Introduction
One ofthe most pressing moral challenges of our time is climate change. Over the past 150 years, the global temperature has risen 0.85°C and is threatening to reach a global average of up to 4.8°C before the end of the century (IPCC 2014: 40, 77).
The problem with a warmer climate is an increased risk of adverse climatic effects. Some of these include heatwaves, droughts, floods, and rising sea-levels, all of which will have harmful impacts on both current and future generations. For instance, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that a warmer climate will give rise to deaths from excessive heat, increased food shortage, and displacement of people, among other things.Warming is caused by an increase in the global concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O). GHGs are mainly emitted through the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal or petroleum, with additional emissions resulting from activities such as deforestation and agriculture. Despite a growing awareness of the dangerous effects of emissions, atmospheric concentrations of GHGs have been rapidly growing in the past 50 years. Since 1750, humans have increased the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere by around 40 percent, and half of that amount has been emitted since the 1970s (IPCC 2014:44-5).
In order to halt the dangerous effects of climate change, we need to start making deep cuts in emissions. Many people are skeptical that this could be a responsibility individuals have, given the magnitude of the problem, and the negligible effects of an individual’s action on it (see, e.g., Sinnott-Armstrong 2005). But if it isn’t, then it must be a responsibility collectives have.1 We take collective responsibility to be the group-level responsibility of a singular, and not a plural, subject.
That is, collective responsibility is a property of the group itself and cannot be reduced to responsibility of the members of the group.In this chapter, we will argue that there is collective responsibility to mitigate climate change and to reduce global GHG emissions. There are many collectives potentially responsible for climate change: companies, environmental organizations, consumers, and lobby groups all either contribute in a serious way to climate change or have a significant capacity to affect emissions, compared to individuals. In spite of this, it’s commonly held that climate change can only be solved by government action (Broome 2012: 36; Gardiner 2011: 75-6; Vanderheiden 2004: 144). States are the main political units in the international community, and the negotiating parties to international climate agreements. For that reason, we are going to focus in this chapter on the responsibility of states as collective moral agents.
We’re in good company in thinking about states as the principal agents when it comes to climate change. Others focus on some variant of this: “countries” (Neumayer 2000: 186—7; Pickering and Barry 2012: 670; Shue 1999: 534); “states” (Shue 1999: 534; Zellentin 2014: 260, 265-8); and “nations” (Miller 2009: 128) (see also discussion in Berkey 2017, esp. fn. 5). And it makes sense to think this way, because states, after all, have the power to coordinate the emitters within their territory, whether through incentives or through sanctions.
Still, while much focus has been placed on states as central actors in taking responsibility for climate change, they have not necessarily been identified as culpable emitters of GHGs in their own right. In order to say that they are, it needs to be shown that states are not merely proxies or intermediaries for other things within the state territory, such as the citizens or privately- owned corporations. It could be that states do not themselves emit, but that companies and citizens within their borders do. In order to show that states are collectively responsible—in the strongest sense that comes from being culpable—for mitigating climate change, we need to show that they are genuinely causally responsible for significant quantities of emissions.
We shall assume that only agents are the kinds of entities that can act and bear responsibility (Lawford-Smith 2015).2 In order to make the case that states are responsible collectives, then, we shall have to see whether they satisfy the conditions for collective moral agency. We’ll address that question in section 32.2, then turn to the question of whether states are emitters in their own right in section 32.3. Section 32.4 considers the moral implications of this, section 32.5 answers several objections, and section 32.6 concludes the chapter.
32.2