Abstract
We thank those who commented on our article for helping foster our goal of initiating greater discussion about global climate change (GCC) and non-violent civil disobedience (NVCD). We see Gupta’s comment (Gupta 2011, this issue) as reinforcing our points, but with the benefit of providing more understanding of Gandhi’s influence in policies and actions that should be useful in future discourse about GCC and NVCD. Likewise, Ott seems to be in basic agreement with our views (Ott 2011, this issue). However, he reminds us that the general media needs to increasingly raise questions about mitigation and do a better job of framing GCC in an ethical context, along with the need to obtain solidarity with people in other nations, such as those of the European Union. Ott (2011) also raises questions we had not dealt with, namely: Should laws in the USA be rigidly applied to discourage NVCD as much as possible? Or, should laws better tolerate NVCD by removing protestors from
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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