Climate Justice Beyond the State

Lachlan Umbers, Jeremy Moss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000336740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences biologiques
• Subtopic: Écologie

Virtually every figure in the climate justice literature agrees that states are presently failing to discharge their duties to take action on climate change. Few, however, have attempted to think through what follows from that fact from a moral point of view. In Climate Justice Beyond the State, Lachlan Umbers and Jeremy Moss argue that states' failures to take action on climate change have important implications for the duties of the most important actors states contain within them – sub-national political communities, corporations, and individuals – actors that have been largely neglected in the climate justice literature, to date. Sub-national political communities and corporations, they argue, have duties to immediately, aggressively, and unilaterally reduce their emissions. Individuals, on the other hand, have duties to help promote collective action on climate change. Along the way, they contribute to a range of important contemporary debates, including those over the nature of collective duties, what agents are required to do under conditions of partial compliance, and the requirements of fairness.

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

1
The climate duties of sub-national political communities

Amongst the most striking responses to President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement came from American cities and states, several of whom committed to taking action on climate change, even in the absence of adequate national-level climate policies. On the very day President Trump announced his intention to withdraw from the Paris agreement, the governors of California, New York, and Washington announced the formation of the United States Climate Alliance. This group now includes 24 member states and the unincorporated territory of Puerto Rico (together accounting for around 25% of the United States’ total emissions) committed to curbing their emissions in line with the Paris targets. Many municipal governments followed suit.¹ Mayor Peduto of Pittsburgh, for example, reaffirmed a commitment to move the city to 100% renewable energy by 2035 (Hidalgo and Peduto, 2017). More recently, Mayor de Blasio of New York City announced his intention to divest $5 billion worth of fossil fuel assets from the city’s pension fund (Milman, 2018).

Yet climate action at the sub-national level, often in the face of national-level intransigence, is nothing new (Bulkeley, 2013). In 1990, for example, the city of Toronto committed to reducing its net emissions to 20% below 1988 levels by 2005 (Harvey, 1993). By 2017, the city’s emissions had fallen to 44% below 1990 levels (Toronto, 2017, p. 3) The state government of New South Wales introduced the Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme in 2003, the world’s first mandatory emissions-trading scheme. By 2010, the scheme was estimated to have either reduced or offset the equivalent of over 90 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions (Perdan and Azapagic, 2011, p. 6045).² In 2006, California passed the Global Warming Solutions Act, which mandated that emissions must be reduced to 1990 levels by 2020, and to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 (Bulkeley, 2011). California’s greenhouse gas emissions have steadily decreased every year since 2007 (Board, 2018). British Columbia introduced a carbon tax in 2008, which recent studies indicate has been responsible for a 5–15% drop in emissions (Murray and Rivers, 2015, pp. 677–80). Coming into effect in 2009, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is a cap-and-trade system regulating CO₂ emissions from power plants in Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia. The RGGI has been associated with a steep decline in power plant emissions (Murray and Maniloff, 2015). And there are many examples besides these to be found.³

These developments have been the object of increasing interest in the social sciences.⁴ And, as states continue to fail to adopt adequate national-level policies to address climate change, such efforts are taking on ever-greater importance. Sub-national political communities, after all, are substantial contributors to climate change in their own right. Cities, for example, have been estimated to account for upwards of 70% of global energy-related CO emissions (IEA, 2008).⁵

Very little attention, however, has thus far been paid to the normative issues that climate action on the part of sub-national political communities gives rise to.⁶ In this chapter, then, we shall argue that where states fail to satisfactorily discharge their duties to mitigate climate change by reducing their emissions, the sub-national political communities of which they are comprised may have duties to take such action unilaterally – i.e. to reduce their emissions to help mitigate the threat posed by climate change, even in the absence of an adequate national-level climate policy.⁷

Climate action at the sub-national level, we think, is an instance of a more general class of cases in which the failure of some collective agent to discharge some duty to which it is subject entails duties for the agents of which it is comprised to take steps to help partially discharge that duty. The chapter, then, begins with a discussion of such cases and a defence of the devolution principle, which sets out conditions under which such duties arise. The following sections then set out the argument with respect to sub-national political communities’ duties to take action on climate change and consider several objections.

Before proceeding, however, several qualifying remarks are in order.

First, it is important to clarify that our aim, here, is only to defend the claim that many sub-national political communities have weighty pro tanto duties to take steps to reduce their emissions. At least in principle, however, these duties might be outweighed in particular cases by other considerations, all things considered. What each sub-national political community ought to do at any given time, in practice, will be a matter of balancing the reasons which apply to it at that time. Since these will vary very widely community to community, we will have little to say on this issue in what follows (though we will occasionally touch upon it).

Second, nothing in what follows is intended to detract from the idea that action at the national level – ideally as part of some fair, enforceable global agreement – represents the ideal response to the climate crisis. To that end, as the following section makes clear, the argument we set out applies only to sub-national political communities belonging to nations that have failed to adopt adequate climate policies. We shall have little to say concerning the duties of sub-national political communities belonging to states that have adopted such policies.

Third, the arguments that follow are intended to apply only to sub-national political communities that belong to wealthy, developed nations. In developing nations, there will often be a range of complicating considerations (e.g. potential trade-offs between emissions-reductions and the alleviation of severe poverty), which will render the case for such duties much more difficult to make out at both the national and sub-national level. Though we certainly do not wish to deny that some such communities may have duties of the sort we discuss, here, we shall set such cases aside, for the present.

Fourth, questions of legitimate authority have occasionally proven contentious in sub-national climate politics. The cities of San Francisco and Oakland, for example, recently attempted to sue five fossil fuel companies for public nuisance under California state law. The companies succeeded in having the case transferred to the federal court, where it was dismissed (Schwartz, 2018).⁸ Our argument in this chapter, then, is intended to apply only to sub-national political communities with the legitimate constitutional authority to take steps to mitigate the harms of climate change. Without such authority, it would be impossible (or, at least, illegitimate) for such communities to act upon duties of the sort we shall defend.

Finally, we shall argue that many sub-national political communities have a special sort of collective duty to reduce their emissions to help mitigate climate change. A collective duty, in this sense, is a duty which applies to some collective qua collective. Suppose, for example, that a team of four people is rowing a boat up a river. Making the boat move requires the combined efforts of all four. Up ahead, they see a boy drowning. They could very easily rescue the boy by rowing the boat towards him. The rowers, intuitively, would have a duty to do so. Yet this duty must apply to the team qua team, rather than to any of the individual rowers qua individuals. Ex hypothesi, no individual, acting alone, can make the boat move in order to effect a rescue. By ought-implies-can, then, no individual can have a duty to rescue, here (though they will obviously have individual-level duties to contribute to the collective rescue effort). In similar fashion, then, we shall argue that many sub-national political communities qua communities have duties to take steps to help mitigate climate change.

This, however, means that our argument must necessarily presuppose that such communities constitute collective agents, insofar as it is only agents that can bear moral duties.⁹ This assumption, we think, ought to be largely uncontentious. It is widely accepted, for instance, that states constitute collective agents, insofar as they have the features generally thought essential to natural persons’ agency – a continuous identity over time and (through their legislative and executive organs) capacities to deliberate over, adopt, revise, and pursue particular goals and ends (Goodin, 1995, ch. 2; Erskine, 2001).¹⁰ Sub-national political communities typically possess these same features. We, therefore, take such arguments to apply mutatis mutandis to such communities, also. Note that we shall discuss the individual-level deontic implications of the collective duties we shall defend in this chapter in chapter three and the conclusion.

The devolution principle

The purpose of this chapter is to defend the claim that many sub-national political communities have special kinds of collective duties to take steps to address climate change. A collective, in the sense we have in mind, is simply a set of two or more agents. We shall refer to any proper subset of a given collective as a sub-collective. Sub-collectives might simply be ordinary individual agents. Every individual member of a cricket team, for example, is a sub-collective in this sense. Alternatively, sub-collectives might themselves also be collectives. Businesses, for example, are collectives of individuals but may themselves also be a part of wider collectives like cartels.

In this section, we shall defend the claim that where some collective fails, or is sufficiently likely to fail, to discharge some collective duty, the sub-collectives of which it is comprised may have what we shall refer to as devolved duties to, at least partially, discharge the original collective duty. Consider:

Ten on the Shore: A company is holding its Christmas party down at the seaside. The company comprises a CEO, a four-person service team, and a five-person sales team. During the party, they see a dinghy capsize, plunging three victims into the water. There are two boats on the shore: a large boat which requires ten people to row and could carry all three victims to safety, and a smaller boat which requires five people to row but could carry only one of the victims to safety. There is only time for one boat trip before the victims drown.

The interests of the victims in receiving aid, together with the capacity of the company to assist them, other things equal, clearly give rise to a collective duty on the part of the company to attempt a rescue by rowing the larger boat out to the victims.

Yet suppose that the CEO fails to direct the company to affect a rescue. Instead, she says, “Do as you like. I, however, will be remaining on shore.” The service team, also, refuse to join in. Nothing can be done to change their minds. It is virtually certain, then, that the company will fail to discharge its duty to rescue the victims.

This, we think, makes a profound difference to the duties of the sales team. Clearly, if it was sufficiently likely that a rescue by the company as a whole was going to be attempted, the sales team would have a duty to contribute to such an attempt. This duty arises out of the very same kinds of considerations which ground the company’s duty to make such an attempt – the interests of the victims, and the capacity of the sales team to provide assistance.¹¹ The optimal response to those considerations on the part of the sales team would be for them to play their appropriate roles in a collective rescue. That way, they could ensure that all three victims would be saved. If, by contrast, they were to act independently (i.e. row the smaller boat out to the victims), they would doom any company-wide attempt to failure and two of the victims to needless death. Yet the failure of the others to co-operate means, effectively, that this optimal course of action is unavailable to them. Attempting to play their part in the wider rescue attempt would, ex hypothesi, simply result in the death of all three victims, given the failure of the others to participate. The appropriate response for the sales team in this case, then, would clearly be to act independently, so as to partially discharge the original collective duty by rowing the smaller boat out to the victims and rescuing one of them.

The almost certain failure of the wider collective to discharge its collective duty, then, together with the considerations which ground both the original collective duty, and the duties of the sub-collectives of which it is comprised to participate in efforts to discharge that duty where the prospects of such efforts are good enough, give rise to a devolved duty on the part of the sales team to act so as to at least partially discharge the original collective duty. This suggests the following principle:

Devolution Principle: If there is some duty, D, which applies to some collective, C, some sub-collective, S, belonging to C will have a pro tanto duty to act unilaterally so as to at least partially discharge D if (1) S is an agent, (2) the considerations which give rise to D also apply to S, (3) those considerations would have given rise to a duty on the part of S to contribute to C’s efforts to discharge D had C been sufficiently likely to act so as to discharge D, and (4) C has either failed to discharge D, or is insufficiently likely to act so as to discharge D.

We should make four clarificatory points before proceeding. First, the devolution principle, as stated, m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The climate duties of sub-national political communities
• 2 The climate duties of corporations
• 3 The climate duties of individuals
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index