How we deal with climate change is the most important ethical issue the human race has ever faced. Global heating affects not only every human on this planet now and for at least dozens of generations to come, but also all the non-human animals, who are within our stewardship.
I’m writing this article to provide an overview of this substack, which discusses Climate Ethics. I covered this topic in my 2023 book Earthling: A New Ethics for the Anthropocene, published by Ethics Press in the U.K. For me, the two biggest climate-ethics issues are the impacts of our actions on non-human animals, and on future generations of humans who will have to live, for the next several hundred years, with the climate we’re creating now.
Climate ethics can be a fairly broad field. I approach it as an environmental lawyer and writer; others approach it as a sub-discipline of philosophy. I plan to review some of the philosophical books as well as climate fiction in future articles here. I also touch on social, political, environmental, legal, and economic issues related to global heating.
Books written in the 2010s spent time discounting climate-deniers’ arguments. Those arguments have been settled now. It is indisputable that the world is heating up, currently by an average of around 1.5°C, due to increased concentrations of human-emitted greenhouse gases, primarily CO₂ and methane, in the atmosphere.
We know the main causes of those emissions: burning fossil fuels and methane leaks. We shouldn’t spend more time debating this settled science. Those who dispute it are guilty of bad faith, and no amount of talking will convince them.
But there isn’t enough political will to solve the climate crisis, presumably because the problem is long-term, mostly affecting distant and future people, and we’re short-term thinkers focused on our own lives.
I believe we are headed toward a world with 3°C of warming by the end of the century. The third chapter of Mark Lynas’ book Our Final Warning discusses a 3°C world. Based on that chapter and other research, here’s what it will probably look like:
53% of the world’s population exposed to 20 to more days with heat levels that can kill, every year;
Droughts and desertification in many areas of the world, resulting in a huge reduction in land that can be cultivated with agriculture;
The loss of around 80% of our glaciers;
Increase in number and intensity of tropical storms and flooding;
A very high risk of extinction for one million species;
Positive-feedback events that will cause more heating: the loss of Amazon rainforest and Arctic permafrost.
An Arctic free of ice in the summer.
Two feet of sea-level rise by 2100, and a commitment to around twenty feet of sea-level rise later, which will cause flooding in many coastal areas.
I suspect that many people instinctively believe that, if we stop emitting greenhouse gases, the climate will soon return to “normal,” i.e. the pre-industrial levels that we had a hundred years ago. But this is not the case. When we stop emitting GHGs, we will be stuck with the temperatures occurring at that time because it takes centuries for natural processes to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere.
As long as we continue to emit GHGs, temperatures will rise, and the effects will get worse: heat waves, droughts, sea-level rise, wildfires, desertification, and on and on. Eventually we’ll take action. It surprises me that this summer of 2026, the hottest summer on record, with the worst-ever heat waves and forest fires, has not caused a groundswell of political will on the climate. But things will keep getting worse until we take action. How bad a disaster do we need to convince us to get serious? The fictional heatwave in India which begins Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future kills 20 million people. Would that be enough?
Governments around the world must provide the solutions to the problem. Individual or local action will not be enough. And international cooperation is essential: one major hold-out country continuing to emit large amounts of GHGs will doom the overall effort. At the very least we should all adopt policies favoring conversion from fossil to renewable energy in our cars, homes, and power plants.
But you can still help as an individual. The most important thing is to stop burning fossil fuels:
Ride an E-bike or drive an EV instead of a fossil-powered car; or take public transportation.
Replace natural-gas appliances in your home with electric ones.
Reduce plane flights.
And eat more plant-based food instead of meat.
It’s important to do what you can to influence your country’s government to adopt policies that fight global heating, by voting, protesting, and supporting organizations that are litigating against bad policies and government actions.
Future generations will look back on the present moment as the time we could have acted to prevent the worst impacts of global heating. We are already to blame for our selfishness and short-sightedness. So let’s do what we can to reduce that blame and make our fragile planet better for future generations and for us.