I. The causes and the direct and indirect consequences of man-induced climate change, which is only one, but one of the most threatening of the various ecological dangers facing us, must be treated by the empirical sciences, and in fact by a still quite rare cooperation of the natural and social sciences. These sciences cannot treat the issue in separation, for the natural processes that lead to climate change are the topic of the natural sciences. But since many of these natural processes are triggered by human behavior, we need the social sciences in order to predict or at least explain such behavior and perhaps devise realistic possibilities of changing it if it leads to undesirable consequences. To give one example from the various anthropogenic factors influencing our climate: While the term “greenhouse” was applied only in 1901 by the Swedish meteorologist Nils Gustaf Ekholm to the phenomenon of greenhouses gases in a planet’s atmosphere preventing it from losing heat to space,[1] the basic physical and chemical ideas go back to studies written by Joseph Fourier, Claude Pouillet, Eunice Newton Foot, and John Tyndall from the 1820s to the 1850s. In 1896 the Swedish physical chemist and later Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius already calculated that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) would lead to a rise of the global temperature by 5-6° Celsius.[2] This was an astonishing scientific achievement, even if Arrhenius still ignored several relevant variables. Arrhenius, however, was not worried about the prospect. For he underrated the speed of man-induced increase, and he thought that the greenhouse effect would be more beneficial than detrimental to humanity: It would avert the danger of a new ice-age and bring better climate to the Northern parts of the earth, where he himself lived. “The enormous combustion of coal by our industrial establishments suffices to increase the percentage of carbon dioxide in the air to a perceptible degree... As in every other case, there is good mixed with the evil. By the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth, ages when the earth will bring forth much more abundant crops than at present, for the benefit of rapidly propagating mankind”.[3]
What strikes most modern readers in Arrhenius’s remarks is the combination of extraordinary acumen in physics and chemistry, lack of ecological and economic knowledge, and ethical naiveté. He does not consider, for example, that the rapid propagation of humankind as well as the growth of their needs would dramatically increase the combustion of coal, and while it might have been rational then to assume that the man-induced greenhouse effect could benefit Scandinavia, there was no reason to believe that the rise of temperatures in equatorial areas could be beneficial for agriculture there. Arrhenius’s evaluation is clearly “Scandinavia-centric”.
The quote from Arrhenius shows that the main reason for the actual situation, which is not unlikely to transform our planet into a partially uninhabitable place within the end of this century,[4] was not lack of knowledge. Many of the dangers confronting us have been known for decades to scientists and could certainly have been explored more in depth and communicated to a broader public much earlier if there had been a political will. Why was there none? The answer that brutal economic interests[5] hid the truth is certainly not wrong but it is unilateral – unlike in the case of the tobacco industry, the forces supporting the combustion of fossil resources were an integral part of the project of modernization that since the industrial revolution of the 18th century has radically transformed our value system, our social institutions, and in this process nature, too. The desire to subject nature completely to human needs has been traced to the divine empowerment of Genesis 1,28 but this is a remote ancestor that for almost two millennia did not trigger any of the consequences ascribed to it. For even in monotheism, although perhaps to a lesser degree than in the pantheistic polytheism of the pagan world, nature, being God’s creation, partakes in a holiness the awe for which has proved to be one of the most powerful inhibitors of human conduct.[6] We needed the replacement of this awe by a restless desire for new consumerist goods – a desire whipped up by modern technologies of advertising and manipulation – in order to get where we are.[7]
It is, first, the disappearance of this awe, second, Descartes’s development of a new conception of humans being no longer part of nature but somehow opposed to it, and, third, the noble desire to ease human suffering, extend the human life-span, relieve the burden of hard physical work, and allow more people to enjoy commodities originally restricted to a small elite that have produced the world in which we live. Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis already anticipates the scientific and the technological revolutions, which together with the unleashing of trade and industrial capitalism led to a self-reenforcing mechanism, further strengthened by the rise of the world market, democracy, and the welfare state. The success of a politician depends in such a system largely on economic growth, and the use of cheap energy was the easiest way to achieve such goal for the nation and re-election for oneself. For a long time, investments in fossil energies were understood as a generous renouncement of immediate consumption in order to render life smoother for future generations. Kant still considered the true problem of intergenerational justice the question on which grounds the present generations should make sacrifices for the benefit of future ones.[8]
But even after the deleterious consequences of certain investments could no longer be denied by informed and honest people, the decision to limit one’s use of energy is inhibited, on the individual level, by at least three psychological factors. First, the undesirable consequences are not directly visible; and the effort of imagination requisite to fancy them is often beyond the intellectual and volitive powers of people. Second, even when this effort succeeds, the victims, such as people starving to death or forced to dangerous migrations because of extending deserts in Africa or drowning on smaller Pacific islands because of the rise of sea-water are perceived to be far away in space and often also in time, and this did not enhance the motivation to use constraint. (The good news is that this has begun to change in the last decade in countries like Australia and the USA, for harm hits now closer to home.) Third, it is never my single individual contribution that triggers those consequences but collective behavior; and if I am the only one who renounces a certain good, while others continue to enjoy it, I will be worse off, while no real benefit will accrue to humanity at large, since others will step in for me. This is the well-known tragedy of the commons.[9]
Beyond this psychological level, the three most prestigious social institutions of the modern world, sovereignty of states, market economy, and democracy, have proven, if not hostile, at least not conducive to the solution of the problem of limiting climate change. As just said, often the destructive consequences of one’s behavior do not hit oneself but people far away; and if these people are beyond the borders of a political unit, there is no easy mechanism to enforce a change, neither in the domestic political process nor in international law.[10] But how about a country’s own citizens? As long as they are not yet born or at least not adults, it would be naive to assume that the market or the democratic process guarantee their rights. A true market (which must be defended by law against the formation of monopolies and oligopolies) is, on the whole, the most efficient mechanism to achieve an equilibrium of supply and demand for those who have purchasing power – but future generations do not have such power, and they do not have voting rights. Nobody represents them. It is therefore not at all surprising that we have not succeeded in institutionalizing justice between generations and between nations to the same degree that has been achieved with regard to justice between classes. Finally, it has to be mentioned that even among those who will in all likelihood be hit by the disastrous consequences of climate change denial is not rare. Human inertia plays an important role, since the social appreciation of certain activities is particularly hard to change – people do not like to acknowledge that what they and their parents cherished in the past, such as SUVs or expensive travels, was morally wrong. Furthermore, the complexity of the science involved and the decline of the trust in authorities of all kinds, including that of scientists, give denial of the facts an easy excuse.[11]
II. But while all this explains the enormous difficulties that we have in implementing intergenerational justice (which, of course is not limited to climate justice but represents a much broader concept), it does not change the fact that a behavior that creates considerable, probably enormous harm to people far away in space and/or time is gravely unjust, even if it satisfies immediate interests of the agents. It is impossible to reduce justice to an equilibrium between selfish interests. True enough, people may agree about Pareto improvements based on purely selfish interests if they are not yet in a Pareto-optimal situation; but it would be morally absurd to claim that only such moves are morally required. For the most horrific injustices may well be Pareto-optimal. The basic principle of any acceptable moral theory is the recognition of the demands of justice as something irreducible to one’s own interests. Justice demands the equal treatment of people and the recognition of the universality of norms, be they entitlements or prohibitions. Deviations from this principle are inevitable in a differentiated society; but they must be shown to be in the common interest. On the basis of such a universalist ethics, it is clear that harming the life, health, property, and freedom of people spatially and temporally distant for the satisfaction of fleeting desires is immoral – even if one has to grant that the status of future generations entails complex ontological questions that do not concern contemporary, only spatially distant people. The focus on demands of justice toward other persons does not exclude that there is intrinsic value in non-human entities, particularly organisms and ecosystems, a value that is not reducible to their instrumental value for human purposes. (A value does not lose its intrinsic nature if one holds the position that the recognition of such values enriches also the life of humans).[12] But it is impossible to deny that in the case of conflict between a human and an animal life, the first, while not the only value, trumps the latter, since only humans can be moral agents. And in political discussions it is probably wise to focus on justice between humans for the simple reason that a general agreement on this issue is more easily achieved – but not for the reason that in the Western tradition the recognition of such an intrinsic value is less developed than in the Asian religions.
While the idea of justice is irreducible to selfish interests, human nature is so deeply flawed that it is morally imperative to render moral behavior on the whole compatible with individual interests. While morality will always ask for some form of self-sacrifice, we have to create economic, legal, and political systems in which the moral person does not become the victim and the immoral one the successful usufructuary. There must be disincentives to immoral acts, and while such disincentives are not limited to punishment, coercion is crucial to protect the basic norms. Just law is the system of norms rightly enforced by public authority. The trust in the social reality of fundamental moral norms is necessary to keep even decent people law-abiding; for few want to be the lonely fool who respects rules at a high personal price when others are deviating from them. The tragedy of the commons cannot be overcome without a reliable mechanism of negative sanctions against those who break the laws. Thus, the transformation of our morality into an attitude that accepts responsibility for the remote consequences of our behavior must be accompanied by far-reaching legal reforms. While in such a new system there will be a better balance between rational egoism and universal welfare, the process of changing the system in this direction will inevitably hurt many interests and thus provoke stubborn resistance. Historical experience shows that such processes of transformation are more likely to be successful if they are based both on moral passion and emergent interests connected to the change. Abolitionism was inspired by sincere outrage at the horror of slavery – but it would be disingenuous to deny that the expected increase of cheap labor was a powerful motive for Northern industrialists too. Analogously, wise politicians must point both to the great injustice connected to climate change, which will hit most those who have least contributed to it, and garner the support of those green capitalists investing in sustainable energies.
But what are the main institutional changes that moral policies have to bring about?[13] I want to quickly mention changes in our concepts of property, liability, taxes, and constitutional and international arrangements. The central idea from the point of view of a universalist ethics can only be that both the use of resources and the emission of pollutants must be capped to a level that allows future generations to enjoy the same rights that the current generation is reaping the benefits of. While differentiations in property are just and inevitable as an incentive for work, it is hard to accept the idea that natural capital can become absolute property of a person or a generation – for unwrought natural capital is not made by human labor, the source of legitimate private property, but antecedes it. In the case of renewable resources, such as wood or fisheries, there can be no right, either of an individual or of a whole generation, to use the capital stock up – they can only harvest the “interests”. In the case of non-renewable resources, the argument does not work; for it would prevent any generation from using them, while a reasonable limitation is directed towards rendering such use possible for as many generations as possible. One will have to posit that the use of such resources must be compensated for by investments in alternative resources, which must increase the scarcer the first resource gets. Concerning the pollution rights, the cap of the acceptable global amount should be divided by the number of persons existing, each being entitled to the same “environmental space”. In order to avoid creating an incentive to further demographic growth, the UN should grant to the different countries the amount corresponding to the number of their inhabitants for a few decades so that countries may not be induced to policies fostering population growth. Rights to pollution should be tradeable in order to increase efficiency of allocation.
In order to facilitate the transition to a closed-loop economy, it is reasonable to conceive buying an environmentally problematic product as a mere buying of the use of the product. Thus, when it does not work anymore, the producers should be obliged to take it back since they are most familiar with the ingredients and best knows how to reutilize them. Whoever causes pollution, must be liable for it and pay appropriate compensation also in international courts – of course in the hope that this legal threat will lead to the prevention of future pollution. Concerning the problem that most ecological disasters are caused by a complex web of agents, the answer can only be that institutions who contribute to ecological damage have to pay into a compensation fund according to the quota to which their activities have contributed to such damage. There will be doubtless difficulties in determining such partial contributions; but even a rough demarcation would be widely better than letting institutions off the hook that share responsibility. And while for a large institution a very high civil penalty is often a greater deterrent than criminal punishments, we need also an expansion of criminal law in order to protect the environment.
All this shows that what we need is not so much a radical transformation of our legal system as an intelligent further development of its toolkit. This holds also for the economy, an area that is only at a superficial level opposed to ecology – for both share a concern with scarcity and are subject to the imperative of efficient use of scarce resources. While the theoretical and empirical arguments for the superior allocation efficiency achieved by markets when compared with command economies are strong, it always depends on the legal framework whether the desirable outcomes of markets are achieved or whether the externalization of costs proliferates, as in all cases of environmental destruction. One has to distinguish sharply between two theories of the market: The one teaches that fair and free competition within a certain framework has to be accepted because it benefits society at large; the other claims that economic agents have an absolute freedom to engage in activities they think will maximize their profit whatever the costs for others. Such agents quickly understand that they can multiply their profits if they can influence legislation to change the rules of the game, for example by allowing them to externalize even more costs on others, like people far away or future generations. It does not help here to appeal to the Coase theorem and claim that bargaining leads to higher efficiency than compensatory Pigouvian taxation. For not only does the theorem ignore the question of just distribution, it presupposes that there are no transaction costs, which is almost never the case – and in the case of future generations there is not even a bargaining partner to begin with. Rightly understood, ecotaxes are no imposition from a state that does violence to individuals – such taxes not only diminish the use of scarce or harmful resources but somehow represent the demand or compensation claims of future generations, which would inevitably drive the prices up if they already existed.
On the constitutional level, I think that we need a new organ with high scientific expertise that represents further generations – either as a part of the legislative or, in countries with a constitutional court, as part of the judicial power when it comes to the decision whether certain laws violate basic rights of future citizens, which should be guaranteed by every constitution. And internationally we will have to move toward an Environmental Council that complements the work of the Security Council in determining the basic environmental goals of humanity at large. All these are ambitious projects, and it will take decades to realize them. But if we do not modify our institutions in such direction, it is not unlikely that the Baconian project will prove not a blessing but the prelude to the greatest catastrophe in human history.
[1] “On the Variations of the Climate of the Geological and Historical Past and their Causes”, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 27 (117), 1-62.
[2] Arrhenius’ essay appeared in 1896 in German in Sweden and shortly afterwards in English translation: “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground,” Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science (fifth series), vol. 41, April 1896, 237-276. See http://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf
[3] The Evolution of the Universe (Swedish original 1906), Harper & Brothers: New York/London 1908, 61-63.
[4] See David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth. A Story of the Future, Tim Duggan Books: New York 2019.
[5] See Naomi Oreskes/Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt, Bloomsbury: London 2010.
[6] A great expression of this is Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato si’.
[7] See Ken Sayre’s Unearthed. The Economic Roots of Our Ecological Crisis, University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame 2010
[8] Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, Third Thesis.
[9] See Garett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (3859), 1243-1248, who focused on unregulated population growth.
[10] It suffices to point to paragraph 52 of Draft Decision -/CP. 21 of the 2015 Paris Agreement within the UNFCCC: “Article 8 of the Agreement does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation”.
[11] See my essay “Causes and Consequences of the Destruction of the Belief in the Attainability of Truth: Philosophical Reflections with a Historical Example,” Filozofia 79 (2024), 113-132.
[12] For comprehensive ethical discussions, see Holmes Rolston, III, Environmental Ethics, Temple University Press: Philadelphia, PA 1988 and Robin Attfield, Environmental Ethics, John Wiley: Hoboken, 2014.
[13] For a systematic overview of a doctrine of natural law that takes account of the ecological problem, see my book: Morals and Politics, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004 (German original 1997).