Syllabus Bank
Although the science surrounding climate change is increasingly clear, the ethical, social and political discussions surrounding how to address it remain as contested as ever. While the industrialized world has been historically responsible for causing the problem over the last 150 years, scientific evidence suggests that we cannot avoid the dangerous effects of climate change without reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from both developed and some rapidly growing developing countries (e.g. India and China). This fundamental inequity is what underlies most political debates on climate change in international relations. Undergirding all of these debates are questions of equity and justice.
This course unpacks the equity and justice dimensions of the climate crisis. Although we will focus on global politics, we will also spend several weeks delving into conceptual tools that can be applied in analyzing climate politics from the local to the global level, such as environmental justice, intersectionality, and race. We will start the course by laying a foundation in the core scientific evidence of anthropogenic climate change, its primary impacts, and by explaining why climate change is fundamentally an issue of justice. We will then navigate contested political terrain that produced to what many have referred to as the “historic” 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, adopted by the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). We will deconstruct many of the tough questions of climate justice that governments continue to debate on the global stage, including: should developing countries be required to reduce their GHG emissions; if so, what mechanisms are available for doing so, who should pay for it, and should all developing countries be treated equally; and if not, what are the alternative problem solving tools and what would those entail from the developed world? We will then explore the ethics of emerging technologies in addressing climate change, the links between COVID-19 and climate politics, and follow the UN climate negotiations (COP27) which will take place in Egypt in November this year.