Climate Justice and Non-State Actors

Corporations, Regions, Cities, and Individuals

Jeremy Moss, Lachlan Umbers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000052220
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book investigates the relationship between non-state actors and climate justice from a philosophical perspective.

The climate justice literature remains largely focused upon the rights and duties of states. Yet, for decades, states have failed to take adequate steps to address climate change. This has led some to suggest that, if severe climate change and its attendant harms are to be avoided, non-state actors are going to have to step into the breach. This collection represents the first attempt to systematically examine the climate duties of the most significant non-state actors – corporations, sub-national political communities, and individuals.

Targeted at academic philosophers working on climate justice, this collection will also be of great interest to students and scholars of global justice, applied ethics, political philosophy and environmental humanities.

1

Levels of climate action

Garrett Cullity (Adelaide)

Climate action of different sorts is possible for national governments, for individual persons, and for various other intermediate agents – collective agents operating at a subnational level, such as regional governments, cities, corporations, and non-government associations of various kinds.¹ Given these three levels of agency – national, intermediate, and individual – what climate duties are located at each level, and what is the relationship between them? An initial answer is this. The principal bearers of climate duties are national governments. Solving the global collective action problem of anthropogenic climate change will require an international climate agreement; national governments are the parties who must reach it. Their duties are duties of difference-making: duties to do what will make a great difference to the welfare of current and future people.² Intermediate and individual agents then have derivative climate duties – duties deriving from their relationships to the actions of national governments. The climate duties of intermediate agents are duties of influence: duties to perform those actions that, through incentive and example, can influence national agents to solve the global problem. And the climate duties of individuals are duties of participation: duties to join in collective actions initiated at higher levels, complying with the regulation of our consumption activities in the ways needed to mitigate, and ultimately solve, the problem.

This initial answer is wrong. The main aim of this paper is to explain the ways in which it is wrong, and to formulate a better view. Nonetheless, it is a useful starting point for thinking about the different climate duties that apply at different levels of agency. The three kinds of duties it emphasizes are importantly distinct, and it is by seeing what needs to be added to and subtracted from the initial answer that we best approach a more adequate one. I hope to vindicate this approach as I go, by showing that it is fruitful. After beginning with a fuller description of the initial picture and the three kinds of duties it ascribes, I work through each of the three levels of climate agency in turn, explaining how the initial answer needs to be improved. The last section summarizes the alternative picture that we arrive at if we make these improvements. It is a more complicated picture: while the duties of lower-level agents do depend on their relationships to higher-level ones, the reverse is also true; and while duties of difference-making and influence are important, I shall be arguing that the principal climate duties of agents at all three levels are participatory.

I: The initial picture

In between the international and individual levels of agency, I am grouping together a variety of other agents as “intermediate”: regional governments, cities, corporations, and non-government organizations. This may seem misguided. Measured in terms of economic size, the biggest “intermediate” agents dwarf the smallest countries. California’s GDP is $2.75t, just below that of France on the international scale. The smallest nation economically, Tuvalu, has a GDP of $38m, forty times smaller than that of Tokyo and 70,000 times smaller than California’s. Given this, it may seem muddled and unhelpful to specify the “levels” of climate action as I have, placing California at an intermediate level between Tuvalu and individuals. No doubt, some individuals spend more than $38m in a year.³

However, the point of this classification is not to grade agents in terms of their economic power. It is to identify the kinds of climate action that are available to different kinds of agents, the morally relevant reasons there are to perform those actions, and consequently the kinds of duties that they bear. The stringency and scope of an agent’s duties depend on which actions the agent is able to perform. Economic capacity is relevant to this – we will come to that later – but so is normative capacity. Some actions are only available to agents with the right kind of authority to perform them. In the case of climate action, it is only national governments that are qualified to be parties to an international treaty; intermediate agents, whatever their economic size, are not. And intermediate agents, disparate though they are, possess capacities for action that individuals lack (when acting as individuals rather than as institutional role-bearers): capacities that include representation, coordinating the efforts of individuals, and authority over them of various forms.

The initial picture of the allocation of climate duties from which we will be working emphasizes this difference between the actions available to agents at the three levels. It relies on a diagnosis of what the problem of anthropogenic climate change fundamentally is: namely, a global collective action problem (Gardiner, 2001). We all inhabit an economic order in which the environmental cost of each agent’s resource use is largely externalized – most of the cost of each agent’s action is borne by other parties (Stern, 2008, p. 1). Some of the bearers of that cost are our contemporaries; many more will bear the much greater costs that are projected into the future.⁴ Large-scale collective action problems of this form need to be solved by imposing effective regulation: here, since the problem is global, the regulatory solution has to be global too. What we need to achieve is a binding international agreement that limits future global greenhouse gas emissions to sustainable levels through the application and enforcement of effective economic incentives and supply-side restrictions (Stern, 2007; Green and Denniss, 2018).

It is natural to treat the allocation of duties in this case as following the same pattern that we find in other collective action problems. For example, suppose our town’s water supply is limited, and with unregulated water usage we face the prospect of running out. We need the municipal authorities to introduce a scheme of water restrictions. In this sort of situation, the allocation of duties is evidently this: the municipal government has a duty to implement a scheme of water restrictions; other influential agents (such as the local health authorities) have a duty to use their influence to get the government to do this; and individual water consumers have a duty to comply with the restrictions once implemented.

The initial picture makes the corresponding allocation of duties in response to our global collective action problem of climate change. The agents with a duty to solve the problem are national governments. They are the agents in whose power it lies to form the international agreement that will constitute the solution we need. Agents at the other two levels, since they are not potential parties to such an agreement, do not bear those duties. However, they are able to support a global climate solution in two other ways. Intermediate agents, given the scale on which they operate, have the capacity to influence national governments to reach the agreement we need; and individuals can conform with it once it is reached. Individuals will then acquire duties to participate in a regulatory solution; but no individual has a unilateral duty to adopt the constraints that would make sense as part of that regulatory solution, prior to its adoption – any more than I have a duty not to water my lawn prior to the implementation of municipal water restrictions.⁵

We can sharpen this picture by introducing some terminology. “Duties of difference-making”, we can say, are duties to produce positive impacts and avoid negative impacts on others’ welfare. If we are being careful, we should note that causing an impact is not always the same thing as making a difference to whether that impact occurs – but let us use “duties of difference-making” to cover both cases.⁶ Within this class of duties, we can then make a pair of distinctions. Duties of dependent difference-making are duties to produce positive and avoid negative impacts on others’ welfare, by affecting whether some other agent produces or avoids those impacts. Duties of independent difference-making are the duties to produce positive and avoid negative impacts on others’ welfare directly, without relying on someone else’s agency to do so. A further distinction concerns whether a duty of difference-making is a duty to induce another agent to do what that other agent already has a duty to do. When a duty of difference-making is not of that kind, we can call it a primary duty of difference-making. A secondary duty of difference-making is a duty to induce another agent to fulfil a primary duty of difference-making.⁷ Notice that these two distinctions do not coincide. We see this in the duties that authoritative agents have to solve collective action problems: these are primary but dependent. The municipal government’s duty to implement water restrictions is primary, since it is a duty to instruct individuals to do what they do not already have a duty to do; but it is also dependent, since the difference the government makes is made by affecting the actions of individual consumers.

The other class of duties for which we will need a label comprises “duties of participation”. These are the duties that an agent can have to join in the activity of a group. When a group is achieving something important by acting together and is doing so through its members’ willingness to join in, sharing the costs of the collective action, I can thereby acquire a duty to join in on the same terms.⁸ Duties of participation should be distinguished from duties of difference-making: I can have duties to join in the worthwhile actions of groups that are large enough to absorb the costs of my non-participation, without its having a significant impact on anyone’s welfare. If I ride on public transport without paying, the moral complaint against me is not that I am harming anyone. It is that I am failing to participate in the collective practice on the same terms as everyone else.⁹ Participatory duties are the duties I have when I lack a good answer to the question “Why aren’t you joining in?”

Phrased in these terms, the initial picture of climate duties is as follows. National governments are the bearers of primary duties of difference-making, as the potential parties to the international agreement that is needed as the solution to our global problem: like other agents with the capacity to solve collective action problems, their duties of difference-making are primary but dependent. Intermediate agents have secondary duties of dependent difference-making: duties to influence national governments to do what they already have a duty to do. Some prominent individuals have secondary duties of influence too – opinion-formers and well-connected people who can influence the decision-making of national governments. However, most individuals are not in that position: their climate duties are duties of participation, not difference-making. In the future, when there is a global climate agreement, individuals will have duties to comply with the regulation it imposes on them. Meanwhile, the climate duties of individuals extend at most to participating in the joint efforts now under way to encourage their governments to do what they ought – supporting climate action campaigns and voting for parties with sound climate policies (Johnson, 2003; Maltais, 2013).

To complete the initial picture, we can consider its application to two other important kinds of climate action. So far, we have been focusing on the actions required to solve the global climate problem. But in addition, during the period before we have arrived at that solution, we need to consider the ways in which our action can affect the severity of the problem itself. We face the question what we should be doing to mitigate the climate impacts of our past and current activity, and what we can do by way of adaptation, to protect vulnerable people from being harmed by the changes to the climate that are already underway. The initial picture can be extended to cover these actions too, making the corresponding claims. With respect to mitigatory and adaptive action, national governments are again the primary bearers of duties of dependent difference-making to exercise their authority to change their citizens’ behaviour. They have duties of mitigation, owed to climate-vulnerable people around the world, to regulate their own economies in a way that lessens the harm they are doing; and duties of adaptation, owed to their own citizens, to protect them from the threats that the processes of climate change now under way will expose them to. From these, the mitigatory and adaptive duties of other agents derive in the same ways as before. Intermediate agents have secondary duties of difference-making through influence on national governments; individuals have duties of participation in the actions initiated by their governments.

A corollary of this picture is that the climate duties of intermediate agents and individuals may be relatively modest. When one agent has a difference-making duty and a second agent can potentially influence whether it is fulfilled, then that gives the second agent a morally relevant reason to exercise that influence. But whether there is a duty to exercise it will depend on how influential one is likely to be, how burdensome the action will be, and what morally relevant reasons there are to do other things instead. A clear case for the possession of duties of influence will apply only to those intermediate agents for which climate action is not very disruptive. Similarly, getting from the reasons that individuals have to participate in worthwhile joint action to a duty to participate also depends on the cost of participation and the reasons there are to do other things instead. The party with the best climate policy may have other social and economic policies that are bad. And while I have participatory reasons to join in climate action campaigns, I also have participatory reasons to join in campaigns to address poverty, animal welfare, mental health provision, and every other worthwhile movement for social improvement. So the clearest assignment of climate duties, on this picture, is to national governments. Some intermediate agents and individuals may bear the other two kinds of duties: but that depends on what else is at stake for them.

II: Revising the initial picture

The initial picture makes some assumptions that others may wish to question, but I shall not. It assumes that institutional agents can have moral duties; that current patterns of greenhouse-gas-emitting activity will harm future generations; and that duties to avoid such harm are not undermined by the fact that the identity of future individuals is contingent on the actions we take now. I also accept its assumption that the scope and stringency of the duties an agent has depend on all of the reasons that bear on that agent’s actions.¹⁰ Thus, although the initial picture offers a classification of the kinds of climate duties that are borne by agents at the three levels and the relationships between them, it does not say that all agents at a given level have the same duties. It says that the climate duties that individua...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Levels of climate action
• 2. Sub-national climate duties: Addressing three challenges
• 3. Carbon majors and corporate responsibility for climate change
• 4. Sectoral responsibility for climate justice: Is aviation exceptionalism defensible?
• 5. Corporations’ duties in a changing climate
• 6. Individual climate justice duties: The cooperative promotional model & its challenges
• 7. Are we morally required to reduce our carbon footprint independently of what others do?
• 8. Right-levelling indeterminacy: Environmental problems, non-state actors, and the global economic market
• Index