I.Introduction

Are commercials currently being run in the United States paid for by the fossil fuel industry encouraging Americans to continue unjust and unethical behavior in regard to climate change? These commercials encourage Americans to organize politically against any legislation that would increase the cost of fossil fuel even though the US use of fossil fuel beyond its fair share of safe global emissions is already contributing to misery around the world and threatens many of the world's poorest people in the years ahead with catastrophic threats to human life and the resources on which life depends.

ClimateEthics has written frequently about some obvious ethical problems with cost arguments often made by opponents of climate change policies. Among other problems with cost arguments are that they (a) don't acknowledge duties, obligations, and responsibilities to those most vulnerable to climate change impacts, (b) ignore obligations to prevent human rights violations, (c) wind up being used to give polluters permission to cause great harm to human health and the environment around the world, and, (d) often ignore the costs of doing nothing to reduce the threat of climate change. For instance, see: Ethical Problems With Cost Arguments Against Climate Change Policies: The Failure To Recognize Duties To Non-citizens.
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Despite the obvious ethical problems with these arguments that oppose climate change policies on the basis of increased cost to the United States alone, there is virtually no recognition of the ethical problems with these arguments by US politicians, the media, nor often even by environmental groups. This post explores this reality in regard to commercials currently being aired that have been paid for by the American Petroleum Institute (API).

To examine the strange anomaly of the failure to spot the obvious ethical problems raised by the type of cost arguments embedded in the API commercials, it is helpful to consider the following hypothetical:

If a Canadian manufacturer of garbage cans emitted toxic chemicals that migrated across the US border and killed Americans and harmed the environment and this company at the same time tried to convince Canadians that: (a) the chemicals were not toxic when there was strong scientific evidence that the chemicals would kill humans and harm the environment, and, (b) tried to convince Canadian citizens to oppose proposed Canadian government actions to prevent emissions of the toxics only because of adverse impacts on the Canadian economy, Americans would likely easily see the Canadian company as unethical if not criminal.

Yet there is no evidence that Americans see the obvious ethical problems with very similar behavior of some fossil fuel companies in regard to climate change. That is some American fossil fuel companies have been supporting the dissemination of misleading information about whether climate change is a huge threat particularly to poor people around the world and we now know that climate change is already harshly affecting some of the worlds poorest people. Some of these companies are also fighting any US government policies that would lead to reduction in use of fossil fuels on the basis of increased costs to the United States alone without acknowledging that the United States has duties, responsibilities, and obligations to people who are at great risk from human-induced global warming. Yet there is virtually no discussion of the ethical problems with this behavior in the US press, among US politicians, or in any civil society debate about climate change.

A current example of a fossil fuel industry attempt to generate public opposition to climate change policies on the basis of cost to Americans alone is a commercial frequently currently being run by API in many US states. This commercial's goal is to defeat legislative proposals that would eliminate tax write-offs for the petroleum industry or impose new taxes on fossil fuel companies through a variety of mechanisms including cap and trade legislation.. The API commercial pictures ordinary working class people claiming that taxes on the petroleum industry will destroy jobs and ruin the economy. The commercial urges Americans to organize to defeat any legislation that would increase fossil fuel costs. Since most solutions to climate being seriously considered in the United States work by putting a cost on carbon, these commercials appear to be designed, at least in part, to generate political opposition to any climate change legislation. (Although the fossil fuel industry is also opposed to the reduction of subsidies that will reduce oil company profits profits)

API is the key oil industry lobby organization in the United States, representing some 400 companies that cover the spectrum of the oil and gas industry, from the largest major to the smallest independent corporations. .

API has a long history of lobbying against climate change legislation For instance API was one of the major funding sources of the Global Climate Coalition along with ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum (now BP), Texaco, General Motors, Ford, DaimlerChrysler, the Aluminum Association, the National Association of Manufactures, and others (Hoggan and Littlemore, 2010:13). The Global Climate Coalition was the major US industry group fighting against a global climate regime from the late 1980s to 2002. The Global Climate Coalition frequently opposed climate change policies on the basis of scientific uncertainty that human releases of greenhouse gases were threatening human flourishing and the environment and cost to the United States economy.

Last year, Green Peace asserted that they discovered a memo leaked from API that urged oil companies to encourage their employees to act in such a way that would give the impression that there was a spontaneous bottom-up citizen rebellion against climate change cap and trade legislation. (Green Peace, 2009) If the Green Peace claim is true, API engaged in activities designed to fool the media and US citizens that opposition to climate change legislation was being mounted by regular citizens voicing their spontaneous concerns rather than employees of petroleum companies that had been encouraged by their employers to make a ruckus at public meetings.

The API ads currently playing in many parts of the United States also attempt to make the case against taxes on the petroleum by showing opposition from what appear to be ordinary working Americans. The logic of the advertisement is it is not in the US interest to increase fossil fuel costs, and therefore Americans should act only in their self-interest and oppose any legislation that would increase fossil fuel costs, which means any solution to climate change under serious consideration.

I. Introduction

With the possible exception of arguments that claim the science of climate change does not support action on climate change, by far the most common arguments against action on climate change are claims that proposed climate change policies should be opposed on grounds that they cost too much. These arguments are of various types such as claims that climate change legislation will destroy jobs, reduce GDP, damage specific businesses such as the coal and petroleum industries, increase the cost of fuel, or simply that the proposed legislation can't be afforded by the public.

Of course, not all cost arguments about climate change policies are irrelevant to enlightened climate change public policy. For instance, economists can often help decision-makers reduce greenhouse gas emissions to target levels at the lowest cost, create economic incentives that will most effectively achieve climate change protection goals, and help with questions about how to distribute climate change reduction burdens in society with the least disruption to human flourishing. Without a doubt, economic analyses of climate change reduction strategies are vital to finding the most efficient solutions to human-induced climate change's immense threat. The more low-cost solutions to climate change that are found, the more hope there is to reduce climate change's immense menace.

Yet many cost arguments in opposition to climate change policies are both ethically and factually flawed. This is not surprising as many of the arguments against climate change policies are often defensive moves by parties who are trying to protect themselves against a perceived reduction in their profits if climate change policies are enacted.(Oreskes and Conway. 2010) Climate change policies will clearly create economic winners and losers and those who perceive that their economic interests will be adversely affected have organized to attack climate change policies as being too costly. This is not to claim that all costs concerns about climate change policies are illegitimate but to suggest why so many cost arguments about climate change policies contain deeply problematic ethical assumptions.

As we shall see, cost arguments also sometimes raise ethical questions about which different ethical theories may reach different ethical conclusions. In these cases, spotting ethical issues can lead to disagreement about what ethics requires. Yet, the paper will identify ethical conclusions that can be made about some cost arguments that have a strong overlapping consensus among diverse ethical theories. Philosopher John Rawls defined an overlapping consensus as a matter about which citizens support the same basic laws or justice outcomes for different reasons. (Rawls, 1987) For instance, both utilitarians and Kantians require the interests of people be considered regardless of where they live in the world, but reach these conclusions based upon different ethical theories. In cases where there is an overlapping consensus on ethical principles, different ethical theories support the same prescriptive guidance but for different reasons. This paper will identify some ethical conclusions that can be used to criticize some cost arguments about climate change that are supported by different ethical theories.

A third outcome of ethical issue spotting are matters about which there is disagreement on what ethics requires when different ethical theories are applied to the issues under consideration yet most ethical theories would condemn positions taken on these issues by some parties despite this disagreement about what ethics requires. In other words, some responses to climate change justified on the basis of cost are universally rejected by ethical theories despite disagreement on what perfect justice would require. In these cases, spotting ethical problems raised by these cost arguments can restrict alternatives about appropriate climate change policies to ethically acceptable options about the use of cost considerations in climate change policy.

Recent arguments made against US climate change legislation are typical of cost arguments that have been made in opposition to climate change policies in the United States for over 30 years.

For example, a comment made by US Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in reaction to US House climate change legislation:

"The last thing American families need right now is to be hit with a new energy tax every time they flip on a light switch, or fill up their car--but that's exactly what this bill would do." (Trygstad, 2009).

Another typical example of common cost arguments made against climate change is the following statement about the US Environmental Protection Agency's Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) on climate change, a proposal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under existing US air pollution law.

Virtually every concern heightened by the eco¬nomic downturn, especially job losses, would be exacerbated under the ANPR. As with cap-and-trade legislation, the EPA's suggested rulemaking would be poison to an already sick economy. But even in the best of economic times, this policy would likely end them. The estimated costs--close to $7 trillion dollars and 3 million manufacturing jobs lost--are staggering. So is the sweep of regulations that could severely affect nearly every major energy-using product from cars to lawnmowers, and a million or more businesses and buildings of all types. And all of this sacrifice is in order to make, at best, a minuscule contribution to an overstated environmental threat. (Lieberman, 2010)

There are often problems with these cost arguments that go beyond the ethical concerns discussed in this post. For instance, cost claims often: (a) include factual errors in calculating the costs and benefits of proposed climate change policies, (b) are based upon assumptions in the economic models on which the cost claims are based that ignore other potentially valid assumptions, (c) fail to consider costs that society would bear from inaction on climate change, and (d) include outright falsehoods.

An example of an outright falsehood is a claim recently made by Glen Beck, a US television personality, who informed his audience of a "buried" Obama administration study showing that the Waxman-Markey US House of Representatives bill would actually cost the average family $1,787 per year. There was no such study. (Krugman, 2009)

Despite these and other problems with cost arguments that need to be seriously considered to critically evaluate them, this paper focuses exclusively on ethical issues that often arise when cost arguments are made against climate change policies.

This is the second in a series of posts that have looked at the ethical limitations of cost arguments that are very frequently made in opposition to climate change policies. In a prior post, Ethical Issues in the Use of Cost-Benefit Analysis of Climate Change Programs, http://rockblogs.psu.edu/climate/2008/06/ethical-issues-in-the-use-of-cost-benefit-analysis-of-climate-change-programs.html, ClimateEthics examined why cost-benefit analysis in which "cost" arguments did not consider how the "costs" of action were disaggregated from the "benefits" of taking action or which exclusively relied upon "preference utilitarianism" as the ethical justification for non-action are deeply ethically problematic.

This post looks at arguments that attempt to justify non-action based upon claims of excessive costs to one country alone. Future posts will examine other ethical problems with cost arguments such as; (a) The failure to see the ethical limiatations on cost arguments when climate change creates human rights violations, (b) ethical limitations of exclusive use of " willingness-to-pay." as justification for non-action, (c) procedural justice problems with cost arguments, (d) ethical problems when cost arguments try to calculate the dollar value of harms avoided by climate change, and (e) ethical problems with discounting future generations.

Many of the cost arguments made against climate change are simply assertions that climate change policies are too costly. They do not explicitly compare costs of taking action against the benefits of taking action, the form of arguments made in cost-benefit analysis (CBA). To the extent that these arguments are based upon additional costs alone, serious ethical objections can be raised because, as we shall see, one may not do harm to others on the basis that it will be less costly to the one proposing the harm. For instance, it would be ethically problematic for a husband who owed child support to his ex-wife to refuse to give the support on the basis that he would like to use the money for a trip to Bermuda (Garvey 2008:98)

Although many objections to climate change policies are based upon cost alone, this and other posts will focus on CBAs as they more explicitly compare costs of climate change reduction strategies against the benefits to society of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. One can usually understand other kinds of cost arguments against climate change policies as implicitly taking the form of CBAs because even though they don't explicitly compare the costs of climate change policies against the benefits of taking action, they usually can be understood to this implicitly do this.. That is, behind any objection against climate change policies that simply states that the policy costs too much is usually the unstated assumption that the benefits to society that would be obtained by the implementation of the policy are not worth it. Therefore, ethical analysis of CBA is also usually relevant to simple claims that the policy is too costly

CBA is a generic term for a variety of techniques designed to allow decision-makers to determine in a rigorous way whether the payback from a program will be greater than the costs of implementing it. If costs of an environmental program are greater than environmental benefits produced by a program, according to mainstream CBA theory, the program should be abandoned. The economic justification for this use of CBA is the notion that society must decide how to spend its scarce resources and it should spend its money in the most efficient way possible. If money is spent by society on environmental protection programs that don't produce an environmental payback that is greater in economic value than the cost of the program, it is a bad investment and should not be supported. (Shogren and Toman, 2000) This is so, according to CBA theory, because public money should be spent on programs that will produce the largest aggregate benefits. As we have seen in the prior post referenced above, the philosophical justification for this approach is often a form of utilitarianism sometimes referred to as "preference utilitarianism."

II. The Ethical Duty Of Nations to All People, Not Just Citizens.

Proponents of CBAs often argue that governments should not take action to reduce greenhouse emissions if the cost to reduce emissions is greater than the value of climate change caused harms avoided because of the government action. Although CBA may be a very valuable tool for decision-makers who are trying to decide whether investment in a particular project will provide an adequate payoff compared to other projects or investments, CBA's use for some environmental problems such as climate change can be ethically dubious, particularly when it is applied to environmental problems such as climate change where harms and benefits are significantly disaggregated. That is, climate change is a problem being caused by some people around the world who are often separated by significant time and space from those who are most vulnerable to a warming world. Therefore, the costs that CBAs seek to avoid often fall on different people than those who will benefit from climate change policies.

I-Introduction

One of the great privileges of writing ClimateEthics is that it exposes the writer to the good, bad, and ugly of climate change arguments being made around the world. Actually quite frequently we receive thoughtful comments that force us to go a little deeper and in some cases correct mistakes or correct reasonable misinterpretations. Often we get inspiring comments.

One such example of this was a comment received on another website, Climate Progress, to an article of ours that they had cross-posted from Jeff Huggens See, http://climateprogress.org/2010/08/17/are-ethical-arguments-for-climate-action-weaker-than-self-interest-based-arguments/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+climateprogress%2FlCrX+%28Climate+Progress%29

Mr Huggens said in part:

MANY MORE PEOPLE should be speaking out about these arguments. If only a dozen ethicists, moral philosophers, and others are conveying the strong argument in clear ethical/moral terms, the lack of others speaking out defeats the entire enterprise. People (the public, the media, and so forth) naturally wonder, if only 1 percent of all ethicists, spiritual leaders, moral philosophers, other philosophers, "wise women and men", and so forth are speaking out in ethical/moral terms, then those ethical/moral arguments must truly be "not all that important", or "highly controversial and not broadly accepted", or "only held by theoretical folks", or whatever. So, the efforts of the one percent or two percent of folks who DO speak out in those terms are somewhat nullified, in reality, if more and more people in the fields that are supposed to have views on such matters do not also join in to form a larger chorus of voices. In this sense, and for this reason, choosing to be silent, or indifferent, or "too busy" to take a stand on this IS making a choice -- that is, one of indifference.

We believe that those who understand the ethical dimensions of climate change have a duty to speak up strongly because with knowledge comes responsibility.

II. How this Must Be Done

Now, one important reservation needs to be made, however, at this point. We believe that identifying the ethical issues entailed by climate change arguments will lead to three possibilities and all need to acknowledge this:

One, on some issues there will be an overlapping consensus among diverse ethical theories about what should be done. For example, no nation or individual may deny, given what is now indisputable about the threat of climate change even if some uncertainties about actual impacts are acknowledged, that they have immediate obligations to others to reduce their emissions to their fair share of safe global emissions. We believe all ethical systems and views require this. Yet nations are frequently acting as if only their national self-interest counts. And fewer individuals have recognized their duties on this. (A matter that we expect to write a lot about in the near future.) Particularly in regard to the assertion that nations, sub-national governments, organizations, businesses and individuals have duties and responsibilities to others we need people of conscience to speak out.

I. Introduction

Many commentators to ClimateEthics argue that since people are self-interested beings, it is more important to make arguments in support of climate change based upon self-interest rather than ethical arguments. Some go so far to assert that people don't care about ethics and therefore only self-interest-based arguments should be used to convince people to enact domestic climate change legislation. In other words, they argue:"get real" only self-interest arguments matter.

This view has dominated much discussion of climate change policy in the United States. No U.S. politician known to ClimateEthics has been expressly making the ethical arguments that need to be made in response to objections to proposed climate change policies. As ClimateEthics has previously reported, this is not the case in at least a few other parts of the world. See, The Strong Scottish Moral Leadership On Climate Change Compared To The Absence Of Any Acknowledged Ethical Duty In The US Debate.

Almost all arguments in the United States in support of climate change policies have been different self-interest based arguments such as climate change policies will protect the United States against adverse climate caused damages in the United States, create good green jobs, or are necessary to prevent national security risks to the United States that might be created if millions of people become refugees fleeing diminished water supplies or droughts that are adversely affecting food supplies. There are no known politically visible arguments being made in the United States that argue that the United States should reduce its greenhouse gas emissions because it has duties, obligations, and responsibilities to others. In particular, there has been no coverage of the specific ethical arguments for climate change legislation in the mainstream media except with a very few infrequent exceptions.

More specifically, when opponents of climate change policies make self-interest based arguments against the adoption of policies such as cost to the United States, there are no follow-up questions asked by the press about whether those who argue against climate change policies on grounds of cost to the United States are denying that the United States has duties or responsibilities to those outside the United States to prevent harm to them
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Now ClimateEthics agrees, of course, that if the consensus view of climate change science is correct, enlightened self-interest would support strong climate change policies. As an example, most economists now support action on climate change because they believe the costs of doing nothing are greater than the costs of taking action. In fact, there are many reasons why enlightened self-interest would support action on climate change. Yet what we explore here is not whether enlightened-self interest supports climate change policies, of course it does, but whether self-interest arguments are actually stronger than ethical arguments. Although the conclusions reached in this post are initially counter-intuitive, we here explain why ethical arguments are in some ways much stronger arguments than self-interest based arguments and the failure to look at climate change policies through an ethical lens has practical consequences. This, as we shall see, is particularly true of arguments made against climate change policies. And so ethical arguments may be no stronger then self-interest based arguments for some things, but they are actually indispensable for understanding what is wrong with certain arguments made against adopting climate change policies.

In fact, ClimateEthics believes that an appeal to self-interest alone on climate change, a tactic followed both by the Clinton and Obama administrations for understandable reasons, has been at least partially responsible for the failure of the United States to take climate change seriously. We have written about this in some detail at Climate Ethics in and entry entitled "Having We Been Asking the Wrong Questions Scientists.?"

We would like now to explain in greater detail why taking the ethical reasons for support of climate change policies off the table in the debate about climate change is tantamount to a soccer team unilaterally taking the goalie out of the net. In other words, a case can be made that the ethical arguments are actually much stronger than self-interest based arguments at least in some very important ways. Therefore the failure to make the ethical arguments for climate change policies should be a concern because such failure has practical consequences.

What is the worst ethical scandal in the US Congress? Could it be climate change?

Although the US media has recently paid attention to the comparatively minor ethical stories unfolding in the US House of Representatives, there is not a peep in the US media about a much more momentous unfolding ethical failure in the US Senate. While many press stories have appeared in the past few week about potential ethical problems of Representatives Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters in the House, ethical lapses that harm society because public servants may have abused their power in ways that enrich themselves or their families, the US Senate ethical failure is more ethically reprehensible because it is depriving tens of millions of people around the world of life itself or the natural resources necessary to sustain life. The failure in the US Senate to enact legislation to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions is a moral lapse of epic proportions. Yet it is not discussed this way.

There are several distinct features of climate change that call for its recognition as creating civilization challenging ethical questions.

First, climate change creates ethical duties because those most responsible for causing this problem are the richer developed countries, yet those who are most vulnerable to the problem's harshest impacts are some of the world's poorest people in developing countries. That is, climate change is an ethical problem because its biggest victims are people who can do little to reduce its threat.

I. Introduction.

Every once in a while a book is published that goes to heart of issues examined in ClimateEthics This is a review of such a book. This post reviews The Bridge At The End Of The World, Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing From Crisis To Sustainability by James Gustave Speth. (Speth 2008)

Although this new book examines the causes of an unfolding failure to protect the environment on a matter of a number of global environmental issues, this book makes a major contribution to many issues that have been of interest to ClimateEthics. It is a provocative book, but in the best sense of the word. It is a compelling exhortation to look deeper and more critically at the institutions, dominant discourses, and reigning ideas structuring and defining global environmental controversies-matters that for the most part have gone unchallenged by civil society including environmental groups.

According to Speth, it is the current form of capitalism and its influence on governing institutions that it has that is most responsible for global environmental deterioration. If Speth is right, the dominant ideas shaping our environmental discourses must be confronted if there is any hope of moving away from the approaching environmental abyss.

Speth's new book is a clearly written, exhaustively researched, courageous, and compelling description of why the global environment has continued to deteriorate despite forty years during which the modern environmental movement has risen. Seeing a huge failure to make progress on protecting the global environment after almost four decades, Speth explains that in this book he is attempting to go deeper than he has before to examine the root causes of the growing global environmental crisis.

Speth's conclusions are remarkable coming from someone who has been called an "insider's insider." Speth was a co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, member and chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of the President during the Carter administration, Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, founder of the World Resources Institute, a senior adviser to President-elect Bill Clinton's transition team, administrator of the United Nations Development Programme; dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and now a professor at Vermont Law School. There are few people in the United States that have been in a better position to diagnose the worlds environmental problems and their causes.

Because Speth so forcibly attributes the causes of the daunting global environmental crises to an out-of-control global capitalism, given his background as a very well connected Washington insider, the books conclusions are an astonishing lightening bolt that illuminates both the nature and causes of the environmental abyss the world is facing. That this book has come from the dean of the prestigious Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies with high-level ties to some of the most respected environmental institutions is astonishing.

The main idea of this book is that there is no hope of solving the world's major growing environmental and social problems unless there is much more robust government intervention in global economic markets. Although Speth in the end is not completely anti-market-he is very strongly critical of market failures and the hegemony of market ideas. Speth wants to keep a place for markets, but believes governments must keep markets in their place.

I. Introduction.

Are we asking climate change science some of the wrong questions? If what we do about the threat of climate change is an ethical issue, how does this affect how we talk about: (a) climate change science, (b) climate change "alarmists,"(d) the appropriate role of climate change skeptics, (e) what we mean when we make claims that climate change science is "settled", (d) what should nations, sub-national governments. organizations, and individuals do to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in light of what science is saying about climate change impacts?

Despite the fact, as we shall see, many assertions about likely climate change impacts are based upon some unassailable scientific facts that have been known for well over thirty years and other claims about climate change impacts are based upon scientific evidence that is now entailed to high levels of scientific respect, a strong argument can be made that many proponents of climate change policies have been asking the wrong questions of climate change science, namely what do we know about climate change impacts. In this post we will examine: (a) whether we have we been mislead by some to ask what do we know for sure about climate change impacts rather than what are the scientifically plausible harms that could happen if we wait until remaining scientific uncertainties are resolved, and (b) because of these potential harms do ghg emitters have duties to climate change victims to take action even if we concede scientific uncertainty about timing and magnitude of climate change impacts?

This post obviously agrees with those who call for continuing support for science that minimizes remaining scientific uncertainties about climate change impacts, yet questions an underlying assumption of many in the thirty year climate change debate that we must look to science to tell us when we should act to reduce the threat of climate change. In other words, the argument we make here that what we should do in the face of uncertainty is an ethical issue not a "value-neutral' scientific matter, it is not a claim that we need less climate change science for we always need to know as a matter of ethics as much as we can about the consequences of our actions and some uncertainties remain particularly about the potential for rapid non-linear climate surprises that are very possible. In fact in his new book, James Hansen admits that there may be both positive and negative feedbacks in the climate system that we have yet to discover. (Hansen 2010: 44) However, we claim it is deeply ethically problematic to assume that we need to know more before acting in response to strong duties to others to prevent harm to them unless the victims of climate change consent to being harmed or put at risk.

This post will argue that climate change ethicists must pay attention to what climate change science is saying to get the ethics right, but scientists should also answer questions that ethicists would ask of science (which are different than the questions scientists ask themselves when pursuing knowledge alone). Finally we argue that high emitters have strong duties to take action to reduce the threat of climate change before all scientific uncertainties are resolved. Now although most people would agree with what we have said so far, we will argue that all of this has consequences for what climate scientists talk about, what we should expect of climate skeptics, and how we justify domestic climate change policy. Because the United States for many years, and many powerful actors in the current climate change debate in the United States and several other countries consistently take the position we need more science before committing to strong domestic action, the issues discussed here go to the heart of the public debate about climate change.

As we shall see, those opposing climate change policies have managed to make scientific uncertainty the major focus of climate change policy debates, a focus that is often irrelevant to ethical duties to act once science generates a respectable description of likely impacts that follow from non-action in cases where waiting may make it impossible to avoid the consequences. In other words, ethical conclusions about climate change must pay attention to what science is saying about likely climate change impacts, but duties to act do not depend upon scientific conclusions that have reached high levels of certainty.

ClimateEthics has frequently examined ethical questions that arise because policy-makers must make decisions in the face of scientific uncertainty about the timing and magnitude of climate change impacts. See, for example, The Ethical Duty to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the Face of Scientific Uncertainty,
http://rockblogs.psu.edu/climate/2008/05/the-ethical-duty-to-reduce-greenhouse-gas-emissions-in-the-face-of-scientific-uncertainty.html

This post argues that for over thirty years the public climate change debate has focused on the wrong scientific questions compared to those that ethics would ask of climate science. Since the mid-1960s opponents of climate change policies have demanded to know from science what are the known climate change impacts; yet ethics would ask: (a) What are the scientifically plausible climate change harms?, (b) Could these harms happen if we wait until all uncertainties are resolved and the consensus view turns out to be correct?, (c) Are the harms potentially catastrophic for some, and (d) Have the potential victims of climate change consented to be put at risk while uncertainties are resolved?

This post argues that what we should do about climate change is not a scientific-technical question but is essentially an ethical question and the failure to frame it as such has been responsible, at least in part, for a thirty-year delay in taking action.

This post argues the misplaced focus on the scientifically known, rather than scientifically plausible climate change impacts and subsequent ethical implications that come from scientific notice that humans are doing something dangerous, is partly responsible for over thirty years of delay in adopting climate change policies.

As we shall see, it has usually (although not always) been arguments of some economically interested parties that have been most responsible for this misplaced focus on what is known rather than what is plausible or dangerous. Yet, we will argue, it is also the failure of some climate change policy proponents to stress ethical duties to take action in the face of some remaining uncertainties about timing and magnitude of climate change impacts that is also partly responsible for this thirty-year delay.

Unfortunately this delay has now resulted in atmospheric concentrations of ghgs being allowed to rise to levels that make it increasingly difficult to stabilize atmospheric ghg concentrations at levels that will avoid great harm to millions of the poorest, most-vulnerable people around the world. Furthermore the longer we wait to take action, the increasingly unlikely that it will be that the world will be able to reduce actions to protect the most vulnerable from climate change. In fact, according to a growing consensus view, we are already close to being able to prevent ghg atmospheric concentrations from reaching dangerous levels

Although, as we shall see, much of the climate change science has never been in question and there is a strong scientific consensus view that is worthy of respect that predicts potentially catastrophic impacts from ghg releases at business-as-usual levels, given that there has been some uncertainty about the magnitude and timing of climate change impacts, proponents of climate change policies have sometimes implicitly bought into the assumptions of climate change policy opponents by how the climate policy proponents responded to uncertainty charges. That is they by responding to climate skeptical arguments with scientifically certain counter-arguments has been sometimes practically unhelpful while ignoring ethical arguments about the duty to act in the face of uncertainty in cases when delay in action can create harsh consequences for hundreds of millions of current and future generations that are most vulnerable to climate change impacts.This is so because truthfully scientists should admit that there has been some uncertainty not about whether human activities are creating a huge threat to human health, animals, and ecosystems around the world, this is a settled matter, but what quantitatively is the magnitude of climate change impacts. Yet not knowing precisely what harms will be caused by dangerous behavior is not an ethically acceptable defense to non-action to reduce the threat of a great harm to others. This is particularly true because although the IPCC predictions of what climate change impacts are likely to happen is truly catastrophic for some, there is actually reasonable scientific concern that climate change temperatures and impacts could be outside the upper bounds of IPCC temperature and impact predictions in this century.

The mainstream climate change scientific response to the skeptics has often to claim that the science is settled. There are without doubt, important elements if the scientific basis for human causation that are not only settled but have been settled for a long time. Included in this long list of scientific issues is that the warming we are seeing is highly unlikely to be the result of natural variability. There are numerous attribution and fingerprinting studies that make natural variability a very unlikely cause of the undeniable warming trends the Earth is experiencing.. In fact there is growing evidence that the IPCC upper bound projections of inputs are not "worse case". . In fact ClimateEthics has criticized IPCC as a matter of ethics for frequently cutting of the tales of climate sensitivity distribution predictions from their often quoted predictions. See, for example, Ethical Issues Raised by the Work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): Report On The Bali Workshop (COP-13)

In fact, proponents of climate change policies have let opponents confuse knowledge and prudence claims that at the same time Ignore obligation and duties to others. That is most of the proponents of climate change policies have implicitly argued that because of what science can tell you about climate change impacts and given that the harms from these impacts may be so devastating, it is prudent to your interests to act. A prudence argument is still an argument about self interest. But since many rich people that are high-emitters can protect themselves from the kind of impacts that are being predicted for them, an argument that implicitly encourages people to act in their self interest ( another words an argument from prudence) is much weaker than an argument that that one must act because of duties to others --that is it is others interests that must be considered as a matter of duty, responsibility and obligation.

Those who oppose proposed policies to reduce the threat of climate change often base their opposition on scientific uncertainty or claims that there is no scientific basis for concluding that human activities are causing dangerous climate change. These arguments range from assertions that what is usually called the "mainstream" scientific climate change view is a complete hoax to the milder assertions that the harsh climate change impacts on human health and the environment predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other climate change researchers are unproven. Those opposing ghg reduction policies on scientific grounds have included some honest skeptics and disingenuous ideological purveyors of misinformation. Yet, we will argue, given what we have known for sure about climate change, even the arguments of well intentioned skeptics, not to mention the scandalous misinformation of the skeptical ideological purveyors, are not ethically supportable justifications for non-action on climate change.

In international negotiations, it has often been those who are most vulnerable to climate change impacts such as the small island states or countries like Bangladesh that have insisted on action as a matter of justice despite some remaining uncertainty while a few large emitting countries including the United States and Australia who have resisted making commitments on scientific uncertainty grounds. As a matter of justice, no high-emitting country can use scientific uncertainty as justification for non-action on climate change as long as delay could harm the most vulnerable and there is a credible threshold scientific basis that continuation of certain behaviors is dangerous. Yet, the obvious justice issues entailed by waiting for uncertainties to be resolved before taking action which is then too late to prevent harm have been largely absent in the US debate about climate change. The small island developing states and Bangladesh get it, but Americans, for the most part, have not acknowledged that justice requires action in the face of uncertainty at least in the visible public debate about climate change. Surprisingly, there is no hint of the ethical obligations to act in the face of uncertainty in the US media coverage of the climate change debate. No US politician, known to ClimateEthics, has made the argument we must act to protect others even if there is remaining scientific uncertainty about timing and magnitude of impacts.

As we shall see, this science-based opposition to climate change policies has a successful thirty-year history in the United States and other parts of the world. This post argues the failure to make the ethical arguments for action on climate change in the face of uncertainty takes off the table the strongest arguments for why climate change action is required as a matter of fulfilling responsibilities to others.

II. The Thirty-Five Year Focus on the Known Rather Than The Plausible or Likely.

From the begging of international concern about climate change in the early 1960s, much of the physical basis for worrying about climate change was never in doubt despite relentless claims by some during this period that concern about human-induced climate change was not scientifically sound. For most of the last thirty-five years, we have known without doubt such things as:

• The basic physics of the natural ghg effect including the initial forcing (a factor which changes the Earth's energy balance) of each greenhouse gas in watts per square meter, therefore what warming would be expected in the absence of positive and negative climate feedbacks,
• How much ghgs are being liberated by fossil fuel combustion and some land use changes around the world such as deforestation,
• The global warming potential of different ghgs
• That the level of ghg in the atmosphere is increasing in proportion to fossil fuel use,
• The amount of infrared radiation being trapped and re-radiated at any time by increasing levels of atmospheric ghgs,
• The temperatures of the upper and lower atmosphere,
• Changes in global temperatures,
• Change in ice cover and glacier extent,
• Changes in the amount of intense storms,
• Amount of water vapor in the atmosphere,
• A great amount about the causes of natural climate variability including several variable features of Earth-Sun relationships, tectonic changes in the Earth's surface, and ocean-climate interactions .

I. The Oil Spill and Climate Change Compared.

Over the last two months the U.S. Congress has been engaged in a great operatic drama over what many have called the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history: the BP Gulf oil spill. Last week U.S Congressman angrily grilled BP CEO Tony Hayward about the causes of the disaster and BPs inability to shut off the oil flow. As this took place, the brown and orange slick continued its daily assault on fisheries, birds, and livelihoods.

Although oil leaking from the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform site may in fact be creating the greatest environmental and economic harm in U.S. history so far, there is new evidence that another looming environmental problem is likely to produce far worse environmental and economic impacts not only for the United States but particularly for some of the poorest people around the world. It is also a problem about which the U.S. Congress has done nothing for twenty years: human-induced climate change.

While the US focuses on the Gulf tragedy, climate change causing greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere at ever more dangerous rates. This past week the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that by the end of May atmospheric concentrations of the chief greenhouse gas CO2 had reached an all-time high for at least 2.1 million years, 392.94 parts per million (ppm).

NOAA also announced that May continued a streak that is making this year, 2010, the hottest year on record so far from January through the end of May. Globally the May temperatures was 0.99°F above the 20th century average of 61.3° making it the hottest May on record.

As the globe has been experiencing record heat during the spring of 2010, floodwaters that have been predicted by climate change science are wreaking havoc in many locations world-wide. Disastrous flooding was experienced this spring in France where flash floods hit the back hills of the French Riviera and turned streets into rivers of surging, muddy water. The death toll from the flooding has risen to 25. In Myanmar and Bangladesh, floods and landslides triggered by incessant monsoon rains have killed more than 100 people. China has also experienced devastating flooding this year as well as Brazil. In the United States, flooding in Texas, Nebraska and Wyoming has caused massive damage to farms and homes. Although science cant say that all of these flooding events are directly attributable to human-causation, this flooding is predicted by climate change science.

Climate change not only threatens more people, animals, and ecological systems around the world than the Gulf spill; it promises to be a problem that will continually wreck havoc for centuries while harming the world's poorest and most vulnerable people with drought, floods, killer storms, rising sea levels, and vector borne disease.

BP may shut down the oil gusher in the Gulf by the end of the summer, yet the harms from human-induced climate change will likely plague the world for centuries. While the threat from the BP gusher to the wild life in the Gulf is huge, the threat to people, animals, and ecological systems from climate change is much larger.

While it is proving difficult to shut down the oil flow from the Deepwater Horizon site, the magnitude of greenhouse gas emissions reductions needed to prevent dangerous climate change is truly civilization challenging. This is so because the world will need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions from current levels by 80% or greater by the middle of this century to prevent catastrophic climate change as greenhouse gas emissions increase world wide increase at 2% per year under current trends.

Yet, some of the members of the U.S. Congress that are outraged at BP have been resisting meaningful action on climate change. In fact the U.S. Congress has been a barrier to responsible U.S. climate change action since the early 1990s.

There are a few things in common about the Gulf spill and climate change. One lesson of the Gulf oil spill that is an ominous warning about climate change is that the Deepwater Horizon disaster demonstrates that what are often initially believed to be low probability, in fact unforeseeable, catastrophic impacts do happen. (See article on unforseeability) Although even more optimistic predictions of climate change impacts are disastrous for some of the world's most vulnerable people, the upper end of possible human-induced temperature increases in this Century of 5 to 9 o C will be catastrophic and perhaps unimaginable for the world.

I-Introduction

This post examines ethical issues raised by the cap and trade regimes that have emerged to solve the climate change crisis in the last decade. These regimes have emerged: (1) at the international level under the Kyoto Protocol, (2) at the regional international level including in the European Union and between US states and the Canadian provinces, and (3) at the sub-national level including among Northeastern U.S states. There is also a large voluntary carbon trading market that has emerged around the world that is not the focus of this post although these regimes raise many ethical issues considered here.

At the international level, under the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change there are three different trading regimes. They are:

(a) Emissions Trading (ET) -A mechanism that allows a nation with a Kyoto target to buy d allowances from a country with a Kyoto target that does need all of its allowances.

(b) Joint Implementation (JI)-A mechanism that allows project financing by nation with a Kyoto target in another country with a Kyoto target.

(c) Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)-A mechanism that allows nations with Kyoto targets to finance projects in developing countries that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The goal of this post is to spot the major ethical issues raised by carbon cap and trade regimes that have emerged around world, not necessarily to resolve these issues.

Spotting ethical issues raised by cap and trade regimes will not necessarily lead to a consensus about what should be done about these issues because there are competing ethical theories that might reach different conclusions about these trading regimes including utilitarian, rights, virtue, relationship, and ecological based theories among others. However, for some issues there may be an overlapping consensus among ethical theories about what ethics requires. (Brown et al., 2006). For other issues there may be agreement among ethical theories that some positions on cap and trade issues are ethically problematic no matter what ethical theory is applied to analyze the issue under consideration. Therefore, spotting ethical issues raised by carbon cap and trade regimes may be practically valuable despite the inability on some issues to determine unambiguously what ethics demands, if spotting the ethical questions leads to eliminating from consideration some positions on these issues that fail to pass minimum ethical scrutiny. (Brown et al., 2006)

The purpose of this post is not to resolve all ethical issues entailed by cap and trade regimes but to encourage further ethical reflection about these issues. Cap and trade regimes have in a very short time reached wide support around the world with only very limited ethical reflection on the issues discussed in this chapter. Because uncritical acceptance of these existing regimes may lead to significant injustices and given that there may be opportunity to change and restructure existing regimes in the future, this post is meant to encourage ethical reflection on existing as well as future cap and trade regimes.

Although existing cap and trade regimes differ in many of their details, they all have the following common steps. First a government establishes an emission limitation for total emissions from the government's jurisdiction and then permits or allowances are either given away or auctioned off and in this way create a society-wide "cap." The cap is expected to be "tightened," that is, reduced over the years, thus increasing the costs over time of future allowances. The permits allow holders to emit ghgs usually in tons of carbon for a specific period. To enable trading, rules are established that allow those entities with caps to meet their obligations either by purchasing unneeded allowances from others that have caps, funding projects that reduce emissions at places under the control of others, or purchasing off-sets created by carbon reduction projects somewhere in the world.

Cap and trade regimes are usually justified on several different grounds including:

• Trading provides a mechanism for making carbon emissions reductions at lowest possible cost. Because carbon is well mixed in the atmosphere, it doesn't make any difference where reductions are made in the world to lower future atmospheric concentrations of ghgs. Therefore emitters of carbon can finance inexpensive projects to reduce carbon emissions and apply reductions achieved by these projects against their reduction obligations and in so doing reduce ghg emissions that cause climate change. In this way, cap and trade regimes maximize the efficiency of carbon reductions. And so cap and trade regimes are usually supported on the grounds that they provide the flexibility to achieve the greatest reductions at lowest possible cost.

• Proponents of cap and trade regimes often point to a successful program still in place in the US that has been declared to reduce 40% sulfur emissions (SOx) by coal-burning power plants in the period 1990-2004. (EDF, 2009)

• Cap and trade regimes provide economic benefits to developing countries through CDM credits and other "off-sets" thus helping developing countries economically.

• Cap and trade regimes keep high-cost emitters in the political game because they can reduce their emissions at low cost and thereby help minimize political opposition for climate change legislation.

This post next looks at the following ethical issues entailed by cap and trade regimes:

a. Justice of the Cap

b. Allocating Global Commons Resources as Property Rights.

c. Environmental Effectiveness

d. Distributive Justice

e. Procedural Justice

I. Introduction

This post identifies twenty questions that the US press has failed to ask opponents of proposed US climate change policies that should be asked if climate change raises civilization challenging ethical issues.

To understand why these questions should be asked, it is first necessary to review the kinds of arguments that have usually been made in opposition to US climate change policies, programs, and legislation and why these arguments fail to deal with the profound ethical questions raised by the threat of human induced climate change.

Since international climate change negotiations began in 1990, the United States has yet to adopt meaningful greenhouse gas emissions reduction legislation For almost 20 years arguments against US climate change legislation or US participation in a global solution to climate change have been made that have almost always been of two types.

By far the most frequent arguments made in opposition to climate change policies are economic predictions of various kinds such as claims that proposed climate change legislation will destroy jobs, reduce GDP, damage US businesses such as the coal and petroleum industries, or increase the cost of fuel. A variation of this argument is that the United States should not adopt policies on climate change until other nations such as China take steps to reduce their emissions because if the United States acts and other nations don't reciprocate this will harm the US economy.

The second most frequent argument made by opponents of climate change policies are assertions that governments should not take action on climate change because adverse impacts have not been sufficiently scientifically proven. These arguments range from assertions that what is usually called the "main-stream" scientific climate change view is a complete hoax to the milder assertions that the harsh climate change impacts on human health and the environment predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other climate change researchers are unproven.

Both the economic and scientific arguments against climate change policies implicitly argue that climate change policies should be opposed because they are not in the US national interest.

The responses of advocates of US climate change policies to these arguments are almost always to take issue with the factual economic and scientific conclusions of these arguments by making counter economic and scientific claims. For instance, in response to economic arguments opposing climate change legislation, proponents of climate change action usually argue that climate change policies will create jobs or are necessary to develop new energy technologies that are vital to the health of the US economy in the future. In responses to the lack of scientific proof arguments, climate change advocates usually stress the harsh environmental impacts to people and ecosystems that climate change will cause if action is not taken or argue that climate change science is settled. In other words, advocates of climate change action, respond to claims of opponents to climate change programs by denying the factual claims of the opponents.

By simply opposing the factual claims of the opponents of climate change, the advocates of climate change policies are implicitly agreeing with the assumptions of the opponents of climate change action that greenhouse reduction policies should not be adopted if they are not in national self-interest.

Yet, climate change is a problem that clearly creates civilization challenging ethical issues. By ethics is meant the domain of inquiry that examines claims that given certain facts, actions are right or wrong, obligatory or non-obligatory, or when responsibilities attach to human activities.

If nations or individuals have ethical obligations, they are likely to have duties, responsibilities, and obligations that require them to go beyond consideration of self-interest alone in making decisions. And so, if climate change raises ethical considerations, governments may not base policy decisions on self-interest alone.

Given this, one might ask what aspects of climate change raise ethical questions. In fact there are several distinct features of climate change call for its recognition as creating civilization challenging ethical questions.

First, climate change creates duties because those most responsible for causing this problem are the richer developed countries, yet those who are most vulnerable to the problem's harshest impacts are some of the world's poorest people in developing countries. That is, climate change is an ethical problem because its biggest victims are people who can do little to reduce its threat.

Second, climate-change impacts are potentially catastrophic for many of the poorest people around the world. Climate change harms include deaths from disease, droughts, floods, heat, and intense storms, damages to homes and villages from rising oceans, adverse impacts on agriculture, diminishing natural resources, the inability to rely upon traditional sources of food, and the destruction of water supplies. In fact, climate change threatens the very existence of some small island nations. Clearly these impacts are potentially catastrophic.

The third reason why climate change is an ethical problem stems from its global scope. At the local, regional or national scale, citizens can petition their governments to protect them from serious harms. But at the global level, no government exists whose jurisdiction matches the scale of climate change. And so, although national, regional and local governments have the ability and responsibility to protect citizens within their boarders, they have no responsibility to foreigners in the absence of international law. For this reason, ethical appeals are necessary to motivate governments to take steps to prevent their citizens from seriously harming foreigners.

And so if climate change raises civilization challenging ethical questions which imply duties, responsibilities, and obligations what questions should the press ask opponents of climate change policies when they make economic and scientific arguments against climate change policies?