In June 1992, 154 nations agreed to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Like all international treaty agreements, before an international treaty is finalized, nations must grapple with numerous treaty principles that are developed through negotiation to deal with issues that will likely arise in a treaty’s application to policy. Since the 1992 climate treaty was enacted, opponents of government action on climate change have largely framed their opposition to government climate policies on the basis of scientific uncertainty about GHG caused warming and excessive cost of implementing the treaty. Key ethical principles that were enacted in the 1992 UNFCCC relevant to the uncertainty and excessive cost arguments included the “precautionary principle,” the “no harm” principle, and under the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement nations base their GHG emissions reduction targets on “equity.” Another rule which has been agreed to by most governments which undermines the excessive cost arguments are government duties to protect human rights.
At the recently concluded Egyptian COP27, UNESCO invited speakers including myself to reflect on ethical issues that will arise in any government’s consideration of geoengineering as a solution to climate change. This program also considered why ethical principles that have been agreed to under international law have not gotten traction in national implementation of the climate treaty.
This entry is a summary of my explanation of why ethical principles which have been agreed upon to guide national responses to climate action have not gotten traction in national responses to climate charge including the United States.
Because entities whose economic interests are threatened by implementation of a treaty created to protect civil society from threats that cant be adequately dealt with at the local level often resist compliance with ethical/l principles adopted by the international community, UNESCO has expressed interest in getting traction for ethics in international efforts to create and implement treaties to protect civil society from threats that cant be solved at the national level. My conclusions about why ethics did not get traction are largely based upon my experience inside the US federal and Pennsylvania state governments as these governments struggled to adopt policies to reduce GHG emissions.
The consensus scientific view of climate change is usually understood to be that initially articulated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (About IPCC 2021). IPCC was established in 1988 by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Environment Program to enable governments to assess the scientific, technical, and socio-economic information relevant to climate change, its potential impacts, and options for adaptation and mitigation (IPCC 2010). The IPCC does not do original research but synthesizes and summarizes the extant peer-reviewed climate science to make recommendations to governments and policymakers about needed climate policies, (IPCC 2010a).
Any government who is a member of WHO or UNEP may be a member of the IPCC with current membership at hundred 195 countries. (About IPCC 2021) Therefore countries who have sometimes opposed international action on climate change on scientific grounds, including the United States and Saudi Arabia, for instance , have the same power as governments that have traditionally strongly supported national action on climate change such as most of the governments in the European Union and many of the nations most vulnerable to climate impacts such as sea lea level rise or flooding such as small island developing states already being threatened by sea level rise.
This entry explains why ethical principles that all nations who are signatories to the 1992 Climate treaty agreed would guide their response to national climate policies have not gotten traction in national responses to climate change. I have encouraged UNESCO to continue to consult with others on this important question.
In addition to the ethical issues discussed in this paper, a new Routledge Handbook on Applied Climate Ethics which is being edited by myself and Katherine Kintzel Gwiazdon, Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Law, has identified 40 ethical issues that arise in climate change policy formation. We believe it is important to help citizens understand that these issues raise ethical questions and therefore can’t be effectively dealt with by only debating about facts. This is so because if nations take positions on these issues based only on their self-interest they will likely harm others.
Anyone interested in getting a copy of the Handbook, please so indicate in your response to this article.
Adam Smith who convinced civil society of the value of free markets also warned civil society that merchants would sometimes ruthlessly scheme against the public interest. The central purpose of the fossil fuel funded disinformation campaign was to undermine civil society’s faith in mainstream climate science.
Most Americans including myself until recently did not know that Adam Smith who has been widely celebrated for convincing civil society of the benefits from the invisible hand of free markets also warned that merchants would sometimes ruthlessly scheme against the public interest. See, Adam Smith and the Conspiracy of the Merchants – Research Portal, King’s College, London (kcl.ac.uk)
Given that the IPCC’s assessment reports must be unanimously approved by the member countries including countries who have for most of the history of international climate change negotiations have opposed strong international responses to climate change, one can conclude that there has been a broad consensus about the IPCC’s scientific conclusions among nations of the world.
When the founding nations of 1992 climate treaty agreed to the climate treaty, anticipating some climate science issues would remain somewhat uncertain at least initially, all nations unanimously agreed to the inclusion of the “precautionary principle.” This principle not only prohibits nations from using scientific uncertainty as an excuse for failing to comply with their obligations under the climate treaty, it requires governments to use precautionary science to describe dangerous risks that cant be described quantitatively for practical reasons.
While serving as Program Manager for United Nations organizations in the EPA in 1997 under the Clinton administration, I was asked by the US State Department to co-chair with a colleague from the energy department a negotiation taking place in the UN Commission on Sustainable Development which was considering whether nations would agree that the “balance of the evidence suggests a discernible human cause of climate change.” At the conclusion of these negotiations in 1997 every country in the world that was seated in the UN CSD at that time which was approximately 160 countries, agreed with this statement including Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries. This statement had already been agreed to by all nation’s IPCC scientists in 1995. These countries included nations that had historically sometimes opposed international action on climate change including United States and OPEC countries such as Saudi Arabia. This statement was consistently strengthened over the next 15 years in IPCC meetings so that in 2013 all nations who were members of IPCC agreed with the conclusion that: “Human emitted GHG are extremely-likely, at least a 95% chance, responsible for than half of the Earth’s temperature increase since 1953. Yet many US politicians at the federal and state level continued to claim that human induced climate change was a hoax.
Counterpoints, 2020
This chart depicts that IPCC’s conclusions about human causation of climate change increased in confidence in every report over the 25 years with the last report claiming that human cause of climate change was virtually certain, meaning at least a 95% probability.
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 the planet warms if the natural forces that have caused warming in the Earth’s historical heating and cooling cycles, these differences are referred to as “human fingerprints;”
(2) have compared the temperature forcing of human GHGs to forcing of the natural causes of climate variations in “attribution studies,” and have concluded that only the forcing from human sources can explain the recent rise in global temperatures;
(3) have known precisely since the mid-1880s the amount of forcing a molecule of CO2 generates in watts per square meter;
(4) have known that the CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere is from fossil fuel combustion because of its chemical isotope.
(5} determined that the CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere is directly proportional to the timing and amount of fossil fuel combustion around the world;
(6) tested these lines of evidence rigorously in computer model experiments since the 1960s,
(7) these models have not only accurately predicted future warming, they have been run backward and accurately described past temperature regimes .
The way the upper and lower atmosphere heats up is one of ten lines of evidence referred to as a “ fingerprint” that support human causation of experienced warming. For instance, if a layer of GHGs is causing the observed warming, the lower atmosphere warms as the upper atmosphere cools. If variations in the sun’s energy reaching Earth are causing the warming, the upper and lower atmosphere warm at a similar rate. These and other human fingerprints have been tested and these tests have concluded that atmospheric GHG from human activities are causing the warming.
{Simple Climate 2011)
The global confidence in human causation of warming is derived not only from the fingerprint evidence but also scientific tests designed to compare whether the warming being experienced on Earth can be attributed to those natural forces which are known to have driven historical changes in climate such as regular changes in the sun’s energy reaching the Earth. This kind of study is called an “attribution” study. The above chart compares the warming expected from human activities in red, to the warming expected by natural forcing in blue, to the actual observed warming in black. Thus, this comparison is very strong evidence for attributing recent warming to human caused forcing.
The scientific confidence in the consensus view of climate change is also extraordinary strong because, in 1988, the World Health Organization and the UN Environment Program created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) whose mission is to synthesize the peer-reviewed climate science and socio-economic literature on climate change and make recommendations to the international community. Approximately every five years, starting in 1990, thousands of scientists, most of whom have been recommended by member governments for their scientific expertise, produce comprehensive three volume IPCC reports. The IPCC does not do research, it synthesizes the peer-reviewed scientific literature.
IPCC has issued Reports every year since 1990. The reports are produced in three different working groups. WGI synthesizes the physical climate science literature. WGII synthesizes the science on climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability, and WGIII focuses on mitigation. This writer was a contributing author to a new IPCC Chapter in Working Group III in the IPCC 5th assessment on ethics and sustainability and for the 6th Assessment Report Working Group II.
In “The Denial Countermovement” sociologists Riley Dunlap and Araon McCright describe how some fossil fuel companies, corporations that depend on fossil fuel, business organizations, and free-market fundamentalist foundations have successfully prevented government action on climate change by funding the climate change disinformation campaign which they explain sought to undermine the public’s confidence in mainstream climate science (Dunlap, R., & McCright, A., 2015. p. 300).
This website has described the morally reprehensible nature of the climate change disinformation campaign originally documented by sociologists. See, D. Brown, Is climate science disinformation a crime against humanity? | Donald Brown | The Guardian.
Despite the current almost universal agreement among nations that climate change is human-caused and very dangerous, many US politicians frequently have and continue to argue that human-induced climate change is a hoax. As of March of 2021, there were 139 elected officials in the United States Congress who deny the scientific consensus on human caused climate change. (CAP, 2021). These members received more than $61 million in lifetime contributions from the coil,, oil, and gas industries. (CAP, 2021) And so many US federal legislators who have taken a skeptical position on climate change have received money from fossil fuel interests.
While working for the Clinton administration, i had an opportunity to witness how the fossil fuel industry frustrated the efforts of a US administration that sought to reduce US ghg emissions. An example, while I was working as the US Program Manager to UN Organizations during the Clinton administration while the US was considering ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, during this time, the Global Climate Coalition, an international lobbying group of businesses who opposed action to reduce GHG emissions was waging an intense national campaign in opposition to the US ratification of the Kyoto Deal.
Also while Kyoto deal was in its final stages Senators Robert Byrd and Chuck Hagel were moving a petition through the US Senate which stated that the US should not sign an agreement that included new US commitments that mandated new US commitments unless developing country parties agreed to new commitments within the same time frame. The Byrd-Hegel passed the US Senate unanimously on in July 1997, 95 to nothing. Although the Clinton administration signed the Kyoto Deal in November 1998, the success of the Byrd-Hegel petition made it obvious that any attempt to ratify it would be futile.
The perceived alleged unfairness of the Kyoto Protocol is one of many examples of the need to get traction for the accepted definition of “equity,” a term which nations agreed would guide a nation’s determination of its fair share of global emissions reductions needed to achieve global reduction needed to achieve legally required reductions. On the meaning of “equity” IPCC said;
There is a basic set of shared ethical premises and precedents that apply to the climate problem that can help put bounds on plausible interpretations of “equity” In the burden sharing context. Even in the absence of a formal globally agreed burden sharing such are important in expectations of what may be reasonably required of different actors. (IPCC, 2014, ARR5, pg 317)
IPCC went on to say that:
In these equity principles can be understood to comprise four key dimensions: responsibility, capacity, equality and the right to sustainable development (IPCC, 2014, AR5, WG3, CH 4, pg 317)
Notice total emissions in tons alone is not an acceptable criteria for determining equity. The failure to get some traction for the IPCC definition of “equity” has predictably been an invitation to opponents of climate change policies to scheme against the public interest. For interest, President Trump justified his US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on the basis it was unfair to the US. Yet the Paris Agreement allowed nations to determine what equity required of them. Also predictably those opposed to climate change policies frequently opposed proposed US targets on the basis that China had not adopted a target of the same or greater magnitude claiming that China is a larger in terms of tons. These opponents of US emissions targets appeared to be unaware that the US historical emissions and per capita emissions are greater than China’s and per capita and historical emissions are recognized under the IPCC as valid considerations for determining equity making the US under the concept of equity more responsible for percentage reductions than China,
State and subnational governments
In the United States, state governments control a significant amount of the nation’s GHG emissions. The following chart depicts that 10 US States are responsible for half US ghg emissions.
Ecosystem Marketplace
Each level of government controls some activities that produce ghg emissions that other levels don’t control. For instance, US states exercise control over some aspects of land use, some forms of public transportation, building codes, and electric power generation that the federal government doesn’t control. Thus, there is a need for all levels of government to adopt climate policies if a national government is going to achieve its ghg reduction obligations.
In this author’s experience most US residents of subnational governments are rarely aware that emissions from the subnational government are contributing to raising atmospheric GHG concentrations globally and therefore by their failure to reduce the GHG emissions from the subnational government to zero, they are contributing to harms around the world such as those that are causing refugees.
This author served for a few years as lead staff responsibility on climate issues in the Office of Chief Council for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources Pa DER after he returned to PA DER from EPA in June of 1998.
Shortly after I returned the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection I briefed the DEP Secretary that the science of climate change was very strong and the world needed all levels of governments including states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The secretary, authorized me and a deputy secretary to begin a conversation with fossil fuel interests to get their ideas about how we might proceed. Several weeks later we met with a representative of the coal industry who brought a representative of the coal miners union. As we explained that we would like to begin a conversation with fossil fuel interests on what the state could productively do to reduce PA GHG emissions, we didnt get far into the conversation when the representative of the coal industry said don’t you dare begin this. This is none of your business. This meeting took place on a Thursday and when I returned to the office on Monday I was informed by Deputy Sec. that the state had been notified that the coal industry had activated members of the Pennsylvania Senate Coal Caucus who promised that if DER even began the a process to lower Pa GHG emissions, the PA senators would seek to cut the DEP budget. And so I was told the plan to organize a conference had been postponed indefinitely.
One of my initial assignments for Pa DER on climate change was to monitor a cap and trade program that was under development among ten northeastern states. This state regional climate change program was referred to as the regional greenhouse gas inventory or RGGI. The states began RGGI negotiations in 2003 at the prompting of the New York governor George Pataki. After attending several RGGI negotiations and reporting back to PA DER management, it became clear that there was no appetite at that time in Pennsylvania for a greenhouse gas cap and trade program because it was explained to me by state officials that “Pennsylvania was a coal state.” Although Pennsylvania finally joined RGGI in April of 2022, it is still an open question whether regulations that Pennsylvania will need to implement RGGI and achieve GHG emissions reduction goals recently announced by Governor Wolf will survive the regulatory process which provides numerous opportunities for the fossil fuel industry to block regulations. In addition, the almost 20 year delay in reducing Pa GHG emissions has made the problem worse for reasons that those who don’t understand certain features of climate change that make it different than other domestic environmental problems wont initially understand. 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.
During hearings in the Pennsylvania legislature over the next decade on potential state legislation that would reduce Pa GHG emissions, hearings were increasingly dominated by testimony of climate skeptics who sometimes spread odious disinformation. See D. Brown 2019, Climate Change Disinformation Comes to Pennsylvania.
Making matters worse because most of hearings were in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives run by a legislator who was a very vocal climate change skeptic the hearings were not a forum for serious considerations of the merits of both sides of the issues in contention. And the legislative hearings that I attended there was no considerations of the immense harms from Pennsylvania GHG emissions to the rest of the world nor serious counter arguments to the skeptics claims challenging the scientific consensus position articulated by IPCC. This phenomenon is evidence that the climate change disinformation campaign has worked among a large percentage of US citizens and legislators. One extraordinary example of this is the failure to consider why the consensus view that has been adopted by all IPCC nations in regard to warming caused by human activities has failed to take hold. This is evidence that the odious climate change disinformation campaign achieved some of its goals.
I ended my presentation to the UNESCO Egyptian event, with the claim that the failure to get traction for the ethical rules that nations agreed would guide the government’s response to climate change was because the fossil fuel disinformation campaign has largely worked. The ruthless scheming of the fossil fuel funded disinformation campaign was the major reason why some governments have been failing to reduce GHG emissions as required by law and ethical principles.
Although this is particularly a problem in the US, research that I and several colleagues from Australia an New Zealand working with colleagues from around the world examined policies in 14 countries concluded that this is a problem in some other countries and in some of these countries the disinformation campaign tactics originally developed in the US were used to weaken the nation’s responses to climate change. (Brown, Taylor, eds, 2015, Ethics and Climate Change, A Study of National Commitments, IUCN))
Because I was on record for strongly critically examining US climate policy through an ethical lens, I was surprised when the G. W. Bush State Department in 2009 invited me to make a presentation on climate ethics to the Scottish legislature as they were debating a national GHG emissions target.
When I arrived at the Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh, the debate was already underway with one parliamentarian arguing that Scotland should set a tough target because Scotland owed it to the rest of the world. This was an argument I never heard in the US but an argument which I believed was ethically required and practically needed. It is also required by the “no harm” principle which all countries agreed to in the Preamble of the 1992 Climate Convention. (UNFCCC, 1992, Preamble)
Shortly thereafter Scotland set a target of net zero GHG emissions by 2045.
Donald A. Brown
References,
Brown. D., Taylor P. eds. 2015, ,Ethics and Climate Change, A Study of National Commitments, IUCN
(COP 2021 ) Center for American Progress, Climate Deniers in Congress.center for 117
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