Philosophical Foundations of Climate Change Policy

Joseph Heath is Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. A fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Trudeau Foundation, Heath is the author of several books, both popular and academic. His most recent, The
Machinery of Government (Oxford, 2020), is a study of the ethics of public administration. He is also the author of Enlightenment 2.0, which won the Shaughnessy Cohen prize for Political Writing in Canada.

Introduction

1. False Starts
1.1 Traditional environmental ethics
1.2 Liberal environmentalism
1.3 Conclusion

2. Climate Change and Growth
2.1 The undemandingness problem
2.2 Limits to growth
2.3 Impacts of climate change
2.4 Sustainability and fungibility
2.5 Catastrophe
2.6 Conclusion

3. Intergenerational Justice
3.1 The consequentialist challenge
3.2 The structure of intergenerational cooperation
3.3 Applications and objections
3.4 Just savings
3.5. Conclusion

4. Carbon Pricing
4.1 Market reciprocity
4.2 Carbon pricing
4.3 Example: food
4.4 Complementary policies
4.5 Conclusion

5. The Social Cost of Carbon
5.1 Embedded CBA
5.2 Basic principles of CBA
5.3 CBA and regulation
5.4 Objections and replies
5.5 Climate change
5.6 Compensating the losers

6. Positive Social Time Preference
6.1 The case for temporal neutrality
6.2 Reflective equilibrium
6.3 Institutionalized responsibility
6.4 Thinking politically
6.5 Discounting for deontologists
6.6 Conclusion

Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography