Reassessing Responsibility in Global Environmental Ethics — Epoche C1
The discourse surrounding climate change often oscillates between two primary poles of responsibility: individual consumer choices and the policy decisions of nation-states. While both are undoubtedly crucial, this conventional framing is insufficient. It obscures the multi-layered web of accountability that characterises global environmental governance — the ensemble of treaties, institutions, markets and practices through which environmental problems are managed across borders — and it particularly underestimates the moral obligations of non-state actors: corporations, international organisations and civil society groups, entities that act on the world stage without being governments. Specifically, a state-centric approach such as that developed in John Broome's Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World (2012), while offering valuable insights into the ethics of climate action, falls short by not fully accounting for the moral agency and impact of entities beyond national governments. This essay sets out Broome's position and its appeal, tests it against the scale of corporate and institutional power, and sketches the broader allocation of duties that a global crisis requires. Broome's division of moral labour Broome, a philosopher who spent the first part of his career as an economist and later served as a lead author on the social and ethical chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report, organises climate ethics around a distinction between two kinds of duty. Duties of justice are owed to particular people and centre on not harming them: since an individual's lifetime emissions foreseeably contribute to harms suffered by identifiable classes of victims, Broome argues that each of us has a duty of justice to stop contributing — dischargeable, in his view, by reducing emissions and offsetting the remainder, at a cost he judged modest at the carbon prices of his time of writing. Duties of goodness , by contrast, are duties to make the world better overall — to weigh the interests of future generations against present costs and act at the scale the problem demands. Broome assigns these squarely to governments, and his reasons are worth stating rather than assuming. First, mitigation — the reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions, as opposed to adaptation, which is adjustment to the warming already unavoidable — is a textbook collective-action problem: each emitter enjoys the full benefit of its own emissions while the resulting harm is spread across everyone, so voluntary individual restraint is systematically undersupplied. Only an agent with the power to legislate, tax and enforce can change the incentives of all emitters at once. Second, the central trade-offs of climate policy — how much the present generation should sacrifice for future ones — are distributional questions of the kind that public institutions, not private individuals, have the standing and the instruments to settle. Stephen Gardiner's survey of the field reinforces the diagnosis: climate change combines a commons problem played out among states with an intergenerational deferral of costs and a striking inadequacy of existing institutions, which is why he regards it as an unusually intractable ethical problem. On this picture, the state is where the moral action is. The Korean precedent for state capacity From a South Korean perspective, the emphasis on state capacity resonates with historical experience. The Republic of Korea's transformation from one of the poorest economies in the world in the early 1960s to an advanced industrial economy — the growth often termed the "Miracle on the Han River" — was orchestrated by what political economists call a developmental state: a state that does not merely regulate markets but actively plans, finances and directs industrialisation through five-year plans, credit allocation and export targets. The same state later took on the environmental fallout of the growth it had engineered, and it did so with the instruments of a strong state. Korea enacted the Act on the Allocation and Trading of Greenhouse-Gas Emission Permits in 2012 and launched the resulting national emissions trading scheme in 2015 — a mandatory cap-and-trade system, the first of its kind covering an entire national economy in East Asia, in which the government sets a ceiling on total emissions and firms buy and sell the permits beneath it. In 2021 the Framework Act on Carbon Neutrality and Green Growth wrote a 2050 carbon-neutrality target into statute and set a legal floor under the national 2030 reduction target. Whatever one thinks of the adequacy of these measures, they illustrate exactly the capacities Broome relies on: legislation, enforcement, economy-wide coordination. This historical precedent might lead one to conclude that states are indeed the principal loci of environmental responsibility. The globalised reality: what the emissions ledger shows However, the globalised reality of climate change strains this framing, and the strain can be measured rather than merely asserted. In a 2014 study in Climatic Change , Richard Heede worked through the historical production records of the world's largest fossil-fuel and cement producers — how much coal, oil, gas and cement each firm actually extracted or manufactured, year by year — and converted those quantities into the carbon dioxide and methane ultimately released. His finding: just ninety entities, a mixture of investor-owned companies, state-owned companies and nation-states producing fossil fuels, account for roughly sixty-three per cent of cumulative worldwide industrial emissions of carbon dioxide and methane since the industrial revolution, with several individual firms each responsible for percent-level shares of the global total. Two caveats keep this honest. The attribution is to producers of fuels that others burned, and whether responsibility follows the producer, the consumer or both is a normative question