For the Good of the World

Is a Universal Ethics Possible?

A. C. Grayling

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780861542673
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

'A must read' Gordon Brown 'A truly excellent book' Sir David King The three biggest challenges facing the world today, in A. C. Grayling's view, are climate change, technology and justice.In his timely new book, he asks: can human beings agree on a set of values that will allow us to confront the numerous threats facing the planet, or will we simply continue with our disagreements and antipathies as we collectively approach our possible extinction?As every day brings new stories about extreme weather events, spyware, lethal autonomous weapons systems, and the health imbalance between the northern and southern hemispheres, Grayling's question – Is Global Agreement on Global Challenges Possible? – becomes ever more urgent.The solution he proposes is both pragmatic and inspiring.

1

CONFRONTING THE DANGER OF A WARMING WORLD

Global warming is happening, its effects are already being felt, the harm to humanity, other species, and the planet is increasing, and too much of it is already irreversible. The further dangers that threaten if the global temperature rises above 2° Celsius are devastating – and if the all too real possibility of an increase to 4° Celsius happens by 2100, the result will be that many of today’s children will be faced with a literally catastrophic situation, with hundreds of millions of starving and desperate refugees fleeing from extensive regions of our planet made uninhabitable by floods, droughts, pestilence, storms, and fire, and therefore with conflict escalating as settled populations, themselves already struggling with economic and social difficulties, contend with migrant populations numbering in the millions and tens of millions, entering their territory in a frantic quest for food and shelter.

This apocalyptic vision is not fiction. It is, in sober fact, a real possibility. The world is facing an extreme emergency. Its governments and far too many of its people are behaving as if they are blind to this fact, despite the increasingly frightened chorus of concern from science and climate groups, despite the careful and detailed analyses regularly published by the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and despite the periodic international summits at which governments agree to act, but which so far have had woefully insufficient effect – as illustrated by the fact that in the decade following the Kyoto Protocol’s adoption in 1997 global greenhouse gas emissions rose faster than in the decade preceding it.1

In order to focus minds, discussion of the dramatic warming trend in the planet’s climate should concentrate on potential worst-case scenarios, that is, on the far too great possibility that it will cause severe harm to humanity along with other species and the environment generally. Focusing on the potential worst-case harms identifies the efforts required to prevent them happening, or at least to mitigate them or to prepare to adapt wherever mitigation is unfeasible. ‘Should’ implies that even if it is not certain that the most harmful effects will occur – if it is ‘merely’ possible that they might occur – the risks are so great that efforts to prevent or mitigate them, or at least to prepare to adapt, are essential.

This is the rational strategy. It is not rational merely to hope that warming will be restrained. It is not rational to bank on the chance of less severe outcomes. The evidence is that humanity’s efforts to moderate climate warming are, so far, very unpromising. Competition, rivalry, ignorance both genuine and wilful, and the malign effects of the self-interest Law are all already and in fact actively against the survival of humanity and the planet. To put matters bluntly: collective suicide is currently and actually in progress; the intervention required to prevent or moderate it is beyond urgent.

It should by now be common knowledge that average global temperatures have risen markedly since the beginning of the industrial era because human activity has added to the burden of CO2e (‘carbon dioxide equivalent’ – mainly carbon dioxide but with other ingredients present) in the earth’s atmosphere, the increase spiking upwards most sharply since the middle of the twentieth century, and even more so again since 1990. The chief culprit is the burning of fossil fuels for energy to power industry and transport, and to heat and light homes and businesses. The ‘fossils’ in fossil fuels are the remains of plants and marine animals fossilized over hundreds of millions of years, trees and other plants turning into coal and marine animals turning into oil and gas.2 Plants and animals capture and store energy from the sun; burning their fossilized remains releases ancient solar energy. The remains are non-renewable and finite in quantity, so they are a diminishing resource. That is a problem in itself, but of course the immediate and far more serious problem is that burning fossils causes an excess of CO2e in the atmosphere, creating a greenhouse – a hothouse – effect, with the result that what on the face of it look like ‘modest’ rises in average global temperature of 2° Celsius and above threaten highly significant adverse changes to sea levels and weather patterns – and therefore the viability of the earth’s current flora and fauna, including humans.

For the first time in the planet’s history the change in the global climate, and the effects this is having, are the result of the activities of a single, numerous, highly active, and highly destructive species: human beings. There have been mass extinctions before – five so far, in each of which around 75–95 per cent of species vanished. The first occurred 450 million years ago, the latest (barring the one currently in process) happened 66 million years ago – this being the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction in which all non-avian dinosaur species were annihilated. Such wholesale extinctions meant that the planet’s ecological systems had to start over, acting upon and in turn being shaped by new species arising. With the single exception of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction, which was caused by a major meteor impact, these extinction events were the result of climate change – specifically, climate change caused by greenhouse gases.

The worst was the Permian–Triassic or ‘Great Dying’ event of 250 million years ago, which annihilated more than 80 per cent of marine and 70 per cent of terrestrial life. Greenhouse gases were a major cause. Ocean warming caused a massive release of methane by destabilizing the stores of solid methane hydrates on the ocean floor; methane is a potent and fast-acting greenhouse gas, and it is found not only in oceans but in the vast regions of permafrost in earth’s northern hemisphere, which, as it thaws in response to temperature rises, threatens to release its currently trapped methane. Humanity is currently releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at a rate ten times faster than happened in the ‘Great Dying’.

Research based on ice cores takes our knowledge of climate history back 800,000 years. There is now about 35 per cent more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in that stretch of time, and it is hypothesized that this applies for any point in a much longer stretch – as much as the last 15 million years.

There is a chilling fact about the rate at which greenhouse gases are entering the atmosphere. The sharp rise in their presence there has, as noted, a definite and recognizable starting point: industrialization in the nineteenth century. The uptake of effective new technologies tends to be rapid; the printing press in the fifteenth century and the mobile phone at the end of the twentieth century are cases in point. Steam power, factory production, electricity generation, and automotive transport mushroomed with increasing speed in the century following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the energy resources powering them being coal and, later, oil also – fossil fuels whose burning pumped CO2 into the sky in huge and ever-increasing volumes, and continues to do so at ever-greater rates. In total, 85 per cent of the greenhouse gas now in the atmosphere has been emitted since the end of the Second World War. The chilling fact is that over half the volume of gases thus pumped into the sky has been emitted since 1990.

The greenhouse effect of CO2e emissions has been known for a long time. The relationship between the atmosphere and global temperature was first discussed by Joseph Fourier in his Mémoire sur les températures du globe terrestre in 1824. At the end of the nineteenth century the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius (his 1903 Nobel Prize was, however, awarded for chemistry) worked out that earth’s surface temperature would rise between 5° and 6° Celsius if the amount of CO2 then present in the atmosphere were doubled. His colleague Arvid Högbom calculated that in the 1890s carbon emissions from industrial processes equalled that from all natural sources. But it was not until the 1950s that systematic monitoring of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels began, at the instigation of geologist and oceanographer Roger Revelle and his colleagues at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. They sited their measuring instruments at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii and in Antarctica so that greenhouse gas quantities could be determined in places least affected by local conditions of emission. Revelle reported the findings to Congress; the first use of the expression ‘global warming’, together with an outline of its effects on weather and the risks it posed of desertification and sea level rises, appeared in a newspaper article, published in November 1957, about the work done by Revelle and his colleagues.3

Revelle died in 1991. It is in the years since then that CO2e emissions have doubled over the preceding period of increase. At this rate average global temperature will rise by 4° Celsius by the last year of the twenty-first century. The result will be to make great tracts of North and South America, Africa, and Asia south of latitude 60° (the line of latitude that runs immediately south of the Shetland Islands, Greenland, and Siberia) uninhabitable or almost wholly so. It is already the case that the survival of existing plant and animal species requires that they move 1,000 metres a year towards the poles to keep within the habitable conditions to which they are adapted. Losses of habitats and declines in numbers of many species have already reached emergency levels. When the Paris Agreement on climate change was signed by 195 countries in April 2016, the threshold of a CO2e atmospheric concentration of 400 ppm (parts per million) – which scientists and activists had for decades been arguing was the upper limit of tolerability – had already been passed. It is now, at time of writing, in excess of 411 ppm; in April 2021 a measurement at Mauna Loa registered a frightening 420 ppm.4

It is not merely possible but necessary to bring imagination to bear on the practical meaning of climate change. It has been remarked that one of the factors promoting populism in a number of Western democracies in the first and especially second decades of the twentieth century was immigration. Immigration is a phenomenon of both push and pull; migrants are pushed from their homelands by hardships, and they are pulled by the attractions of wealthy peaceful countries where opportunities for themselves and their children are greater. The hardships that push them are caused by conflicts, by repeated extreme weather events causing droughts or floods which destabilize water and food resources, and by the tension between rising populations and subsistence levels of poverty, all the factors typically operating jointly. Climate change will dramatically intensify both the push and the pull factors – and, in fact, is already doing so. Europe experienced a shock when a million refugees fled from the brutal conflict in Syria and sought asylum in European Union states. But this is small beer in comparison to what climate change will do. Consider Bangladesh, a country of 163 million people. On current warming trends, it is predicted that by 2050 up to 20 million of its people will be flooded out by rising sea levels. In 2016 more than that number were displaced by extreme weather events worldwide, most of the displacement being temporary; but in the low-lying delta regions of Bangladesh which will be lost under water, the effect will be permanent.

According to a World Bank estimate, what threatens Bangladesh will be repeated in many places on all continents, risking permanent displacement of 140 million people. That estimate is at the very low end of projections. The United Nations predicts 200 million climate refugees on optimistic assumptions, a billion refugees if worst fears are realized.5 It is wise to take pessimistic projections seriously, because in working to undershoot them by as much as possible one can thereby mitigate and adapt far better to what current projections admit is already on the way: more frequent and more devastating storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, and monsoons; the drowning of some islands and coastal cities or their repeated serious flooding; heatwaves that kill people; droughts and desertification; the spread of disease-bearing insects such as mosquitoes and ticks into regions currently free of them; mushrooming populations of rats and other vermin; increasing frequency and spread of epidemic diseases, malaria, and dengue fever; interruptions in power supplies; interruptions in production and delivery of food together with outright shortages; problems with fresh water supply; damage to roads, railways, and airports; rising social and political tensions attending these stresses; and civil and international conflicts as a result.

This apocalyptic vision is not an overstatement. Disrupted weather patterns that tip the balance into drought and flood do it in easily predictable ways, because we have examples of them already. In prolonged dry spells heatwaves can be fatal for humans, water supplies are put at risk, and dust storms occur that damage topsoil and harm agriculture with resulting loss of both crops and livestock. The knock-on effect on food supplies and, in their turn, on social stability, is serious – just imagine if the supermarkets in your town had empty shelves and no prospect of restocking; how long would it be before hungry people started breaking into other people’s houses in the hopes of finding hoarded tins of food? When extreme wet weather, unusually high tides, and rising sea levels cause flooding the immediate danger is that people will drown, be stranded, or be displaced as refugees; but they add further risks such as contamination of water supplies by fouling them with soil and debris and pushing sewage back out of pipes and lavatories, salinating the soil so that it becomes useless to agriculture, and leaving behind increased mould, waterborne diseases, and breeding opportunities for mosquitoes. Rising sea levels put at risk a number of highly populous cities: Dhaka, Miami, Mumbai, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and many more. Whole regions – among them the Ganges and Nile deltas, most of Florida, the Maldives, and a number of Pacific islands – are at risk of disappearing under the sea.

While humans face the additional problems of air pollution and disease proliferation arising from these developments, other species face the results of ocean acidification, deforestation, thawing of polar ice and permafrost, and associated destruction of habitats; and most non-human species apart from the likes of rats and cockroaches are not very adaptable. Consider the polar bear, as the North Pole ice cap melts, or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Other books by the same author
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 CONFRONTING THE DANGER OF A WARMING WORLD
• 2 TECHNOLOGY AND THE FUTURE
• 3 JUSTICE AND RIGHTS
• 4 RELATIVISM
• 5 THE SOLUTION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• NOTES
• Imprint Page