"The book addresses an issue of fast-growing concern in the academic and non-academic debate on climate change: the role and responsibility of the oil and gas industry, and the consequent implications for climate policy and politics, and for the governance of climate change"--
AbstractSolar geoengineering (SG) is considered a promising, albeit controversial, climate engineering technology to help reduce predicted global warming. However, the complexity of SG raises serious doubts about its political practicability. The objective of this article is to investigate this technology's feasibility, a fundamental dimension of said practicability. Feasibility is here understood as a political property: the higher the feasibility of a state of affairs ranks, the greater its eventual political practicability. According to this perspective, the less SG clashes with economic, institutional, and moral soft constraints, the more feasible it becomes, and hence the greater its political practicability. An analysis of economic and institutional soft constraints points to a high degree of SG feasibility. This feasibility is, however, limited by the perceived non‐bearable moral costs which SG involves. Given the greater weight of moral soft constraints, SG's overall feasibility is therefore low. Based on these indications, the article offers suggestions for lessening SG's friction with soft constraints, especially with the highly sensitive moral ones, with the aim of increasing this technology's feasibility. On the basis of this heightened feasibility, the paper concludes with policy recommendations which improves the practicability of SG.
Abstract The paper discusses Baatz's work (2018) published in a recent issue of this journal. It first considers the proposed framework of justice within which to evaluate instruments for adaptation finance; it then develops the framework's criteria of fairness and feasibility further; finally, it proposes an option for increasing the capacity of Baatz's framework to ensure that instruments for adaptation finance operate in a just way.
Carbon emissions threaten the stability of climate systems and change climate dynamics in ways that inflict harm on present and future generations. Therefore, the ultimate moral crux of climate change involves harm avoidance and prevention. Moral cognitive neuroscience, and in particular the dual-process theory, indicates that up, close and personal harm triggers deontological moral reasoning, whereas harm originating from impersonal moral violations, like those produced by climate impacts, prompts consequentialist moral reasoning. Accordingly, climate ethics should be based on consequentialist approaches. Moral cognitive neuroscientific research indicates, in fact, that consequentialism is closer to the moral processes and judgements human beings normally use when faced with issues like climate change that involve impersonal notions of harm. Adapted from the source document.
Scientific evidence suggests that to have a 75 per cent chance of limiting warming in 2100 to 2°C above the pre-industrial level, the cumulative emissions of CO2 over the period 2010–50 should be capped at 657.1 Gt. The objective of this article is to examine the distribution of such an emission budget by applying different ethical perspectives. In particular, the article first analyses the paths for sharing the emission budget, that is, the major families of distributive patterns that vindicate a number of elementary principles and criteria of distribution. Subsequently, it presents and discusses the shares of the emission budget attributed to states, regions and groupings of states according to the paths investigated and it draws some reflections on the implications of such shares for the ethics of mitigation. Finally, it advances some lessons for international climate policy.
Justice, by and large, implies greater legitimacy and can persuade parties with conflicting interests to cooperate more closely on collective actions. Therefore, the aim of this article is to investigate the role that ethical arguments have played in restoring mutual trust between the developed and the developing countries in negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol Adaptation Fund and in transforming the patent failure of the Subsidiary Body for Implementation Bonn May 2006 meetings on its management into the encouraging success of the Nairobi December 2006 round. These meetings are analysed from the perspectives of procedural and distributive justice in order to interpret the negotiating dynamics and their outcomes. More specifically, procedural and distributive justice are, respectively, sought in the Bonn and Nairobi formal meetings through reference to, and the emergence of, principles and criteria of participation, recognition and distribution of power among Parties, and of Parties' responsibility for, and vulnerability to, climate impacts. Adapted from the source document.