20 Ethical Questions the Press Should Ask Opponents of Climate Change Policies

By Donald A. Brown

This post identifies 20 questions that the press has failed to ask opponents of proposed U.S. climate change policies and that should be asked if climate change raises civilization-challenging ethical issues.

To understand why these questions should be asked, it is first necessary to review the kinds of arguments that have usually been made in opposition to U.S. climate change policies, programs and legislation and why these arguments fail to deal with the profound ethical questions raised by the threat of human-induced climate change.

Since international climate change negotiations began in 1990, the United States has yet to adopt meaningful greenhouse gas emissions reduction legislation. For almost 20 years, arguments against U.S. climate change legislation or U.S. participation in a global solution to climate change have been made that have almost always been of two types:

By far the most frequent arguments made in opposition to climate change policies are economic predictions of various kinds, such as claims that proposed climate change legislation will destroy jobs, reduce GDP, damage U.S. businesses such as the coal and petroleum industries, or increase the cost of fuel. A variation of this argument is that the United States should not adopt policies on climate change until other nations such as China take steps to reduce their emissions because if the United States acts and other nations don’t reciprocate this will harm the U.S. economy.

The second most frequent type of arguments made by opponents of climate change policies are assertions that governments should not take action on climate change because adverse impacts have not been sufficiently scientifically proven. These arguments range from assertions that what is usually called the “mainstream” scientific climate change view is a complete hoax to the milder assertions that the harsh climate change impacts on human health and the environment predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other climate change researchers are unproven.

Both the economic and scientific arguments against climate change policies implicitly argue that climate change policies should be opposed because they are not in the U.S. national interest.

The responses of advocates of U.S. climate change policies to these arguments are almost always to take issue with the economic and scientific conclusions of these arguments by making counter economic and scientific claims. For instance, in response to economic arguments opposing climate change legislation, proponents of climate change action usually argue that climate change policies will create jobs or are necessary to develop new energy technologies that are vital to the health of the U.S. economy in the future. In responses to the lack of scientific proof arguments, climate change advocates usually stress the harsh environmental impacts to people and ecosystems that climate change will cause if action is not taken or argue that climate change science is settled. In other words, advocates of climate change action respond to claims of opponents to climate change programs by denying the claims of the opponents.

By simply opposing the claims of the opponents of climate change, the advocates of climate change policies are implicitly agreeing with the assumptions of the opponents of climate change action that greenhouse reduction policies should not be adopted if they are not in national self-interest.

Yet, climate change is a problem that clearly creates civilization challenging ethical issues. By ethics is meant the domain of inquiry that examines claims that given certain facts, actions are right or wrong, obligatory or non-obligatory, or when responsibilities attach to human activities.

If nations or individuals have ethical obligations, they are likely to have duties, responsibilities, and obligations that require them to go beyond consideration of self-interest alone in making decisions. And so, if climate change raises ethical considerations, governments may not base policy decisions on self-interest alone.

Given this, one might ask what aspects of climate change raise ethical questions. In fact there are several distinct features of climate change that call for its recognition as creating civilization-challenging ethical questions.