The Climatorial Imperative

Abstract

Climate change has become reality. Climate stability accounts for the most challenging global governance goal. In the very many contemporary writings about global warming, the discussion has been centred around the negative impacts of climate change. The burden of climate change has been thematised and cost-sharing strategies heatedly debated. The need for fairness in sharing the burden of climate change has been argued to consider national economies, the world society but also balance inbetween generations. A warming global earth was recently revealed to hold advantages (Puaschunder, 2017a, b). Based on state-of-the-art welfare function measurements and economic productivity parameters, the economic gains and productivity-efficiency benefits from a warming earth were recently captured (Puaschunder, 2017a, b). Contemporary Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measurements served as basis for estimations about the productivity of the agriculture, industry and service sectors around the warming globe. Results naturally build the intellectual basis for the climatorial imperative – advocating for the need for fairness in the distribution of the global earth benefits among nations based on Kant’s (1983/1993) imperative to only engage in actions one wants to experience themselves being done to oneself. Passive neglect of action on climate mitigation is argued as an active injustice to others. Countries passive or agnostic about global warming mitigation that reap benefits from a warming earth should therefore be obliged to finance international aid for those that are directly and negatively impacted by climate change – for instance, grant automatic asylum to climate refugees. In addition, building on common and international law, those countries that have better means of protection or conservation of the common climate should also face a greater responsibility to protect the earth (Puaschunder, 2016). All these efforts should alleviate the contemporary global governance predicament that seems to pit today’s generation against future world inhabitants in a trade-off of economic growth versus sustainability. Deriving respective policy recommendations and incentives to spread the prospective global warming gains for the wider climate change community around the globe and over time is aimed at ensuring that the shared benefits of climate change reach all contemporary and future world inhabitants around the globe in an economically efficient, legally sound and ethically equitable but also practically feasible way.