  many of the positions held by many opponents of climate change on these issues, matters which have been frequently written about on this website. As Amaryta Sen and others have pointed out, one need not know what perfect justice requires to spot injustice.(Sen, 2009) For this reason, it is usually possible to strongly condemn many of the positions on these issues held by opponents of climate change policies even if there is reasonable disagreement on what justice requires.  Thus, it is not necessary to get agreement on what perfect justice requires before strongly condemning some positions on climate change issues on moral and ethical grounds. It is not necessary to know what justice requires to condemn injustice.

Another objection to relying on moral arguments to shame opponents of climate change sometimes heard, is that shaming will not change government or human behavior.  Many times I have heard people say moral arguments don’t work, people only respond to self-interest.  Yet naming nations who violates basic human rights and holding them up to ridicule, that is “naming and shaming”, has proven to be in many cases an effective tool to enlarge human rights protections around the world.  Jennifer Jacquet, in a recent book Is Shaming Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool, explains that shaming has proven to be an effective tool to change ethically unsupportable behavior of governments and institutions provided a shaming strategy is created that is mindful of lessons learned from successful “naming and shaming” programs. (Jacket, 2015) In addition, moral arguments have been key to creating social movements that have transformed society in cases such as slavery, child labor, women’s rights, children’s rights, human treatment of animals, etc. Yet shaming strategies should learn from what has worked in the past.

III. Designing An Effective Shaming Tool To Change Government Behavior On Climate Change

As the international community heads to COP-21 in Paris next week, given that moral shaming always has the potential of achieving a change in government or individual behavior of those who justify their actions on ethically indefensible grounds and given that the global community is rapidly running out of time to prevent dangerous climate change due in large part to the success of opponents of climate change programs to frame the public climate debate in a way that avoids moral criticism, a strategy of publicly shaming nations. politicians, and opponents of needed climate change policies who refuse to be guided by their ethical responsibilities is needed now more than ever to get urgently needed action to reduce the immense threat of climate change.

An effective shaming strategy should focus not on all issues where there is disagreement among parties but only on those positions which clearly flunk minimum ethical scrutiny. For instance, in the climate change debate because  there is significant disagreement among countries about what equity framework should control how ghg emissions should be allocated among nations, a shaming strategy would not likely lead to a resolution of these contentious issues. Some negotiations about reasonable equity frameworks is likely necessary to arrive at a global position on what equity requires. However, as we have seen, a country that claims it can set its national ghg emissions reductions commitments on the basis of national economic interest alone can be subjected to strong ethical condemnation .Therefor, even on an issue such as what does equity require about which reasonable disagreement exists, the disagreement does not support the conclusion that anyone’s claim about what equity requires is entitled to respect. In fact, many nations and individuals have taken position on what equity requires that can be strongly condemned on non-controversial ethical grounds even though reasonable disagreement exits on what equity requires. For this reason, progress can be made even on the issue of what does ‘equity’ require by holding positions on this issue that fail to pass minimum ethical scrutiny to public scrutiny.

Given that many nations continue to take positions  on many issues that cannot be justified on any ethically acceptable reasons, there is a huge potential to pressure governments on ethical grounds in Paris and in subsequent negotiations provided that the governments or government officials are required to respond in a publicly transparent way to the ethical issues that must be faced in climate change policy formation.

A recent article in Climate Progress by Jeremy Deaton explains how shaming can lead to action on climate change in Paris and  the years ahead. Deaton says:

December’s international climate summit might not result in a legally binding agreement, but it will almost certainly include mechanisms for countries to review each other’s progress. So, while the process could lack formal sanctions, it may allow for informal sanctions. Writing in Grist, Jacquet argues, “Governments must be convinced that if they fail to keep their pledges they will suffer negative reputational consequences that will damage their relations with other countries and may lead to domestic political damage as well.”

The potential success of a shaming strategy in Paris and beyond will be greatly enhanced if nations are required to respond on the record to questions asked by other governments and NGOs about how they responded to important ethical issues that must be faced in formulating their climate change policies.  Such a mechanism under the UNFCCC has been under active discussion since the Lima COP in 2014.  And so for a shaming strategy to be most effective, the UNFCCC negotiation outcome needs to establish a mechanism that forces nations to be transparent about the actual basis for their national climate commitments in regard to the ethical issues that must be faced in policy formation.

And so to strengthen the power of a shaming strategy to bring needed change, the Paris negotiations should seek to create a process that will force nations to explain on the record how they have responded to moral issues raised by climate change policy formation.  The Widener/Auckland research project mentioned above has concluded that nations will claim they have taken equity and justice into account without explaining quantitatively how they based their national commitments on specific equity frameworks or how a quantitative ghg emissions reduction leads to a safe atmospheric ghg concentration level that will limit warming to tolerable levels. Furthermore, this research reveals that the actual basis for many national climate commitments, known as INDCs (Intended Nationally Determined Contributions under the UNFCCC) was economic interests not global responsibilities yet nations have not revealed how economic considerations have affected their national commitments. For this reason an effective shaming strategy requires that the international community must create an obligation that governments respond to questions from governments and NGOs on the record relating to important ethical issues. Many human rights regimes have established  these procedures.

Because the Widener/Auckland research project identified above has concluded that nations will often disguise the actual basis for their national climate commitments, nations should be required to submit information with their INDCs that will allow citizens to better understand how their national INDC has responded to important ethical issues that must be faced in climate change policy formation.. For this reason, as we have explained on this website before, nations should:(a) report their ghg emissions reduction commitments in tons of CO2e rather than a percent reduction commitment from a baseline year, (b) the temperature limit and associated carbon budget that the INDC is seeking to achieve, (c)  the equity principles that the nation relied on to assure the justice of its INDC, and (d) For Annex 1 countries, ghg emissions in 1990, the common baseline year. This information will allow clear evaluation of how nations have responded to ethical duties to reduce their ghg emissions to their fair share of safe global emissions.

Thus the Paris COP should seriously consider how to create an institutional mechanism and information base to allow citizens and governments to  evaluate how nations have responded to their ethical obligations.on climate change

As Daeton said in the above article:

With shame, we are witnessing a very old tool being put to use on a relatively new problem. Humans have relied on shame since their evolutionary infancy to enforce social norms, and now it’s being used to urge action on climate change. How can we motivate the changes we need to curb global warming? As Jacquet points out, morality can evolve. It’s up to humans to render carbon pollution a moral ill and climate action a moral good. Shame may prove essential to that process.

Creating a process under climate regime to shame nations on their moral failures will not be the first time that the international community has relied heavily on shaming to achieve widespread social shame. As we have noted, the spread of human rights regimes has, for instance, relied heavily on “naming and shaming” countries who fail to protect human rights. The success of efforts to increase enjoyment of human rights protection around the world is widely attributed to the ability of nations and human rights NGOs to question nations on their human rights record and the creation of a legal duty of nations to respond in writing  to these questions. The climate change regime should follow the example  of international human rights law on these issues.

A similar strategy should be followed to pressure government officials and politicians who hold ethically unsupportable positions on climate change such as they wont support government action on climate change because the policies will impose costs on their government’s economy, a position as we have seen which ignores the clear responsibility of governments to not harm others outside the jurisdiction of the government. To create effective shaming tactics to pressure individual government officials or politicians running for office, NGOs should ask officials and politicians to respond on the record to questions that will expose the actual justifications for the official’s or politician’s position on climate change issues. For instance, when a government official or politician says he or she will not support action on climate change because it will harm the relevant government’s economy or destroy jobs, the official or politician should be asked if he or she denies that governments  not only have economic interests but also ethical duties to not harm others. This website has identified many specific questions that should be asked of government officials and politicians to expose the ethical problems with their positions in several articles. See, for instance,

a. If Pope Francis is Right that Climate Change is a Moral Issue, How Should NGOs and Citizens Respond to Arguments Against Climate Policies Based on Scientific Uncertainty?

b. If Pope Francis is Right that Climate Change is a Moral Issue, How Should NGOs and Citizens Respond to Arguments Against Climate Policies Based on Unacceptable National Costs

c If Pope Francis is Right that Climate Change is a Moral Issue, How Should NGOs and Citizens Respond to Arguments Against Climate Policies Based on the Failure of Other Countries Like China to Act?

 

The upcoming Paris negotiations may make progress on creating a transparent process that will allow other governments and citizens to shame governments who base their responses to climate change on ethically unsupportable grounds.

This website will report regularly on what happens in Paris to make a shaming strategy more effective in reducing the threat of climate change.

References:

Jacquet, J., 2015,  Is Shaming Necessary, New Uses for an Old Tool, Pantheon Books, , New York

Sen, A., 2009, The Idea of Justice, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts .

By

Donald A. Brown

Scholar in Residence and Professor

widener

dabrown57@gmail.com

climate change ethics navigating

The Seeds of the Corporate Funded Climate Disinformation Campaign, the 1971 Lewis Powell Memo

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Lewis-Powell

Although numerous articles on this website have acknowledged that responsible scientific skepticism is a positive force in the advancement of science, as we have explained in numerous articles under the category of  “disinformation campaign” there has been a well-funded climate change disinformation campaign that since the 1980s has been engaged in the following ethically dubious tactics including:

  • Lying or reckless disregard for the truth about climate science,
  • Cherry picking the science by focusing on unkowns while ignoring what is well-settled in climate science,
  • Cyber-bullying and ad hominem attacks on scientists and journalists,
  • Manufacturing bogus, non-peer-reviewed climate science through the creation of  ideologically motivated conferences and publications,
  • The use of ideological think tanks to promote the views of climate change deniers through their media outreach, speakers bureaus, publications, and conferences,
  • The use of front-groups and fake grass-roots organizations, known as Astroturf groups, to promote the views of climate change deniers that hide the real parties in interests,
  • Making specious claims about “bad science” that are based upon the dubious assumption that no conclusions in science can be made until everything is proven with high levels of certainty.

This website contains numerous articles on the many ethical problems with the corporate and free-market fundamentalist foundation funded climate change disinformation campaign that was in full bloom by the  mid-1980s. These articles examine the tactics of the disinformation campaign through an ethical lens that distinguishes it from responsible scientific skepticism.  See, for instance:

The Climate Change Disinformation Campaign: What Kind Of Crime Against Humanity, Tort, Human Rights Violation, Malfeasance, Transgression, Villainy, Or Wrongdoing Is It? Part  One: Is The Disinformation Campaign a Crime Against Humanity or A Civil Tort?

Ethical Analysis of the Climate Change Disinformation Campaign:  Introduction to A Series. Ethical Analysis of Disinformation Campaign’s Tactics: (1) Reckless Disregard for the Truth, (2) Focusing On Unknowns While Ignoring Knowns, (3) Specious Claims of “Bad” Science, and (4) Front Groups..

Ethical Analysis of Disinformation Campaign’s Tactics: (1) Think Tanks, (2) PR Campaigns, (3) Astroturf Groups, and (4) Cyber-Bullying Attacks.

Irresponsible Skepticism: Lessons Learned From the Climate Disinformation Campaign

The climate change disinformation campaign that arose in the 1980s was part of what sociologists call a countermovement, that is a movement that arises when elements of society are threatened by social movements that are perceived to potentially adversely affect their interests.

An environmental countermovement arose in the United States in response to the rise of the modern environmental movement which was born in the late 1960s in response to among other things, the publications in 1962 of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and a growing number of highly visible pollution events including the Santa Barbara oil spill and the fire in the Cuyahoga River in 1969.  After Silent Spring, many more citizens understood that toxic substances were widely distributed throughout the world at levels that could harm human and animal health.

The beginning of the modern environmental movement in the United States has often been pegged by environmental historians to Earth Day on April 22, 1970. On the first Earth Day in New York City tens of thousands of people concerned about environmental issues marched and paraded in lower Manhattan and many thousands attended speeches in Union Square Park. New York City was only one of hundreds of locations throughout the United States where Earth Day events took place on April 22, 1970.

The rapid rise of the modern environmental movement that was undeniable by April 1970 was perceived to be a threat to many members of the US business community, As a result, soon after the first Earth Day in 1970, the environmental countermovement began to organize. Sociologist Robert Brulle summarizes the rise of countermovements as follows:

Counter-movements originate as the change movement starts to show signs of success by influencing public policy, and threatening established interests. The elites of these interests then respond to these threats by fostering countermovements to protect their interests by opposing or challenging social movements. ….The countermovement organizations that emerge take the form of elite driven efforts to mobilize economically impacted populations, or populations that share similar interests of ideologies. [Brulle]

Many sociologists and environmental historians also attribute the speed of the rise of the environmental countermovement to a 1971 memo of Lewis Powell to the US Chamber of Commerce that was based on the claim that the American free enterprise system was under attack from the social movements that arose in the 1960s including the environmental movement.

Powell was a corporate lawyer, a former president of the American Bar Association, and a board member of eleven corporations, including Philip Morris and the Ethyl Corporation, a company that made the lead for leaded gasoline. Powell had also represented the Tobacco Institute, the research arm of the tobacco industry, and various tobacco companies. Within two months after his 1971 memo, President Richard Nixon nominated Powell to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, where he served for fifteen years.

The Powell memo criticizes corporations for their lack of vigor in responding to the challenges to free enterprise that were growing in the beginning of the 1970s and calls for a much more aggressive response from the business community that it claims is needed to protect fee enterprise from criticism from college campuses, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians. (Powell Memo)

The memo specifically recommended that businesses:

  •  Designate a member of senior management who has responsibility to fight attacks on the free enterprise system,
  • Expand the role of business organizations to fight the threats of the free market including the US Chamber of Commerce which has the time, finances, and organizational capacity to powerfully unify the response of the business community,
  • To counter criticism of the business community from college campuses, business organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce should support scholars who will defend the free enterprise system, develop speakers and support speakers’ bureaus that will counter the liberal rhetoric coming from college campuses, subject textbooks to ideological review, insist on equal time for speakers exposing the views of the business community for speakers on campuses, insist that college faculties be balanced by those who will defend the free enterprise system, request that graduate schools of business include courses that support the free enterprise system, encourage local chambers of commerce to provide the views of the business community in high schools, establish staff who work with the media to communicate to the general public the views of the business community, monitor and criticize television programs that unfairly criticize the free enterprise system and where appropriate file complaints with the Federal Communications Commission, monitor radio and other media and pressure them to cover the views of defenders of the free enterprise system, support scholars who support the free enterprise system to publish in scholarly journals, establish incentives for scholars to publish defenses of free enterprise in books, papers, and pamphlets, spend more money on advertising that expressly supports the free market system.
  • Much more aggressively support politicians who support the interests of the business community.
  • Become much more involved in the judicial system to support the interests of the business community by, among other things, filing litigation and amicus curiae briefs in important cases.
  • Harness the power of corporate shareholders to advance the interests of the business community.
  • Dramatically increase finances in support of opposition to those threatening  unfettered markets including increasing the staff of organizations like the Chamber of Commerce to engage in this work.
  • Much more aggressively defend the free enterprise system by among other tactics linking personal freedom to free enterprise.

Shortly after the Powell memo was sent to the Chamber of Commerce in 1971, much more aggressive tactics in defending the free enterprise system by the business community became evident including the following:

  • The organizational counterattack of business in the 1970s was swift and sweeping — a domestic version of Shock and Awe. The number of corporations with public affairs offices in Washington grew from 100 in 1968 to over 500 in 1978. In 1971, only 175 firms had registered lobbyists in Washington, but by 1982, nearly 2,500 did. The number of corporate PACs increased from under 300 in 1976 to over 1,200 by the middle of 1980.(Bill Moyers, The Powell Memo: A Call-to-Arms for Corporations, September 14, 2012)
  • In 1972, three business organizations merged to form the Business Roundtable, the first business association whose membership was restricted to top corporate CEOs.The Business Roundtable quickly developed into a formidable group, designed to mobilize high-level CEOs as a collective force to lobby for the advancement of shared interests. Within five years the new mega-organization had enlisted 113 of the top Fortune 200 companies, accounting for nearly half of the economy. (Bill Moyers, The Powell Memo: A Call-to-Arms for Corporations, September 14, 2012) .
  • Business also massively increased its political giving — at precisely the time when the cost of campaigns began to skyrocket (in part because of the ascendance of television). The insatiable need for cash gave politicians good reason to be attentive to those with deep pockets. Business had by far the deepest pockets, and was happy to make contributions to members of both parties.(Bill Moyers, The Powell Memo: A Call-to-Arms for Corporations, September 14, 2012)
  • From the late 1970s to the late 1980s, corporate PACs increased their expenditures in congressional races nearly fivefold. (Bill Moyers The Powell Memo: A Call-to-Arms for Corporations, September 14, 2012)
  • Powell’s legal recommendations inspired “a multi-faceted, comprehensive, and integrated campaign” coordinated and funded by large corporations and rightwing foundations “to create taxpayer subsidized law firms… to rewrite American jurisprudence… advanc[e] their agenda before judges, lawyers, legal scholars, and government policy makers… [and] sought to assure control over the future direction of the law” by installing ideologically friendly faculty in law schools, as well as organizing and rewarding students with scholarships and clerkships under conservative judges, and placing those judges on the bench. (Jerry M. Landay, The Attack Memo that Changed the World)
  • The California Chamber of Commerce picked up on the Powell Memo and proposed what became in 1973 the Pacific Legal Foundation, the first of eight regional litigation centers. The Olin, Scaife, Bradley, Smith Richardson, and Coors’ Castle Rock foundations, and others, continue to underwrite these operations. , (Jerry M. Landay, The Attack Memo that Changed the World)
  • Huge corporations, including Powell’s Philip Morris, invested millions of dollars in the Chamber of Commerce’s National Chamber Litigation Center and other legal foundations to bring litigation demanding new corporate rights. In rapid succession, corporations and supporters funded the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Mid-Atlantic Legal Foundation, the Mid-America Legal Foundation, the Great Plains Legal Foundation (Landmark Legal Foundation), the Washington Legal Foundation, the Northeastern Legal Foundation, the New England Legal Foundation, the Southeastern Legal Foundation, the Capital Legal Center, the National Legal Center for the Public Interest, and many others.(Clements)
  • The number of companies with Washington lobbying offices grew from 175 in 1971 to 2,445 a decade later. Along with 2,000 different trade associations, businesses have a combined Washington staff of 50,000, plus 9,000 lobbyists and 8,000 public relations specialists.  (Smith. Who Stole the American Dream)
  • Since 1972 and continuing to the present, conservative foundations also heavily underwrite scores of institutes and policy centers that operate along the general lines proposed in the Powell memo. These agitprop operations are modeled on the Heritage Foundation, and include the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, and Citizens for a Sound Economy, the National Association of Scholars and Accuracy in Academe, Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center, and Reed Irvine’s Accuracy in Media. (Jerry M. Landay, The Attack Memo that Changed the World)
  • Business expanded its acquisition of media to help it control the message and viewpoint. Today six corporations control 97% of all media in the US. By insisting on the mandate of “balance” any unwanted fact or statement can be countered and diminished by claiming a need for equal time. These will generally be provided by the dozens of conservative think tanks and speakers. Television, radio and magazines are closely scrutinized for where and when to counter or insert business friendly news, information or preference. Most media today expends vast amounts of coverage on business and financial news. (Ron Sandahl)
  • Powell’s court opinion in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti shifted the direction of First Amendment law by declaring that corporate financial influence of elections should be protected as individual political speech. This directly set up Citizens United to become law. (Ron Sandahl).
  •  Huge corporations, including Powell’s Philip Morris, invested millions of dollars in the Chamber of Commerce’s National Chamber Litigation Center and other legal foundations to bring litigation demanding new corporate rights. By 1978, the millions of dollars invested in the radical corporate rights campaign began to pay off. The first major victory for the corporate rights advocates came in 1978, with a corporate attack on a Massachusetts law in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti. Several international corporations — including Gillette, the Bank of Boston, and Digital Equipment Corporation — filed a lawsuit after the people of Massachusetts banned corporate political spending intended to influence a citizen referendum. Justice Lewis Powell cast the deciding vote and wrote the 5–4 decision wiping off the books the people’s law intended to keep corporate money out of citizen ballot questions. For the first time in American history, corporations had successfully claimed “speech” rights to attack laws regulating corporate money in our elections. (Clements)
  • With that success, an emboldened corporate rights campaign next attacked energy and environmental laws. In the 1982 case of Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corporation v.Public Service Corporation of New York, utility corporations and the array of corporate legal foundations all argued that a New York law prohibiting utility corporations from promoting energy consumption violated the corporations’ rights of free speech. The corporations won again, and again Justice Powell wrote the decision for the activist Supreme Court that he had imagined in his 1971 Chamber of Commerce memo. Over a period of six years, Justice Powell wrote four key corporate rights( decisions for the Supreme Court. (Clements)
  • Although many new voices have emerged in the 40 years since it circulated Powell’s memo, the U.S. Chamber has expanded its leadership position within the corporate power movement, leading dozens of judicial, legislative and regulatory fights each year. Measured in terms of money spent, the Chamber is by far the most powerful lobby in Washington, DC, spending $770.6 million since 1998, over three times the amount spent by General Electric, the second-largest spender. At the same time, the Chamber has reinforced its lobbying power by becoming one of the largest conduits of election-related “independent expenditures,” spending over $32.8 million on Federal elections in 2010. The Chamber sponsors the Institute for Legal Reform, which has spearheaded the campaign for tort “reform,” making it more difficult for average people who have been injured, assaulted, or harmed to sue the responsible corporations. Along with well over a dozen legal foundations, the Chamber has also helped shape the powerful “business civil liberties” movement that has been a driving force behind the Citizens United decision and other judicial actions that have handcuffed regulators and prevented Congress from putting common-sense checks on corporate power. (Cray)

It is clear from the above that the climate change disinformation campaign is only one element in an organized effort of corporations and free market fundamentalists foundations to limit the power of citizen movements to protect human health and the environment when these movements threaten corporate profits or unregulated markets.

References:

Brulle, R., 2000, Agency, Democracy, and Nature, MIT Press, p. 619

By;

Donald A. Brown

Scholar in Residence and Professor

Sustainability Ethics and Law

dabrown57@gmail,com