Hard Truths in Climate Policy and Politics

Abstract

This forthcoming chapter in the NOMOS climate change volume responds to Lucas Stanczyk’s chapter, On the Moral Challenge of the Climate Crisis. Stanczyk offers up what this chapter describes as two “hard truths” about climate change policy: (1) there is no way to obtain the necessary scale and pace of emissions reductions without focusing explicitly on contemporary patterns of consumption; and (2) if left unchecked, global population growth threatens to overwhelm any gains otherwise made. This chapter explores these contentions, offering some refinements as to how each might best be pragmatically and ethically framed and pursued within climate policy. It also offers a policy scholar’s reaction to Stanczyk’s creative theory of intergenerational justice, endorsing it on slightly different grounds than he offers. Then, accepting the framework he lays down, it focuses on practical challenges that Stanczyk’s thought-provoking theory raises, grappling centrally with the question: what role should climate ethics play in on-the-ground climate policy and politics? Stanczyk rightly worries that technological advancements such as carbon capture and storage and solar geoengineering might be usurped by those in power to prolong the use of fossil fuels, rather than transform the system. This chapter contends that this warning contains the seeds of wise guidance toward morally and politically sensitive climate policymaking: policymakers must strive to enact policies that improve not just the technological terrain but the political conditions for more transformative system change.

Keywords: climate change, population, consumption, intergenerational ethics, Green New Deal