ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that there is a need to fix responsibility in governments, scientific organizations and environmental NGOs engaged in environmental policy debates to identify ethical issues that arise in policy formation. It explains how these ethical issues were considered or ignored, and expands the work of NGOs working on environmental issues to include a much deeper applied ethics component of their work. Climate change more than any other environmental problem has features that scream for attention to see it fundamentally as a moral, ethical, and justice issue. There are also deeply problematic ethical assumptions that have remained largely unchallenged when the opponents of climate change policies have argued that a nation, such as the US, should not adopt climate change policies due to scientific uncertainty. Government environmental policy-makers should expressly create responsibility in an office or individual for identification, analyses, and responses to ethical issues raised by environmental policy-making.
