Abstract
Despite knowledge of the risks of global climate change during the past 30 yr, the USA, among other nations, has failed to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions to reduce the risks to present and future generations. This is despite the fact that scientific and ethical literature makes the case that meaningful action is urgent. Consequently, we suggest that climate and environmental scientists, among others, consider whether non-violence civil disobedience should be used as a means to promote action on global climate change.
Highlights
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon commented that global climate change (GCC) is the ‘only one truly existential threat...the great moral imperative of our time’ (Ki-moon 2009)
Given the urgency to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the failure, to date, to implement GHC reduction targets in the USA and some other countries in accord with the best available science in order to avoid serious and irreversible harm and do so in an equitable manner between nations, we suggest that a new approach to bring about action on GCC should be discussed and, might be required: non-violent civil disobedience (NVCD)
Res. 98 resolved that the United States’ Senate should not ratify any protocol or other agreement under United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that would mandate commitments to reduce GHG emissions or which would result in harm to its economy, despite the fact that, as we will discuss, ethically speaking economic interests alone do not permit the activities of people of one nation to harm those in other nations (Brown 2010b)
Summary
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon commented that global climate change (GCC) is the ‘only one truly existential threat...the great moral imperative of our time’ (Ki-moon 2009). He might be one of the most visible international public figures to make such a proclamation, others have argued the case that GCC is an important ethical issue ‘...an act of protest, deliberately unlawful, conscientiously and publicly performed It may have as its object the laws or policies of some governmental body, or those of some private corporate body whose decisions have serious public consequences; but in either case the disobedient protest is almost invariably nonviolent in character.’. To justify NVCD, 2 conditions need be demonstrated: a great injustice is occurring, and there is strong reason to believe that policies and laws and lawful recourse to changing them will not work (Morreall 1976, Sustein 2003)
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