Climate Change, Health, Ethics and the Sustainability of Civilization
Authors: Butler Colin D. 
Published: March 2024

Climate change represents an ethical crisis, some aspects of which are poorly understood. “We” – most policy makers, and most people with sufficient resources to read this paper –are in deep denial. Denial makes daily life possible, even, at times, delightful, but it hinders the myriad actions that are required if humanity is to bequest a future with more options. At the moment, it looks like the coming generation will face formidable obstacles, with greatly constrained choices.

Climate change, entangled with a host of other factors that have – for over 50 years – been conceptualised as elements of “limits to growth” is an increasingly clear threat to civilization. Although this may seem far-fetched to some readers, there is a growing literature on this topic. This literature does not argue that climate change will operate by itself to create this risk; rather, it will interact with a complex suite of other social and ecological factors including competition between and within species. Over eight billion humans inhabit a single Earth-sized planet. Were Earth was the size of Jupiter far more people may be possible. But even if human ingenuity seems without limit, material resources are not.

Any decline in the “quality” of civilization will have severe health consequences, initially affecting the most vulnerable, but – if it deepens sufficiently – it will affect all of humanity.

Probably the most widely appreciated understood ethical dimension is that the dominant drivers of climate change – affluent populations based largely in the global North – are comparatively insulated (at least to date and in the near future) from the most obvious harms from greenhouse gas amplified heatwaves, droughts, famines and floods. There is also growing appreciation of the intergenerational (unethical) unfairness unabated climate change is causing, so that the post World War II generation (sometimes called “baby boomers”) have unfairly benefited at the expense not only of the age cohort of Greta Thunberg (born 2003), but even more so of Greta’s near contemporaries in the global South, such as Kaluki Paul Mutuku (born 1993).

In addition to its unfairness, the catastrophe of climate change deepens due to self-deceit. This also has an ethical facet. Our success as a species has spawned hubris, a forgetting (and suppression) of too many past failures and their lessons, leaving an illusion of infallibility. “We” are too often mis-informed that as yet unviable technologies, from the direct air capture of carbon and its safe sequestration underground to the deliberate injection of atmospheric pollutants such as sulfur, in order to cool parts of Earth, will rescue future generations – or at least some of them - from the worst consequences of planetary heating. Although a few researchers have long recognised the “moral hazard” that arises from excessive faith in such practices, this dimension is, as yet, very poorly understood not only by the public, but by many in the scientific community.

Even less discussed is the relationship between climate change and the increasingly unethical scientific publishing industry. For example, can journals that rely excessively on market forces for their viability (or even for their undisclosed megaprofitability) adequately discuss key issues relevant to "planetary overload", such as hyper-capitalism? Another taboo topic is the suppression of discussion about population size and population growth rates, fuelled largely by an unholy alliance between neoliberalism and the Vatican and a vague recall that Nazi Germany and some other societies distorted ecological concepts to seek to justify genocide. Relatedly, can scientists in totalitarian societies freely and adequately analyse these problems?

If our species can better understand these complicated issues, and re-awaken the wider respect for ethics that was briefly held following Word War II, then civilisation may have a chance. The current trajectory of climate change, however, may defer this needed re-awakening for generations, and – perhaps – then only in a mythical form.