And so what has been politically feasible on climate change in the United States is inconsistent with what ethics and justice would require of the United States. If this is the case, strong criticism of the United States is warranted as long as the U.S. leadership is not advocating among its own people to support positions that ethics and justice would require of it.
The United States and several other countries have been acting in the last four COPs as if they need not commit to impose costs on themselves to reduce the threat of climate change as long as others refuse to commit because other nations who do not impose emission constraints on themselves would benefit economically by being able to produce goods at lower costs than those who increase energy costs through adoption of climate policies. In other words, the United States has been consistently negotiating as if its economic interests trump its ethical obligations to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to the U.S. fair share of safe global emissions.
As a matter of justice, no nation, including the United States, can refuse to reduce its emissions to its fair share of safe global emissions levels on the basis that others won’t act. Yet this is consistently what the United States and a few other nations have done. Making matters worse, the negotiations leading up to Durban beginning at the Poznan COP in 2008 have been plagued by the United States insistence that it would not agree to be bound to a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement that the United States alone among the nations of the world refused to ratify largely because it did not contain emission reduction commitments for developing nations. This U.S. position ultimately made the negotiations much more complicated than they needed to be by insisting that negotiations continue under two tracks, one for the Kyoto parties and one that would ignore the Kyoto agreement and its architecture. In taking this position, the United States was communicating to the world it need not commit to emission reductions until others so committed. And so, one of the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases has consistently refused to reduce its emissions to its fair share of safe global emissions on the basis of national economic interest.
The United States and several other nations including Canada, Japan and Russia have now refused to make a commitment in a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol on the basis that they need not commit to reduce greenhouse gas emission until other nations make equivalent commitments. Although the U.S. has agreed to make voluntary reductions under the Cancun Agreements, this was committed to on the basis that developing nations made voluntary commitments under Cancun also. [4] Also, as we shall see, these voluntary commitments are inadequate to prevent dangerous climate change.
In examining previous COPs, we have proposed the ethical criteria that any proposed post-Kyoto regime must meet at a minimum. [10] That is, any post-Kyoto regime must:
- Require sufficient greenhouse emission reductions to assure that the international community is on a greenhouse gas emission reduction pathway that will prevent dangerous climate change harm. This is sometimes referred to as the environmental sufficiency criteria.
- Begin to base differences among national allocations on the basis of equity and justice. This is sometimes referred to as the equity criteria.
- Assure that those responsible for climate change provide adequate, predictable adaptation funding to enable developing countries, and in particular, the most vulnerable developing countries to do what is necessary to avoid climate change damages in cases where it is possible to take action and to prevent damages, or be compensated for climate change damages in cases where it is impossible to take protective action. We refer to this as the just adaptation criteria.
Although these three criteria, i.e., environmental sufficiency, equity and just adaptation, constitute the minimum ethical considerations that any climate regime must satisfy, they don’t capture all ethical questions raised by any proposed climate change regime. There are numerous other ethical questions raised by any proposed climate change regime that go beyond these minimum requirements including issues of fair process, gender issues in policy formation, obligations of sub-national governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals for climate change, human rights issues relating to climate change, and many more. This article, however, now looks at Durban in light of the three minimum criteria.
A. Environmental Sufficiency
Durban not only failed to produce an agreement that assures that the international community is on a greenhouse gas emission reduction pathway that will prevent dangerous climate change harm, it deferred serious implementation of any new commitments in emission reductions until 2020. Although Durban accomplished the laudable goal of getting all nations to negotiate an agreement with legal force, it did almost nothing to put the world on an emission reduction pathway that had hope of preventing dangerous climate change. Although the Cancun COP the year before Durban did produce voluntary commitments from the most important developed and developing nations, these commitments leave at the very minimum a 5Gt gap between emission levels that will be achieved if there is full compliance with the voluntary emission reductions and what is necessary to prevent 2 degree C rise, a warming amount that most scientists believe could cause very dangerous climate change, and an amount that has been adopted as the ultimate goal of the UNFCCC. (See [4] for a fuller discussion of this) There is no reason to believe that future negotiations that were agreed to in Durban will overcome the unwillingness of nations to commit to emissions reductions that are necessary to prevent dangerous climate change. In Durban, the hard issues have simply been deferred to the future.
B. Equity Criteria
The second minimum ethical criteria that all post-Kyoto proposals must meet is the requirement that national emission reduction proposals must be consistent with what “equity” and “justice” demands of nations. That is, equity requires that each nation reduce its emissions to its fair share of safe global emissions. And so, each nation’s emission reduction levels should be based upon what distributive and retributive justice demands, not on national self-interest. Although there are different theories of distributive justice that lead to different national allocations, many justifications for national GhG emission allocations voluntarily agreed to under Cancun fail to satisfy any ethical scrutiny. In other words, it is not necessary to know what perfect justice requires to conclude that some voluntary proposals for national GhG allocations under Cancun are unjust and Durban did nothing to change this. These issues have been deferred to future negotiations under Durban.
C. Just Adaptation Criteria
The third minimum ethical criteria for judging any second commitment period under the UNFCCC is that it must provide adequate funding to support adaptation programs in developing countries given that some developing countries have done nothing to cause climate change and must take steps to avoid harsh impacts. The Durban agreement did manage to create a Green Climate Fund that will be the financial mechanism to manage adaptation funding, and also made some progress on a few other adaptation issues. Yet, Durban failed to identify dedicated sources of funding to implement an adaptation agenda that is based upon “mandatory” contributions to “new”, “predictable”, and “additional” sources of funding. Therefore, Durban failed to satisfy the ethical criteria for adequate funding for adaptation.
IV. Conclusion.
To adjudicate the disagreement about whether Durban was a disaster or a meaningful step forward, one must look at Durban’s resolution of the major issues needed to get the world on a reasonably hopeful path that would avoid dangerous climate change, whether nations are agreeing to commit to their fair share of safe global emissions, and whether mechanisms for needed adaptation are in place. Under these criteria, Durban was a huge failure.
