As the world turns its attention to the negotiations at the next climate change conference in Doha, it is useful to truly reflect on the subject. Most observers of climate change policy developments around the world agree that climate change is a civilization challenging ethical problem, yet most governments have utterly failed to enact climate change policies consistent with what ethics and justice would require of them. For instance, nations continue to approach international climate negotiations as if their economic interests alone are a legitimate guide for domestic climate change policy formation rather than their ethical responsibilities to others.
Donald A. Brown, a leading voice in the field, has recently published a new report entitled Climate Change Ethics, Navigating the Perfect Moral Storm. Don is a Scholar in Residence, Sustainability Ethics and Law at Widener University School of Law in the United States. For years he has been a regular speaker on ethical issues at side events at the side events of the UN climate conferences.
Most climate change ethics literature has been focused on analyzing specific ethical issues entailed by climate change. Because different ethical theories may reach different conclusions about what should be done in respect to many of these issues, much of the existing climate change ethics literature provides little practical guidance to policy-makers about what should be done in developing policy. Yet by following positions actually taken by disputants in a thirty-year climate change policy debate, Navigating the Perfect Moral Storm makes it clear that most of the arguments made in opposition to climate change policies have been clearly ethically bankrupt even in regard to issues about which different ethical theories would reach different conclusions about what should be done. And so it is easy to spot and clearly identify injustice of the positions that governments and individuals have taken on climate change issues even for those issues about which determining what perfect justice requires may be difficult. For this reason, Navigating the Perfect Moral Storm argues climate change ethicists should be more engaged in policy formation rather than focus exclusively on theoretical ethical issues if they desire to give ethical principles more influence in climate change policy formation.
Information on the book is available here.
Energy in Demand - Sustainable Energy - Rod Janssen 