Should We Try to Reduce Our Individual Emissions of Greenhouse Gases?

The scientific evidence is clear: climate change is real, it is already happening, and the increase in worldwide temperatures is fuelled by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere whose emission is a side-effect of various human activities. This suggests that if you take seriously the threat of climate change to human and animal welfare, you should aim to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that you emit. In this way, you help contain the overall amount of emissions, thus keeping global warming in check.

Surprisingly, many philosophers disagree with this seemingly straightforward piece of practical advice. They argue that we should become politically more active and seek ways to pressure our governments into taking action. A focus on reducing individual emissions strikes them as no more than an unhelpful diversion. The basic point that these philosophers insist on is that climate change is a global problem that requires a collective solution; trying to tackle climate change through uncoordinated individual action is like trying to stop a war by deserting.

It is surely correct that we will not be able to keep the rise in global temperatures in check unless our governments take decisive and coordinated action. This makes it plausible to assume that our most important duties with respect to fighting climate change are political in nature. But even granting this, many of us still feel that merely taking political action might not be enough. Even if it is unlikely that we  will achieve much  by  reducing our emissions in  the absence of institutional solutions that incentivise others to do  the  same, many of us still feel uncomfortable about continuing to engage in high-emission activities now that we are aware of their connection to global warming. In this short post, I explain why this feeling of unease seems to me well-founded.

For one thing, it is easy to appear hypocritical if you are actively fighting for a political solution to a problem that you are at the same time overtly and seemingly shamelessly contributing towards. Of course, it is open to you to point out that individual sacrifices are futile in the absence of an institutional solution, and that you will happily abide by relevant rules and regulations once an institutional solution is in place. But by doing this, you might well be providing an argument that manages to convince others only at an intellectual level. Intuitively, most of us expect that those who fight for social change should display a willingness to lead by example. Once you have decided that you should become politically active in the fight against climate change, you thus have what we might call an integrity-based reason in favour of making an effort to reduce your carbon footprint.

But there is a further reason to reduce your carbon footprint that applies to you no matter how politically active you are in the fight against global warming. Note that whenever you engage in an activity that raises the expected amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, you thereby raise the amount of climate-change related harms that you should reasonably expect will eventually occur.  While it is impossible to know in which ways—if any—the emissions  that you are responsible for are contributing to climate-change related harms,   the scientific evidence leaves little room for doubt that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are an important driver of global warming, and that an increase in global temperatures is correlated with an increase in extreme weather events and natural disasters. These two scientifically established links suffice to make it the case that from your imperfectly informed point of view, it is rational for you to estimate that with each contribution to the overall amount of greenhouse gases   in the atmosphere,  you increase the amount of climate-change related harms   that will eventually occur.

Now for most of the emissions that we are responsible for as individuals, it is true that they raise the amount of expected harm only by a tiny bit.  It follows  that the expected harm that we cause by engaging in high-emission activities cannot by itself speak decisively against engaging in such activities. After all, many activities are associated with an increase in  expected  harms,  and  this does not suffice to render engaging in them morally objectionable. Consider the example of walking a dog, which might result in someone getting bitten. Or consider the example of driving a car, which—quite apart from its impact on    the climate—raises the probability that there will be a traffic accident in your town. For many such risk-imposing activities, it seems that we may permissibly engage in them as long as engaging in them serves some valuable purpose, and  as long as we  engage in them in a conscientious manner.  To  take the example  of driving a car, as long as you drive carefully and have a reason to travel from one place to another, driving seems to be a morally permissible activity.

When it comes to emitting greenhouse gases, the requirement to emit them only in a conscientious manner makes little sense.  While you reduce the risk     of a traffic accident if you drive carefully, it is impossible to reduce the risk of climate-change related harms by emitting greenhouse gases in a careful manner. By contrast, the requirement to engage in a risky activity only if doing so serves some valuable purpose has force also in the context of emitting greenhouse gases. More precisely, the requirement speaks against producing emissions that we could avoid at little or no cost to  ourselves.  On the face of it,  this may  sound like an unnecessary restriction on what we  may permissibly do.  After   all, it seems plausible that whenever we choose to engage in an activity, we  do  so because we expect to benefit from it. But on reflection, I believe that we frequently engage in high-emission activities unthinkingly. That is, we could easily find a low- or at least lower-emission alternative that would leave us roughly equally well off. For example, many of us could avoid distant holiday destinations without being worse off for it;  many of us could eat less meat or  use their bicycles more frequently and be healthier and happier as a result, just   as many of us could pay more attention to fuel efficiency when buying a new car without thereby sacrificing anything of appreciable significance. To the extent that we  could reduce our emissions in this costless manner,  I believe that we   are morally required to do so. If we fail to reduce our emissions where we could costlessly do so, we risk harm to others for no good reason. This shows an insufficient concern for the welfare of others, and strikes me as disrespectful.

In sum, our most important individual responsibility in the fight against climate change may well be to lobby for political change. Even so, we should carefully consider also our individual choices to emit, and elect to reduce our emissions where we can easily do so. If we fail to  reduce our emissions where  we could easily do so, we unnecessarily put others at an increased risk of harm, thus showing an insufficient concern for their welfare.

Are employees responsible for cooperate harms?

49.6% of Australia’s 2016-7 direct emissions came from just ten companies and their assets. The worst of these was AGL, at 43.3 million tonnes of CO2-e (Latimer 2018). To put this in perspective, the average Australian emits between 3 and 30 tonnes of GHGs per year (Australian Greenhouse Calculator 2018), while Australia itself emitted 550.2 million tonnes of GHGs 2015-6 (Jericho 2018). There’s an argument to be had, obviously, over the quantity of emissions necessary to make a difference to the harms of climate change. On the one hand, you might think difference-making is extremely hard to come by: perhaps only cumulative global emissions make a difference; or only the emissions of large countries make a difference. On the other hand, you might think it’s easy to come by: perhaps even the emissions associated with isolated individual actions can be expected to make a difference (Broome 2013).

Corporate emitters fall somewhere in between these two extremes. We know that increases in emissions correlate with more frequent and more severe extreme weather events. Although we don’t know exactly how the causal relations work, we can assume that it’s not 1:1 between a molecule of extra GHG and a difference in the way an extreme weather event occurs (Lawford-Smith 2016). But corporate emitters aren’t in the business of emitting single molecules; at the volume they emit, we can assume they’re more likely than not to make a difference of the relevant kind.

Still, it’s not enough to be responsible for a harm to simply cause the harm, at least normally. We need it to also be the case that the agent that causes the harm is not morally excused. Different theorists give different accounts of what excuse consists in, such as ‘not being ignorant about the harm’, or ‘not being culpably ignorant about the harm’. That means AGL would only be responsible if it knew that its emissions would cause climate change harms, or didn’t know but should have known. However, this way of thinking about excuse is unlikely to get a corporate emitter like AGL off the hook, because climate change is massively well-publicised, and the link between GHGs and harms is well-established. So it’s likely that AGL is responsible for the harm it does.

But what exactly does this mean? It’s not enough to say “AGL is responsible for climate change harms!” and stop there. In fact, it’s not enough to specify the obligations that we think follow from that, and stop there. I think it’s clear that AGL, and Australia’s other big corporate emitters, have obligations to desist in all GHG emissions (to move away from coal, oil, petrol, and natural gas), and to mitigate their historical GHG emissions to some realistic extent. (And of course, there’s a complicated discussion to be had about exactly what is ‘reasonable’ here: should AGL mitigate only to the extent compatible with remaining profitable? Should it mitigate even if that leads to bankruptcy and closure? Should it mitigate if this would have negative effects on individual energy customers?)

The reason we can’t stop there is that AGL is not currently very likely to be receptive to claims about its climate change obligations. That’s why I think we have to ask further questions, about what AGL is, who its members are, what they owe in virtue of their membership, and more broadly, how to get values into corporate agents so that they are more likely to be receptive to the obligations that they have.

Following Katherine Ritchie, I understand groups to be realizations of structures (Ritchie 2013). This might sound complicated, but it really just means that groups can be modelled in a way that includes ‘nodes’ (something like roles) and ‘relations’ (which connect some roles to others). For example, we might understand ‘Chief Executive Officer’ as a node in a corporate structure, and we might understand the relations between that node and the ‘General Manager’ node to be hierarchical, such that the former gets to tell the latter what to do. AGL had 3,500 employees at the time of its 2017 Annual Report. All of these people occupy nodes in the corporate structure of AGL.

One interesting question to ask about corporations is whether employees are the full story about their membership. Some people think that shareholders ought to be included too. I prefer to think of the relationship between shareholders and corporations as one that holds between two groups. If both groups are agents (which means, they are both highly coordinated and able to make decisions) then it’s a relationship in which one agent commissions another agent to do something, in this case, climate change harm. The shareholders would be like a mafia boss directing a subordinate to carry out a murder. If only one group is an agent (this will be the corporation), then it’s a relationship in which many agents—individual shareholders—contribute to an explanation of why the corporate entity went on to do as it did. This won’t be a commissioning if the shareholders are not coordinated enough for this to be an exercise of their agency.

When we tell the story about corporate responsibility in terms of employees who are co-constituents of the corporation, by way of occupying nodes in its structure (at least, at a time), we have a way to say more about who’s responsible when a corporate agent is responsible. It’s the employees, taken together. They can make it the case—‘from the inside’—that the corporate agent does what it ought to do, by making it the case, through their roles, that the corporation is value-responsive.

I think employees must use their roles (their occupation of nodes in the corporate structure) to try to make it the case that the corporation fulfils its climate obligations. They can do this in lots of different ways. Those who have the opportunity to participate in the corporate decision-making procedure ought to put value considerations forward. Those in positions of power should introduce roles that reliably bring value considerations to the table (like ‘Environmental Responsibility Officer’). Those at the top of such corporations should write or modify corporate charters that explicitly include environmental values. And all employees should work to build an institutional culture that is environmentally responsible, and work against an institutional culture that is environmentally irresponsible.

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