Justice, Power, and Climate Change

• In Event: Possibilities for Climate Justice in a Non-Ideal World

Abstract

To date, the climate ethics literature has overwhelmingly focused on questions of justice: e.g., how should the costs of climate action be distributed among states, or within them?; does fairness require us to take “historical emissions” into account, or to exclude them?; what climate duties do contemporaries bear with respect to future generations? Thanks to this work, we now know much better what makes climate change unjust, who’s to blame, and what a more just world might look like. Yet, real climate justice seems to be as elusive today as it was when the first climate treaty was signed 30 years ago. This paper aims to examine this shortcoming, before proposing an alternative approach for climate ethics.

The critique focuses on two problems. The first concerns the implicit audience of climate-justice appeals, which, I argue, is almost invariably the global elite—be them wealthy states, corporations, or economic classes. The idea is that these actors alone command the resources and power necessary to prevent further climate injustice, compensate the harmed, and realize just arrangements globally. This suggests the second problem, which concerns moral psychology: much of the climate-justice literature (implicitly) endorses the view that recognition of moral principles is alone sufficient to motivate moral action, even among those who stand to lose from such moral action—i.e., the very same global elites to whom these appeals are directed. Regrettably, after 30 years of climate inaction, it appears there is little reason to share this view.

After presenting the critique, the latter half of the paper limns an alternative frame for climate ethics, called the climate-power approach (CPA). Unlike the climate-justice approach, the CPA orients itself to the global majority—i.e., poor, working, and middle-class citizens in every state—and centers on questions about how to cultivate the solidarity and counter-hegemonic power necessary to meaningfully shift global climate politics.

Author

• Ross Mittiga, ​Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile