Communicating the Moral Dimensions of Climate Change | Climate Shift

As Azim and I lay out in a recently published paper in Nature Climate Change, at least six distinct yet closely related processes likely contribute to weak moral intuitions about climate change. Here’s a quick recap of what we write in the paper:

1) First, for most people, climate change is a complex, distant (for now) and abstract phenomenon; as a result, it tends to produce fairly limited emotional reactions in people, starving the moral judgment system of the emotional input that it relies on.

2) Second, the moral judgment system is finely tuned to recognize specific types of moral transgressions, such as intentionally performed actions that cause harm to identifiable victims; yet as the philosopher Dale Jamieson and others have argued, climate change lacks many of these features: its victims are by-and-large strangers or not yet alive and it is a side-effect of modern life, not something anyone is intentionally trying to cause (there is no single moustache-twirling villain we can blame)...

Uncertain future for international forest scheme – Features – ABC Environment (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

One major sticking point has been the question of who gets paid, and for what.

UN Envoys Close to Deal on Energy, Sustainability Goals - Bloomberg

“The text is a nice signal, but you could drive a truck through all the loopholes,” said Jake Schmidt, director ofinternational climate policy at the Natural Resources Defense
Council, a New York-based environmental group. “All of the tangible outcomes were weakened or removed.”...

WWF, an environmental group, said the new text is full of “weak words” such as “encourage” and “promote,” rather than “will” and “must.” The group put the tally at 514 weak
words to 10 strong ones. The agreement being planned won’t be legally binding.