Tackling climate change has often been considered the responsibility of national governments. But do individuals also have a duty to act in the face of this problem? In particular, do they have a duty to adopt a greener lifestyle or to press their government to act? This review critically examines the arguments provided for and against such duties in the relevant philosophic literature. It first discusses the problem of causal inefficacy—namely the fact that individual greenhouse gas emissions appear to make no difference to the harmful consequences of climate change—and whether it clears individuals from any moral obligations related to climate change. Then, it considers various other arguments for the existence of such duties, including integrity, fairness, universalizability, or virtue. Finally, it assesses the existence of a duty to promote collective action through active citizenship. The conclusion emphasizes that most writers agree on the fact that individuals have at least some duties to take action against climate change, but that disagreement remains about the exact nature and, above all, the extent of these duties. WIREs Clim Change 2016, 7:798–814. doi: 10.1002/wcc.422 This article is categorized under: Climate, Nature, and Ethics > Ethics and Climate Change
Geoengineering is commonly defined as 'the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change' (Royal Society, 2009, 1). Technologies which might be deployed to attempt geoengineering are either speculative or only in the very early stages of development. Those currently being considered fall into two main camps. Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) techniques aim to decrease climate change by withdrawing significant amounts of carbon dioxide, the main anthropogenic greenhouse gas, from the atmosphere. Proposed methods include direct air capture, ocean fertilization, enhanced weathering, and large-scale afforestation. Solar Radiation Management (SRM) technologies endeavor to offset the warming effects of rising greenhouse concentrations by decreasing the amount of energy the Earth's surface receives from the Sun, usually through increasing the planet's albedo (i.e. its reflectivity). In the early literature, the techniques attracting most attention are spraying sulfate particles in the stratosphere (stratospheric sulfate injection or 'SSI') and marine cloud brightening ('MCB'). Other possibilities include making deserts, oceans and roofs more reflective. Despite their speculative nature, discussion of geoengineering technologies is growing rapidly in science and policy circles. Having for decades largely been dismissed as irrelevant or counterproductive to serious discussion, some now advocate for geoengineering techniques as possible 'tools in the toolkit' for future climate action. This 'partial mainstreaming' began in 2006 when Paul Crutzen, a prominent atmospheric chemist, argued that serious research was needed because of ongoing political inertia on reducing global emissions (Crutzen, 2006). Crutzen's focus was on stratospheric sulfate injection. He stressed that SSI was 'by far not the best solution' (212) and that 'the very best would be if emissions of the greenhouse gases could be reduced so much that the stratospheric sulfur release experiment would not need to take place' (217). However, he also insisted that 'currently, this looks like a pious wish' (217). Crutzen's intervention was controversial in the science community. Nevertheless, in the intervening decade or so, discussion of geoengineering has developed at a considerable pace. In particular, a number of reports from scientific academies (e.g. Royal Society, 2009; National Research Council, 2015) and policy institutes (e.g. Bipartisan Policy Center 2011; FCEA 2018) have emerged. Notably, such reports typically remain cautious (even skeptical) about climate engineering, emphasize the priority of
This article provides theoretical foundations to the widespread intuition that an individual duty to reduce one's carbon emissions should not be overly demanding, and should leave some space to personal life-projects. It does so by looking into the moral structure of aggregative problems such as climate change, and argues that contributing to climate change is less wrong than causing the same amount of harm in paradigm cases of harm-doing. It follows that strong agent-relative reasons, such as consideration of the agent's most important life-projects, are likely sometimes to outweigh the reasons for refraining from contributing to climate change, especially when there is no alternative course of action. This, however, does not mean that individual carbon-emitters are off the hook, since a lot can be done to reduce carbon emissions without jeopardising one's most important life-projects.
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