About the Author:
Donald A. Brown is Associate Professor of Environmental Ethics, Science and Law at Pennsylvania State University where he is currently teaching inter-disciplinary courses on climate change and sustainable development, and acting as Program Director of the Collaborative Program on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change whose secretariat is the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State. Mr. Brown is also Director of the Pennsylvania Environmental Research Consortium, an organization comprised of 56 Pennsylvania universities and the Pennsylvania Departments of Environmental Protection and Conservation and Natural Resources.
Before holding these positions, he was an environmental lawyer for the states of Pennsylvania & New Jersey and Program Manager for United Nations Organizations at the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of International Environmental Policy. Mr. Brown has written about and lectured extensively on climate change issues over the last 20 years. His interest has been the need to integrate environmental science, economic, and law in environmental policy making.
I Introduction.
Two dramatically conflicting headlines about the outcome of the recently concluded Cancun United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change‘s 16th Conference of the Parties are initially defensible:
One might be: Some developed nations tragically fail to make meaningful commitments on climate change for the twentieth year in a row as scientists tell the world that we are running out of time to prevent dangerous climate change.
Another might be: Cancun surprises many by keeping hope alive for a global climate change deal.
This article looks at these conflicting conclusions about Cancun through an ethical lens. This article will explain that although some hope for a global solution to climate change is still alive due to decisions adopted in Cancun, one must see Cancun in the context of a twenty-year failed attempt to prevent dangerous climate change, and from that stand-point, Cancun must be seen as another troubling ethical failure of those most responsible for climate change. Twenty years of failure to achieve a global solution to climate change is a tragedy because each year when there has been a failure to commit to adequately reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, it becomes more difficult in subsequent years to get on a GHG emissions reduction pathway capable of preventing serious climate change.
For some, the modest progress in Cancun toward a global approach to climate change has been seen as a positive step forward. (BBC, 2010) This is so because many thought that the UNFCCC architecture for a global solution to climate change was in jeopardy of completely unraveling before Cancun; a legal structure that had been gradually been put into place since 1990 when negotiations on a global solution to climate change began. Yet, this article will argue that Cancun must be seen in the context of what has failed to happen in the last twenty years on climate change and not only on the basis of the very limited positive steps made in Cancun.
To many others, Cancun was another tragic lost opportunity for the international community to prevent dangerous climate change as well as the most recent in a series of moral failures of those most responsible for climate change to commit to steps necessary to protect those who are most vulnerable to climate change’s harshest impacts. One observer of Cancun concluded, for instance, that:
The Cancun Agreements of the 2010 UN Climate Summit do not represent a success for multilateralism; neither do they put the world on a safe climate pathway that science demands, and far less to a just and equitable transition towards a sustainable model of development. They represent a victory for big polluters and Northern elites that wish to continue with business-as-usual. (IBON, 2010)
We must see climate change as an ethical problem because:
(a) it is a problem caused by some people in one part of the world that puts others and the natural resources on which they depend at great risk;
(b) the harms to these other people are not mere inconveniences but in some cases catastrophic losses of life or the inability to sustain life; and
(c) those who are vulnerable to climate change can’t petition their governments to act to protect themselves but must rely upon a hope that a sense of justice and responsibility of those causing the problem will motivate them to change their behavior. Since climate change raises civilization challenging ethical questions, any proposed climate change regime must be examined through an ethical lens.
This article reviews the Cancun outcome through an ethical lens in light of the overall responsibility of those nations who are exceeding their fair share of safe global emissions in regard to their duties:
(a) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to levels necessary to prevent harm to others;
(b) to reduce greenhouse gas emission to levels consistent with what is each nation’s fair share of total global emissions; and
(c) to provide financing for adaptation measures and other necessary responses to climate change harms for those who are most vulnerable and least responsible for climate change.
To understand the significance of what happened in Cancun, it is necessary to briefly review the history of international negotiations leading up to Cancun. That is, it is not sufficient to simply examine what happened in Cancun without seeing Cancun in the context of the twenty-year negotiating history that had as its goal the prevention of dangerous climate change and the harms that each year of delay in agreeing to a global deal exacerbate.
