Brief Description
This book examines the threat that climate change poses to the projects of poverty eradication, sustainable development, and biodiversity preservation.
Learn More about the Book
This book examines the threat that climate change poses to the projects of poverty eradication, sustainable development, and biodiversity preservation. It offers a careful discussion of the values that support these projects and a critical evaluation of the normative bases of climate change policy. This book regards climate change policy as a public problem that normative philosophy can shed light on. It assumes that the development of policy should be based on values regarding what is important to respect, preserve, and protect. What sort of climate change policy do we owe the poor of the world who are particularly vulnerable to climate change? Why should our generation take on the burden of mitigating climate change that is caused, in no small part, by emissions from people now dead? What value is lost when natural species go extinct, as they may well do en masse because of climate change? This book presents a broad and inclusive discussion of climate change policy, relevant to those with interests in public policy, development studies, environmental studies, political theory, and moral and political philosophy.
About the Author
Darrel Moellendorf is Professor of International Political Theory at Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universitat, Frankfurt am Main. He is the author of Cosmopolitan Justice (2002) and Global Inequality Matters (2009). He co-edited Jurisprudence (2004, with Christopher J. Roederer), Current Debates in Global Justice (2005, with Gillian Brock), Global Justice: Seminal Essays (2008, with Thomas Pogge) and The Handbook of Global Ethics (2014, with Heather Widdows). He has been a Member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, a recipient of DAAD and NEH Fellowships, and a Senior Fellow at Justitia Amplificata at Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt and the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Bad Homburg.
Review Quotes
1. "This book is a penetrating and comprehensive first effort to tackle a largely unacknowledged but supremely important moral dilemma. It is a unique contribution to advancing the literature on climate change and shows the importance of our necessary initiatives to exit the fossil fuel regime by raising prices to decrease demand and to create a direct threat to the only source of energy now affordable to many of the world s poorest struggling for sustainable development."
Henry Shue, Centre for International Studies, University of Oxford"
2. "Darrel Moellendorf's book is a valuable, second-generation contribution to the literature on the normative implications of anthropogenic climate change. It brings together a great many issues that must be addressed in connection with climate change. Among others, it addresses the issues of normative principles and frameworks and of impacts to the non-human world, technical questions about risk and uncertainty and discounting future impacts, the distribution of mitigation costs, and the appropriateness of strategies other than mitigation."
Kendy M. Hess, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
3. "This book provides a timely challenge to current trends in decision making frameworks for climate change policies The text provides an argumentative arsenal for the case that the sense of 'urgency' related to climate change does not automatically justify reduced consideration of moral starting points, but rather, such moral perspectives may be the most practical means of determining what we can and cannot do in relation to future climate change policies."
Phil Johnstone, Journal of International Development"
