Strategic Environmentalism

Abstract

Abstract Continuing the strategic argumentation of chapter 5, this final chapter focuses on the fossil fuel industry’s ties with dictatorships. Linking oil and gas trade with dictators to environmental reform, the chapter suggests that the nonconsequentialist presumption against commercial ties with dictators can yield a distinctive argument for the development of green energy. More specifically, recognizing the unfortunate public salience of climate change skepticism in the United States, the chapter constructs an argument for the development of green energy that can appeal to Americans moderately skeptical of climate change and swayed by various forms of corporate rhetoric about environmental issues. Accepting—arguendo and in a qualified way—key empirical and normative assumptions of American environmental skeptics, the chapter proceeds in two stages. First, while environmentalists have often justified the development of green energy through references to future generations, the chapter tries to show that they need a present-oriented argument focused on negative duties to respect rights, in order to justify prioritizing the development of green energy to environmental skeptics in the United States. Second, the chapter constructs such an argument, calling on affluent democracies to develop green energy in order to be able to stop their complicity, through oil and gas trade, in dictators’ violation of their peoples’ property rights.