JOHN BROOME: WRITINGS ON CLIMATE
CHANGE TO 12 SEPTEMBER 2024
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The
value of life in the social cost of carbon: a critique and a proposal
Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis, ahead of print, 2024.
In its 2023 revision
of the social cost of carbon, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
values people’s lives on the basis of their willingness to pay for them,
without applying any distributional weights. It justifies this proposal
on grounds of the Kaldor–Hicks criterion, which avoids interpersonal
comparisons of wellbeing. But this criterion was discredited 70 years
ago. Interpersonal comparisons of wellbeing cannot truly be avoided, and
they should be used to determine distributional weights. One way of
doing so is to identify as a numeraire a good that brings equal
wellbeing to each person. A healthy life year is a reasonable, though
only approximate, candidate for such a good. This article presents the
point of view of a philosopher, regarding the practice of economists
from outside the discipline.
Link to text
Utilitarianism
and climate change
A guest essay in Introduction to Utilitarianism: An Online
Textbook, by Richard Chappell, Darius Messner and
William MacKaskill, 2023.
Link to text
Why
not a carbon tax?
Revista de Ciencia Política, ahead of print, 2024.
If the world is to
overcome the threat of climate change, a price must be set on carbon. A
carbon tax is a means of creating a carbon price, and it is an ideal tax
in that, unlike most taxes, it promotes economic efficiency. Yet many
countries have no carbon tax. The reason is that there are strong
political interests opposed to taxing carbon. I shall argue that these
interests need to be appeased by fully compensating anyone who would
otherwise be harmed by a carbon tax. This includes the owners and
workers in the fossil fuel industries. If a carbon tax is to be
successful, it needs to be introduced alongside an appropriate system of
compensation. Some of the compensation will need to be paid out of
public debt, and this will be feasible for many countries only if they
are supported by a new financial institution: a World Climate Bank.
Link to text
A World Climate Bank
Report published by the Global Challenges Foundation, 2022. Written
with Duncan Foley.
Link to the full report
Review of: Greta Thunberg, No
One is Too Small to Make a Difference
Society, 58 (2021).
Full
text
Climate
change and population ethics
In
The Oxford Handbook of
Population Ethics, edited by Gustaf Arrhenius, Krister
Bykvist, Tim Campbell, and Elizabeth Finneron-Burns, Oxford
University Press, 2022, pp. 393–406.
We
cannot make good decisions about climate change without taking
account of population ethics.
Draft
Self-interest
against climate change
Lecture
delivered at Stanford University on 14 February 2020. Swedish
version in Klimat och Moral: Nio Tankar om Hetten,
edited by Magnus Linton, Natur & Kultur, 2021.
Economic
theory tells us it is possible to control climate change in a
way that requires no sacrifice from anyone in any generation.
Doing so will require decarbonization to be financed by means
of public borrowing, which will need to be managed through a
new financial institution: a World Climate Bank.
Draft
Philosophy in the IPCC
A
challenge for the world: take notice of economics
In a Festschrift for Ottmar Edenhofer, 2018.
Text
Efficiency
and future generations
Economics
and Philosophy, 34 (2018), pp. 221–41.
Standard
lessons from economics tell us that an externality creates
inefficiency, and that this inefficiency can be removed by
internalizing the externality. This paper considers how
successfully these lessons can be extended to intergenerational
externalities such as emissions of greenhouse gas. For
intergenerational externalities, the standard lessons involve
comparisons between states whose populations of people differ,
either in their identities or their numbers. Common notions of
efficiency break down in these comparisons. This paper supplies
a new notion of efficiency that allows the lessons to survive,
but at the cost of reducing their practical significance.
Preprint
Published
version
Trump and climate change
The Philosophers' Magazine, 76 (2017)
Preprint
A World Climate Bank
In Institutions for Future Generations, edited by Axel Gosseries
and Iñigo González-Ricoy, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 156-69
Written with Duncan Foley
Because greenhouse gas is an externality, it creates Pareto inefficiency.
It is therefore possible to respond to climate change in a way that is a
Pareeto improvement, requiring no sacrifice from anyone in any generation.
A great deal of benefit can be achieved by doing so. However, making a
Pareto improvement in practice requires a new international financial
institution. We need a World Climate Bank, which will allow investments to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions to be financed by public debt.
Text
Do not ask for morality
In The Ethical Underpinnings of Climate Economics, edited by
Adrian Walsh, Säde Hormio and Duncan Purves, Routledge, 2016, pp. 9-21.
Experience has shown that governments cannot be motivated by morality to
make sufficient investments to bring climate change under control. They
therefore must be motivated by self interest. It is possible to respond
adequately to climate change without asking for a sacrifice from anyone in
any generation.
Published
version
A reply to my critics
Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 40 (2016), pp. 158-171
A response to three comments on my Climate Matters. In
responding to Elizabeth Cripps, I argue that each individual’s emissions
do harm because the harm done by cumulative emissions is roughly
proportional to their quantity. Each rich person’s emissions are therefore
an injustice. In responding to Holly Lawford-Smith, I point out that the
harm done by each tonne of a person’s emissions is very much greater than
the cost to the person of avoiding that emission, so very few among the
rich have any excuse for making emissions. In response to Paul Bou-Habib,
I argue that the morality of climate change has no need for a
‘person-affecting’ notion of improvement, and that notion is in any case
defective because it can be cyclical.
Published version Journal page
Climate change and the ethics of
population
In Demography and Climate Change, edited by Franz Prettenthaler,
Lukas Meyer and Wolfgang Polt, Joanneum Research, 2015, pp. 37-43
Proof
Climate change: life and death
In Climate Change and Justice, edited by Jeremy Moss, Cambridge
University Press, 2015, pp. 184-200
Full text
A
philosopher at the IPCC
The Philosophers' Magazine, 66 (2014), pp. 10-16
A shorter version appears on the blog of The London Review of Books
Published version
The
public
and private morality of climate change
The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, 32, (2013), pp. 3-20
Translation in Foreign Theoretical Trends (China), forthcoming
Full text (including the diagram, which was omitted
from printed version)
The
most
important thing about climate change
In Public Policy: Why Ethics Matters, edited by Jonathan
Boston, Andrew Bradstock and David Eng, ANU E Press, 2010, pp. 101-16
Full text
Should we value population?
Journal of Political Philosophy, 13 (2005), pp. 399-413
Reprinted in Population and Political Theory: Philosophy,
Politics and Society 8th Series, edited by James Fishkin
and Robert Goodin, Wiley-Blackwell 2010
Reprinted in The Study of Ethics, Southeast University Press,
2007, pp. 3-21
Full text
The
ethics
of climate change
Scientific American, June 2008, pp 69-73
Reprinted in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2008,
edited by Tim Folger and Elizabeth Kolbert, Houghton Mifflin, 2009, pp.
11-18
Reprinted in Research Ethics: A Philosophical Approach to
Responsible Conduct of Research, edited by Gary Comstock,
Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 265-9
Full text
Valuing
policies
in response to climate change: some ethical issues
(Report written for the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change,
2006)
Published on the UK Treasury website.
Reprinted in Global Justice, edited by Christian Barry and
Holly Lawford-Smith, Ashgate Publishing, 2012
Preprint
Counting the Cost of Global
Warming
White Horse Press, 1992
Full
text
of book
Writing for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Contributions to the Fifth Assessment Report:
Chapter
3: Social,
economic and ethical concepts and methods (Lead Author)
Link
Technical Summary
(Lead Author) Link
Summary for Policymakers
(Drafting Author) Link
All in Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change,
Cambridge University Press, 2014. (The report of Working Group III.)
Synthesis Report, IPCC, 2014 (Member of the Core Writing Team) Link