amartya sen on climate change

8/11/2019 Amartya Sen on Climate Change

1/6

CLIMATE CHANGE

GLOBAL WARMING IS JUST ONE OF MANY ENVIRONMENTAL THREATS THAT

DEMAND OUR ATTENTION

AUGUST 22, 2014

ByAmartya Sen

Our global environment has many problems. If the high volume of carbon emission is one, the low level of

intellectual engagement with some of the major environmental challenges is surely another. There are, of coursemany engaging and well-researched studies of particular environmental problems such as global warming, andwe have good reason to be appreciative of that. And yet some of the foundational issues have remainedunresolvedindeed, unaddressed.

I would like to comment on two quite different, but ultimately related, areas of neglected environmental analysesthat demand immediate attention. The first is the general problem of not having anything like an overall normativeframework, involving ethics as well as science, that could serve as the basis of debates and discussions on policrecommendations. Despite the ubiquity and the reach of environmental dangers, a general normative frameworkfor the evaluation of these dangers has yet to emerge. The second is a much more specific problem: the failure tdevelop a framework for assessing the comparative costs of different sources of energy (from fossil fuels andnuclear power to solar and renewable energy), inclusive of the externalities involved, which can take manydifferent forms. (By externalities, I mean the consequences that operate outside the market and that market pricedo not reflect, such as the release of pollutants into the air, of effluents into rivers and public water supplies, ofradiation into the atmosphere.) One of the externalitiesthe evil effects of carbon emissionhas receivedenormous attention, which in its context is a very good thing, but there are other externalities that also demandour urgent attention. These include the growing danger from the rapidly increasing use of nuclear energyinChina and India especially, where the use of nuclear energy is gathering momentum and large expansions arebeing planned, but also elsewhere. The dangers of nuclear energy have received astonishingly little systematicattention in scientific and policy discussions. Environmental thinking has to be multi-directional rather than singlefocused, even if the focus is something as important as the climatic threats from carbon emissions.

Not only is the large issue of making reasoned estimates of the externalitiesincluding probabilistic evaluation

of energy production and energy use largely neglected, but the lack of a normative framework also contributes toignoring the benefits from greater energy use on which the lives of billions of deprived people in the world depenSince the emphasis on cutting emissions, if necessary by lesser energy use, has become an almost universalposition among environmentalists, I shall begin by noting some persistent biases in thinking about the benefitsand penalties of energy use in different forms in the contemporary world.

First, the recent focus of energy thinking has been particularly concentrated on the ways and means of reducingcarbon emissions and, linked with that, cutting down energy use, rather than taking energy use as essential forconquering poverty and seeing the environmental challenge within a more comprehensive understanding. Therewould appear to be an insufficient recognition in global discussion of the need for increased power in the poorercountries. In India, for example, about a third of the people do not have any power connection at all. Making iteasier to produce energy with better environmental correlates (and greater efficiency of energy use) may be a

contribution not just to environmental planning, but also to making it possible for a great many deprived people tolead a fuller and freer life.

Second, there is insufficient recognition of an empirical fact that at first glance may seem rather trivial, but whichhas much greater importance than may be immediately recognized. Many areas of the world where poverty iscommon are also particularly sunny and offer hugely underappreciated opportunities for the generation and use osolar power, if the scientific and engineering problems of using this source of energyincluding the developmenof cheaper storage of seasonally variable powerare adequately addressed. The availability of a strong sun, ofwhich Bangladesh and India and much of Africa get a great deal more than does Europe (which is currently thecenter of environmental activism in the world), makes it possible for many of the poorer areas on the globe to usea gigantic supply of energy, if environmentally sound ways of harnessing, storing, and utilizing solar energy canbe developed. This could benefit some countries with fewer known stocks of fossil fuels (such as large parts of
http://www.newrepublic.com/tags/climate-changehttp://www.newrepublic.com/tags/climate-changehttp://www.newrepublic.com/authors/amartya-senhttp://www.newrepublic.com/authors/amartya-senhttp://www.newrepublic.com/tags/climate-change


2/6


3/6

waves. Recently the costs of these renewable sources of energy, particularly solar, have been falling very fast quite a bit faster than was expected. This has happened rapidly in China, helped by technological innovations bualso by governmental subsidies to the solar-panel industry. This has influenced the costs and benefits of solarenergy outside China as wellquite substantially, for example, in India, mainly through the cheaper costs ofimported Chinese solar panels. America and Europe have tended to keep out the cheaperand heavilysubsidizedChinese panels mainly in the interest of their respective domestic solar-panel industries. Questioncan certainly be raised about the quality and the durability of the cheaper Chinese panels, but the comparison hato be done without a protectionist bias.

There are many other issues to be faced in coming to rely more on renewable energy, including the costs ofstorage to integrate the time pattern of energy use with the time pattern of energy production dependent onnatural circumstances, such as seasonal as well as daily variations of sunny times. The scientific possibility ofcutting down storage costs requires much more investigationand much greater public support for scientific andengineering research.

It is not my contention that these problems are easy to investigate and to solve. There are empirical gaps in ourknowledge as well as analytical difficulties in dealing with the evaluation of uncertainty. But the same problem ispresent in the analysis of global warming as well, and the recent works on estimating global dangers fromemissions from fossil fuels have moved inescapably in the direction of having to take note of uncertainty,particularly the low but non-negligible probabilities of totally catastrophic consequences from climate change (theproblem of the so-called fat tail in the probability distribution of dangers from global warming).

The comparison between the two sources of energynuclear power and renewable power from sun, wind, andwaverequires urgent evaluation, with special attention to their respective consequences on human lives andwell-being, as well as concerns about ecosystems. The need to go beyond unidirectional thinking about theenvironment is extremely strong right now. We must radically broaden the priorities of environmental planning anof energy-related scientific research in view of these empirical and evaluative concerns. Even as I turn now toexamine the ingredients of a broadly normative framework for environmental evaluation, we need to pay particulattention to these specific issues, both for their immediate importance and for their relevance for normativeevaluation in an inclusive framework.

A normative framework for environmental evaluation would have many requirements. Among them, it has to haveboth evaluative soundness and the possibility of informed application and reasoned public use. The issues thathave to be considered in developing an applicable normative framework must include politics and publicreasoning, science and epistemology, and ethics. I shall take up these different, but interrelated, engagements inturn.

The politics and public reasoning about our environmental threats involve perhaps the most difficult set ofproblems to be addressed. Even though scientific evidence on the fragility of the environment has been growing,the politics of environmental understanding has often been running defiantly against accepting the scientificreadings, particularly in the United States, and it seems to have got almost completely trapped in bitter disputesbetween Republicans and Democrats.

Yet the problem goes beyond political partisanship and polarization. The bulk of the American population seemsbasically unconvinced that the threat is large enough to warrant any great sacrifices today on the part of thepresent population. Even as President Obama is gathering enough traction for trying to impose strong constraintson allowable emissions, particularly affecting older plants and factories, Democratic candidates in some states arreputed to be getting ready to dissociate themselves from Obamas initiative, moving closer to the Republicanposition as the next elections get closer. There has been a serious failure in communicating the results ofscientific analysis and in involving the general public in informed ethical reasoning, especially in the United StateOf course America is not the whole world, but public understanding and policy-making in the United States areimportant not only because it is such a big polluter, but also because the willingness of other countries to makesacrifices today would be hard to arrange if Americans go on polluting the environment with little attempt torestrain themselves.


4/6

There has been a lot of research on climate change in recent years, and the science of our vulnerability to globawarming and other changes associated with massive, continuing, and increasing emissions is as clear today asscientific prognostication can plausibly be. If this is an area where the primary challenge may be seen ascommunication rather than basic science, it is not so in considering threats to the environment coming from otherdirections. As was said earlier, sustained scrutiny of making extensive use of nuclear power as a substitute forfossil fuels has barely started. There is a huge necessity for probing research on the rational assessment ofexternality-inclusive costs of production and use of energy from different sources.

If there are many scientific issues to be addressed, the task is not any easier on the ethical side. The moral andpolitical issues involved in this type of environmental decision involve complexity of different kinds, but perhapsthe most immediate problem arises from the involvement of different generations in any decision involved. Theneed for concerted action for our common future was powerfully outlined more than a quarter century ago in apioneering manifesto, prepared by the World Commission on Environment and Development, led by GroBrundtland, formerly the prime minister of Norway and later the director-general of the World Health OrganizationThe Brundtland report defined sustainable development as meeting the needs of the present withoutcompromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Even though I shall presently argue that we have to go beyond Brundtlands pioneering move, we must first

recognize how intellectually transformative that move has been. Sustainable development has become the rulingtheme in much of the environmental literature, and this is surely a huge element of social progress. Even in termsof public communication, the Brundtland formula has had quite remarkable success in many parts of the world,particularly in Europe, and various international congresses and conferences have been held with a basicsympathy for Brundtlands visionary approach. At the political level there is still some concerted resistance toacknowledging the challenge of sustainability, but there is a large body of informed and influential people acrossthe world who are ready to go along with the kind of ethics of fairness that Brundtland has been advocating.

It might be thought that if we were to take a strictly anthropocentric perspective on the question of theenvironment, then we need not go beyond human living standards, and can be sensibly concerned withecosystems only to the extent that they affect our own lives. But this temptingly simple conclusion is by no meansobvious or clear-cut, mainly because we human beings do not only have needs. We also have values and

priorities, about which we can reason. To say that worrying about other species is none of our business is notethical reasoning, but a refusal to engage in ethical reasoning. The contrast between our needs and our chosenpriorities has been a subject of discussion over centuries, including the medieval distinction between agents anpatients in the conceptualization of humanitybetween those who think, decide and act, and those who onlyhope to be treated well by circumstances. It is hard to see how environmental thinking, which has many differentaspects, can be reduced to a concern only with human living standards, given the other concerns we may veryreasonably have.

There is a need for greater clarity in deciding on how to think ethically about the environmental challenges in thecontemporary world. Focusing on human freedomincluding our freedom to think about what responsibilities wehavealong with our interest in our own quality of life can help in this understanding, and shed light not only onthe demands of sustainable development, but also on the content and relevance of what we can identify as

environmental issues.

The environment is sometimes seensimplistically, I believeas the state of nature, including such measuresas the extent of forest cover, the depth of the ground water table, the number of living species, and so on. It istempting to go from there to the conclusion that the best environmental planning is one of least interference, ofleaving nature alonethat the urgent need is for inaction, rather than for actions that may be best supported byreasoning. This approach is deeply defective for at least two important reasons.

First, the environment is not only a matter of passive preservation, but also one of active pursuit. Even thoughmany human activities that accompany the process of development may have destructive consequences (and this very important to understand and to address), it is also within human power to enhance and improve theenvironment in which we live. Indeed, our power to intervene, with reason and effectiveness, can be substantially


5/6


6/6

similar or more freedoms. This broader way of seeing sustainable development can accommodate ourconcernsand our anxietiesabout the fragility of some of the ecosystems that surround us.

The second broadening concerns the extension of public reasoning from the tendency to appeal to peoples self-interest to explicit recognition of the need to take into account the interestsand the freedomsof futuregenerations. We must use the freedom we have to reason about our priorities and our responsibilities. Manychanges have occurred in the past by the force of new reasoning, whether it be the unacceptability of slavery oruntouchability, or the need for social safety nets for the underprivileged, or the right to medical attention seen as social entitlement for all. The battles have not been easy, and the one on sustainable development will need

engagement and political commitment.

The third broadening is the need for the enlargement of scientific focus from mere avoidance of dangers to thepositive possibilities of enhancing human choices and freedoms, and for avoiding the biases in environmentalthinking that have come from an overconcentration on the richer parts of humanity, and the comparative neglectof research that can expand the generation, storage, and efficient use of environmentally safe energy, particularlyin poorer countries, including those in the tropics. In thinking about expanding human freedom today andsustaining it in the future, we have to take fuller note of the need forgreaterenergy use for a large number ofdeprived people in the world. Even if carbon emissions had not been such a big problem, the case for rapiddevelopment of the economic use of solar power would be important for many of the poorer parts of the globe in way that the richer world, particularly affluent but sun-starved Europe, may not readily see. The focus has to beshifted from single-minded concentration on reducing emissions to a broader understanding of the range of need

of people and the demands that come from expanding and sustaining their substantive freedoms to livereasonably good lives (for which, of course, emission control would importantly figure among other concerns).

Finally, as far as the avoidance of dangers is concerned, there is an urgent need for moving from any one-dimensional priority to facing the multifaceted threats that environmental dangers pose. It is odd, for example, thathe possible negative effects of nuclear energy have figured much more in public fear than in scientific attempts tprovide an assessmentit would have to be probabilisticof the ranges of values within which those negativeeffects can be placed. If there is need for more politics and public reasoning (including on global warming) basedon scientific evidence, there is also a strong need for more scientific and epistemic research on the different typeof environmental threats that we face, including the likely results of increasing nuclear use across the world. Thiswill take us well beyond global warming. Our scientific priorities as well as our ethical commitments demandmoreand multi-directionalengagement. Global warming, extremely important as it undoubtedly is, has to beseen as one part of a much larger picture of worrying threats as well as positive possibilities.

Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate in economics, is a winner of the National Humanities Medal, and teaches economics andphilosophy at Harvard University. His books include Development as Freedom, Identity and Violence, and The Idea ofJustice.

amartya sen on climate change

Documents