These days it seems like everyone knows that we should do something about climate change, but there also seems to be a lot of inertia to take action.
Until relatively recently, a common view was that governments would provide the solutions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) special report “SR15”, released in 2018, established that individuals should also contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in order to meet the mitigation requirements to limit warming to 1.5 C. Publicly, there are plenty of good intentions from both individuals and governments, but there’s not a lot of action on either side. So, what’s going on?
Given that climate change is, quite literally, an existential problem, it’s strange that we’re not all rushing to solve it. After all, what is more morally good than saving humanity from impending destruction? Upon inquiry, it turns out that there are many barriers to action, with perhaps the most surprising one being the philosophical foundation: the ethics of why and how we should act to address climate change. The arguments for action are riddled with challenges. Tim Hayward’s review article, “Climate change and ethics”1, discusses the dilemmas. I have drawn out, below, some of the most important points from that article, along with some more recently published findings, in order to explore the inertia around action on climate change. On review of these arguments, and in light of the many barriers to action, it appears that the persuasiveness of moral reasoning in this respect is weak, because, I will argue, multi-generational future-impact challenges (such as climate change) don’t play well on a normative basis.
Barriers to action
It has been found that most people in developed countries are aware of climate change and the need to take action to avert the associated risks2. The hesitancies to doing so are varied and many3, and collectively could be described as an intention-action gap. A common, lamentable, issue is being stuck in a comfortable first-world lifestyle. Our dependence on emissions-producing activities is high, but not un-substitutable. Changing habits requires willpower, which can be difficult to find when we observe (or even just believe) that other people around us aren’t changing theirs. More concerning is that most people in the developed world are embedded in systems that aren’t designed to enable low-carbon lifestyles.
When people do take climate-change-mitigation action, there is often a misunderstanding of what are the most effective actions to take. Studies from 20084 and 20225 demonstrate that this trend is persistent, and hence an absence of (or ineffective) public education on climate change action is a problem.
Unfortunately, it also seems that the power …
Read the full article which is published on Daily Philosophy (external link)
