CLAVES de razón práctica. The climate crisis as a moral problem (2015)

June 30, 2017 | Autor: Antxon Olabe Egaña | Categoria: Climate Change, Climate change policy, Climate Change Adaptation And Mitigation Strategies
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The climate crisis as a moral problem1 Reconciling a world whose population is expected to reach 9.6 billion by mid-century with a climate system that is beginning to come apart at the seams is an unprecedented moral challenge ANTXON OLABE EGAÑA Efforts to redress climate change have moved into a new phase. After two decades of discrepancies, the signing of an emission mitigation agreement by the governments of the USA and China in late 2014 and the significant position adopted by the European Union have reactivated international climate policy in the run-up to the decisive Paris Summit. Even Pope Francis has weighed in on the global discussions on the issue with a document of considerable social and environmental importance. This article examines the climate crisis in the light of the legacy of the philosophy of modernity. The programme of emancipation propounded by the modernity, as defended by German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas, is incomplete. One of the tasks still pending is precisely that of activating its spirit of criticism and reflection to help create the cultural and political framework required to make the necessary transition away from a global energy system that has begun to destabilise the Earth’s climate and is therefore jeopardising the future of humanity. THE EARTH: OUR COMMON HOME Out of the scientific revolution led by Nicolaus Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton and others came a cultural message that helped to undermine the foundations of the Ancien Régime: the idea that the world was organised according to mathematical laws that the human mind could discover and understand. As a result the metaphysical explanations that had previously predominated came to seem less authoritative than those provided by reason backed up by actual observation. This idea that nature is organised according to mathematical laws that the human mind can understand became the cornerstone of science and philosophy in the 17th century, and provided the basis for the transition to the modern era. The resulting world-view was decisive in helping the thinkers and philosophers of the time to formulate the values and objectives of the Age of Enlightenment and lay the foundations for the philosophy of modernity. It was considered that reason could explain how society was linked together just as it had done with the laws of physics, and could thus help determine what type of institutions were best suited to enabling people to structure their lives in freedom.

This article is going to be published in the Spanish cultural magazine CLAVES de razón práctica in the September-October issue, 2015 1

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Against that background, in the early 19th century European and American traders came to see the world as a vast, empty space where the natural environment did not appear to be a limiting factor. For all practical purposes its capacity to provide resources and receive waste was seen as endless: the idea of “ecological limits” made no sense. But after two centuries of intense economic growth and population expansion, the world has filled up and shrunk, and worldwide environmental impacts and pressures have destabilised essential biosphere support systems such as the climate. In 1968, on the first manned mission to reach lunar orbit, US astronaut William Anders took a photograph that came to be known as “Earthrise”. Its impact on the collective imagination was extraordinary: for the first time people saw a picture of our world set against the immense background of space. That image reinforced the idea that human beings all shared a common home. Life science has also taught us that we are interlinked with the physical, chemical and biological processes that take place on system Earth. In the 21st century, humanity cannot see itself as separate or disconnected from that reality. Scientific knowledge is required to be objective and rigorous, so it is the best tool available to us to learn about “what is”, i.e. the sphere of facts. Karl Popper, a true philosopher of science, believed that the decisive criterion by which all scientific theories should be judged was the extent to which they could be refuted by empirical data. Metaphysics and dogma are not refutable, and are therefore not considered as science. Empirical data collected and analysed systematically at research centres all over the world over the past few decades and compiled by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirm unarguably that the build-up of emissions from the burning of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution has destabilised the world’s climate. This means that the world-view on the basis of which the world economy was developed – in which nature is regarded as all but limitless – no longer holds up. We need a novus imago mundi, a new world-view that can help us realign space and time and encourage us to act responsibly towards global commons such as the atmosphere; a world-view that can help us factor the need to protect the viability of the biosphere and stay within its safe boundary levels into our sense of moral responsibility in caring for our common home. WHY ARE WE FAILING TO DEAL WITH CLIMATE CHANGE? It is now more than 30 years since the scientific community began to sound the alert concerning the risks of climate change. Decisive figures in the early understanding of the problem included US scientists Stephen Schneider and Jim Hansen, who based their analyses on the excellent field work carried out by Charles David Keeling on the island of Mauna Loa. Swedish climatologist Bert Bolin also played a fundamental role in convincing the United Nations to set up the IPCC, whose five reports since 1990 have established the scientific basis for our understanding of the problem. In the generation that has passed since then their warnings have not sufficed to convince the political leaders of the international community to introduce the measures required to redress the situation. The Earth has warmed up by 0.85ºC since 1880. The temperature is now at or very close to its highest level since the last ice age 12,000 years ago. GHG emissions have risen in parallel to the population increases and economic development driven by the Industrial Revolution, because the energy system that underlies both these processes is based on the large-scale burning of coal, oil and gas (which currently account for 80% of the global energy mix). Further momentum is added by factors such as the population

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explosion and increases in average per capita income. Both of them increase the demand for energy, which in turn can only mean further increases in CO2 emissions in the current system. The impacts of climate change on human and natural systems are many and varied. We have entered the age of consequences. Climate change is already affecting the availability of fresh water in many regions, especially Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, thus exacerbating numerous local and regional conflicts; it has significantly increased the frequency of extreme climate events such as heat waves (according to the WHO 35,000 people died as a result of the heat wave that swept across Europe in the summer of 2003, and 15,000 in Russia in 2010), droughts, hurricanes and wildfires; it has caused a drastic reduction in Arctic ice cover in summer; it has resulted in rises in sea levels, affecting the lives of millions in countries such as Bangladesh; and it is exerting great pressure on biodiversity and food resources... I believe that one reason why so little progress has been made towards redressing the problem is that the debate on climate change has been framed exclusively in scientific and technical terms. The moral core of the debate has been avoided, when the truth is that climate change decisively affects the foundations of justice and fairness on which our democratic societies are based. Vested interests have created confusion between the essential role of science in understanding events (the origin, direct causes and dynamics of the problem) and the realm of meaning, i.e. how the destabilisation of the climate affects our understanding of ourselves as a human community. This bias in the framing of the problem is largely due to the fact that to date there has hardly been any involvement by philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, historians, educators, anthropologists, thinkers from the world of culture, legal theorists, artists, poets, film-makers, etc. in discussions on the climate crisis. Without them it is not possible to think about the problem socially in a way that is meaningful for a majority of people in society. Unless scientific information (e.g. the IPCC reports) is socially and culturally decoded it means little to people. If it does not appeal to their basic values, people continue to see the problem as mere information, mixed in with the jumble of background noise created by our hyper-mediaoriented society. History teaches us that the transformations in society that led in the past to great, emancipating achievements were possible because men and women took action on the basis of the values that gave meaning to their lives. Collective action and solidarity will not redress the climate crisis unless we are able to explain it in moral terms which millions of people can understand and which are meaningful and relevant to them in their personal lives. The situation can only be turned around if enough people feel that their core values, e.g. the world that their children and grandchildren will inherit, are being compromised. This is important because 30 years of experience have shown that the leaders of the decisive countries will not adopt or maintain the important decisions required to decarbonise the global energy system unless they are confronted by a well-informed, mobilised international civil society. And the necessary active involvement on the part of millions of individuals can only be achieved by appealing to the values on which they base their lives.

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RESPONSIBILITY TO FUTURE GENERATIONS AND THE MOST VULNERABLE COMMUNITIES Over the past 300 years the critical gaze of modernity has resulted in a striving for “individuation”, personal self-determination, civil rights and freedoms, the democratic construction of the will of the people and for universal human rights in an effort to shine a light on the dark places of the societies of the past and put an end to their legacy of servitude. From a 21st-century viewpoint it is clear that the path has been anything but straight. In the first half of the 20th century the civilising project of the Enlightenment failed in its birthplace in the heart of Europe, as two world wars and the Holocaust cast doubt on the very roots of the 19th century’s heartfelt belief in the uninterrupted moral progress of humanity. Moreover, the socalled “philosophers of suspicion”–Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud – all posed penetrating questions that affected the very basis of the legacy of modernity in terms of thought and morality. The dialectics of the Enlightenment formulated by the forerunners of Critical Theory, Horkheimer and Adorno, presented themselves during the barbaric period of National Socialism as an amendment to practically the whole of the project of the Enlightenment Therefore, we cannot defend an ingenuous view of the moral path taken by societies, governments and states. Experiences such as Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the gulags and the Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot, the dropping of Agent Orange by B-52 bombers in Southeast Asia, the death squads of Latin America, the Tutsi-Hutu genocide and the massacres of Muslims in Srebrenica, to quote just a few examples from the 20th century, leave no room for ingenuousness. But we have learned from those terrible failures of reason and we have got back on our feet over and over again, once more turning a moral gaze on our world, because our deepest humanity demands that we do so. Without that commitment the universal values with which we identify today would not have grown to maturity in the discourse of our society. In the work of Habermas the term “moral dimension” is used to refer to the fair, impartial resolution of relations between persons via universal bases or prescriptions. Habermas defends the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and associates with it a programme of emancipation based on freedom and justice. In Kantian terms, “emancipation” means advancing towards personal autonomy, i.e. the ability to decide for oneself. The moral actions of society therefore seek to create the best possible conditions for the carrying out of projects for personal autonomy. Given the multiplicity of models for living that can be found in modern societies (what Max Weber called “polytheism of values”), rational morality should refrain from interfering in matters concerned with living a good life (ethics), as they belong to the private, intimate sphere of each individual. Rather, it should look to regulatory issues concerned with justice and fairness, i.e. at the foundations of society; at the issues that define what rights and duties the members of a society acknowledge one another to possess. The principles laid down in this area are by definition universal, and are constructed in a dialogue between free individuals in a context not shaped by imposition. This leads to contemporary rational moral theories being presented as theories of justice. The climate crisis is approached in moral terms because there are decisive factors of justice at stake. Its negative consequences are felt by societies everywhere, but it is the poorest, most

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vulnerable communities in developing countries that are and will continue to be hit hardest. For example, many island states in the Pacific and Caribbean will find themselves under water when the sea level rises, including Tuvalu, the Republic of Kiribati, the Solomon Islands, Nauru, the Republic of the Maldives and the Bahamas. Climate change threatens the very existence of these countries. Moreover, indigenous communities such as the Inuit in the Arctic and the millions of people who live in the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta will have to emigrate; and millions in SubSaharan Africa will see the already devastating droughts there grow worse, exerting yet more pressure on their scant resources. “The world’s less privileged children are the ones who will suffer most as seas rise, fires scorch cropland, diseases spread north and famine returns to lands that had been abundant. At this point in history few can claim the excuse of ignorance” (Moore & Nelson, Toward a Global Consensus for Moral Action, 2011). Moreover, an increase in the average temperature of the environment of 2ºC compared to preindustrial times will drastically change climate parameters. It will be an unqualified disaster for the world that our children and grandchildren stand to inherit from us, and indeed for the rest of the life forms that share the biosphere with us. In the face of this menacing prospect, we in our generation must appeal to our own sense of dignity and assert our unbreakable will to transition towards an enduring society. The idea is not to draw up plans for a sea-change in the economy and in society: the road to the totalitarian hells of the 20th century was paved with good intentions in the form of social engineering, and this important lesson must not be forgotten. The importance of the challenge facing us, however, cannot be overstated. Within a few decades – between 2015 and 2050 – we need to transform an energy system that has been in place for 250 years and we need to overcome the powerful resistance that is and will be deployed by those who oppose change out of economic and political interest. If such a “viable utopia” is actually to be brought about, we need to preserve and pass on the memory of the extraordinary, emancipating gains achieved by society at different times in the past in spite of all resistance and obstacles. Building hope for the climate means remembering that for centuries political control was in the hands of small elites until society claimed the power to make its own political decisions and representative democracies were set up; that the European colonial system which dominated much of the world for 150 years collapsed when the people of the colonies decided to be free; that the ridiculous prejudice of different rights for men and women was considered natural for a very long time until it was finally overcome, at least in our societies. It means remembering how the Afro-American minority in the US won recognition of their civil rights; how Soviet communism, which seemed such a rock-hard system of domination, eventually collapsed; how parliamentary democracies returned to Latin America after decades of military dictatorships; and how the apartheid system in South Africa, which humiliated and exploited men and women of colour for 300 years, was also brought to an end. It also means remembering the formidable progress made in the legitimisation of social rights and the establishment of the welfare state. Building hope means remembering that great changes can be made when the moral conscience of society says “this far and no further”. At the time of its abolition, slavery had been lawful for more than 2500 years, and the Quakers who pioneered the struggle for human dignity were told that the universal abolition of slavery was a radical, utopian idea. Even so, they started a process of change that did not end until slavery was

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eradicated. The forces that are causing the destabilisation of the climate system are not uncontrollable natural phenomena but social dynamics: they depend on us, and we have the last word. If millions of individuals are to feel called on to involve themselves in redressing the problem through politics, the response we present to the climate crisis must be tackled via the foundations of justice and fairness on which our democratic societies are based. In that sense, we must connect with the philosophical and cultural tradition of modernity which`s mainstream from Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant via Alexis Tocqueville, the Frankfurt School, John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice and the civic republicanism of Hannah Arendt to Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice, has always take a critical and moral attitude towards the crucial challenges facing by society (Giner, Historia del pensamiento social, 2013). Climate change is set to be one of the defining challenges of the 21st century. We need to rebel out of a sense of what is right, just as our forebears rebelled against tyranny, slavery and totalitarianism and for democracy, and just as the leaders of the civil rights movement stood up for the equality of all human beings. That is our legacy and the tradition to which we belong, because climate change is much more than just a scientific and technical problem: it is a moral challenge that strongly affects our understanding of ourselves as a universal community. The message is clear: we cannot let our children and grandchildren inherit a world that is environmentally devastated. National governments have a duty to preserve the Earth’s climate, because they are the representatives of the best interests of society and as such they cannot stand by as it slides into an irreversible decline. The great Spanish-born intellectual Jorge Semprún (1923-2011) realised as he approached the end of his life that the challenges of the 21st century would be very different from those of the 20th, and wrote that “the 20th century has been dominated by the issue of the transformation of society, but the 21st-century may well be dominated by the issue of the transformation of the species” (Semprún, Pensar en Europa [Thinking Europe], 2006). Reconciling a world whose population is expected to reach 9.6 billion by mid-century with a climate system that is beginning to come apart at the seams is an unprecedented moral challenge. It is the challenge that will define our generation.

ANTXON OLABE EGAÑA IS AN ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMIST AND ESSAYIST WHO WRITES IN THE SPANISH DAILY NEWSPAPER EL PAÍS. HE IS ALSO THE AUTHOR OF HOMO SAPIENS Y BIOSFERA. RECONDUCIR LA CRISIS CLIMÁTICA-AMBIENTAL [HOMO SAPIENS AND THE BIOSPHERE: REDRESSING THE CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENT CRISIS], WHICH IS DUE TO BE PUBLISHED SHORTLY.

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