Confronting climate crisis : a framework for understanding the criteria for addressing dangerous climate change
Despite wide acknowledgement of the threats from human-induced climate change to human societies and the wider ecosystem, no comprehensive long-term global agreement to tackle the problem has yet been reached to replace the Kyoto Protocol. In arguing for a replacement, evaluative claims are often made that certain policy proposals are more environmentally effective, equitable or efficient than others. However, these three dominant criteria are subject to a range of interpretations, and can come into conflict with one another. This limits their use for guiding policy. Philosophy can and should play a role in scrutinising alternative conceptions, their justifications and assumptions, and help develop justifiable formulations of the criteria. Existing philosophical contributions have focused on aspects of the equity criterion, but have largely overlooked the other two criteria and have not considered how they should be prioritised overall. This thesis, for the first time, considers and proposes an ordering of these three criteria (focusing on mitigation), drawing on a Green Economic conceptual framework. This places ecological effectiveness first, defining the ecological limits of economic greenhouse gas-emitting
Makoff, Ruth
Confronting climate crisis : a framework for understanding the criteria for addressing dangerous climate change. Despite wide acknowledgement of the threats from human-induced climate change to human societies and the wider ecosystem, no comprehensive long-term global agreement to tackle the problem has yet been reached to replace the Kyoto Protocol. In arguing for a replacement, evaluative claims are often made that certain policy proposals are more environmentally effective, equitable or efficient than others. However, these three dominant criteria are subject to a range of interpretations, and can come into conflict with one another. This limits their use for guiding policy. Philosophy can and should play a role in scrutinising alternative conceptions, their justifications and assumptions, and help develop justifiable formulations of the criteria. Existing philosophical contributions have focused on aspects of the equity criterion, but have largely overlooked the other two criteria and have not considered how they should be prioritised overall. This thesis, for the first time, considers and proposes an ordering of these three criteria (focusing on mitigation), drawing on a Green Economic conceptual framework. This places ecological effectiveness first, defining the ecological limits of economic greenhouse gas-emitting
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