Philosophical Foundations of Climate Change Policy

Foundations covers well-trodden ground in debates about Foundations covers familiar ground in debates about environmental economics, environmental ethics and climate justice. Its main value is in providing a stark, but sophisticated defense of a particular worldview, albeit with a specific twist and a few unorthodox suggestions of its own. While Heath's position is controversial—even extreme—in various ways, sharing the journey with him is a useful, informative, and engaging experience.Heath argues for a position he labels "economism": "The basic conceptual apparatus and normative approach being used by climate economists, such as William Nordhaus and Nicholas Stern, is correct." In terms of substantive climate policy, he endorses conventional, market-based cost-benefit analysis (MCBA), a positive social discount rate (2–3 percent), and pronounced optimism about rapid economic growth even as climate change accelerates. In the realm of theory, he maintains that the climate problem should be understood through the concepts of the prisoner's dilemma, Coasian bargaining, and Pareto-optimality. Since Heath embraces the standard analytical framing in economics and international relations, he acknowledges that the main purpose of Foundations is not to advance a new position. Instead, his stated aim is to promote "greater dialogue" about the philosophical grounding of climate policy and so rehabilitate economism. One strategy is to argue vigorously against mainstream theorists of climate justice and environmental ethics. Another is to reject the view that economism is underwritten by utilitarianism. Instead, Heath endorses a less common but still familiar alternative: that "economism" should be rooted in mutual advantage contractarianism—roughly, the view that morality and other social rules are grounded in the best strategies for individuals to promote their own self-interest.In approaching the book, a few cautions are in order. First, Foundations is highly abstract and far removed from the details of actual climate policy. So, despite the book's title, if that is your interest, look elsewhere.Second, Foundations is best approached holistically, rather than by sampling chapters or subsections. One reason is that Heath uses key terms such as "collective action problem," "contractualism," and "cost-benefit analysis" in ways that may not be intuitive and so risk becoming misleading when taken out of context. For example, "cost-benefit analysis" is a treacherous term for philosophers interested in public policy. While sometimes it is taken to mean nothing more than "pros and cons" analysis (PCA), and occasionally the more robust "net benefit analysis" (NBA), mostly it is tied to the highly specific techniques of conventional market-based economics (market-CBA or MCBA), which include marginal cost pricing, discounting the future, shadow-pricing, contingent valuation, and so on (Importantly, few object to PCA, yet NBA is mildly controversial and MCBA highly contentious, including among philosophical utilitarians and contractualists. Thus, it is vital not to confuse the techniques of contemporary climate economics (rooted in market-CBA) with mere pros-and-cons analysis.Third, the book's announced aim of "promoting greater dialogue" is probably best understood as a euphemism. Heath's central purpose is to repudiate mainstream work in climate justice and environmental ethics and reassert the dominance of "economism." Moreover, Foundations is polemical in tone, divides the main protagonists into competing camps from the outset, and is generally dismissive of its opponents and their core concerns. For instance, economists, we are told, understand (the alleged) key issues, such as the importance of economic growth, the primacy of efficiency over justice, the need to take tradeoffs seriously, and the necessity for a method that operates firmly within current institutional constraints. By contrast, philosophers are said to hold positions that are unfit for policy debate and can often be rebuffed with "obvious" and "commonsense" objections. Sadly, the divisive rhetoric risks becoming a barrier (rather than an aid) to greater mutual understanding. Notably, it obscures important facts such that neither economists nor philosophers are united on the core issues, and many have engaged in cross-disciplinary conversations. Moreover, Heath's pronounced partisanship sometimes seeps into how he characterizes his rivals, and so makes the book an unreliable guide to the wider literature (e.g., I am cited as the exemplar of "hypertrophied aversion to economism," which is a strange reading of both my work and the wider literature).In this review, let me offer two main reservations about Heath's own position. The first concerns complacency about climate impacts. Heath professes pronounced optimism about "the extraordinary power of economic growth to improve human welfare" even through a climate crisis. Moreover, he believes that the importance of growth is "often enough to completely eclipse" that of justice and asserts that "the potential for improving the lives of poor people by finding different ways of distributing current production is nothing compared to the apparently limitless potential of increasing production" (67–68). Notably, while this kind of "swamping thesis" is promoted by some economists, it remains highly controversial. For one thing, it relies on bold assumptions about sustainability, substitutability, and resilience across economic and ecological systems. For another, it can seem woefully insensitive to real harms and injustices on the ground.Foundations invokes swamping to sweep aside much contemporary work in climate justice. For example, I have criticized the prisoner's dilemma analysis (which Heath endorses) for ignoring morally salient dimensions of the climate problem, such as skewed vulnerabilities, background injustices, and the twin threats of a tyranny of the contemporary and a tyranny of humanity (Gardiner 2011, 2016). Concerns about skewed vulnerabilities and background injustices currently dominate public debates about climate justice. Since the late 1980s, many have been concerned with poverty, inequality, human rights violations, the history of colonialism, global capitalism, and so on. More recently, specific emphases on race, gender, class, and Indigeneity have come to the fore. Strikingly, Heath is quick to dismiss the entire literature. For instance, legacies of injustice are given short shrift, while concerns about capitalism are set aside in a sentence (2), and damages to nonhuman nature rendered peripheral in a short paragraph (98).Heath's rationale is that, so long as climate change proceeds in a linear way (as he insists should be our expectation), climate change will cause only what he provocatively calls "pedestrian damages." One central claim is that even though expected losses are "in the range of 10–20% of future GDP by the end of century" (105), the impacts on human well-being will be much less important than the huge gains from growth over the same period. Heath asserts that philosophers have failed to appreciate this, but economists do, and have the appropriate policy response. Put crudely, Heath understands the economists' position as follows. On the one hand, the essential climate question is how much to trade-off the value of preventing future damages relative to promoting future growth; and the main problem is that the market currently encourages overconsumption of fossil fuels by failing to put an adequate price on climate damages. On the other hand, the answers are: in principle, this is a matter for Coasian bargaining; in practice, a carbon tax should be implemented that reflects the results of that bargaining. In the background, Heath's overarching assumption appears to be that a global economy that is growing extremely quickly can in principle benefit everyone and on a massive scale. Therefore, the key issues for climate policy should be efficiency and enabling Pareto optimal outcomes.Foundations acknowledges a risk of catastrophic outcomes. Nevertheless, Heath insists the probability is low (a "black swan") and claims this makes catastrophe a side issue. Indeed, one place where Heath departs from orthodoxy among economists is in arguing that risks of catastrophe should not even be represented within standard MCBA and the associated carbon tax. Instead, it should be dealt with separately, through investing in solar geoengineering research. Notably, Heath makes no reference to the serious controversies surrounding solar geoengineering, nor the substantial literature on geoengineering ethics, much of which is skeptical.Ultimately, Foundations confidently affirms: "Climate change is not likely to produce an absolute reduction in living standards, and is almost certain not to within the next century" (82), invoking an alleged "consensus" among economists. I am not convinced this consensus holds. Even if it did, it remains unclear why Heath thinks economists have the relevant expertise. Climate science projects a rise in average global temperature of 2.1–3.5°C for 2100 and 2.3–4.6°C for 2300 for intermediate emissions scenarios, and 3.3–5.7°C by 2100 and 6.6–14.1°C by 2300 for a very high emission scenario (IPCC 2021, 14 and 43). Put in perspective, 4–5°C is comparable to an ice age shift, but happening over a few decades. Moreover, among scientists "there is a widespread view that a 4°C future is incompatible with any reasonable characterisation of an organised, equitable and civilised global community" (Anderson 2012, 29). One reason is the threat to fundamentals such as global agriculture.Heath's rationale for rejecting the widespread view among scientists appears to rest on profound faith in markets and technological innovation to both handle and swamp whatever climate change throws at humanity. It is possible that he is right, especially if we have a very tolerant view of the possible; however, whether it is likely is another matter. Arguably, a more central question is whether we (the current generation, and especially the more affluent) are entitled to take such risks with the future. These questions are central to existing debates, such as those around precaution. Heath mentions these debates in passing, but does not engage. It is a missed opportunity.My second reservation concerns the author's proposal about intergenerational cooperation. The standard view is that cooperation is problematic in the intergenerational context because those not yet born (or now very young) cannot engage in genuinely reciprocal exchange or bargaining with current generations that hold the reins of power. Heath concedes that this is true of direct cooperation, but argues for the possibility of a much weaker form of "indirect cooperation." His leading example is a traditional pension scheme, where younger generations effectively support the retired generation through their own financial contributions to the scheme, in the expectation that when they come to retire future younger workers will do the same for them. Foundations argues that such "indirect reciprocity" is central to current societies and should underwrite our understanding of the climate problem. Two core claims are: (first) this forward-looking indirect reciprocity is a stable scheme of intergenerational cooperation so long as the scheme is ongoing, in the sense of being indefinitely extended into the future; and (second) the scheme is motivated solely by self-interest, benefits all participants, and so sits nicely within mutual advantage contractarianism.One elephant in the room is the word indefinitely. Many concerned about climate change see the current global system as roughly akin to a Ponzi scheme, where short-term economic benefits (to some) arise partly through imposing longer-term environmental costs (on others) in a way that is unsustainable and will ultimately result in a collapse. Predicting exactly when the Ponzi scheme might unravel is difficult and depends both on one's view of the science and of the expectations of others. As emphasized above, Heath is profoundly confident that overall economic growth will be highly resilient to climate change even at 4°C or more; implicitly, he must also be very confident that the young will continue to share that view and so be motivated to play their part in upholding the system. Yet both assumptions seem unduly complacent. For instance, hearing the pessimism of scientists may well cause younger generations to withdraw their participation and condemn "indefinite indirect cooperation" as a morally corrupt fiction. Indeed, this may be their best strategy for self-protection, and so the unintended lesson of the book's main argument.A second elephant in the room concerns the character of intergenerational cooperation under the indirect rationale. One salient issue is the threat of intergenerational time bombs: roughly, activities performed by members of one generation that benefit themselves but have severe costs for some later generation. Strikingly, Heath acknowledges the worry but calls it "not a bug, but a feature" of his view. Presumably, he means that time bombs are inevitably permitted by mutual advantage contractarianism, since it is essential to his view that actors will seek to maximize their gains. Still, in accepting intergenerational time bombs, Heath is acknowledging that older generations may accept only limited forms of "cooperation," and ones that violate many basic intuitions about fairness. This is a familiar worry about mutual advantage contractarianism in other settings. To my mind, it puts my tyranny of the contemporary and concerns of justice (as well as other normative considerations more generally), back to where they should be, right at the center of conversations about intergenerational ethics. For instance, I suspect that if some form of "indefinite indirect cooperation" is to succeed, it cannot be sustained solely by narrow self-interest, but must call on more ethically loaded motivations, such as trust, respect for fairness, and faith in a wider social compact that transcends mutual advantage contractarianism.