CLIMATE CHANGE

GLOBAL WARMING IS JUST ONE OF MANY ENVIRONMENTAL THREATS THAT

DEMAND OUR ATTENTION
AUGUST 22, 2014
By Amartya Sen
Our global environment has many problems. If the high volume of carbon emission is one, the low level of
intellectual engagement with some of the major environmental challenges is surely another. There are, of course,
many engaging and well-researched studies of particular environmental problems such as global warming, and
we have good reason to be appreciative of that. And yet some of the foundational issues have remained
unresolvedindeed, unaddressed.
I would like to comment on two quite different, but ultimately related, areas of neglected environmental analyses
that demand immediate attention. The first is the general problem of not having anything like an overall normative
framework, involving ethics as well as science, that could serve as the basis of debates and discussions on policy
recommendations. Despite the ubiquity and the reach of environmental dangers, a general normative framework
for the evaluation of these dangers has yet to emerge. The second is a much more specific problem: the failure to
develop a framework for assessing the comparative costs of different sources of energy (from fossil fuels and
nuclear power to solar and renewable energy), inclusive of the externalities involved, which can take many
different forms. (By externalities, I mean the consequences that operate outside the market and that market prices
do not reflect, such as the release of pollutants into the air, of effluents into rivers and public water supplies, of
radiation into the atmosphere.) One of the externalitiesthe evil effects of carbon emissionhas received
enormous attention, which in its context is a very good thing, but there are other externalities that also demand
our urgent attention. These include the growing danger from the rapidly increasing use of nuclear energyin
China and India especially, where the use of nuclear energy is gathering momentum and large expansions are
being planned, but also elsewhere. The dangers of nuclear energy have received astonishingly little systematic
attention in scientific and policy discussions. Environmental thinking has to be multi-directional rather than single-
focused, even if the focus is something as important as the climatic threats from carbon emissions.
Not only is the large issue of making reasoned estimates of the externalitiesincluding probabilistic evaluation
of energy production and energy use largely neglected, but the lack of a normative framework also contributes to
ignoring the benefits from greater energy use on which the lives of billions of deprived people in the world depend.
Since the emphasis on cutting emissions, if necessary by lesser energy use, has become an almost universal
position among environmentalists, I shall begin by noting some persistent biases in thinking about the benefits
and penalties of energy use in different forms in the contemporary world.
First, the recent focus of energy thinking has been particularly concentrated on the ways and means of reducing
carbon emissions and, linked with that, cutting down energy use, rather than taking energy use as essential for
conquering poverty and seeing the environmental challenge within a more comprehensive understanding. There
would appear to be an insufficient recognition in global discussion of the need for increased power in the poorer
countries. In India, for example, about a third of the people do not have any power connection at all. Making it
easier to produce energy with better environmental correlates (and greater efficiency of energy use) may be a
contribution not just to environmental planning, but also to making it possible for a great many deprived people to
lead a fuller and freer life.
Second, there is insufficient recognition of an empirical fact that at first glance may seem rather trivial, but which
has much greater importance than may be immediately recognized. Many areas of the world where poverty is
common are also particularly sunny and offer hugely underappreciated opportunities for the generation and use of
solar power, if the scientific and engineering problems of using this source of energyincluding the development
of cheaper storage of seasonally variable powerare adequately addressed. The availability of a strong sun, of
which Bangladesh and India and much of Africa get a great deal more than does Europe (which is currently the
center of environmental activism in the world), makes it possible for many of the poorer areas on the globe to use
a gigantic supply of energy, if environmentally sound ways of harnessing, storing, and utilizing solar energy can
be developed. This could benefit some countries with fewer known stocks of fossil fuels (such as large parts of
sub-Saharan Africa). It could also benefit other countries where some fossil-fuel sources are abundant (such as
coal in India), but where the use of these resources has to be restricted because of their impact on climate
change.
Third, with the growing recognition of the dangers of global pollution from fossil fuels, the attractions of nuclear
power have been quite strong in recent years. The scientific community has been particularly drawn to the
enticements of nuclear power, but they have a strong hold on global policymakers as well. For example, the
World Bank lumps together nuclear with solar and other renewable sources of energy in its presentation of data
for clean energy for the world: Clean energy is noncarbohydrate energy that does not produce carbon dioxide
when generated. It includes hydropower and nuclear, geothermal, and solar power, among others.
The climatic implications of reliance on nuclear energy are indeed enormously better than the continuedand
acceleratinguse of fossil fuels. Yet threats from the side-effects of energy production and use do not come only
through climate change. Nuclear power also has extremely strong negative externalities of very different kinds.
There are penalties and perils that are not included in the evaluation at market prices of the costs of nuclear
power, thereby making that alternative appear to be much cheaper than it actually is from a fuller social point of
view.

Energy evaluation as a part of environmental planning demands much more extensive and probing accounting
of costsit demands that we take note of the various possible consequences of different sources of energy. A
proper accounting of externalities in energy production will require new research techniques, since the
consequences will often have considerable uncertainties, and probability estimates cannot be derived on the
basis of observed frequencies from the past (since there may not be much past to guide us). Without going into
the challenges of uncertainty-inclusive evaluation more fully here, I should point to the understanding that there
are many different ways of speculating on usable estimates of probabilities, within intervals of values, that allow
us to reason about ranges of comparative costs. The alternative of ignoring the accounting of externalities in cost
comparisons, including those of nuclear energy, amounts in effect to assuming that the probability of anything
untoward happening can be taken to be negligible. And in the case of nuclear energy, that is a disastrous
assumption.
There are at least five different kinds of externalities that add significantly to the social costs of nuclear power: the
possibly huge effects of nuclear accidents (as in Chernobyl and Fukushima); the risks of terrorism and sabotage
(a strong possibility in countries such as India); the consequences of possible nuclear theft (a potential
everywhere, but particularly strong in less well-guarded plants); the difficulties in safely disposing of nuclear waste
(which will grow over time cumulatively and possibly quite swiftly if the world comes to rely more and more on
nuclear power); and nuclear reactions that may be set off if and when a nuclear power plant is bombed or blasted
with conventional weapons in a conventional war, or even in a rather limited local skirmish. Each of these
externalities carries possibilities of huge adversities both to human life and to the ecosystems around us. Even
with the tiny probabilities of each of these dangers, the sum of the five, multiplied by the growing number of
nuclear enterprises, tends to produce sizable overall probabilities. Estimates of probable harm (from terrible to
catastrophic) could be gigantic. Nuclear power is, in any case, quite expensive even in conventional terms, and if,
in addition, the expected disvalue (or disutility) of externalities is added to the costs of power production, the
sum-total would begin to move up very substantially.

It is unlikely that in the near future fossil-fuel use can be eliminated by nuclear power, though the picture could
change in the long run. But the dangers of nuclear accident, sabotage, or theft can become very large even
before nuclear power comes anywhere close to replacing coal, oil, and other fossil fuels across the world.
Moreover, to the extent that more safeguards are put into the basic design of nuclear power production and
supply, the costs of nuclear energy will also become significantly larger even in conventional terms.
An alternative that seemed very small in possible use only a few years ago, but which is coming into more and
more serious consideration now, is renewable power through using solar energy, wind power, and the power of
waves. Recently the costs of these renewable sources of energy, particularly solar, have been falling very fast
quite a bit faster than was expected. This has happened rapidly in China, helped by technological innovations but
also by governmental subsidies to the solar-panel industry. This has influenced the costs and benefits of solar
energy outside China as wellquite substantially, for example, in India, mainly through the cheaper costs of
imported Chinese solar panels. America and Europe have tended to keep out the cheaperand heavily
subsidizedChinese panels mainly in the interest of their respective domestic solar-panel industries. Questions
can certainly be raised about the quality and the durability of the cheaper Chinese panels, but the comparison has
to be done without a protectionist bias.
There are many other issues to be faced in coming to rely more on renewable energy, including the costs of
storage to integrate the time pattern of energy use with the time pattern of energy production dependent on
natural circumstances, such as seasonal as well as daily variations of sunny times. The scientific possibility of
cutting down storage costs requires much more investigationand much greater public support for scientific and
engineering research.
It is not my contention that these problems are easy to investigate and to solve. There are empirical gaps in our
knowledge as well as analytical difficulties in dealing with the evaluation of uncertainty. But the same problem is
present in the analysis of global warming as well, and the recent works on estimating global dangers from
emissions from fossil fuels have moved inescapably in the direction of having to take note of uncertainty,
particularly the low but non-negligible probabilities of totally catastrophic consequences from climate change (the
problem of the so-called fat tail in the probability distribution of dangers from global warming).

The comparison between the two sources of energynuclear power and renewable power from sun, wind, and
waverequires urgent evaluation, with special attention to their respective consequences on human lives and
well-being, as well as concerns about ecosystems. The need to go beyond unidirectional thinking about the
environment is extremely strong right now. We must radically broaden the priorities of environmental planning and
of energy-related scientific research in view of these empirical and evaluative concerns. Even as I turn now to
examine the ingredients of a broadly normative framework for environmental evaluation, we need to pay particular
attention to these specific issues, both for their immediate importance and for their relevance for normative
evaluation in an inclusive framework.
A normative framework for environmental evaluation would have many requirements. Among them, it has to have
both evaluative soundness and the possibility of informed application and reasoned public use. The issues that
have to be considered in developing an applicable normative framework must include politics and public
reasoning, science and epistemology, and ethics. I shall take up these different, but interrelated, engagements in
turn.
The politics and public reasoning about our environmental threats involve perhaps the most difficult set of
problems to be addressed. Even though scientific evidence on the fragility of the environment has been growing,
the politics of environmental understanding has often been running defiantly against accepting the scientific
readings, particularly in the United States, and it seems to have got almost completely trapped in bitter disputes
between Republicans and Democrats.
Yet the problem goes beyond political partisanship and polarization. The bulk of the American population seems
basically unconvinced that the threat is large enough to warrant any great sacrifices today on the part of the
present population. Even as President Obama is gathering enough traction for trying to impose strong constraints
on allowable emissions, particularly affecting older plants and factories, Democratic candidates in some states are
reputed to be getting ready to dissociate themselves from Obamas initiative, moving closer to the Republican
position as the next elections get closer. There has been a serious failure in communicating the results of
scientific analysis and in involving the general public in informed ethical reasoning, especially in the United States.
Of course America is not the whole world, but public understanding and policy-making in the United States are
important not only because it is such a big polluter, but also because the willingness of other countries to make
sacrifices today would be hard to arrange if Americans go on polluting the environment with little attempt to
restrain themselves.
There has been a lot of research on climate change in recent years, and the science of our vulnerability to global
warming and other changes associated with massive, continuing, and increasing emissions is as clear today as
scientific prognostication can plausibly be. If this is an area where the primary challenge may be seen as
communication rather than basic science, it is not so in considering threats to the environment coming from other
directions. As was said earlier, sustained scrutiny of making extensive use of nuclear power as a substitute for
fossil fuels has barely started. There is a huge necessity for probing research on the rational assessment of
externality-inclusive costs of production and use of energy from different sources.

If there are many scientific issues to be addressed, the task is not any easier on the ethical side. The moral and
political issues involved in this type of environmental decision involve complexity of different kinds, but perhaps
the most immediate problem arises from the involvement of different generations in any decision involved. The
need for concerted action for our common future was powerfully outlined more than a quarter century ago in a
pioneering manifesto, prepared by the World Commission on Environment and Development, led by Gro
Brundtland, formerly the prime minister of Norway and later the director-general of the World Health Organization.
The Brundtland report defined sustainable development as meeting the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
Even though I shall presently argue that we have to go beyond Brundtlands pioneering move, we must first
recognize how intellectually transformative that move has been. Sustainable development has become the ruling
theme in much of the environmental literature, and this is surely a huge element of social progress. Even in terms
of public communication, the Brundtland formula has had quite remarkable success in many parts of the world,
particularly in Europe, and various international congresses and conferences have been held with a basic
sympathy for Brundtlands visionary approach. At the political level there is still some concerted resistance to
acknowledging the challenge of sustainability, but there is a large body of informed and influential people across
the world who are ready to go along with the kind of ethics of fairness that Brundtland has been advocating.
It might be thought that if we were to take a strictly anthropocentric perspective on the question of the
environment, then we need not go beyond human living standards, and can be sensibly concerned with
ecosystems only to the extent that they affect our own lives. But this temptingly simple conclusion is by no means
obvious or clear-cut, mainly because we human beings do not only have needs. We also have values and
priorities, about which we can reason. To say that worrying about other species is none of our business is not
ethical reasoning, but a refusal to engage in ethical reasoning. The contrast between our needs and our chosen
priorities has been a subject of discussion over centuries, including the medieval distinction between agents and
patients in the conceptualization of humanitybetween those who think, decide and act, and those who only
hope to be treated well by circumstances. It is hard to see how environmental thinking, which has many different
aspects, can be reduced to a concern only with human living standards, given the other concerns we may very
reasonably have.
There is a need for greater clarity in deciding on how to think ethically about the environmental challenges in the
contemporary world. Focusing on human freedomincluding our freedom to think about what responsibilities we
havealong with our interest in our own quality of life can help in this understanding, and shed light not only on
the demands of sustainable development, but also on the content and relevance of what we can identify as
environmental issues.
The environment is sometimes seensimplistically, I believeas the state of nature, including such measures
as the extent of forest cover, the depth of the ground water table, the number of living species, and so on. It is
tempting to go from there to the conclusion that the best environmental planning is one of least interference, of
leaving nature alonethat the urgent need is for inaction, rather than for actions that may be best supported by
reasoning. This approach is deeply defective for at least two important reasons.
First, the environment is not only a matter of passive preservation, but also one of active pursuit. Even though
many human activities that accompany the process of development may have destructive consequences (and this
is very important to understand and to address), it is also within human power to enhance and improve the
environment in which we live. Indeed, our power to intervene, with reason and effectiveness, can be substantially
enhanced by the process of development itself. For example, greater female education and womens employment
can help to reduce fertility rates drastically, which in the long run can reduce the pressure on environmental
destruction, including global warming and the decimation of natural habitats. Similarly, the spread of school
education and improvements in its quality can make us more environmentally conscious. Better communication
and a more active and a better informed media can enhance our awareness of the need for environment-oriented
thinking. It is easy to find many other examples of interconnection. In general, seeing development in terms of
increasing the effective freedom of human beings brings the constructive agency of people in environment-
friendly activities directly within the domain of developmental efforts.
Second, it is not surprising that environmental sustainability has typically been defined in terms of the
preservation and the enhancement of the quality of human life. Brundtlands own formula defines sustainable
development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their own needs. Robert Solow has extended this approach in a powerful way, integrating
the sequential roles of different generations in terms of a comprehensive and easily understandable formula
woven around the idea of living standards, whereby we want to make sure that future generations can enjoy living
standards no lower than ours, and also allow them to ensure that their own successor generations have similar
opportunities to live and provide for the future. There is a lot of wisdom in this understanding, but we must enrich
it further by moving from the valuation of needs-fulfillment and human living standards to the valuing of human
freedomtaking a broader view of our humanity, and not seeing ourselves just as patients.
Consider our responsibility toward the species that are threatened with destruction. We may attach importance to
the preservation of these species not merely because the presence of these species in the world may sometimes
enhance our own living standards. A person may judge that we ought to do what we can to ensure the
preservation of some threatened animal species, say, the Himalayan Quail, and there would be no contradiction if
the person were to say: My living standards would be largely, indeed completely, unaffected by the presence or
absence of Himalayan Quails. I have in fact never even seen one. But I do strongly believe that we should not let
those quails become extinct, for reasons that go much beyond maintaining human living standards.
This is where Gautama Buddhas argument, presented in Sutta Nipata, becomes directly and immediately
relevant. He argued that a mother has a responsibility toward her child not merely because she has generated
her, but also because she can do many things for the child that the child cannot itself do. It is this power to make
a difference, Buddha argued, that generates a corresponding responsibility, and the need to ask: what shouldwe
do? Buddha went on to argue that human beings, for these reasons, have some responsibility toward animals
precisely because we have such power over their lives.
In the environmental context it can be argued that since we are enormously more powerful than other species, we
have some responsibility toward these species that links closely with this asymmetry of power. We can have
many reasons for our conservation efforts, not all of which need be parasitic on our own living standards (or need-
fulfillment), and some of which may turn precisely on our sense of values and on our acknowledgment of our
reasons for taking fiduciary responsibility for other creatures on whose lives we can have a powerful influence.

It is important to bring about a very substantial broadening of the existing norms of environmental policy analysis,
by using a more comprehensive approach, with good science and an adequately responsible ethics. Let me
propose four such broadenings of our vision. First, if the fulfillment of our human existence lies not merely in our
living standards and need-fulfillment, but also in the freedoms that we enjoy, then the idea of sustainable
development has to be correspondingly reformulated to take us beyond the advances in reasoning that we have
already received from the pioneering work of Brundtland and Solow. We must think not just about sustaining the
fulfillment of our needs, but more largely about sustaining, and extending, our freedoms (including, of course, the
freedom to meet our own needs, but going well beyond that). The sustaining of ecosystems and the preservation
of species can be given new grounds by the recognition of human beings as reflective agents rather than as
passive patients. Thus recharacterized, the idea of sustainable development can be broadened from the
formulations proposed by Brundtland and Solow to encompass the preservation and expansion of the substantive
freedoms and capabilities of people today without compromising the capability of future generations to have
similar or more freedoms. This broader way of seeing sustainable development can accommodate our
concernsand our anxietiesabout the fragility of some of the ecosystems that surround us.
The second broadening concerns the extension of public reasoning from the tendency to appeal to peoples self-
interest to explicit recognition of the need to take into account the interestsand the freedomsof future
generations. We must use the freedom we have to reason about our priorities and our responsibilities. Many
changes have occurred in the past by the force of new reasoning, whether it be the unacceptability of slavery or
untouchability, or the need for social safety nets for the underprivileged, or the right to medical attention seen as a
social entitlement for all. The battles have not been easy, and the one on sustainable development will need
engagement and political commitment.
The third broadening is the need for the enlargement of scientific focus from mere avoidance of dangers to the
positive possibilities of enhancing human choices and freedoms, and for avoiding the biases in environmental
thinking that have come from an overconcentration on the richer parts of humanity, and the comparative neglect
of research that can expand the generation, storage, and efficient use of environmentally safe energy, particularly
in poorer countries, including those in the tropics. In thinking about expanding human freedom today and
sustaining it in the future, we have to take fuller note of the need for greater energy use for a large number of
deprived people in the world. Even if carbon emissions had not been such a big problem, the case for rapid
development of the economic use of solar power would be important for many of the poorer parts of the globe in a
way that the richer world, particularly affluent but sun-starved Europe, may not readily see. The focus has to be
shifted from single-minded concentration on reducing emissions to a broader understanding of the range of needs
of people and the demands that come from expanding and sustaining their substantive freedoms to live
reasonably good lives (for which, of course, emission control would importantly figure among other concerns).
Finally, as far as the avoidance of dangers is concerned, there is an urgent need for moving from any one-
dimensional priority to facing the multifaceted threats that environmental dangers pose. It is odd, for example, that
the possible negative effects of nuclear energy have figured much more in public fear than in scientific attempts to
provide an assessmentit would have to be probabilisticof the ranges of values within which those negative
effects can be placed. If there is need for more politics and public reasoning (including on global warming) based
on scientific evidence, there is also a strong need for more scientific and epistemic research on the different types
of environmental threats that we face, including the likely results of increasing nuclear use across the world. This
will take us well beyond global warming. Our scientific priorities as well as our ethical commitments demand
moreand multi-directionalengagement. Global warming, extremely important as it undoubtedly is, has to be
seen as one part of a much larger picture of worrying threats as well as positive possibilities.
Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate in economics, is a winner of the National Humanities Medal, and teaches economics and
philosophy at Harvard University. His books include Development as Freedom, Identity and Violence, and The Idea of
Justice.