Assessing climate policies: Catastrophe avoidance and the right to sustainable development

Daniel Edward Callies and Darrel Moellendorf
Additional contact information
Daniel Edward Callies: 164894University of California, San Diego, USA
Darrel Moellendorf: 416234Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 2021, vol. 20, issue 2, 127-150

Abstract: With the significant disconnect between the collective aim of limiting warming to well below 2°C and the current means proposed to achieve such an aim, the goal of this paper is to offer a moral assessment of prominent alternatives to current international climate policy. To do so, we’ll outline five different policy routes that could potentially bring the means and goal in line. Those five policy routes are: (1) exceed 2°C; (2) limit warming to less than 2°C by economic de-growth; (3) limit warming to less than 2°C by traditional mitigation only; (4) limit warming to less than 2°C by traditional mitigation and widespread deployment of Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs); and (5) limit warming to less than 2°C by traditional mitigation, NETs, and Solar Radiation Management as a fallback. In assessing these five policy routes, we rely primarily upon two moral considerations: the avoidance of catastrophic climate change and the right to sustainable development. We’ll conclude that we should continue to aim at the two-degree target, and that to get there we should use aggressive mitigation, pursue the deployment of NETs, and continue to research SRM.

Keywords: climate change; degrowth; mitigation; negative emissions; geoengineering; sustainable development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1470594X211003334 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:pophec:v:20:y:2021:i:2:p:127-150

DOI: 10.1177/1470594X211003334

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Politics, Philosophy & Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().