Recasting climate change as an ethical problem

One in which it is the rich West that has the problem

Dear Global Jigsaw,

As a global community of readers, a cross-border issue like climate change is naturally suited to our interests. In a few days, the 28^th United Nations Climate Change Conference, more commonly referred to as COP, will be held in Dubai.

The last one that I covered as a reporter was COP 15, which was held in 2009. In many ways it feels like a different world today. But this is not so in the policy world of climate change, where everyone seems stuck like “two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl year after year” to paraphrase Pink Floyd.

2011-2020 was the warmest decade recorded, with global average temperature reaching 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels in 2019. Human-induced global warming is presently increasing at a rate of 0.2°C per decade. The extent of Arctic Sea ice has been decreasing rapidly, with a decline of 12.2% per decade. Glacier mass loss has accelerated, impacting freshwater availability for billions. Oceans have risen by around 20 cm since the late 19th century, and the rate of rise is accelerating. Projections warn that by 2100, sea levels could rise by 0.26-0.77 meters.

Credit: Sepp photography

Climate change has become part of the normalized lenses through which we experience and understand the world. Every time a December is especially cold, an October especially rainy, or a June especially hot, people mutter “climate change,” almost like a password that symbolizes an “in group” of the environmentally aware, globally concerned citizen.

And yet, there are historical and ethical questions at the heart of the problem that belie easy solutions and that few (especially in the West- where the problem receives most play time in public discourse) investigate in any depth.

Since the start of the industrial revolution until now, human beings have put over 1.5 trillion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. The United States has been responsible for 25% of these cumulative emissions (at 400 billion tonnes), more than any country to date, and twice more than China’s 13%, the country that is the world’s second largest national contributor.

The EU as a whole represents some 22% of cumulative emissions; the member state of  Germany on its own, about  7.6%. In contrast, most countries across Africa have been responsible for less than 0.01% of all emissions over the last 266 years. India contributed some 3% by 2020.

Now, the waters are muddied when we compare the historic share of global emissions of various countries to their current equivalents. While the rich world certainly got the warming ball rolling, its share of global emissions has been reducing, just as those of the large developing countries started taking off.

Today, the EU only accounts for around 7.3% of global emissions, down from 15% in 2009. The United Kingdom, an early industrializer, has a current share three times less than its historic contribution. Even the U.S. is down to 14%, from its cumulative contribution of 25%.

Conversely, the current share of emissions for many developing countries like China and India are more than double their cumulative shares. By 2019, China’s emissions of carbon dioxide accounted for 30% of the word’s total and thus Beijing added one more record to its list of global titles, overtaking the U.S to become the world’s largest emitter of green house gases.

But even setting aside historic emissions and focusing on the present, the chasm between the per capita emissions of rich countries and those of emerging countries remains wide. For the 17.6 tonnes emitted by the average Joe in America, the average Zhou in China emitted under 9 tones, and the average Jagannath in India, only 2.5 tonnes. The average for the 27 members of the EU in 2019 was about 7 tonnes (down from 10 in 2009).

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In 2009, a  few months before the UN meet at Copenhagen that I reported on for the Business Standard newspaper, I’d attended a climate change seminar held in the Danish capital. There, the Princeton University-based moral philosopher Peter Singer claimed that the failure of the major industrialized nations to reduce their emissions to a level that would not cause serious adverse effects to others was a moral wrongdoing on a scale that exceeded the wrongs of colonialism. The only really fair basis on which to formulate a global climate change policy he said was one where every person on the planet was accorded an equal per capita allocation for carbon emissions.

This would allow countries in the developing world room to grow and increase their emissions, but require rich countries to make large cuts. It was the most intuitively fair solution to the problem, where one human life is considered on par with another. Yet not a single leader from the rich world was, or is, in favour of it.  

On the other hand, developing country leaders have long made use of the per capita measure as a basis for articulating ideas and positions on climate change. At a UN meet in September of 2009, President Paul Kagame of Rwanda suggested giving every country an annual per capita quota for CO2 emissions, and allowing developing countries below the quota to trade their excess quota with countries that were above theirs. Then Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, had also drawn attention to the fairness of the per capita emissions argument by pledging that Indian per capita emissions would never exceed the average per capita emissions levels of the rich countries at the time.

A promise like this wiped the past slate clean by “forgiving” historical wrongs and focusing instead on the present. It was therefore a concession to rich countries in order to get them on board a global deal.

Now, there are some obvious flaws with the per capita approach. It can be argued, for example, that someone living in Norway where it is extremely cold for large parts of the year needs a larger allocation of emissions than someone who lives by the Mediterranean. It also draws attention to the politically difficult, but crucial issue of population control. A per capita approach rewards those countries that have ‘failed’ to control their populations

China, for example, argues that its one child policy: shaved between 300 and 400 million people off the expected growth of its population, therefore reducing annual emissions by as much as 1.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide and other gases.

But the rejection of per capita based arguments is not only about rational economic calculations. A more fundamental problem lies with its fundamental fairness. It assumes an equality between all people that does not exist in fact, and is not truthfully desired even in societies where egalitarianism is an acknowledged and purposefully inculcated ideal 

Put baldly, people everywhere have sharply circumscribed moral constituencies of concern. We are usually willing to do the right thing by our friends and family. We are able, if pushed, to stretch our moral constituencies further, to include villages, castes, religions and nations. But climate change requires us to extend our sense of moral obligation spatially to a global community of people we have no contact with, and have in fact been conditioned to think of as outside our realm of concern.

Were the effects of climate change localized, to say the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea, it is doubtful there would be much concern in the rich world, even if the historic and present green house gas emissions of these countries were known to be a substantial part of the cause.

Any political leader trying to persuade people to curtail their carbon footprint in the absence of direct consequences for themselves, purely on the grounds of global responsibility, will have a tough time garnering votes. Given that oratorical dressing aside, climate change policy is all about interests rather than morality, this is scarcely surprising.

In my book, New Old World, I argued that the reason the EU became so concerned about climate in the early 2000s, had to do with much more than enlightened disinterest in rescuing the world from environmental catastrophe.

Having momentously admitted a number of former Eastern bloc communist countries into the Union in 2004, the European project, as the process of creating an ever more closely bound Europe was called, had run out of steam. In 2005, an attempt to bring a new European constitution into force was stopped in its tracks when French and Dutch citizens voted “no” to it in referendums, creating shock waves in Brussels. The result was a generalised glumness about the prospects of a ‘grand European project.’

 The original, overarching aims that underlay the creation of the European Union, the bringing of peace, stability and prosperity to a warring continent, had become normalized by the twenty first century. Youngsters in France did not spend their days gasping in wonderment at the fact that they did not have to live in fear of going to war against Germany. The creation of the EU was a radical event in the history of Europe, but this epochal change was just so much water under the bridge for most. It was normal to be rich in Europe today, just as it was normal to be secure (random acts of terrorism notwithstanding).

 The EU got scant thanks and was thus left scrabbling to devise reasons that would persuade its audience about its continued importance. One that fortuitously happened to be up for grabs was climate change. Taking up the self-proclaimed leadership of delivering the world from the perils of global warming ticked several boxes for the EU.

It was a sufficiently grandiose and worthy goal, in keeping with the weighty objectives of the union’s past, like peace and solidarity. It provided a narrative that people could identify with and invest in, unlike the minutiae of the important but unsexy work that the EU did around customs and internal markets. It was easier to rally support for saving the world for future generations, than for instituting measures for improving the functioning of the VAT system.

Climate change shifted the focus away from a Europe of exhausted possibilities, and failed referenda, struggling to claim popular legitimacy, outwards: to a Europe supposedly leading the world along the path of moral righteousness. EU leaders could indignantly point to the ‘irresponsible’ behaviour of the new powers of the world, China and India, with their massively increasing emissions. They could wag the occasional finger at the status quo power, the United States, as well, which defiantly refused to face up to the great damage being done to the world’s environment.

But for the emerging world, the overwhelming priority remained, and remains, creating and sustaining the economic growth that will continue to lift the hundreds of millions of people that remain mired in debilitating poverty. And while there is a consciousness of the need to try and ensure that this growth is as carbon neutral as possible, the emergence of a real alternative to the carbon-dependent model of growth still at the heart of rich country economies had not yet been demonstrated.

What has been demonstrated by the rich world’s growth trajectory is that copious pollution was the route to the comfortable lives enjoyed there today.

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That’s it from The Global Jigsaw for this week. Please leave comments. I love to hear from you. And do share with others in your networks. And, if you are able to upgrade to becoming a paid subscriber, may much good karma accrue to you!

Hasta pronto,

Pallavi

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