ABSTRACT
The predicted effects of climate change are potentially catastrophic. They include dramatic lowering of people’s living standards and great loss of life. The commonly employed methods of economics, however, pay no specific attention to the effects that are expected to threaten many people’s survival and subsistence. Moreover, the most serious effects are likely to be experienced by future people living centuries after us. But, as a result of the common practice in economics to discount the effects on future people, the economics of climate change may give significantly lower weight to those later serious effects of climate change compared to earlier (often lesser) effects. A number of authors have therefore accused the standard economic evaluation of climate policies of being unable to deal explicitly with the serious ethical issues related to climate change and suggested that the economics of climate change should go beyond standard economic modeling and reconsider the narrow utilitarian ethics underpinning these models (e.g., Jamieson, 2014; Spash, 2002; Stern, 2014a, 2014b; see also the discussion in IPCC, 2014).2 In this chapter, we take these suggestions seriously. We consider a specific nonutilitarian approach to justice, sufficientarianism, that cares especially about the effects on people’s basic subsistence. We begin by discussing the strengths of sufficientarianism in comparison to other ethical theories particularly in the context of intergenerational distribution related to climate change. Although the sufficientarian understanding of justice has provoked some plausible objections when applied among contemporaries, this approach has specific characteristics that speak in its favor when dealing with relations between generations. Moreover, many climate ethicists have advocated sufficientarian understandings of justice (Beckerman and Pasek, 2001; Cripps, 2013; Caney, 2010b; Shue, 2010; Wolf, 2009). However, little has been done so far to investigate whether and how sufficientarian principles could be used to inform the economic analysis, and what consequences this would have. These neglected issues are addressed in the latter part of this chapter. We argue that accommodating sufficientarian ideals in the economic analysis is possible, but would require major changes in some of the
core assumptions and customary methods of climate economics. We explore some recent attempts of environmental and climate economics to refine the standard assumptions (Heal, 2009; IPCC, 2014; Stern, 2014a, 2014b). In particular, we find the use of resource-specific discount rates (Baumgärtner et al., 2015; Drupp, 2015; Heal, 2009; Traeger, 2011) a promising way to integrate sufficientarian principles with intergenerational economic evaluations. Despite its narrowness, our investigation reveals some of the main conceptual and practical problems that arise when economics aims to address the ethical issues related to the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change. We argue that intergenerational sufficientarianism offers some promising ways for the economics of climate change to overcome these problems.
