So here’s a weird one for you.  Philosophers are sometimes asked to take part in public discussions, and where they have a contribution to make, I think this is an entirely good thing.  Philosophers recently gave evidence at the Leveson Inquiry, and they said some helpful things about freedom and privacy.  Philosophers are also sometimes asked to bring a little philosophical clarity to moral problems, and every now and then I get asked to talk about the ethics of climate change in the midst of nonphilosophers — I just gave a talk at the University of Leeds, in connection to the UK Energy Research Centre, in an interdisciplinary workshop about low carbon vehicles.  (If you can stand it, the talk is here — it’s really a short argument for the claim that we know more about how stuff works than how we ought to use it, and that the questions we ask shape the answers we give.  Not headline news.)

I find this kind of thing very rewarding (for me anyway), but there is always the thought that I’m moralizing, rather than doing moral philosophy.  The idea is that I’m setting myself up as a moral expert, telling people what they ought to do, and that’s an instant turn off.  I try to get around that by saying, at the start of such talks, that I’m not a moral expert at all, and in fact there’s evidence for the view that people who study ethics are no more ethical than anybody else (there’s some evidence for the thought that ethicists are actually in bad moral shape – Eric Schwitzgebel’s research is interesting stuff).  I say you wouldn’t expect someone who teaches or writes about English literature to crank out good sonnets, so why think someone who studies moral philosophy knows better than you what you ought to do?  The student of moral philosophy just knows a bit more than most about certain ethical concepts, some part of the history of ideas, and maybe like any philosopher they can follow the implications of views pretty keenly.

But on the train back, I wondered whether ethicists can get away with what looks increasingly like a cop out to me.  Is there’s scope for a weird conflict of interest here?  If you’re an organic chemist and asked to talk about some aspect of human fertility, you can simply state the facts you know, make judgements based on your expertise, and advise a panel accordingly.  But if you’re asked by some people in the medical profession to say something about the moral philosophy around the abortion debate, do you have to declare the fact that you’re a consequentialist or a Kantian or a virtue ethicist?  If you’re of some faith or other and tied to a pro-life view as a result, maybe there’s reason to think that you should mention that ahead of accepting an invitation to advise a panel on abortion.  Shouldn’t an ethicist fess up ahead of time too?  “Look, I’ll give you an overview of the positions, but I’m a convinced consequentialist, I think that’s the right view of morality, so this is going to be a really biased take on abortion.  But I can’t help that.  I think consequentialism is true.”

Are applied ethicists sometimes unable to give unbiased advice?  Is there a problem for them that’s no problem for people like chemists?

The current issue of The Philosophers’ Magazine features a fine forum on sport, with a number of philosophers of sport weighing in (ahem), just in time to prove that even the Olympics can be a source of philosophical inspiration.  Here’s an article by Jim Parry, visiting professor of Olympic studies at Gresham College no less, called ‘The Philosophy of the Olympic Movement’. He goes into some detail about the philosophical underpinnings of the modern games (there’s a lot I didn’t know about that), but he makes a particularly interesting point about the fundamentally ethical nature of sport.  He writes,

It is difficult even to state the characteristics of sport without relying on terms that carry ethical import, and such meanings must apply across the world of sports participation.  Without agreement on rule-adherence, the authority of the referee, and the central shared values of the activity, there could be no sport.

Somewhere behind the sponsorship deals, security concerns, drugs testing and large personalities, there’s the founding ideal of the modern games:  the promotion of a certain set of values, including co-operation, respect and what Parry calls ‘mutual valuing’.  The Games went to Moscow, and who knows, maybe that had a little to do with the wall coming down.  Perhaps something good rubbed off at the Beijing Olympics.  Maybe we could do with the injection of such values here in London too.

So what do you think?  Is sport a fundamentally ethical practice?  When the Olympics come to town, does it have good effects on human rights, tolerance, and other sorts of values in the host country?  Do athletes and spectators alike walk away better people for having taken part or looked on?  Are the Olympics part of a real push towards peaceful internationalism?  Or is it all a huge waste of time, money, and lycra?

Here’s the last in a series of three posts about shifting facts and climate change, from a talk in a series called Rights to a Green Future in Utrecht earlier this month. The general idea is that the facts of climate change are shifting around, and I think that’s doing something to moral reflection on action. The first post, about history and cumulative emissions, is here. The second, about the present state of play and equal per capital shares, is here. This post is about arguments for action that depend on some future good.

These arguments are hypothetical in form: if we value a sustainable world, a green future, a nice and habitable planet like the one we’ve got for those who come after us, then, the argument goes, such and such a sort of mitigation or adaptation strategy is now demanded. Sometimes the argument is reversed: if we want to avoid a future with a lot of miserable lives in it – suffering we might dodge if we choose wisely now – then, again, such and such a strategy is morally demanded of us.

Commitments to a sustainable future, when they do appear in international negotiations, typically mention the Brundtland Report’s definition: sustainability ‘implies meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. The question at the back of everyone’s mind when they hear this, the question which needs now to shift to the front, is this: is it possible for our needs and future needs to be met?

There are now a lot of people around – we were just joined by number 7 billion, and it looks like we’ll have 10 billion before the world’s population levels out. Most of our basic needs are met by burning fossil fuels. In other words, the moral argument for action now might be thought to boil down to the question of whether we really can act to meet everyone’s needs. In a nutshell, is sustainability possible? Is it possible to meet our own needs and leave a habitable world in our wake?

That’s partly an empirical question. The world seems to have settled on two kinds of targets or limits – the thought is that if we pass them we’re in for dangerous climate change and an unsustainable world. One is 2 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels, and indeed this target was loudly endorsed at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conference in Cancun in 2010, which called for all countries to take urgent action to limit the increase in global average temperature to beneath this temperature threshold. (There’s a good summary here.) Some nations, particularly low lying island states with a lot to lose as sea levels rise, have argued that 1.5 degrees or less is the only safe maximum. (112 countries argue for this more ambitious target.  There’s a list and details here, of the so called Least Developed Countries and the Association of Small Island States.)

How likely are we to stay under the 2 degree target? We have already warmed the world by .74 degrees, and another half a degree or so is thought to already be in the climate system. In a paper which appeared in October of this year, the examination of published emission scenarios from different climate models found that in the set of scenarios with a ‘likely’ chance of staying below 2 °C, and by that the mean merely a better than 66% chance, emissions must peak and begin falling rapidly very soon, between 2010 and 2020. (Joeri Rogelj et al, ‘Emission pathways consistent with a 2 °C global temperature limit’ Nature Climate Change, Volume: 1, (2011) 413–418)

As they put it,

“Without a firm commitment to put in place the mechanisms to enable an early global emissions peak followed by steep reductions thereafter, there are significant risks that the 2 °C target, endorsed by so many nations, is already slipping out of reach.”

The related target is 450 parts per million of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, which is thought to be the maximum we can emit and stay beneath the 2 degree threshold. The level at present is about 390 ppm. It turns out that while the projected date at which passing 450 is unavoidable is still several years ahead, the choices we make now about building power plants and extracting energy can ‘lock us in’ to pathways that overshoot 450. According to a report released last month by the International Energy Agency (World Energy Outlook 2011), the world’s existing infrastructure is already producing 80% of the carbon budget we’ve got left if we want to stay under 450 ppm. If trends continue and we build more fossil fuel burning energy plants, by 2015, 90% of the available “carbon budget” will spent. By 2017, the remaining carbon budget that might keep us under 450 ppm will be gone, and we’ll have no chance at all of staying under 2 degrees. As the Guardian reported,

“The door is closing,” Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said. “I am very worried – if we don’t change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety] … If we do not have an international agreement, whose effect is put in place by 2017, then the door to [holding temperatures to 2C of warming] will be closed forever,” said Birol.

Are we likely to have such an agreement? Copenhagen was viewed by many as the world’s last chance at a global agreement, and of course that did not materialise. As I write this, newspaper reports from the current UN Climate Conference in Durban say that the world’s leading economies now privately admit that no new global climate agreement will be reached before 2016. The EU is pressing for targets now, but the US, Canada, Russia, Japan, India and China say new negotiations should not begin until 2015, to come into effect in 2020 at the earliest.

The IEA, again in its 2011 report,

“projects that world CO2 emissions from fuel combustion will continue to grow unabated, albeit at a lower rate … [this] is in line with the worst case scenario presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the Fourth Assessment Report (2007), which projects a world average temperature increase of between 2.4°C and 6.4°C by 2100.”

For what it’s worth this kind of talk jives with the results of a 2009 poll, undertaken by the Guardian, which showed that,

“Almost nine out of 10 climate scientists do not believe political efforts to restrict global warming to 2C will succeed … An average rise of 4-5C by the end of this century is more likely, they say, given soaring carbon emissions and political constraints.”

What exactly does passing the 2 degree limit mean? No one is sure. It’s synonymous with so called ‘dangerous climate change’ or ‘runaway climate change’. The IPCC associate temperature rises above 2 degrees with ‘more and more negative impacts’. Mark Lynas put some flesh on the these conservative bones with a book called Six Degrees, an attempt to work out what we’re in for as the world heats up, degree by degree, by looking at what the world has been like, in its long history, at those temperatures. It’s just one take on our prospects past 2 degrees, but it’s well-researched, compelling stuff. Here’s a summary:

Between 2 and 3 degrees of warming, one ‘tipping point’ is crossed. Enough heat to cause the eventual complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet is in the system, which would eventually raise global sea levels by as much as seven metres and change the planet’s weather systems. Heat waves are likely to be responsible for many deaths each summer in Europe, coral reefs die and the marine food chain is disrupted, and the loss of fresh water from melting glaciers and snowpack affects both food production and the availability of drinking water.

Between 3 and 4 degrees, a large tipping point is crossed, where it’s thought that climate mechanisms might run out of control, with tipping points leading to the emission of more greenhouse gasses and more tipping points leading to the emission of still more greenhouse gasses, and so on until warming is, in effect, runaway. If the Amazon rainforest collapses, dries and burns, as is consistent with a 3 degree world, the carbon released could be enough to push us up another 1.5 degrees past a four degree world. Beyond three degrees, Africa, Australia and parts of North American turn into deserts on some climate models – food production obviously suffers, and water becomes scarce.

Between 4 and 5 degrees another tipping point is crossed, the Arctic permafrost melts, and huge amounts of methane and carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere, further increasing the effects of climate change and pushing us up to 5 or 6 degrees. The Arctic melts, again increasing sea level. Humanity heads towards the poles, as other parts of the world become uninhabitable.

Beyond 5 degrees … there’s nothing like a clear picture. The world hasn’t been that hot for millions of years. Lynas talks of methane hydrates on the ocean floor erupting up in warmer waters and pushing the greenhouse effect out of control, and real questions arise here about the possibility of human beings joining the other 95% of the earth’s species in extinction. There’s talk of the Earth becoming a hot, desolate, lifeless ball, like Venus.

So what can we make of arguments for sustainability in the light of all this? Is sustainability still a live possibility?  The argument is of the form, if we want a world like x, we must do y — but it’s possible that a world like x is becoming less and less likely.

It seems to me that sustainability arguments can take still take hold of us, with a particular sort of urgency, but perhaps only for a few years more, after which it becomes more and more likely that we’ll be unable to do anything to avoid the possibility of runaway climate change. I have to admit that it’s not easy to say things like this and keep a straight face. One sounds very much like some end-of-the-world cultist, warning that the end is nigh, but the voices telling us that we’ve only got a few years left to leave a habitable world in our wake are coming from the authors of peer reviewed papers, the heads of respected research institutions, the writers of books that win the Royal Society Science Prize. The world’s nations have agreed a 2 degree target, calling climate change an ‘urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet’.  These aren’t crazy people talking.  It’s the agreed language of representatives of our governments.

There are thoughts to be had here about civil disobedience, as well as other thoughts about human nature. But since I wrote this, we’ve had something of a conclusion in Durban. (Mark Lynas’ valuable discussion of the meaning of the Durban Platform is here.) It looks like there’s a commitment to have a commitment in 2015, which will come into legal force, if all hurdles are cleared, in 2020. Whether or not we’ve left it too late is unlcear, but there’s room for philosophical reflection on how to think about this possibility, about what it does to arguments for action on climate change, and about what to make of ourselves against this backdrop.

Here’s the second of three posts on the shifting ethics of climate change, timed with recent events in Durban. The first, about the changing facts of cumulative emissions, and what this means for historical arguments for action, is here. This post considers arguments for action that employ talk of emissions rights or the call for equal per capita shares.

Some moral arguments for action on climate change depend not on the past but the present. They get us past a certain sort of recrimination – an objection to historical arguments on the grounds of a lack of foreknowledge on the part of the West – and move us all in the direction of equality with a clear and green conscience.

You might think, for example, that however we got to where we are, the benefits and burdens associated with using fossil fuels ought now be shared out equally. That’s what human beings ought to do with a limited, scarce and common resource. Maybe this is something you think follows from reflection on distributive justice or fairness. Maybe it has to do with emissions rights, which follow in a way from the rights that some argue all human beings have – rights to a secure and free life, for example.

If there are ‘safe’ emissions levels, if we can think clearly about the planet’s sinks as common resources to be divided up equally, then it follows pretty sharply that everyone on the planet has an equal right to emit within those safe limits. Perhaps you think in terms of a greenhouse budget, that some maximum concentration of greenhouses gasses in the atmosphere is acceptable, and we must divvy up the shares that remain equally, and take care to stay under that limit.  (Here’s Peter Singer, arguing for a ‘fair deal on climate change’; you can read more details in ‘One Atmosphere’ in his book, One World.)

Whichever of these lines you choose to take, given the enormous levels of emission per capita in the West, it’s been argued on almost all sides that the West has an obligation to reign in its consumption, bringing it down and in line with others whose use of the planet’s common resources is less reckless. This, anyway, is part of the thinking behind such things as the contraction and convergence model, advocated with gusto by Aubrey Meyer and the Global Commons Institute and endorsed by a very large number of people and organizations, as a means to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions equitably. The idea is that some safe global emissions ceiling is set, everyone has an equal right to emit greenhouse gasses beneath that ceiling, and countries get emissions budgets based on population. High per capita emissions in the developed world contract, leaving room for the developing world to develop its way out of poverty, while levels converge beneath some safe threshold and, together, wind down and avoid the worst of climate change.

The plan has many supporters – these quotations are from the Global Commons Institute’s website.

“If we agree to per capita allowances for all by 2030 then assigned amounts for Annex One countries would be drastically reduced. However, because all countries would have assigned amounts, maximum use of global emissions trading would strongly reduce the cost of compliance. In such a scenario Industrial Countries would have to do more, but it would be cheaper and easier.”

Jan Pronk COP6 2000, Dutch Environment Minister

“Liberal Democrats argue for the principle of contraction and convergence with the long-term goal of equalising per capita emissions globally.”

Chris Huhne, now the UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change

“When we ask the opinions of people from all circles, many people, in particular the scientists, think the emissions control standard should be formulated on a per capita basis. According to the UN Charter, everybody is born equal, and has inalienable rights to enjoy modern technological civilization.”

China State Counsellor Dr Song Jian, COP 3 1997

“We do not believe that the ethos of democracy can support any norm other than equal per capita rights to global environmental resources.”

Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Prime Minister of India, 2002

“The international climate regime should be based on legitimate principles of equity, such as long-term convergence of emission levels per capita in the various countries.”

Nicholas Sarkozy President of France 2008

“In the final analysis the per capita emissions in emerging economies will meet those of industrialised countries. I cannot imagine the emerging economies will one day be permitted to emit more CO2 per capita than we in the industrialised countries. With this proposal, emerging nations with rapidly expanding economies could be on board the global climate negotiations scheduled for 2009.”

Angela Merkel President of Germany 2008

But, again, the facts are changing. Around ten years ago, this was, and some places it still is, the model used for thinking about contraction and convergence:

The idea is that, fairly rapidly after 2000, developed countries have a steep drop in emissions to make, while China, India and the rest of the world can grow a bit, meeting us in 2030, where we all cruise downwards, eventually to nearly preindustrial levels in one hundred years or so. (EDIT:  Note that the GCI has new models, updated for the current state of play, with new, challenging emissions reductions.  You can see those, and the GCI’s dim view of the Durban platform, here.)

The trouble is that, in 2012, the world looks much different than it did just ten or even five years ago. The developed world has not undertaken a programme of rapid per capita emissions reduction, and China, India and the rest have not just grown a bit, with their emissions likely to flatten out and on course to meet us on the way down in 2030. While it is a mixed bag, with some countries taking steps to lower emissions rates, and indeed emissions dipping in places during the recession, the trend in global emissions has always been upwards – the global increase is now 45% on 1990 levels, coincidentally the date of the IPCC’s first assessment report.

According to a report published by the European Commission in September and another by the International Energy Agency this year, 2010 was a record year in terms of increasing emissions.  The long term annual average increase in emissions from 1990 is 1.9%, but in 2010 the increase was 5.8%, the largest jump ever recorded. This was driven partly by increases in China of 10% and India of 9%, as well as rises in the developed world, notably the USA.

How far have we strayed from the lines on that graph? The USA’s emissions have not dropped sharply, but increased by 11% on 1990 levels. China did not slowly grow, but passed the US as the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in 2006. Amazingly, again according to the European Commission, China’s per capita emissions could equal US levels by 2017 – it’s thought China has already overtaken France and Spain. China has promised not to let itself reach US levels, and its investment in renewables is huge, but it is astonishing to think that a country with a billion more people in it could match the United States in its bloated per capita emissions rates in just 5 years. It’s growth on an extraordinary scale.

The trouble with the moral equation and present emissions is not just this mess of facts, but the time we have left between now and 2030. It made sense at the start of this century to talk about emissions rights and equal per capita shares, which we might divvy up and keep under a safe emissions limit. As we move closer to the point of convergence, the 2030 deadline and the so called safe threshold, our ability to do the right thing, our room for moral manoeuvring, wanes. Emissions rates, on this model, should have begun falling rapidly in the West 5 or 10 years ago, but they have generally increased. Per capita emissions in the developing world had a bit of breathing room, but were not expected to rocket up past our own, already excessive levels.

Kant’s dictum, ought implies can, is something worth reflecting on in this connection. It makes sense to say that we ought to do something only if we actually can do it. It makes sense to call for climate justice, to demand that emissions be shared out equally among the people of the world beneath some safe threshold, only if this is something we in fact can do. There is now at least the possibility that it is now too late to do the right thing — it might already be too late for the LCDs and small island states, who are calling for an immediate deal and even tougher targets. As the space on the graph between us and 2030 compresses, and the lines we have to contemplate riding out become steeper and steeper and therefore further and further from the realm of the physically possible, the possibility that it’s too late is genuinely before us. Facts here intrude on morality, and sometimes the possibility of doing the right or just or equitable thing can slip beyond our grasp if we let it.

This kind of thing isn’t entirely outside our experience. Suppose you’re at an office party, your friend has been drinking, and you know he’s going to make a fool of himself as he walks towards the boss. You’ve got a few moments to grab his arm and save him from trouble he doesn’t deserve. But in that moment, at a certain point, it becomes too late for you to act, and in a single quiet breath, all your inner reflection about what you ought to do changes, passes from a live practical question to something theoretical, to a moot discussion of what you might have done or should have done. Maybe it becomes regret. We’ve all felt that, that sense of a chance slipping away. It’s possible to have that feeling about sharing out emissions rights. It’s possible to have that feeling about this part of the moral dimension of climate change.

We’ll turn to sustainability arguments, which depend on the future, not the past or present, in the next post.  Meanwhile, I’d like to know what you think about arguments for equal emissions rights.  What I’m contemplating is that calls for equal rights to emit will at some point bang up against so called ‘safe emissions thresholds’.  What do we do when it’s too late to for ‘climate justice’?  There are further thoughts to be had about morality in extremis.  As it gets harder and harder to do the right thing, as ‘safe’ emissions pathways get more and more steep, is there room to excuse ourselves, and say that equal emissions rights are just beyond us?  I’d say no, but it’s hard to square that with other things that seem true.