Humanity is facing an extreme risk from unabated climate change. The science is widely understood and accepted. Yet we seem paralysed when it comes to reducing the threat: in spite of 20 years of international talk emissions continue to rise alarmingly. The dangerous political inertia which besets us is investigated in Stephen Gardiner’s book A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change. It’s a philosopher’s take on the issue, thorough and elucidatory, yet entirely accessible for general reader — Gardiner even helpfully indicates when a more technical discussion can be safely skipped without losing the thread.
The “perfect moral storm” in which we are caught and which makes it so difficult for us to act in the case of climate change is a convergence of three “storms”, which he differentiates as global, inter-generational and theoretical. Globally, the causes and effects of climate change are dispersed, the agency is fragmented and the world appears to have no institutions capable as yet of establishing the agreed regulations and enforcement necessary to address a tragedy of the commons. Exacerbating factors which make agreement more difficult include the uncertainties about the magnitude and distribution of the effects of climate change, the fact that its sources are deep-rooted in economic infrastructures, and the responsibility it places on the developed nations vis-à-vis poor countries. It’s not unfamiliar material, but Gardiner’s discussion of its ramifications in the kind of international negotiations we have so far observed is perceptive and realistic. Not that he takes any pleasure from pointing out how intractable the problem is in those negotiations. He’s as concerned as anyone who understands what the science is pointing to. But his judgement of what has been happening to date is pessimistic, and his discerning of the factors working against international agreement is certainly illustrated all too clearly in what we see happening in the repetitive ongoing discussions. The manoeuvrings of the developed nations appear crucial in his analysis, although he doesn’t engage in overt blame-laying.
The second, inter-generational, storm is heightened by the fact that carbon dioxide is a long-lived greenhouse gas and what we are putting into the atmosphere will be there for a long time, some of it for thousands of years. The climate change we are experiencing today is the result of emissions in the past rather than current, and the effects of our emissions are deferred for future generations to experience. The benefits of carbon dioxide emissions are felt by present generations in the form of cheap energy, whereas the costs are deferred to future generations in the risk of severe or catastrophic climate change. Gardiner explores the moral discomfort of being part of a “tyranny of the contemporary” and seeks to uncover the full moral imperative which this storm carries with it.
By the theoretical storm Gardiner means our lack of skills and basic competence in addressing issues such as intergenerational equity, international justice, scientific uncertainty, and the human relationship to animals and nature. Climate change involves all these matters, and we are poorly placed to deal with them. There is not enough deep analysis of what exactly has gone wrong and what it would take to set it right. Short-term geopolitical discussions dominate our social discourse. “Cost-Benefit Paralysis” is the title of a chapter in which he focuses on the theoretical inadequacy of economics which simply doesn’t recognise the full seriousness of the threat to future generations.
The uncomfortable ethical imperatives which confront us over climate change lead to attempts to avoid them – what Gardiner describes as moral corruption. His writing on this topic is illuminating, and borne out all too often in current debates. Avoiding real engagement with the issues is a feature of moral corruption. His list of the ways in which this is achieved is comprehensive and all too recognisable: distraction, complacency, selective attention, unreasonable doubt, delusion, pandering, hypocrisy. Gardiner observes that the intergenerational setting of climate change enhances the phenomenon of moral corruption. Today’s victims of climate change can strongly challenge the corruption of climate change discourse, but tomorrow’s victims are not here to argue their case and are the more readily ignored. Moral corruption does not rule out action altogether, but it produces weak action which can pretend to be addressing the problem and hailed as a great achievement. It avoids overtly selfish behaviour but more by camouflage than substance.
Jane Austen may seem an unlikely source of illumination of the problems of inaction on climate change, but Gardiner draws interesting parallels between the process by which John Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility allows himself to be persuaded out of sharing a modest portion of his wealth with his widowed stepmother and half-sisters. Dashwood moves from a serious and apparently firm moral commitment into eventually dismissing the commitment almost entirely. In a similar fashion, Gardiner considers, the rich nations of the world have failed to deliver on the ethically grounded commitments represented in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the poor, the future, and nature have largely been left to fend for themselves.
Gardiner’s discussion is centred on ethics. The political inertia in which we are mired is a failure of ethics, and it is obviously his hope that the exploration of this fact will help us find a way through what at present seems impenetrable difficulty. His book points to some changes required, and nowhere more so than in the attitudes of the developed nations who have become rich through the energy provided by fossil fuels. They must accept the predominant burden of responsibility in winding back their own usage of fossil fuels and compensating the developing world. In all his patient exploration of the issues, and with all due allowance to the difficulties of transition, there is no escaping this central ethical fact of the matter.
When humans become rich and powerful they seem to find every reason in the world to resist anything that might threaten that wealth and power
It’s hard to resist pessimism about the capacity of our institutions to take up the ethical challenge. When humans become rich and powerful they seem to find every reason in the world to resist anything that might threaten that wealth and power, even when it is obviously in their own best interests and in the interests of their own descendants to co-operate in preserving the global commons. The reasoning Gardiner exposes carries an immediate logic which blinds us to longer term consequences or paralyses any attempt we might try to make to address them. However his own inclination is to resist pessimism, and he supplies a list of what he describes as initial ethics to help us “muddle through”. At very least, he reflects, ethics can bear witness to serious wrongs even if they can’t as yet effect change.
His thoughtful book, behind its quiet and rigorous exploration of habitual human thinking, does bear witness to the wrongs we are enmeshed in. It’s tempting to hope that at our level of human civilisation we will surely pull back from threatening disaster by simply recognising the ethical inadequacy of our current stances and putting our wealth and power to better uses than preserving them at all costs. But, as Gardiner concludes, the intellectual task is daunting and it is not yet clear that we are up to it.
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I am reminded of Gramsci’s famous line about ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’.
I would add that the elephant in the room is Market Capitalism – and the near universal reach of the values of the Free Market™, whose cult is apparently embraced as the principal good that must be preserved by virtually all of our contrarian regulars, pretty-well without exception, to my knowledge. Never mind the dreary old biosphere, it’s selfishness dignified as ‘Liberty™’ that counts!
I don’t believe this is a coincidence.
As a system of producing things the FM™ is certainly unparalleled, but its inherent destructiveness if left unrestrained in a closed, finite system would be non-controversial in a society that hadn’t largely surrendered its wits to its shallow, glittering allure!
My inherent selfishness is not only assumed but necessary – no, even laudable – and the ostentatious accumulation of trinkets is the measure of my worth. What price my participation in any personal sacrifice for the merely common good?
This has become a grotesque, pathetic farce in Australia, where the most affluent people in history bleat heart-rendingly – and with apparent conviction – about the privations they are set to suffer if they are no longer allowed to run untrammeled across the globe, and people who don’t give a hoot about the remnant poor (moral failures from their perspective) – and spend much of their time trying to systematically dismantle the welfare state that supports them – are suddenly moist of crocodilian eye about the appalling fate that awaits pensioners and the disadvantaged!
It can’t have escaped the notice of the non-indoctrinated that even advocating market mechanisms to solve the crisis – in fact, bending over backwards to do so – is ‘socialism’, and inherently wrong merely because that label has been stuck on it!
So, in the face of an existential crisis – there is no crisis! No – instead, it’s actually somehow plausible that scientists are conspiring to bring about a global Marxist government! Utter muppets who spout such gibberish are invited to address the US congress and have the ear of the Australian Parliament! The influence of huge, oppressive interests who fund the whole fiasco is somehow invisible while individual scientists who naively assume their job is to tell the truth are publicly hyper-scrutinised, vilified and defamed!
That all this is supposedly what ‘conservatism’ has become just adds to the grotesquerie! Again, my still-as-yet-unanswered question – what is the conservative position on conducting a radical experiment with the one atmosphere we possess?
Well said Bill!
I guess its time for humanity to grow up into searching for a deeper purpose of it all. So far we have done terribly at it. Before the enlightenment handed us the power of scientific discovery and the tools to riches and destruction alike, the search for “purpose” was central but of cause held hostage to dogmatic religious nonsense.
Now we are a fragmented bunch of individualists stuck in the “capitalism” wet dream that has no purpose other than to optimize the current unsustainable system of exponential growth. A system in which the elites have become billionaires while the rest is turned into loan serfs and de facto slaves.
Its time to ask some fundamental questions about the meaning of life, our personal and our species destiny. Its time that we own up to the reality that (a) we will never have Star-Trek and this planet is the only place we will call home and (b) that we better come up with a realistic vision of how we will think we will live in 100, 200, 1000 10,000 years from now given our one planet reality. We have not much time left to do this and to come up with a global plan for limiting individual and collective resource entitlements to what is sustainable. Anything else will lead to a century and more of war and terror at the end of which this place will neither be in a physical nor spiritual state to feel like home to anybody.
Bryan – Thanks for a very useful review of a book that sounds like it is closely related to my own research. I expect I’ll be picking up a copy before too long.
Bill – hear, hear!