ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS
1) In talking about LULUs and environmental justice in Unit #4, we recognized that the
environmental / economic / health benefits and burdens of something like a landfill, power plant,
or highway are not necessarily evenly distributed. And that’s true of climate change too: the
nature of carbon emissions and the greenhouse effect means the people who feel the effects of
climate change aren’t necessarily the same people who got the benefits of those carbon emissions.
This holds internationally – but also intergenerationally.
So global climate change raises really interesting and thorny ethical problems! Let’s talk about
them. Specifically, let’s consider the ethical challenges discussed by Gardiner and Hartzell-
Nichols. What did you think?
2)Global climate change is many things — but first and foremost, it’s a climatological
phenomenon studied by scientists across many various disciplines. So here’s a thread for us to
talk about the science behind global climate change. What is it, exactly? How does it work? What
is causing it, and how? Perhaps most importantly, what’s our collective knowledge and
understanding of climate change based on?
Sample Answer