Prof. Darrel Moellendorf - Chair for International Political Theory and Philosophy
The Parties to the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement agreed to act on the basis of equity to protect the climate system. Equitable effort sharing is an irreducibly normative matter, yet some influential studies have sought to create quantitative indicators of equitable effort that claim to be value-neutral (despite evident biases). Many of these studies fail to clarify the ethical principles underlying their indicators, some mislabel approaches that favour wealthy nations as ‘equity approaches’ and some combine contradictory indicators into composites we call derivative benchmarks. This Perspective reviews influential climate effort-sharing assessments and presents guidelines for developing and adjudicating policy-relevant (but not ethically neutral) equity research.
With the significant disconnect between the collective aim of limiting warming to well below 2°C and the current means proposed to achieve such an aim, the goal of this paper is to offer a moral assessment of prominent alternatives to current international climate policy. To do so, we'll outline five different policy routes that could potentially bring the means and goal in line. Those five policy routes are: (1) exceed 2°C; (2) limit warming to less than 2°C by economic de-growth; (3) limit warming to less than 2°C by traditional mitigation only; (4) limit warming to less than 2°C by traditional mitigation and widespread deployment of Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs); and (5) limit warming to less than 2°C by traditional mitigation, NETs, and Solar Radiation Management as a fallback. In assessing these five policy routes, we rely primarily upon two moral considerations: the avoidance of catastrophic climate change and the right to sustainable development. We'll conclude that we should continue to aim at the two-degree target, and that to get there we should use aggressive mitigation, pursue the deployment of NETs, and continue to research SRM.
Climate change and climate change policy raise important issues of intergenerational and international justice. Intergenerational justice requires that CO2
emissions be halted by the middle of this century or shortly thereafter. But
since human development requires energy, the elimination of emissions raises
important questions of international justice. Responding adequately to climate
change requires international cooperation in order to affect a rapid transition
to renewable energy production and consumption and to safeguard conditions
in which continued progress in human development can be made.
The world built by financial integration allows crises that move quickly from one country to another, destroying the lives of people who are vulnerable to poverty. Witness the remarkable speed of the crisis that began as a home mortgage crisis in the United States in 2007 but quickly generalized into an economic crisis around the world. When such contagion breaks out, the poor typically suffer disproportionately. Even after a recovery, the lasting effects, the hysteresis, can trap an entire generation in poverty, which they might otherwise have avoided.
After a short introduction into the recent discourse on the Anthropocene, I will discuss three different interpretations of the Anthropocene: the Anthropocene as promethean, as destruction andas inegalitarian. These interpretations cannot simply be settled by the facts since they concern the direction in which things might develop. Therefore, I will argue, they are not mere predictions based on theoretical reason. Because of the very fact thatthey are bound up with fundamental human interests and human moral concerns, they involve prospection based on practical reason and prospection is itself deeply associated with hope. The final part of my paper aims to show that we are justified to hold hope in the epoch of the Anthropocene.
The international community is currently in the midst of a facilitative dialogue about how to increase mitigation ambition under the terms of Paris Agreement. This dialogue concerns centrally considerations of equity, which includes matters of both justice and responsibility. I defend the importance of the right to sustainable development in this regard. I argue that if the right of states to pursue poverty eradicating human development is to be respected, then there is plausible interpretation of responsibility for mitigation in which a state’s ability to pay is the central consideration, where that ability is measured by its human development level. That conception of responsibility should be applied to considerations of how increase mitigation ambition.
The language of hope is a ubiquitous part of political life, but its value is increasingly contested. While there is an emerging debate about hope in political philosophy, an assessment of the prevalent scepticism about its role in political practice is still outstanding. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of historical and recent treatments of hope in political philosophy and to indicate lines of further research. We argue that even though political philosophy can draw on recent analyses of hope in analytic philosophy, there are distinct challenges for an account of hope in political contexts. Examples such as racial injustice or climate change show the need for a systematic normative account that is sensitive to the unavoidability of hope in politics as much as its characteristic dangers.
Darrel Moellendorf investigates the question of the justification of hope under current conditions in his “Hope for Material Progress in the Age of the Anthropocene." He argues that hope is subject to rationality constraints and can only be justified if there are “hope-makers" that are constituted by evidence and explanation that allow reasons for hope to be shared. Concerning political progress, Moellendorf takes up a claim from the Marxist tradition that assumes that social justice can only be achieved under conditions of massively increased productive capacity. He discusses G. A. Cohen's version of this claim, in particular concerning the question whether there is evidence for a generalized tendency in human history for productivity to grow, but adds to Cohen's discussion an important new element: we can only hope for such increases if environmental circumstances are sufficiently favorable that when humans labor, improvements can be passed on to at least some successor generations—“the fact of climatic favorability." This fact is now in doubt since human progress seems to be self-undermining by threatening those very climatic conditions. This entails that our hopes must not only be founded in economic tendencies but also in evidence about humanity's abilities to solve social problems.
Unter Klimaforschern herrscht
weitgehend Konsens, dass der Mensch durch die anhaltende Produktion von
Treibhausgasen globale und ‚unumkehrbare‘ Klimaveränderungen in Gang gesetzt
hat und das Ausma0 der Schäden nur durch ernsthafte
Emissionsvermeidungsstrategien beschränkt werden kann (IPCC 2019). Stritt ist
gleichwohl die konkrete Ausgestaltung einer solchen Strategie. Ökonomische
Modelle berechnen in diesem Kontext wohlfahrtsmaximierende
Vermeidungsstrategien. Das Optimumskalkül folgt dabei dem Kriterium der
Pareto-Effizienz, vernachlässigt aber in den meisten Fällen den Gedanken der
Verteilungsgerechtigkeit. Eine faire Verteilung der Kosten, sowohl zwischen als
auch innerhalb der Generationen, stellt jedoch eine wichtige Voraussetzung für
ein starkes Commitment der beteiligten Akteure dar. Die vorliegende Arbeit
untersucht daher, wie sich modellierte Vermeidungsstrategien ändern, falls
neben dem Effizienzgedanken auch Kriterien einer gerechten Verteilung in das
Optimumskalkül einfließen. Konkret werden ein ability-to-pay sowie ein
emission-intensity-reduction-Ansatz näher untersucht. Im Ergebnis zeigt sich,
dass der ability-to-pay-Ansatz keine wesentlichen Fairnessvorteile gegenüber
dem rein effizienzgetriebenen Ansatz verspricht. Dagegen scheint die
kontinuierliche Reduktion der Emissionsintensität eine gerechtere Verteilung
der Kosten mit einer erfolgreichen Beschränkung der Erderwärmung vereinen zu
können.
