Henry Shue is Professor Emeritus of Politics and International Relations at University of Oxford’s Merton College. He's the author of Basic Rights, as well as The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now, among many other publications. In 1976, he co-founded the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland. He was a supporter of the successful campaign by Virginia's Augusta County Alliance to stop the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, and now works primarily on explanations for the urgency of far more ambitious policies to eliminate fossil fuels in order to avoid irreversible damage for future generations.
These long-lived connections provide a radically different example of the insight from one of the characters created by my fellow Southerner William Faulkner: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
And similarly long chains reach from the present into the future. Conventionally, we tend to think that the future is yet to be born or is even only just beginning to be conceived. But the climate future was already beginning to take shape when humans started centuries ago to inject more carbon into the atmosphere than the usual climate dynamics could handle in the usual ways, and climate parameters were forced to start changing. The vast and accelerating carbon emissions of the late 20th century and the early 21st century are building minimum floors under the extent of climate change in future centuries, barring radically innovative corrections of kinds that may or may not be possible.
[Timothy Mitchell has written:]"The modes of common life that have arisen largely within the last one hundred years, and whose intensity has accelerated only since 1945, are shaping the planet for the next one thousand years, and perhaps the next 50,000." The future is not inaccessible – we hold its fundamental parameters in our hands, and we are shaping them now. In this respect, the future is not unborn–it's not even future.
– The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have
a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
It's really amazing to think that our generations have such long shadows into the future. Just to think about how that has changed within a matter of one or two centuries. Over the past three decades, as a political philosopher, you've kept justice at the center of the struggle to stop climate change and express action, prompting ways to approach the climate challenge and avoid leaving an uninhabitable world behind. For you, why is this generation the pivotal generation?
HENRY SHUE
Well, it's because of the situation we face. We can tell from the science that we have to reach zero carbon emissions by 2050. And common sense tells you that bringing them down for the second 50% is going to be harder than the first 50%. So we have to take care of the first 50% by about 2030, and it's 2023 already. We literally must - if we're going to keep climate change from becoming even more dangerous than it is - is to do a very great deal in the next seven or eight years. And a huge amount between now and 2050. So it's not that this problem is the most important of all possible problems. There are other problems like preventing nuclear war, but this is a problem that either we get a grip on it now, or there's a real possibility that it will escape from our control.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
I'm all for carbon taxes. The difficulty with carbon taxes is that at what level? Where and who are we taxing? The consumers who are buying those goods? The producers in other countries? Now, with satellites, we're able to see where the emissions are taking place, but are we actually taxing the full cost of carbon? And the people or corporations buying carbon credits, are they sometimes getting rewarded for behaviors that they should be doing anyway for existential reasons?
SHUE
So, we need to be hardheaded about this and look very hard at what people are actually doing. Carbon credits could be a good thing, but they would need to be carefully regulated, and we would need institutions to police them and be sure people are actually doing what they say they're doing. And meanwhile, we should concentrate on reducing emissions because in theory, the carbon credits would get you to the same place but only if what they promised is actually delivered. And it very often isn't. There's a very recent study saying that something like 90% of promised carbon offsets are not actually being implemented. I don't know if it's that bad, but there's a lot of hanky-panky going on.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Indigenous philosophy is one of not being above nature and Indigenous communities are very good stewards of the planet and living within limits for the generations. They want to have something else to pass on. We're just remembering all the intergenerational knowledge that we have forgotten over the years. Something that you've identified is that public policy is often determined by this economistic thinking. How can we transform that so that it really encompasses all aspects, not just putting a value on nature as though nature is unlimited? It renews itself, but we only have one planet. Last year's Earth Overshoot Day was identified as July 28th. And it's getting earlier and earlier each year. So how do we transform our thinking not to be just about the economy?
SHUE
Young people need to encounter nature to actually get out into it and see it and feel it and smell it, sense it. And one thing philosophers can do and are trying to do is to argue that value is not just value to humans, which would be a kind of instrumental value. You know, you want to save a plant because you can make Tamoxifen out of it. And Tamoxifen will help prevent cancer, which of course is a good thing, but also to say species and other elements of nature have value in themselves and their value doesn't consist solely of what they can do for us. So that's two things. One is to make the point that not all value is value for humans, but things can have value in themselves. The other is to try to find ways that especially young people actually experience nature.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
These issues are very deeply ingrained in society. And it seems very clear that many environmental issues are largely being controlled by the 1%. So it seems that the public has very little control over our planet. So how do you think that ideas like fossil fuel elimination and alternative energy will be and are being received by the public?
SHUE
People like Greta Thunberg, that's what gives me the most hope is that there is one segment of society, namely the youngest people, who are fired up and who do see the problem and do want to do something about it. I think it's really accurate to say that the battle to get a grip on climate change is also the battle for democracy. Our politics are now heavily influenced if not literally controlled by vested interests. And these include fossil fuel interests. So the Clear evidence of this is that the richest governments in the world are subsidizing the extraction of fossil fuels.
I mean, the United States and the UK have tax breaks and other subsidies for fossil fuel. So that's a climate problem, but it's also a democratic problem because it means that the politics are not being run for the benefit of the general public. They're being run for the benefit of some relatively small numbers of vested interests. So we need things like youth movements on climate change for the sake of the climate and for the sake of getting our politics back under democratic control.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
It's really important to also outline basic emissions that are subsistency emissions and the difference between those and luxury emissions. There are things that we can do without. And there are people who have sacrificed for generations and are just coming into having access to the kind of energy on demand that we in the West have.
SHUE
This distinction between subsistence emissions and luxury emissions was my main contribution to these debates. And it has recently been calculated that the richest 1% of people in the world produce more emissions than the bottom 50%. A whole lot more. And a lot of these emissions are by those of us who are in the richest 1%. And I'm probably one of those people. A lot of our emissions are from things we don't really need to do. We don't need to constantly fly for our vacations. We can walk in natural places near where we live, or at worst, we can drive in an electric car and so on. That of course means changing some of the things that we take for granted and noticing how great the emissions that they cause are and doing something to reduce our emissions.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
And with the large scale, rapid adaptation that needs to take place across so many sectors, across not just our individual countries, but the world acting in tandem and finally agreeing upon governance and principles and meeting those obligations. What is the role of the philosopher in these political and social movements?
SHUE
One thing we can do and which I've tried to do is spell out the ways in which this is an ethical or moral problem. People don't need philosophers to tell them that they're facing problems. I first became interested in this problem by talking to delegates from India who said, "You people in the rich countries keep saying we have a problem. And our question is, who are we? You industrialized countries, and it's mainly the greenhouse gas from your industrialization that's created climate change. We haven't done that much industrialization yet." This was 25 years ago. Of course, now India is beginning to industrialize, but their point then was, and it's still largely true, that a lot of the problems are going to hit countries that haven't caused climate change. And so this strikes people just intuitively as unfair.
What a philosopher like me can do is just spell out exactly why it is unfair. I think they're right. It is unfair if one person causes a problem, and then someone else has to deal with it. That makes it as if the one who's dealing with it is the slave of the one who caused the problem. I make a mess. And then you have to clean it up. That's as if you worked for me. And that's really incompatible with equal respect for all human beings. And that's the sort of thing philosophers can spell out. And there is now a lot of good philosophical work being done spelling these things out.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
It's a complicated issue. We want to save the rainforests on different continents, but some Indigenous people say they have to have a livelihood. Now we're just treating their forests like it's the world's forest. So they have to live as well. That's been another critique that it's another form of colonization. And we need to make sure that they're fairly compensated for being the lungs of the planet.
SHUE
We need to find a way that will preserve the forest, but enable the people who've lived there to have worthwhile lives and lives that they would choose to have. So we shouldn't treat them like they are objects in our museum of nature. Though it does turn out that Indigenous people are by far the best at preserving biodiversity. If one allows them to live in accord with their own culture, they will take care of the forest and guard it, but we need to work with them cooperatively and not impose our schemes on them.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
As you reflect on education, the challenges we face, and the kind of future we're leaving for the next generation, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember?
SHUE
When I was at my first university, it was thought of as one of the world's leading places in philosophy. And I learned to use the methods that were dominant there. When I went to the other university, the first seminar that I took was a critique of the methods that I had learned at the first university. And this made a big impression on me because I had left the one where I did the Masters thinking, "Okay, I know how to do this now, I'm getting good at this." But then I learned, actually, there are problems with this way of doing things, too. So what I learned from all this is not that no method works and nothing is worthwhile, but just that however good the methods of analysis one has at any given time They're not going to be perfect. And so one needs to keep some humility and keep an open mind and keep on learning and not assume that you're on top of things.
So, one lesson I would draw for education is we really do need to teach people to think critically and not just try to pump them full of the beliefs that we think are right. And I do worry about the extent to which some topics are put sort of out of bounds at universities. We don't want to allow hate b behavior, but I think we also need to maintain free speech and enable people to think critically. And this is another of these tricky matters, but I think that's another balance we need to try to keep.
This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Inshara Ali with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this episode was Inshara Ali.
Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).
