The Disaggregation of Climate-Induced Harm: An Impossible Undertaking for Utilitarians

In this article I hold that utilitarians are wrong to want to disaggregate climate-induced harm, whether in terms of chaotic or linear causality. This is not because individual emissions do not count, in probabilistic terms, for risk projections of overall climate dam-age, rather because individual emissions only contribute to increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration if the anthropogenic flow of CO2 exceeds the amount of CO2 that can be naturally taken up by the biosphere, over a given time segment. I therefore maintain that individual climate duties consist of reforming the social and technological structures that make each individual emission part of a collective phenomenon, global warming, which leads to an enormous global disutility, climate change. In the final part of the article, I argue that utilitarian ethics would have much more to say if, instead of focusing on the dis-aggregation of climate-induced harm, it addressed the key issues of the energy transition, i.e. carbon pricing, research and development in green technologies and climate finance.