Keywords

1 Fossil Fuels and Social and Economic Progress

Nature’s development of a particularly resistant complex organic polymer, lignin, allowed the emergence of the first treelike plants. Trees became robust, some very tall, measuring more than 30 m, and abundant, forming luxuriant marshy forests in the Carboniferous period between 360 and 299 million years ago. These forests sequestered huge amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. Their fossil remains produced the large coal deposits that fuelled the industrial revolution and still sustain a large part of the world’s energy needs. They are known as coal forests (Santos 2012).

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the consumption of wood to build ships and houses, to meet household demand, and feed the furnaces in foundries and those used to produce bricks and glass began to reduce the forest area in Europe dramatically. The solution was to increase the use of coal, abundant in England and other regions of Central Europe. First, however, the coal mines had to be drained of flood waters before coal could be extracted. The English ironmonger and inventor Thomas Newcomen (1664–1729) sought to solve the difficulty, and in 1712 he built a steam-driven machine based on an earlier prototype from 1675 created by Denis Papin (1647–1713), a French physicist and inventor (Santos 2012). The Newcomen steam engine was inefficient, but the problem was successfully solved by James Watt (1736–1819) in 1776.

The 1780s marked the beginning of the fossil fuel era of long-lasting and widespread conversion of the chemical energy stored in coal and other fossil fuels into other forms of energy. Coal provided the primary energy supply for the industrialisation process of the nineteenth century, with global primary energy consumption from coal increasing from 97 TWh in 1800 to 5728 TWh in 1900 (Smil 2016). The history of the intensive exploitation of petroleum began in 1853 with the discovery of a process for distilling kerosene from petroleum by the Polish scientist Ignacy Lukasiewicz. In 1856, the first petroleum refinery began to operate in Pleiesti, Romania, soon followed by many more. In 1859, Edwin Drake, a railway engine driver in New Haven, Connecticut, revolutionised the petroleum industry when he succeeded in extracting petroleum from the subsoil by boring through the rocky layers, near Titusville, in Pennsylvania. Shortly afterward, in 1876, Nikolaus Otto, a German engineer, built and successfully used the first four-stroke internal combustion engine, which was the first competitive alternative to the steam engine. After a few decades, petroleum exploration became commonplace worldwide and oil was used in an increasingly intensive way. Natural gas is a naturally occurring hydrocarbon gas mixture consisting of methane and other alkanes found in natural gas fields or associated with oil fields and coal beds. In the nineteenth century, natural gas was used mostly as a source of light. Still in the twentieth century, once efficient pipelines had begun to be built, it was also used for domestic heating and cooking, to generate electricity and in industry.

The intensive use of fossil fuels was an essential driver in constructing the current global development model. This has improved average human economic prosperity at the global level, especially in the last two centuries (Santos 2021), although it has not solved the deepening North-South socioeconomic divide. The availability of an affordable and abundant form of energy associated with socioeconomic, scientific, and technological advances contributed to the rapid improvement of public health, an increase in fertility, and a remarkable extension of life expectancy, leading to a 7.8-fold increase in the global population from 1800 to 2019. The other outstanding feature of the processes initiated by the Industrial Revolution was sustained exponential global economic growth for more than two centuries, which allowed a 33-fold increase in global GDP per capita from 1820 to 2006 (Jones 2016). Global primary energy consumption increased from 20 EJ in 1800 to 584 EJ in 2019 (BP 2020), representing a 3.7-fold increase in primary energy consumption per capita.

In the nineteenth century, science predicted that CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion would cause an increase in the atmosphere’s mean global temperature. During the twentieth century global climate change was identified and attributed to anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, especially CO2. According to the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “observed increases in well-mixed GHG concentrations since around 1750 are unequivocally caused by human activities” (IPCC 2021). The atmospheric concentrations of CO2, Methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) in 2021, were 415.7±0.2 ppm, 1908±2 ppb, and 334.5±0.1 ppb, respectively, representing 149%, 262% and 124% of pre-industrial levels (before 1750). (WMO 2022). Since the establishment of the IPCC in 1988, the share of fossil fuel primary energy supply has remained almost unchanged between 1990–2020 at around 81% (Pedersen et al. 2021; IEA 2021). Although electric power generation from renewable energies reached 27% in 2019 and is fast increasing, there is no evidence yet of a sustained global energy transition to renewables, since fossil and renewable energy production increases at similar speeds (Pedersen et al. 2021). Such a transition will need to take place before 2050, requiring global annual reductions of 1–2 GtCO2 in CO2 emissions throughout the 2020s and beyond, to achieve the Paris AgreementFootnote 1 goal of holding the increase in global mean surface temperature (GMST) below 2 °C, and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C (Le Quéré et al. 2021), relative to pre-industrial times (1850–1900) (IPCC 2021). A pathway with no or limited overshoot of the 1.5 °C Paris goal requires global GHG emissions to fall by about 45% by 2030 compared to 2010, reaching net zero around 2050 (IPCC 2018). Limiting the GMST rise to below 2 °C requires CO2 emissions to decrease by about 25% from 2010 to 2030 and reach net zero around 2070 (UNFCCC 2021). These results show that rapid global decarbonisation is now mandatory to achieve the Paris goals.

The Earth’s GMST has increased by around 1.1 °C compared to the average for the 1850–1900 period. The largest part of this increase (2/3) has occurred since 1975 at a rate of about 0.15–0.2 °C per decade (Hansen et al. 2010). Cumulative CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and industrial production in the period 1850–2019 have amounted to 1640 GtCO2, rising from 0.85 GtCO2 to 36.5 GtCO2 in 2019 (GCP 2020). Thus, the mitigation challenge and urgency are mounting (Peters et al. 2020). Since the Paris Agreement,Footnote 2 emissions have continued to increase every year. Only the measures taken worldwide to combat the COVID-19 pandemic crisis caused an estimated temporary 5.6% drop in CO2 emissions (Le Quéré et al. 2020) and a 5% drop in total GHG emissions measured in carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) (Becker et al. 2020). This is the largest annual reduction ever observed (Le Quéré et al. 2021).

2 Climate Change Ethics and Justice

Climate change has been a very fertile subject for ethics since the beginning of the 1990s (Jamieson 1992; Gardiner 2006; Arnold 2010; Gardiner 2011; Caney 2014, 2016). Climate change is viewed as an intragenerational and intergenerational global problem that may be solved by the application of universal theoretical ethical principles to positively influence and promote real-world responses. Those principles are discussed within the UNFCCC, partly reflected in the Paris Agreement (UNFCCC/COP 2015; Okereke and Coventry 2016) and agreements taken in follow-up COPs (UNFCCC/COP 2022). Justice principles generally seek to address the asymmetries between individuals in developing and developed countries and also between individuals inside each country, as regards personal contributions and institutional responsibilities in GHG emissions and in the capacity to reduce these emissions. A second type of asymmetry is connected with different degrees of vulnerability to the impacts of climate change. Generally, people living in developing countries, and especially in the least developed countries and in fragile states (OECD 2018), are more vulnerable and have a much lower capacity to cope with the damaging impacts of more frequent extreme weather events attributable to climate change, and to changes in precipitation regimes and the global average sea level rise, than people living in the advanced economies. Furthermore, in communities around the world, especially in developing countries, poor people and in particular women are more vulnerable to the harmful impacts of climate change (Nellemann et al. 2011). Finally, there is a third asymmetry caused by the delay in controlling the cause of a slowly evolving process. The GHG emissions produced by the current generation are exacerbating a problem that is already growing and are making it more harmful for future generations. These asymmetries tend to increase poverty, malnutrition, hunger, health risks and forced migrations in more vulnerable populations. Here we will address questions related to climate ethics and the emerging field of climate justice, although leaving aside those concerning the moral status of climate change denial (Gremmen 2012; Lavik 2015).

Ideally, a normative theory of climate change ethics could be very relevant in deciding how to distribute investment between mitigation and adaptation, how to correctly balance the costs and benefits of mitigation measures, and how to distribute the costs and non-climate benefits of decarbonisation. It could also help in achieving a just transition from a fossil-fuel-based global economy to one powered by renewable energies. However, after more than 25 years of philosophical analyses in ethical normative theory, climate change risks continue to increase (Santos 2020), and the energy transition is still in its infancy. Faced with the increasing evidence that climate politics has a “difficult, problematic, or perhaps wicked” specific character (Brandstedt 2019), climate ethicists have tried to be more practical and to seek pragmatic ways to bring individual people, and eventually society, closer to normative ethical ideals. This emerging approach, known as non-ideal theory, specifically addresses the question of realism, which implies starting from an accurate description of people, politics and policies, transitional processes, concerns, and ways of dealing with non-compliers (Heyward and Roser 2016).

One critical aspect of the non-ideal theoretical approach of bringing individuals and society closer to normative ethical ideals is to identify agents of change, who are willing to pursue changes that would reduce injustices resulting from climate change (Laurence 2020). An agent of change is an agent willing or potentially willing to pursue actions to address and help resolve significant injustices. An additional problem is to decide on ethical grounds what importance should be given to agents who cause injustice and are often politically mobilised to defend the existing state of affairs, regarding social or political climate change issues, such as governments, political parties, and corporations. What ethical attitude should be recommended for climate deniers who endorse the narrative developed by the fossil fuel industry since the 1980s that acting decisively to reduce emissions of GHG will have a devastating effect on jobs and the economy as a whole? (Collomb 2014) A third issue in non-ideal theoretical analysis concerns the extent to which agents of change are free to move successfully towards normative ethical ideals or are constrained by the overarching economic system that supports and empowers them, in which case the agent of change has to become the system itself (Somerville 2020). According to Brandstedt “even non-ideal climate justice may be too disconnected from the fast-moving and messy climate circus” (Brandstedt 2019). More recently it has been suggested that “engaged methods” that involve substantial interaction between the theorist and actual or potential agents of change ought to be used to influence real-world climate action (Green and Brandstedt 2021).

Climate justice comes in three main forms: academic discourse, a motivational ideal of non-governmental organisations, and social and political grassroots movements concerned with questions of human rights and social, distributive, and intergenerational justice related to or caused by climate change. Grassroots climate justice and climate action movements are a form of climate activism that originated in the concepts and movements of environmental justice that began to appear in society in the 1990s (Schlosberg 2014). The Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative was founded in 2001, during the first Climate Justice Summit at the COP6 meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in The Hague.

There is a certain disconnection between non-ideal ethical theories of climate change and their applications and the grassroots movements of climate justice, although the ideals and interests of both frequently overlap. They have so far represented two complementary approaches to address the challenge of climate change, each functioning in its own domain with few cross-references and little collaboration (Schlosberg 2014). However, this situation appears to be changing. A wide range of climate justice and climate action movements and individual climate change activists have been able to develop and establish what have been called anti-fossil fuel norms (Green 2018; Blondeel et al. 2021), such as discontinuing fossil fuel subsidies, promoting fossil fuel divestments, phasing out coal power stations and coal mining investments, discontinuing oil and gas fracking, phasing out the use of oil and natural gas, and more generally establishing a moratorium on prospection for fossil fuels. Anti-fossil fuel norms have been advocated in more or less explicit ways by individuals and organisations in civil society, international organisations such as the IMF (Herbst-Bayliss 2016), the World Bank (King 2014), the OECD (Gurría 2015), and state leaders (Green 2018). The leader of the Catholic religion, Pope Francis, who also implicitly endorsed some of these norms (Francis 2015), was promptly rebuked by defenders of mainstream neoclassical economics (Nordhaus 2015; Rocca 2015). Francis Rocca of The Wall Street Journal commented that Pope Francis “offered a broad and uncompromising indictment of the global market economy, accusing it of plundering the Earth at the expense of the poor and of future generations” (Rocca 2015).

Recently, a growing number of young climate activists have been expressing their dissent regarding current global climate change policies and business-as-usual economic and social policies, including their undisputable emphasis on support for unlimited economic growth (Escobar 2015; Marris 2019). In the complex reality of youth concerns about climate change, O’Brien et al. (2018). have identified three types of dissent: dutiful, disruptive, and dangerous. This heterogeneous global climate movement has captured the world’s attention, is becoming more powerful, and will likely be able to influence the future course of events. Part of its strength lies in the fact that the young activists do not represent someone else’s agenda. Furthermore, the young protesters do not yet have vested interests, other than their existential interest in protecting their future lives and well-being. In fact, the risks and uncertainties of not holding the GMST increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels are disproportionally higher for them and for the generations to come (Thiery et al. 2021).

It remains to be seen whether the movements that defend anti-fossil fuel norms are able to influence societies worldwide and contribute to accelerating global decarbonisation. The adoption of anti-fossil fuel norms could become a rapidly spreading form of social behaviour in some democratic countries.

3 Climate Change and Sustainability. Inequalities and Economics as Critical Points

In 1983, the World Commission on the Environment and Development, chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, defined sustainable development as “development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. It gradually became clear that sustainable development is not a strictly scientific concept that can be defined unambiguously, since opinions differ as to precisely which human needs should be considered for application of the principle of intergenerational equity (Santos 2012). These needs can be categorised as falling within social, environmental, cultural and economic realms, but the relative importance of the different components is a matter of opinion.

Sustainability is a state of living that is able to continue for a long period and can be applied to all living systems, including the human system. It is a broader concept than sustainable development, which is implicitly more focused on a strategy for human development. Both concepts are very recent in the history of civilizations and what makes them distinctive is their emphasis on the future, which can be interpreted as a form of uneasiness about the future of mankind. Expressive proof of this concern was provided in 2015, when 193 countries of the UN General Assembly adopted the 2030 Development Agenda, with 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and the 169 targets and 232 indicators associated with these. Most of the SDGs are interconnected and interdependent, SDG 13—Climate Action—being a leading example. Here we shall focus on the interdependency between SDG 13 and SDGs 8 and 10.

Most people would agree with Indira Gandhi when, in her speech to the UN Conference on Environment in Stockholm in 1972, she posed the question: Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters? It is impossible to achieve sustainable development without eradicating or greatly reducing various acute forms of inequality: extreme poverty, hunger and food insecurity, long-term unemployment and income inequalities within and between countries. Inequalities in human development impede a successful response to climate change, and help to reinforce it. The solution to each problem is dependent on the solution to the other. It is highly unlikely that climate justice can be restored with the current level of inequalities across the world. Furthermore, it is unlikely that the GMST goals of the Paris Agreement can be reached without substantially increasing support for climate change mitigation from OECD countries to their non-OECD counterparts. There are various other examples of inextricably bound sustainability problems but discussion of these is beyond the scope of this chapter.

It has been argued that it is difficult for mainstream neoclassical economics (MNE) to promote effective mitigation at the global level (Klein 2015). Many have voiced the opinion that the neoclassical economic system has failed to respond fast enough to the challenge of climate change, and there are examples where it has impeded effective action (Turner 2019). Nevertheless, neoclassical economics provides the tools needed to address the problem. Why has it been unsuccessful up to now? The answer to this question lies at the core of sustainability in the current and next centuries, and is briefly analysed here, from the point of view of MNE.

There is consensus that rapid global mitigation is disruptive for many economic activities, with some industries and businesses gaining value and flourishing while others shrink and tend to disappear, which generates social and economic costs and losses for groups of people and countries. It may be possible to reach agreement on how to implement a just and equitable transition to a global low-carbon economy using the most appropriate transitional assistance policies for each region and country (Green and Brandstedt 2021), but the transition has been, and continues to be, constrained by the overarching global role of MNE.

Neoclassical economic theory acknowledges the over-exploitation of natural resources, pollution, increasing GHG emissions, waste accumulation, and environmental degradation as market failures that can be corrected by internalising the cost of negative externalities through appropriate market correction measures. In the case of climate change, the market correction is to establish a price attached to GHG emissions so that the cost of emissions is borne by the emitter. All countries, or initially a climate club of countries (Nordhaus 1992), should use, in all sectors of the economy, a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade mechanism, as applied in the European Union, or indeed both methods, to put a price on carbon. The economic cost-benefit optimisation models that use mitigation as a market correction tool based on a carbon price were developed about 30 years ago and have been regularly updated by William Nordhaus (Nordhaus 1992, 1993, 2013, 2017, 2018), but their effective application in global climate governanceFootnote 3 and national policymakingFootnote 4 to mitigate and ‘control’ climate change has had limited success so far.

The climate change challenge is particularly difficult to address from the point of view of neoclassical economics, for three main reasons. First, it requires intertemporal decisions involving time periods much longer than one or two social generations, while the main objective of the theory of economic growth (Solow 1956; Swan 1956) is to maximise economic growth, measured as GDP, over periods of 50–60 years, or shorter. This objective is succinctly expressed by Joseph Stiglitz when he writes that analytic growth models “are intended to help us answer questions like, for the intermediate run—for the next 50–60 years, is it possible that growth can be sustained? What does this possibility entail? We write down models as if they extend out to infinity, but no one takes these limits seriously” (Stiglitz 1997). However, some of the activities in the human subsystem over a period of 50–60 years interfere with the Earth system for many centuries and generate impacts on the human subsystem that should not be ignored. A paradigmatic example is anthropogenic GHG emissions that have had impacts on the human-climate system over the last two centuries that will be felt for many centuries and possibly millennia, periods of time which for human hyperbolic time discounting are virtually irrelevant (Ainslie 2001). What humans do now, how they live, and the characteristics of their technosphere in the current intermediate run, have impacts on the climate system well beyond that run, and these impacts will affect the human subsystem in intermediate runs in the very distant future. In the intertemporal decisions recommended by cost-benefit optimisation models (Nordhaus 2017, 2018), the critical point is to assume that the future is a series of successive intermediate runs of economic growth. The reason for favouring the intermediate run rather than the long run stems from the fact that the operative social time of the contemporary generation is strongly focused on its own element of operative time. The spaces of experience and horizons of expectation of future generations are barely relevant because they go beyond the operative time of the contemporary social generation (Santos 2021).

There is a second, more specific difficulty with MNE in dealing with long-term intertemporal decisions, although it relates to the previous one. Climate change market-based mitigation policies are especially sensitive to the value chosen for the social time discount rate used for investing in mitigation, a choice that has generated well-known debates (Nordhaus 2007; Stern 2007). A high discount rate, as advocated by Nordhaus, implies that it is not advisable to mitigate climate change rapidly because that would involve a very high social cost of carbon, which would slow global GDP growth. A cost-benefit analysis under the assumption of continuous and robust GDP growth shows that there is no need for rapid mitigation since future generations will be empowered with better technology to deal with the problem of climate change. A low discount rate, as advocated by Stern (2007), is favoured by ethical considerations of intergenerational justice based on the severity of the future impacts of unmitigated climate change, especially in the most vulnerable countries.

The third difficulty in the MNE approach is that mitigation is related to climate justice through the recognition that climate change has different impacts in populations with vastly different socioeconomic development levels, and in particular puts human rights at risk for poor and vulnerable people (Olawuyi 2015). Current negative climate change impacts are on average more severe in lower- and middle-income countries than in higher-income countries, in terms of loss of lives and livelihoods. In the former group of countries, there tend to be more profound negative effects on human rights, including rights to life, development, food, health, water and sanitation, and housing. This disparity in the impacts on human rights is not captured by mitigation models based on a cost-benefit economic optimum. In other words, in a poor and vulnerable population, the economic losses measured in terms of GDP may be low but the loss in human rights and environmental degradation may be high. Using the Global Progress Indicator (GPI) (Kubiszewski et al. 2013), which is used in ecological economics and takes into account both environmental and social factors, rather than GDP, would lead to a different final result.

Each country is a special case as regards the energy transition, so the effect of putting a price on carbon depends on the endogenous energy sources, the energy system, the growth rate of energy demand, the transition process and the level of socioeconomic development. However, all countries are committed to the same global model of GDP growth, believed to lead necessarily to increased economic prosperity and well-being in the foreseeable future. Carbon pricing is likely to slow down a country’s GDP growth and its sustainability and competitiveness in the global economy in the short term. Governments, especially in OECD countries, frequently prefer to use regulation and administrative measures to decarbonise the economy, instead of a carbon tax, because the cost of such measures is less transparent to society and it therefore becomes unclear which voters will be more affected by the process (Luciani 2020). The introduction of a uniform CO2 price on all emissions in a world economy based on intensive energy use, where 81% of the primary energy sources in 2019 were fossil fuels (IEA 2021), would necessarily reduce global GDP. In any case, rapid decarbonisation requires an increased level of state intervention in macroeconomics, which is unwelcome in neoclassical economics.

Knowledge of the beneficial effects of mitigation, especially in the long term for future generations, has been insufficient to move the electorates in OECD countries towards strong decarbonisation policies. In addition, global mitigation has not yet been sufficiently supported by the developed Annex1 countries,Footnote 5 as inscribed in the Paris Agreement from 2020 and onwards.Footnote 6 Recently, damage resulting from impacts attributed to climate change, especially damage related to extreme weather events, has caught the attention of society and governments in OECD countries, emphasising the need for rapid adaptation and mitigation action. Furthermore, there are emerging signs that uncontrolled climate change is already creating risks for economic growth in some countries (Kiley 2021). Rapid mitigation is more difficult in emerging and developing economies, such as the major emitters China and India, since their priority is to advance their development agenda and reach the same level of GDP, economic prosperity, and well-being as the OECD countries (Bhardwaj et al. 2018; Jinping 2020; Choudhury 2021).

The current point of view of neoclassical economics is that up to now nations have adopted minimal mitigation policies and that only alternative climate policies based on optimised growth theory models can successfully address the problem (Nordhaus 2018). Reaching the international temperature target of 2 °C with current policies is not considered to be feasible with reasonably accessible technologies, even with very ambitious mitigation strategies (Nordhaus 2018). The cost-benefit economic optimum, which optimises global climate mitigation policy using the DICE model, projects that the GMST will reach about 3.5 °C in 2100 and continue to increase in the twenty-second century (Nordhaus 2018). This result is heavily dependent on when implementation of the optimised mitigation policy begins. If the optimal cost-benefit pathway is delayed by 20 to 30 years the GMST increase in 2100 will be 4 °C or more. It remains to be seen whether world climate policy will end up following the 3.5 °C trajectory or stay below the Paris Agreement temperature targets. If the former happens, this can be interpreted as substantiation of the constraints imposed by neoclassical economics in the search for a solution to the climate change problem.

In conclusion, there is a great distance between current world climate change policies and optimal MNE global mitigation policies that are supposed to effectively address the climate change challenge, yet the former are strongly influenced by the overwhelming global dominance of neoclassical economics.