Climate Justice in an Ethically Complex World

Book Update #4 – Values Chapter

In book one of my guidebook series, I am writing about how we can cultivate our intellectual, ethical, and emotional resources to embrace ecological limits and advance the transition towards sustainable and democratic societies.

This latest writing update is an essay that discusses some of the ideas I’m exploring in a chapter on ethics and values.

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Achieving a just transition away from fossil fuels is a core motivator and strategic concern of the climate movement. Today’s young activists call for climate justice, and have pushed considerations of fairness into policymaking. A review of various Green New Deal (GND) proposals finds that they almost universally invoke justice to frame plans for investing in a 100% renewable energy system. But what if our definition of a just transition is too idealized to guide our response to the climate crisis?

While the concept can evoke a number of ideas, climate justice often points to the disproportionate impact of fossil fuel use and climate disasters on particular groups of people, and a resulting obligation to specifically safeguard, invest in, and elevate the voices of those groups. The original GND resolution describes justice as “stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of… frontline and vulnerable communities.” The vision expressed in influential documents on climate justice often seems to be ever-increasing welfare as the only just outcome of a renewable energy transition.

Though this vision may primarily be meant to express our aspirations, its feasibility is not typically examined in depth. As a result, our understanding of climate justice may not yet incorporate much of the complexity that we face.

Transition Dilemmas

Consider one source of ethical tension: Communities will experience greater harm as we move further away from a climate that can support agriculture and safe living conditions, suggesting a need for as quick a transition to renewable energy as possible. However, the well-being of countless numbers of people is currently tied to the fossil fuels that we must rapidly phase out. A quick thought experiment illustrates the challenge. If fossil fuel use was completely shut down tomorrow, the planet would likely stop warming and very slowly return to its pre-industrial state. However, with fossil fuels currently providing 80 percent of the world’s energy, most economic activity would also stop—food production processes, manufacturing centers, transportation systems, healthcare institutions, and more. If we abruptly abandoned fossil fuels, it’s clear that untold harm would follow. Societies would have to simultaneously expand their social safety net to try to ensure that everyone can continue to meet their basic needs amidst a rapid transition. Despite these policies, there will be a threshold decarbonization rate beyond which communities may experience some reduction in welfare in the short to medium term.

This thought experiment highlights a contradiction at the heart of the energy transition: moving too slowly means greater harm from an increasingly damaged climate, while moving too quickly—reducing fossil fuels faster than we can replace them with renewable energy—likely means some level of hardship from decreased energy services that we currently rely on every day. Our concern for maintaining communities’ well-being in the present seems to impose a limit to transition speed that comes at the expense of their well-being in the long term.

Some may assert that we can transition fast enough to comply with our carbon budget with no cost to well-being, but that is an open question demanding extensive evidence as well as subjective judgment. To work towards justice we cannot assume that this question is already resolved, and must instead attempt to thoroughly investigate it.

Difficult Choices

It makes sense to begin by establishing the technical limits to transition speed. We would need to ask several questions about the conventional ideas for decarbonization (i.e. those that allow us to reduce carbon emissions without shutting things down). How fast can our technology become more energy efficient? How fast can renewable energy infrastructure be manufactured and installed? How fast can we reforest available land to absorb carbon from the atmosphere? How fast can we expand our social safety net and reorganize society to meet basic needs at lower rates of energy consumption? We must also look into other limits facing these transition strategies beyond deployment speed. For example, what is the total potential impact of increased energy efficiency and reforestation? Do resource availability issues constrain the size of the renewable energy system we can build?

Only after getting a sense of these technical limits do we have the context to consider ethical limits. If we try to achieve the maximum transition speed that technology will allow, is any harm likely to result? How would different groups of people experience the benefits and costs differently? Carefully considering these questions can help us think about the possible consequences of moving too quickly. Finally, we could compare more moderate pathways to the rapid transition pace demanded by our dwindling carbon budget, and calculate how much warming would take place. If the answer is that we can only maintain the energy services required to meet basic needs at today’s levels by causing warming beyond the international “red line” of two degrees Celsius (2C), then we would need to accept that some reduction of welfare is inevitable, and determine which side to err on.

I believe that this dilemma is something transition advocates must examine. Technological advancements could of course alter the analysis, making it more feasible to address the climate crisis without as much disruption, but ecological problems are somewhat time-limited. At today’s high level of emissions, delaying serious action for just a few years can significantly increase the decarbonization rate needed to keep warming below 2C and consequently the likelihood of reduced welfare during the process. According to the UN Emissions Gap Report, after a decade of inaction the rate needed now is more than double what it was in 2010. If it were possible to decarbonize with no significant consequences for our well-being today, that may not be true in a year. The ethical complexity of our situation increases constantly.

Different perspectives on justice point towards different conclusions. Climate justice often entails a recognition that some of the most disadvantaged communities, who had little role in causing climate change, are affected worst. It suggests that their needs should be prioritized, which would likely mean pushing the transition as fast as possible. However, those living in carbon-intensive societies might be best served by a transition that seeks balance between reducing emissions quickly and maintaining a certain level of energy services. There will be advocates on each side arguing that theirs is the most just approach.

This discussion illuminates a vital point: there is no single answer as to what is just. Because humanity has waited so long to address the climate crisis, many clear-cut good choices may be off the table, and we’ll instead need to look for the best available among various difficult options.

Analyzing Justice

To figure out the nuances of climate justice, we must reflect on one of the fundamental conditions that gives rise to the idea of justice in the first place—scarcity. If we lived in a world where all living things could access enough resources to meet their needs today and in the future, there would be less of a reason to think about justice. When scarcity is involved justice becomes especially relevant, because we have to determine legitimate ways of distributing limited resources and opportunities.

By analyzing the types of limits that give rise to scarcity, we can better understand the challenges we face. We need to figure out where the limits are, the extent to which they can be overcome, and how best to do so. Ecological limits, for example, are rooted in physical laws and give rise to absolute scarcity that we can do little to overcome. Prolonged overshoot beyond ecological limits eventually causes societies to collapse, so we must learn to live within them. Other limits may produce a more artificial scarcity. If the economy distributes wealth in a grossly inequitable way, such that many people don’t have the resources needed to embrace a rapid energy transition, it’s because of man-made limits that we can change.

Our analysis of limits must incorporate the realities of trade-offs and uncertainty. In a world of limits there are always trade-offs. Rights have costs, both in terms of the material resources required to grant them and in terms of conflicts with other rights. We cannot assume that all rights we believe should ideally be possessed can actually be granted. We must first figure out what is physically possible, and then determine what is morally preferable given the constraints at play. Uncertainty is another key aspect of our judgments. Many details about our issues can be known with a high level of confidence, others not as much. Like everything else, dealing with uncertainty requires balance. We should strive to eliminate it but accept that we may not be able to do so completely. In those cases, we must acknowledge that it exists. Action will often be warranted nonetheless. We can only be morally responsible for the predictable consequences of our actions.

We may ultimately decide to allow more warming than we could theoretically avoid because the challenges of a maximally fast transition would be too substantial for some communities. At the same time, I believe that the kind of “transition culture” we would need to develop would help us access major sources of well-being that are currently neglected in societies driven by consumerism, profit, and power—dynamics I explore in my essay on a new Enlightenment. Nevertheless, it is not realistic to define a just transition as one that avoids any adversity, even for vulnerable communities whose welfare is prioritized. A more nuanced perspective might recognize justice as a good faith commitment to undoing the burdens we can undo—the artificial scarcity—while attempting to equitably distribute the unsolvable burdens posed by absolute scarcity.

It is crucial that our shared understanding of justice incorporates the challenges arising from absolute scarcity, the likely trade-offs between different interests and values, and the many uncertainties that will accompany the transition. Climate activists must initiate conversations about these topics within the movement; otherwise, we may find the transition’s strongest advocates paralyzed when ethical dilemmas arise. Once we acknowledge the many limits we face, justice will probably look quite different than it did in the fossil fuel age, when abundant energy and resources provided quick yet superficial solutions to human problems. We’ll need to stimulate broad public discussion and recognition of this new vision of justice to have any chance of passing policies informed by it. If we can learn to navigate the ethical complexities of our non-ideal world, we will be much better prepared to transform it.

This is an excerpt from my ecological transition guidebook series, which is currently being written. If you would like to provide feedback on the full draft when it is ready or be informed of future progress, please subscribe here at freedomsurvival.org.

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Check out the previous post, which explores some of the “core facts” of an “eco-democratic value system.”