•8•
The general structure of a basic right presented here rests on the conviction, shared with Thomas Hobbes, of the significance for human life of helplessness and vulnerability: “for everyone healthy adulthood is bordered on each side by helplessness, and it is vulnerable to interruption by helplessness, temporary or permanent, at any time. . . . To be helpless they [infants and the aged] need only to be left alone” (19). Acknowledgment of basic rights is an expression of human solidarity. “The honoring of basic rights is an active alliance with those who would otherwise be helpless against natural and social forces too strong for them” (33). Individual persons control what they can when they can, but when they are in danger of suffering at the mercy of forces they cannot control, they need to rely on others, including the strangers who inevitably constitute the vast majority of humanity. This solidarity among strangers can build institutions structured by rights and duties that will protect us each, as needed, against some of the threats that are liable to confront us.1 The implementation of rights through the performance of duties blocks threats—not all threats, of course, but “standard threats” that are “ordinary and serious but remediable” (32). We do not control which threats arise or when they arise, so we need to do our best to foresee them and to build in advance strong social institutions that will be ready to provide social guarantees for the most fundamental human interests against standard threats if and when they occur. Chapter 7 further explores “the institutional turn” required by basic rights.
CHANGING THREATS
Two crucial features of the standard threats against which rights-based duties can protect are that they must be determined empirically and that they change.2 This account of basic rights was specifically designed to deal with the contingent and variable character of human threats. Some accounts of rights have tried to specify rights a priori based on putatively unchanging features of humans. This produces static lists of rights that gain immunity to change through vagueness about implementation. That is not the approach here. While human fragility and vulnerability, in general, may be about as constant as anything can be, the salient particular threats vary over time. We need to confront their specificity, which means that arguments about rights cannot be purely conceptual but need to respond to historical context. Effective protections must be specific to threats. We have to investigate what is happening in order to determine what the crucial threats are and how institutions can be designed to block them.3
In the late 1970s when I was writing this book, it was virtually unimaginable, for example, how much of a threat to the basic right to security and the basic right to liberty that digital surveillance and manipulation, subsequently perfected through the revolution in information technology, would become. Facebook, Google, and Amazon had not been created, and it did not occur to us then that such organizations would eventually be compiling all the information and meta-information about every person that they could grab with, at best, meaningless pseudo-consent and often entirely without their targets’ knowledge. Uncontrolled social media have, I think, become standard threats, and the design of social guarantees to protect personal security and individual liberty is one major current challenge for institutional imagination.
The greatest threat to basic rights in the twenty-first century, however, is most likely uncontrolled climate change. The other greatest threat is the reckless abandonment of the treaty architecture that partially restrained nuclear weapons, but for reasons I will explain presently, I will focus here on accelerating climate change. Forty years ago when I was writing Basic Rights, the human institutions and practices driving climate change—the global energy regime dominated by fossil fuels and the industrialization of agriculture—were growing from strength to strength. Scientists employed by the major oil companies had realized in the 1950s and 1960s that business-as-usual was a threat to the climate.4 The U.S. government had been informed of the climate threat from continued sale and use of fossil fuels in the 1960s and 1970s.5 I, however, was not yet alert to the threat of climate change—it was simply in one of my personal blind spots—and it was not mentioned in the first edition. I have been studying climate change since 1991 and hope to some degree to remedy that omission here.
Forty years later, now that the danger of indefinitely worsening climate change is evident to all but the willfully blind, it is a legitimate question whether the general structure of basic rights originally laid out in 1980 can cast any light on how we should respond. Is it perhaps necessary to articulate an additional basic right—say, a basic right to a healthy environment or a basic right to a stable climate? Others are advancing such formulations, and I have little interest in quarreling with them.6 My standard for judging proposed additional rights, however, is that if rights are to be “justified demands . . . not . . . merely requests, pleas, petitions” (14), and basic rights “are everyone’s minimum reasonable demands upon the rest of humanity” (15), it is essential for theorists not to multiply rights beyond necessity, to adapt Ockham’s phrase. In the economistic jargon often used now, we must avoid “rights inflation” by not adding supposed new rights too readily. So, the question becomes: Is what is threatened by climate change sufficiently new or different that it cannot be accounted for by reference to the familiar rights?
The answer, I think, is a resounding no. In fact, what are endangered by climate change are those very most fundamental human interests that must be protected if any rights at all are to be enjoyed or exercised. Climate change has become a pervasive standard threat. “The substance of a basic right is something the deprivation of which is one standard threat to rights generally” (34). Consequently, climate change is a threat not only to widely acknowledged basic rights but also to all other rights, the protection of which depends on fulfillment of basic rights.
For example, the basic right to physical security has always seemed to me, as I think it did to Hobbes as well, to be the right that it would be most difficult to doubt seriously. And dozens of people in Paradise, California, in 2018 were incinerated in a flash inside their own homes by a then-unusual wildfire—the Camp Fire—that, even if one of its contributing causes was corporate negligence, was also partly caused by prolonged drought exacerbated by worsening climate change. Climate change threatens physical security—and not only through forest fires, but also through flash floods that can also come quickly in the night, sea-level rise and consequent storm surges that rush farther inland, the extension of the habitable territories of vectors of deadly diseases (like mosquitoes and ticks), severe storms on land and sea, extreme heat, and other phenomena.7
The basic right to subsistence is at least equally obviously threatened by the global energy regime of fossil fuels that is forcing the climate to change.8 The definition of subsistence, as used here, begins: “unpolluted air, unpolluted water, adequate food . . .” (23). With regard to air, it is extraordinary that millions of people are killed every year by the polluting effects of the combustion of fossil fuels, even before the indirect effects of combustion by way of climate modification are taken into account. Calculating the effects on life expectancy of particulate air pollution, Michael Greenstone and Claire Qing Fan conclude: “particulate matter (PM) air pollution is the greatest current threat to human health globally,” and they emphasize that “energy production is the primary source of particulate pollution.”9 The death toll from longterm exposure to outdoor fine particulate matter is several million people every year globally.10 Americans account for more than twenty thousand of these deaths annually.11
With regard to water, the burning of coal by electricity-generating plants routinely leads to the dumping of the ashes into unlined pits that then chronically leak dangerous chemicals, including arsenic, into groundwater.12 And the enormous surge in hydraulic fracturing of shale rock—fracking—for either oil or gas consumes gigantic volumes of water that in many cases might otherwise have been available for drinking and other household uses or for irrigation of crops. The intensity of water use for fracking has increased many times over and “ubiquitously in all US shale basins,” producing up to 1,440% larger volumes of wastewater, which contains “salts, toxic elements, organic matter, and naturally occurring radioactive material,” and which would have to be managed meticulously if it were not to contaminate ground-water and streams.13
The most dangerous effects for humans of the combustion of fossil fuels, however, come indirectly by way of the dynamics of rapid climate change and the effects of climate change on the fundamental interests that basic rights are intended to safeguard—on none more than on the food at the heart of subsistence.14 The disruption of agriculture by extreme weather, like the March 2019 flooding in the U.S. Midwest and in Mozambique and Zimbabwe after cyclone Idai, can cause bankruptcies for farmers, transportation blockages, spikes in food prices, and absolute shortages of food, as well as drownings and the destruction of homes. For those who are sufficiently poor to begin with, even temporary food price rises can damage nutrition, particularly in children, by making food unaffordable. In Climate Change and Poverty, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, distinguished international lawyer and scholar Philip Alston, embraces the shocking conclusion that “climate change threatens to undo the last fifty years of progress in development, global health, and poverty reduction”.15
As I emphasize in chapter 2, the first duty correlative to any right is the negative duty not to deprive anyone of the focus of the right, such as unpolluted air, unpolluted water, or adequate food. Through the example of the flower-growing contract, I highlight the danger that economic and political arrangements made by others will make it impossible for ordinary people to provide such elements of subsistence for themselves by trapping them inside social structures that conflict with their fundamental interests. The most striking feature of the current climate change is that it is anthropogenic: human arrangements, specifically the choices over the last two centuries that have produced and preserved the global energy regime dominated by fossil fuel, are forcing the climate to change by expanding the cumulative concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. One might say that climate change is a threat that humanity (collectively) is imposing upon itself (collectively).
It is far more accurate to say, however, that climate change is a threat that those (relatively few) with vested interests in fossil fuel are imposing upon those (many millions) whose air is being polluted with particulate matter from combustion, those (many millions) whose supply of fresh water is being endangered, and those (many millions) whose food is likely to become scarce or unaffordable if the energy business-as-usual persists. Those who are fighting to maintain the dominant position of fossil fuel in the global economy, including their financial enablers in banking, are imposing increasing dangers on everyone else (including their own descendants). As Alston’s UN report puts it, “climate change is, among other things, an unconscionable assault on the poor”.16
Climate change will not stop becoming more severe until the addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere stops, because the atmospheric concentration cannot stop expanding until we stop adding to it. This means we must reach net zero carbon as quickly as possible. Reaching net zero carbon means escaping from the grip of the current global energy regime and making a rapid transition to new sources of energy that do not inject carbon dioxide into the earth’s atmosphere. This means nothing less than an historic global Energy Revolution on the same scale as the Industrial Revolution or the Agricultural Revolution, but much more quickly carried out. Part of what is initially difficult to grasp is that this Energy Revolution is required for the protection of basic rights.
The continued use of fossil fuels for energy has become a pervasive standard threat to basic human rights. Many people will be left unable to provide healthy air, healthy water, healthy food, and physical safety for themselves and their families if societies do not stop obtaining their energy by burning fossil fuels and releasing the carbon dioxide. Every human has a negative moral duty to stop depriving others of the essentials of life, and those of us who are not helpless have the duty to protect those who are.
The current global energy regime is a social institution that is causing harms that its builders mostly did not foresee or intend. In order to protect basic rights, now that we understand the mushrooming magnitude of the harms that are in fact being caused by this institution, we must replace it with institutions that do not undercut the capacity of ordinary people to enjoy their basic rights—with energy systems that do not undermine the planet’s climate.
Smart electricity grids, wind turbines, solar power farms, modified agricultural techniques, electric cars—these and many other such possibilities are matters of technology policy and energy policy. It may seem genuinely weird to suggest that they are matters of human rights as well. But they are. Standard threats change over time, and we have to look and see what they are. Severe climate change can undercut the necessary conditions for stable and sustainable human economies and societies in which people can enjoy their basic rights. Changes are being imposed on the climate because societies are so far clinging to primitive and dirty sources of energy when superior energy technology has emerged and become affordable. We need to face reality and promptly abandon the carbon-based energy technology that previous generations blundered into without understanding its destructive cumulative effects.
THREE SPECIAL FEATURES OF CLIMATE CHANGE
This is not the place for anything like an adequate account of the significance of climate change.17 However, three special features of climate change must at least be noted: the urgency of vigorous mitigation because of the likelihood of our soon passing points of no return, or tipping points, for positive feedbacks and even cascades of positive feedbacks; the threat to the human solidarity that is the ground of commitments to human rights; and the threats to human rights posed by strategies for controlling climate change that attempt to make up for inaction now with dreamed-of technological fixes later.
Tipping Points and Positive Feedbacks
Action to fulfill the duties required by basic rights should always be considered to have urgency because basic rights “specify the line beneath which no one is to be allowed to sink” (18). However, dealing with the threat posed by worsening climate change has a special additional kind of urgency. Earlier I promised to explain why I couple nuclear weapons with climate change as the two greatest threats facing humanity in the twentieth-first century. The basis for singling out these two is that each provides a clear path to—at the extreme—human extinction. Mutual escalation in the use of nuclear weapons, the danger of which provides nuclear deterrence with its distinctive character, is capable of resulting in a certain kind of runaway war. Specifically, if each side rushes to try to preempt the next attack by the other, both sides may unleash more weapons than, in a cooler hour, they would have known to be prudent.18 Mutual attempts at escalation dominance may thus produce runaway exchanges that are mutually destructive. However, without wishing in any way to minimize the nuclear dangers, it is worth observing that this kind of military runaway is still a process mediated by human decisions. No external force seizes control of the escalation and removes it from human management. The process goes out of control while being decided about by humans. This runaway is a social, psychological, and political process. If the escalation goes wild, it will be humans who drive it there. The result would be an entirely man-made catastrophe.19
By contrast, climate change is capable of breaking into a natural, not a social, escalation in which human decisions can no longer significantly affect the process.20 This is especially ironic in that the origin of contemporary climate change is anthropogenic. Like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, this century’s climate change is man-made, but it can escape human control and follow a path of its own that humans can no longer block. Two underlying features are that many of the natural processes involved in climate change are not linear and that some changes in natural processes generate positive feedbacks. Nonlinear change and positive feedbacks are conceptually separate, but they can occur together.
Nonlinear change is abrupt, not gradual—for example, the melting of an Antarctic ice sheet may not simply become progressively faster, but instead become irreversible and even lead to rapid collapse of the ice sheet. The melting of Antarctic sea ice reduces its buttressing effect on marine ice sheets (sheets that rest on land that is below sea-level) and increase the likelihood of glacier instability and rapid collapse.21 The point at which a nonlinear change will occur is often referred to as a threshold or tipping point. Positive feedbacks, on the other hand, consist of an effect that enhances the causal efficacy of its own cause. The melting of Arctic sea ice uncovers dark ocean water that absorbs more of the heat from sunlight than white sea ice does; the warming of the water speeds the melting of the sea ice, which uncovers dark water even faster, which warms the water still more, and then makes the sea ice melt faster still.22 Although nonlinear change and positive feedbacks are conceptually separable, one kind of nonlinear change is a change from a process that does not generate any positive feedback to one that does. In addition, one positive feedback can produce a nonlinear change that brings about a second feedback. If such a sequence should continue, it could become a cascade.
If and when any changes of these kinds occur is of course an empirical matter—in the previous paragraph I have mainly been laying out conceptual possibilities. But the possibility that a tipping point for either a large abrupt change, an initiation of a powerful positive feedback, or both will be reached soon means that the climate system contains important points of no return. It is strongly in the human interest—not to mention the interest of thousands of other species that are already becoming extinct left and right—for the climate not to pass such points. Because there are points of no return, there are last chances for human action—times after which greater severity of change is locked-in and cannot be reversed. “Social and technological trends and decisions occurring over the next decade or two could significantly influence the trajectory of the Earth System for tens to hundreds of thousands of years and potentially lead to conditions . . . that would be inhospitable to current human societies and to many other contemporary species.”23
The existence of such thresholds, or points of no return, gives great urgency to reaching the point of net zero carbon emissions at the earliest possible time and thus at the smallest possible atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (and therefore smallest temperature rise). Steep reductions in carbon emissions are urgent, but instead carbon emissions continue to rise globally: “more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades. Which means we have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on climate than in all the centuries—all the millennia—that came before.”24 Throughout the four decades since this book first appeared we have been squandering our opportunity to act. At some point, not precisely predictable but possibly soon, we will be out of time to preserve the physical preconditions for basic rights and the social institutions that protect them.
The Threat to the Ground of Human Rights
The effective implementation of basic rights rests on some form of human solidarity, reciprocity, or deep cooperation. A right is an entitlement to action by others. Invocation of a right is not a plea for help but a justified demand for others to perform their rights-based duties. The performance of duties can sometimes be enforced upon reluctant or unwilling duty-bearers, but institutions constituted by rights and duties can function only if most people willingly cooperate most of the time. And in normal circumstances the willingness, and even readiness, of ordinary decent people to accord others their rights, even at some inconvenience and cost to themselves, is impressive and indeed admirable.
In extreme circumstances such institutions can break down because social ties fray and individuals lapse into the attitude of “every man for himself.” For example, it is not unusual to have a panicked rush to escape after the sounding of an alarm or to have looting after a hurricane. Many of the threats posed by climate change are physical: fires, floods, drinking water shortages, failed crops, extreme heat, extreme storms, unfamiliar diseases. Many of these physical phenomena, especially failed crops that lead to either food shortages or spikes in food prices, sometimes have social and political consequences like protests, riots, or revolutions. It seems reasonable to conjecture that at some point the worsening physical dangers from climate change may generate sufficient social disruption that significant numbers of people will abandon their willingness to cooperate with social institutions like practices centered on rights and lapse into ruthless—if, very likely, self-defeating—pursuit of their own immediate interests. If so, the social grounding of all rights may be weakened or undercut, and the institutions embodying them may be destabilized.
Such conjectures are empirically supported by a growing, fascinating, and disturbing historical literature on the most recent previous instance of climate change, the “Little Ice Age” of the long seventeenth century, when global temperature moved approximately 1°C downward. In his monumental study, Geoffrey Parker concludes that “few areas of the world escaped the consequences of global cooling” and notes that “the most celebrated description of the consequences of the fatal synergy between natural and human disasters” was the famous paragraph by Thomas Hobbes that ordinarily is mistakenly assumed to be a hypothetical speculation rather than an analysis of observed historical circumstances: “[T]here is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth. . . . And, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”25
Obviously one cannot readily infer any particular conclusions about social disruption from future global warming from these studies of seventeenth-century disruptions from global cooling. Parker argues explicitly that well-functioning modern welfare states provide an institutional safety margin that was unknown in the 1600s. Nevertheless, contemporary climate change has already moved 1°C, and further rises are firmly locked into the climate system by the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (notably, methane) already released, not to mention the additional gases certain to be released in coming years. The system is already inexorably committed to additional centuries of sea-level rise—as MIT physicist Susan Solomon puts it, “the ocean never forgets.”26 The resulting inundation of coastal areas and infiltration of salt into groundwater will certainly drive millions from their homes, and these migrants are liable to be seen by the current residents of whatever territory they flee to as encroaching on, if not “invading,” that territory.27 One can hope that up to some point the current residents will see the climate refugees as fellow humans with basic rights toward which they bear duties, not as threatening invaders.
But beyond that unpredictable point the current residents may feel as overwhelmed as the refugees feel, and desperation may take over on both sides, with rights ignored and order collapsing. The inability of both Europe and the United States to accommodate comparatively small numbers of refugees in recent years, for instance, is not encouraging. Philip Alston’s special report warns about such danger: “consideration of the likely risks that will flow from climate change invariably focuses primarily if not exclusively on rights to life, water and sanitation, health, food, and housing. Yet democracy and the rule of law, as well as a wide range of civil and political rights are every bit [as much] at risk . . . . The risk of community discontent, of growing inequality, and of even greater levels of deprivation among some groups, will likely stimulate nationalist, xenophobic, racist and other responses”.28 The seeds of these responses are sprouting.
Already in 2007, intellectuals in U.S. military and intelligence circles were contemplating U.S. military responses to state collapse in poorer countries as a result of climate change, observing with studied understatement that “altruism and generosity would likely be blunted. In a world with millions of people migrating out of coastal areas and ports across the globe, it will be extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, for the United States to replicate the kind of professional and generous assistance provided to Indonesia following the 2004 tsunami.”29 It is vital that climate change be brought under control before military responses appear to be all that are left.
The Threat to Rights from Attempted Later Fixes for Current Delays
As I mention in a note, my Maryland colleague Paul Vernier liked to say that every silver lining has a cloud (227). Climate scientists realized some years ago that one of the clearest and firmest relationships in climate dynamics is between a particular probability of a particular amount of increase in the average annual global air temperature and the total cumulative atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. This led to a helpful conceptual barometer: the cumulative carbon budget. For a specific probability of a given rise in the average annual global air temperature chosen by policymakers as the goal of action to deal with climate change, say, a 66% probability of a rise no greater than 1.5° C, scientists can calculate the approximate total cumulative atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide compatible with this probability of this rise. This concentration of carbon dioxide is then the cumulative carbon budget for a rise of no more than this probability of this many degrees. This is nicely captured on a website maintained by the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford.30 Carbon budgets for various temperature rises provide relatively clear and firm targets for policymakers who need to decide how aggressively to cut carbon emissions (although the carbon budget abstracts from the effects of other greenhouse gases like methane, which make climate change worse than the accumulation of carbon dioxide alone would have).
A critical feature of the carbon budget is that it specifies the cumulative total of additional carbon dioxide retained in the atmosphere since human activity started adding to that total around the time of the Industrial Revolution. However, it is physically possible to subtract from that total by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, as trees and all other plants performing photosynthesis do. Afforestation, for example, reduces atmospheric carbon dioxide, as do other “carbon sinks.” Basically, this is good news—the silver lining—because it means that there can be what has come to be called, rather clumsily, “negative emissions,” that is, subtractions from accumulated emissions. These proposed processes have come to be called carbon dioxide removal (CDR), or negative emissions technologies (NETs).
The cloud in the silver lining, however, is that awareness by policymakers of the possibility of CDR later may increase their so far almost incorrigible tendency to do little or nothing to corral the fossil fuel regime driving climate change, on the basis of the totally false, but deeply seductive, assumption that inaction now can always be repaired later.31 But in fact it cannot be repaired later, and it is crucial to understand why this assumption is not true, even though carbon can in fact be subtracted or removed from the atmosphere. There are more than three reasons why not, but I must restrict consideration here to three.
First, while there are proven natural mechanisms for CDR like photosynthesis by trees, current levels of carbon emissions from persistent reliance on fossil fuels are so vast that such natural mechanisms cannot even begin to keep pace with the ongoing new anthropogenic emissions, much less produce significant net reductions in the cumulative concentration. Several reasons account for this, including the fact that deforestation exceeds afforestation, and the fact that enough afforestation to take a significant bite out of the now-expanding cumulative concentration would require much more land and water than can be spared by current societies for additional forests. Stopping deforestation is vital—“the Amazonian ecosystem is far closer to an existential tipping point than previously thought,” with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro promoting deforestation as an expression of a right of national sovereignty.32 And increasing afforestation is valuable—both are necessary—but they are nowhere near sufficient.
Sufficiently great CDR would be possible only by using human technologies designed for the purpose. Several infant technologies look theoretically possible, but none have been tested or deployed at the vast scale that would be necessary to affect total global concentration.33 The corporations that continue to enrich themselves by extracting and selling fossil fuels for combustion have not made the investments in CDR that would have been necessary for the continued use of the products they sell to be made safe for the climate. Some venture capital is supporting experimentation, but CDR technologies at a scale adequate to make a global difference remain largely wishful thinking. Carbon corporations ought to have invested in making the use of their commodities safe fifty years ago when they realized that they are selling unsafe products.34 If they had, some of the technologies might be mature now.
Second, even the large reductions in atmospheric carbon that are (merely) theoretically possible could not produce a significantly lower atmospheric concentration until carbon emissions end. This is simple arithmetic. If carbon emissions pour out from our right hand, while we pull them back using CDR with our left hand, we are basically spinning our wheels and going nowhere. Large negative emissions could make a difference, but only in the context of sharply reduced emissions. Negative emissions are at best a supplement to, not a substitute for, zero emissions, given the gigantic existing concentration and all the additional emissions that will inevitably flow between now and the date of net zero.
Third, and most important, are the features of climate dynamics sketched in the previous section regarding nonlinear change, positive feedbacks, and tipping points. It is true that an atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide that had previously been expanded can subsequently be contracted. “Overshoot” in emissions, as it has come to be called, can be corrected, and the atmospheric concentration can be returned to an earlier, lower level. What is emphatically not possible, however, is to reverse all the physical changes that were meanwhile forced to occur by the expanded atmospheric carbon concentration while it endures. For instance, suppose the carbon concentration grows large enough to trap enough heat on the planet to cause widespread melting of the Arctic tundra and the release of the monumental amounts of methane and carbon dioxide currently trapped there. Later, the carbon concentration might in principle be reversed back below the threshold for the melting of the tundra. The original “overshoot” in emissions (including the additional carbon emissions from the tundra) might eventually be corrected.
The only problem is that the tundra may already have melted and released its methane and carbon during the period while the greenhouse gas concentration was large enough to drive the temperature above the threshold for melting; and any positive feedbacks produced by the presence of the additional carbon and methane in the atmosphere, while they persist, may be irreversible. The carbon concentration itself is reversible, and the methane decomposes over a few years, but some of the physical effects of the larger concentration of greenhouse gases, while it lasts, may be irreversible.35 Negative emissions later are by no stretch of the imagination equivalent in their effects to emissions reductions now that prevent temperature from ever rising above the melting threshold. If policymakers take the possibility of later negative emissions as a pretext for less radical emissions cuts now, the consequent undermining of basic rights by the resulting much more severe climate change could be disastrous, rendering large numbers of people helpless as their economies and the stability of their societies are undermined.
THE STRUGGLE FOR CONTROL OF THE CLIMATE
Many of those whose wealth and power rests on the continued extraction and sale of fossil fuels are fighting ferociously and viciously to obscure the facts about climate change and to prevent effective action toward a rapid transition out of the fossil fuel regime.36 Many banks flagrantly ignore the Paris Agreement and continue to provide loans enabling the expanded long-term use of fossil fuels, with the world’s most egregious offenders being JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi, and Bank of America.37 Continuing to practice their dog-eat-dog version of capitalism, the major oil and gas companies are employing a slick camouflage of PR greenwash to disguise their business plans to extract the maximum possible carbon in coming decades: “The world’s 50 biggest oil companies are poised to flood markets with an additional 7m[illion] barrels a day over the next decade . . . . New research commissioned by the Guardian forecasts Shell and ExxonMobil will be among the leaders with a projected production increase of more than 35% between 2018 and 2030 . . . . The acceleration is almost the opposite of the 45% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 that scientists say is necessary to have any chance of holding global heating at a relatively safe level of 1.5C.”38 We urgently need to develop vigorous and effective ways to counterattack this heedless, heartless, and remarkably greedy aggression against the climatic conditions necessary for the satisfaction of basic rights.39 No one ought to be allowed social license to underwrite such further deprivation of basic rights.
I conclude in chapter 5 that “property laws can be morally justified only if subsistence rights are fulfilled. . . . The moral acceptability of the enforcement of property rights depends upon the enforcement of subsistence rights” (124–125); and I emphasize that “to protect non-vital interests by means that preclude the satisfaction of vital interests is to treat non-vital interests as if they are as important as—actually, as more important than—vital interests” (127).40 JPMorgan Chase, “the only bank leading financing for all four key tar sands expansion companies,” would likely contend that it has a perfect right to invest as much as it pleases of the wealth it controls in the extraction of oil from the Canadian tar sands.41 But the combustion of the exceptionally high carbon oil from the tar sands throughout the typical lifetime of a loan for extraction will undercut the stability of the climate and be a contributing cause of the deprivation of subsistence rights. It is not possible to acknowledge both basic rights to subsistence and a purported property right to continue indefinitely to finance the reckless extraction of fossil fuels for combustion that releases carbon dioxide. Everyone must choose a side now in the struggle for the fate of the earth and the lives of its vulnerable inhabitants.
Fossil fuels are becoming our contemporary plague, and those whose air, water, and food are most vulnerable to climate change are becoming the victims of this plague. Perhaps decent people can at least adopt the guideline of Albert Camus’s character Tarrou: “All I say is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims—and as far as possible one must refuse to be on the side of the pestilence.”42 Better, we can vigorously defend basic rights. Fossil fuel interests are extremely powerful and deeply entrenched, but they are not invulnerable. Some hard-headed analysts see hopeful signs for the future.43 On the other hand, the rate of growth in carbon emissions in 2018 was shockingly high, establishing a new record for carbon dioxide from coal-burning plants of more than ten billion tons.44 Many utilities that are abandoning coal are making the disastrous choice to switch to gas and to install long-lived pipeline infrastructure instead of switching to non-carbon energy and building its infrastructure.45 The struggle is on, and even when we cannot find grounds for hope, we can still fight with courage.
October 2019, Merton College