Copenhagen problems were anticipated 35 years ago

There are many and varied theories about what went wrong at Copenhagen and what needs to happen now. It is interesting to note that the problems that states might have in dealing with climate change were anticipated 35 years ago by the Australian philosopher John Passmore.

In his 1974 book on environmental ethics, “Man’s Responsibility for Nature”, Passmore examined intergenerational equity, ie what sacrifices present generations should make for future ones, and why. He took climate change as his test case:

We know at least this much, however. Men will need the biosphere. And it is sometimes suggested that our present level of industrial activity is so heating up the atmosphere that large parts of the earth’s surface will – as a result of the melting of polar ice – eventually be rendered uninhabitable. So, it is concluded, we ought at once, for the sake of posterity, to reduce the level of that activity. The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution concluded that ‘such eventualities are not only remote: they are conjectural’. But this case serves as a sort of touchstone, an extreme example both in its uncertainty and in the disastrousness of the consequences it envisages, were they to eventuate.

Passmore quoted the economist Pigou to the effect that everyone accepts that the state ought to protect future interests ‘in some degree’ against the ‘irrational discounting’ and preference of present generations over future ones.

But the state itself can undertake irrational actions. It is subject to lobbying, and can find it just as hard as individuals to properly protect future generations. Passmore considered whether the nation-state could act in time when faced with a conservation crisis:

There is also the question of time. The degree of urgency, on the view of some scientists, is very great; political action is generally speaking slow, and in this case is subjected to an enormous range of special interests. In these circumstances there is a strong temptation to fall back on the ideal of the strong man, who would conserve by the direct exercise of coercion. I have refused to accept this as a ‘solution’ to the conservation problem, partly because I do not think there is an good reason for believing that any ‘strong man’ who is likely to emerge after the collapse of democracy would be primarily concerned with conservation and partly because I do not believe this to be the kind of cost we ought to be prepared to meet, for posterity’s sake as well as our own. Much the same is true of the suggestion that what we should work for is the collapse, as rapidly as possible, of our entire civilization, as the only way of conserving resources. The cost would be enormous; the benefit more than dubious.

One possibility Passmore considered was a society in which environmental issues were dealt with by regulation issued by a ‘benevolently-despotic scientific research institute’ subject to lobbying, but only from scientific pressure groups.

He wondered if that was too autocratic, because he considered that the great strength of a democracy is the process it provides by which scientific findings and measures to respond to them, can be tested and kept under review.

Nevertheless, applying Passmore’s thinking on this issue from 36 years ago, perhaps the brightest hope is strong central regulation based on science. Which means that actions such as the US EPA’s regulatory approach, including its recent endangerment finding on CO2, may be the best way forward, rather than cap and trade and carbon tax schemes which are more open to political lobbying.