Try to be coolheaded about climate risk, and even conventional estimates of damage will overwhelm you. The cultural mood has lately turned against climate alarm — “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk,” Vice President JD Vance scoffed at the Munich Security Conference last week — but new temperature records are set almost by the month, and the tally of destruction continues to mount.
In his new book, “Climate Justice: What Rich Nations Owe the World — and the Future,” the legal scholar Cass Sunstein cites one estimate that, since 1990, carbon from the world’s five largest emitters is responsible for $6 trillion in income loss around the world. Some researchers have suggested that damage from that already-emitted carbon could grow 80-fold over this century. According to calculations by Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency, the “social cost of carbon” from the United States alone reaches $1 trillion in yearly damages globally. Other estimates run higher.
What are you supposed to do with numbers like these? They are simply too large to be metabolized into policy, as climate diplomats have often emphasized (including to me). They make any American effort to alleviate climate suffering abroad look pathetically tiny. It’s as though they were beamed from another universe, in which wonky technocrats could solve any problem if we gave them the right data and applied the proper discounting rate.
Sunstein is almost the caricature of that wonky technocrat, a distinguished legal theorist (and sometime philosopher and behavioral economist) who helped run and reshape the federal government as Barack Obama’s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. “Climate Justice” is a measured meditation on our obligations to one another in a warming world, and a reminder that, among all its other dizzying and distressing features, global warming is a red-hot problem from moral philosophy, asking of us, who counts and who doesn’t?
Sunstein and I spoke last week about the cause of climate justice, the philosophy of “moral cosmopolitanism” and the very uncertain fate of the federal bureaucracy under Trump 2.0. Here is our conversation, which was edited for length and clarity:
In the book, you write, “Here is my starting point: Each person should be counted equally, no matter where they live, and no matter when they live.” That might strike many people as somewhat radical, especially given how much we seem to be moving away from principles of universality and mutual obligation.
Yes, I feel a little bit like writing this book was like writing a celebration of folk music the day after Dylan went electric. The timing is a little less than perfect.
Or it could be perversely perfect.
Well, folk music is really good.
But moral cosmopolitanism also has multiple forms. The less provocative form is simply that one nation should not harm another: If Canada emits pollution that hurts people in Maine and Vermont, there’s no question that Canada has violated moral requirements. And if Mexico starts throwing poison in the air, and that starts killing people in Texas, and we tell them to stop — we’re not asking for foreign aid, we’re asking them to stop throwing poison on Texans. That form of cosmopolitanism, which suggests inflicting harm on one’s neighbors is a wrong — I think that’s alive and well.
But there are other forms. One would suggest that, if people are dying in a nation and we can help them at modest cost, we ought to do that. An even stronger version would suggest that for purposes of practical policy as opposed to abstract theory people in other nations count as much as people at home. But that’s a very bold claim to make, and I wouldn’t make it.
Even the weak version, that we shouldn’t harm others — are we so sure that is alive and well? Ten years ago, you could tell a story in which, over centuries, our circle of empathy had expanded outward. But now? Just look at JD Vance fighting with the pope about what Christians owe to the world.
Well, I think it’s fair to say that many people in positions of authority in Washington don’t feel toward suffering in other nations the same way that President Kennedy did, when he spoke so movingly of the connectedness of humanity. Where we’re going to be in three years or five years is harder to say. The fact that we are where we are now could not easily have been predicted in 2012, let’s say. And we’re not that far from 2012.
But if the goal is to develop climate politics that are built on the proposition that everyone everywhere matters equally, how far are we now from honoring that principle?
Oh, very far. But the moral principle is not meant as a guide to exact political practice. The idea that someone born in Montreal deserves less concern than someone born in New York City — that’s very hard to defend. But for Canada to say that we care as much about people in New York City as people in Montreal would be very surprising and arguably objectionable.
You write that you used to feel strongly that the U.S. should not account for global damages in assessing whether to scale back its own emissions.
And the reason I thought that was that even to figure out who the wrongdoer is, that is really hard. The U.S. is not a person. Americans who live in Utah, for instance — what do they have to do with all U.S. emissions? They just want to have a good life; they don’t want to hurt anybody.
Or take an American with an extremely small carbon footprint, for instance.
So to see America, as a whole, as a wrongdoer, that’s not right.
Then, think of the victims. It might be that some nation is particularly vulnerable, but a nation consists of lots of people, some of whom are maybe insulated and some of whom are maybe wealthy and some of whom are maybe big emitters.
Then, I also thought, and think, that the United States has conferred massive benefits on other countries in the form of innovation, health benefits, technologies. Man, oh man, what we’ve conferred is massive. And so, in principle, you would want to balance the benefits against the costs, and it might be that, in fact, that they owe us, we don’t owe them — though, of course, we didn’t just give them all those benefits. They had to pay us for most of them.
But I have changed my view.
Why?
Writing the book. That made me see that the logic of those arguments failed. I couldn’t write my way to saying we have no moral obligation to help poor nations whose severe distress is, in part, a product of our actions.
I still think those other objections are valid. They are good worries. But as a matter of rough justice, the harms we’ve imposed on those countries — those are real harms. How large are they? I feel a great lack of confidence in any particular number. But to say that it’s a significant number is correct.
I think in the book the words I use are “a lot,” which has a deliberate vagueness. You could think that “a lot” is, Austin Powers-style, $1 million. Or you could say, maybe we should be talking about billions and billions of dollars.
Perhaps trillions.
But I think the first thing to say is that there is a moral obligation here. That is the foundation of everything. Once we agree to that, then we can start haggling about specifics.
And, perhaps, talking more about adaptation.
Yes. No matter what we do with respect to mitigation, even if we do an unrealistically large amount, as Tom Hanks in his astronaut phase said, Houston, we have a problem. People are going to be very much at risk, there will be increases in mortality and morbidity as well as economic terribleness. All this is going to happen.
In the book you write, “Everyone knows, or should know, that climate change is helping to create horrors: flooding, wildfire, extreme heat, drought and much more. What such words do not adequately capture are the concrete harms: deaths; illnesses; losses of jobs, income and opportunity; fear, stress and sometimes terror.”
To this point, much of the focus of climate change, activism and policy and even technical stuff has been on mitigation. That’s extremely important. But it looks like where we are now, resilience and adaptation are at least equal priorities.
And what happened in California ——
I was going to ask you.
There are things to be done there. Some people don’t think that what happened was attributable in significant part to climate change. It doesn’t really matter.
I agree.
The likelihood that wildfire is going to be a more serious problem than it otherwise would be because of climate change — in my view, that likelihood is close to 100 percent. But you can think that that’s nonsense; still, resilience against weather-related risks is something that everyone in the United States has a keen interest in.
I’ll make one little notation here. There’s a program called the BRIC Program. You may know it. It was created by the first Trump administration — hooray for the Trump administration! I don’t think the Trump people thought it was a climate program, but it doesn’t matter. It’s about building resilience, including resilience against weather-related risks.
And if you look — well, I’ll check right now, whether the program still stands. [He pulls up a web browser and types out a URL.] Yes. It still stands. Now, it does say fema.gov is being updated to comply with President Trump’s executive orders. But I’m hopeful that the program will survive the updating process.
The fact that you are checking in on this program in this way would be, in any other time, astonishing. Which points to the last question I wanted to ask you: Given your experience with the administrative state, how do you see the state of play right now in Washington? One alibi for DOGE is that it is undertaking a basic audit of the executive branch not entirely unlike what Democratic administrations in the past have done. But it’s also easy to see it as a much more radical project to concentrate power, not just in the executive branch, but in a sort of unaccountable corner of the executive branch.
I think one thing that’s clear is that the idea of a unitary executive is something to which the current administration is fiercely committed. They’re trying to get there, and they have a good chance of succeeding.
I think another thing that’s clear is that the idea of a civil service that is fundamentally the president’s team is something that the current people are committed to. I think that’s very, very clear.
There are other things that are less clear. One is to what extent the goal is not simply to eliminate, let’s say “excessive numbers of federal employees,” but to have a fundamental transfer of authority from the federal government to the states. If FEMA were scaled back very dramatically, for example, or the E.P.A. were scaled back very dramatically, we’d see much more in the way of state authority, probably.
That seems a little sanguine to me. You could describe that kind of project as a return to federalism. But returning FEMA to the states would functionally mean that most states would not be able to mount a very effective emergency response, right?
A completely fair point. And we could be observing something like a rejection of the New Deal and the Great Society. But I think when you’re in the midst of something, it’s very hard to say. The fact is, it could be a significant but incremental shift with respect to both the authority of the president over the bureaucracy and with respect to the number of functions the national government engages in. Or it could be a sea change. And we don’t know yet.
Is that an epistemological question, in that we don’t have eyes on everything DOGE and the rest of the Trump team are doing, or is it a question about political and legal contestation, since we don’t know how much will ultimately stand?
It’s a great question. I think we should say that Trump 1 was significant but not revolutionary. And I think what we don’t know now — in the environmental area and others — is whether this effort deserves the name “revolutionary.” I think it’s clear that Trump 2 is more ambitious than Trump 1. But it’s not clear at this stage what it is exactly. And we also don’t know what kind of permission slip the courts will give. And it’s just the first weeks. We’re all on a roller coaster and where we’re going to get on it, it’s very hard to say.
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