The Moral Challenge of Dangerous Climate Change

This book examines the threat that climate change poses to projects of poverty eradication, sustainable development, and biodiversity preservation. It discusses the values that support these projects and evaluates the normative bases of climate change policy. It regards climate change policy as a public problem that normative philosophy can shed light on and assumes that the development of policy should be based on values regarding what is important to respect, preserve, and protect. What sort of policy do we owe the poor of the world who are particularly vulnerable to climate change? Why should our generation take on the burden of mitigating climate change caused, in no small part, by emissions from people now dead? What value is lost when species go extinct, because of climate change? This book presents a broad and inclusive discussion of climate change policy, relevant to those with interests in public policy, development studies, environmental studies, political theory, and moral and political philosophy.

This book examines the threat that climate change poses to projects of poverty eradication, sustainable development, and biodiversity preservation. It discusses the values that support these projects and evaluates the normative bases of climate change policy. This book regards climate change policy as a public problem that normative philosophy can shed light on.

1. Danger, poverty, and human dignity; 2. The value of biodiversity; 3. Risks, uncertainties, and precaution; 4. Discounting and the future and the morality in climate change economics; 5. The right to sustainable development; 6. Responsibility and climate change policy; 7. Urgency and policy; Afterword. Frankenstorms; Appendix 1. The anti-poverty principle and the non-identity problem; Appendix 2. Climate change and the human rights of future persons: assessing four philosophical challenges.