User:Baileymlr/Climate ethics

Article: Climate ethics

Overview[edit in bold]

The idea of climate ethics stems from ethics itself, mostly being a philosophical view at how to deal with global warming. This has been discussed overtime by many countries and influential leaders. Because this is a large scale issue, climate ethicists have theorized about approaches that would have benefits globally. The idea of climate ethics is important due to its impact on every level of life, from the economy and ecosystems, all the way down to the scale of a single persons' life. This has made it a question of who is responsible for changes that need to be made, or if there is even a point of trying to make changes due to the polarity of climate change mitigation. The topic of climate ethics has only become more complex moving into the 2020s as the topic of climate change has gained more traction. This results in having to take into consideration the opinions and views from different fields. It is also argued that this goes further than just being an issue to be solved, but that it is a humanitarian issue that needs to be faced ethically and have benefits that reach further than just those who can make the change, such as those in underdeveloped countries and the animal kingdom.

An article in the scientific journal Nature (Patz, 2005) concluded that the human-induced warming that the world is now experiencing is already causing 150,000 deaths and 5 million incidents of disease each year from additional malaria and diarrhea, mostly in the poorest nations. Death and disease incidents are likely to soar as warming increases. Facts such as this demonstrate that climate change is compromising rights to life, liberty and personal security. Hence, ethical analysis of climate change policy must examine how that policy impacts on those basic rights.

Climate change raises a number of particularly challenging ethical issues about distributive justice, in particular concerning how to fairly share the benefits and burdens of climate change policy options. Many of the policy tools often employed to solve environmental problems such as cost-benefit analysis usually do not adequately deal with these issues because they often ignore questions of just distribution.