Chen Xiao, Huang Ding: Hypocrisy, Exploitation, and Neo-imperialism—On Consequentialist Theories of Climate Justice
On his first day in office, U.S. President Biden signed an executive order to rejoin the Paris Agreement, which was undoubtedly encouraging news for addressing global climate change. However, Biden simultaneously proposed the hegemonistic slogan of the United States leading the global action against climate change. In fact, from George W. Bush to Biden, the United States and other developed capitalist countries have consistently maintained a contradictory and ambiguous attitude toward global greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction actions. On one hand, these nations recognize the severity of global warming and the necessity of GHG reductions; on the other hand, they are unwilling to bear the responsibility for these reductions and attempt to maintain and expand their leadership positions while seizing more interests during the mitigation process. Driven by this mentality, consequentialist climate justice theories—which ostensibly seek the "good" of humanity as a whole but in reality open the door for developed capitalist countries—have gained favor among contemporary developed capitalist nations and have been established as the fundamental principle for allocating GHG reduction tasks. In truth, consequentialist climate justice theory is largely a hypocritical theory used to mask the maintenance of global hegemony by developed capitalist countries led by the United States and to conduct a new round of exploitation of developing countries.
I. Consequentialist Climate Justice Theory
Consequentialism originated from classical utilitarianism and stands in opposition to deontology. It is generally understood as follows: "If a moral theory holds that whether an act is morally right depends solely on its consequences, rather than on the intrinsic nature of the act or anything that happened before it occurred, then that theory is a consequentialist moral theory."
The first to apply consequentialist theory to the analysis of global GHG emissions reduction was Nicholas Stern. His Stern Review, rooted in consequentialist theory, argued that the active implementation of GHG reductions would help increase the overall economic interests of contemporary developed capitalist countries and pointed out: "The costs of extreme weather, including floods, droughts and storms, are already rising… and rich countries will be affected too." In Stern's view, the criterion for judging the reduction issue should be the actual economic interests of each country; that is, "the most common way to express a general measure of well-being is through actual income." Stern calculated the following results: "If we don't act, the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least 5% of global GDP each year, now and forever. If a wider range of risks and impacts is taken into account, the estimates of damage could rise to 20% of GDP or more. In contrast, the costs of action—reducing greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the worst impacts of climate change—can be limited to around 1% of global GDP each year." He Jiankun argued that Stern successfully proved that "the costs and risks of inaction on climate change far exceed the costs and risks of taking action." William Nordhaus contended that Stern’s theory "performs a significant service by attending to the balance of economic priorities and environmental hazards while choosing climate-change policies. By linking climate-change policy to economic and environmental goals in principle, and potentially in practice, it corrects the fundamental flaw of the Kyoto Protocol, which lacked such a link."
Judging solely from its conclusions, Stern’s consequentialist climate justice theory did play a positive role in the early stages of global GHG reduction efforts. By linking GHG reduction to human economic benefits and replacing numerous unquantifiable value factors in environmental protection with a single economic value, it made GHG reduction simpler and more intuitive, facilitating rapid public understanding and acceptance. However, this strategy of "single-factor economic determinism" is more easily exploited in practice by developed capitalist countries that currently control the global economic lifeblood and leadership.
Eric A. Posner’s International Paretianism is another major type of consequentialist climate justice theory and is the theory that has had the greatest impact on U.S. climate policy. Posner’s explanation of International Paretianism is: "the principle that at least one state must benefit from the [climate] treaty, and no state party may be made worse off by it." In economics, Pareto optimality refers to a distribution where at least one person benefits without making anyone else worse off. Therefore, Posner’s theory, simply put, is to achieve Pareto optimality in the allocation of GHG reduction tasks. Although International Paretianism is also a consequentialist climate justice theory, its theoretical claims are not identical to Stern's. Stern pursues the maximization of the economic interests of all countries, while Posner pursues a situation where no participating country is harmed.
Posner believes the key to the climate issue is forming a "feasible" climate agreement, even if the agreement is unfair or immoral, because "Any climate change agreement must be feasible. But the depressing and ironic truth is that, as a matter of principle, insisting on the best scheme [the per-capita equality principle] may make climate change unsolvable—which would, to some extent, bring disaster to the poorest and most vulnerable countries." It is clear from this that Posner holds a stance of political realism; that is: "States will only enter into agreements that serve their interests. States may be affected by moral arguments, but history provides few examples of a state acting against its perceived interests to comply with the moral claims of other states. In practice, however, states typically define their interests in terms of the well-being of their citizens." Thus, International Paretianism essentially abandons claims for fairness and morality in favor of economic interests and political power because, in Posner’s view, a "feasible" climate agreement will achieve global GHG reduction plans better than a "just" climate agreement. In reality, however, achieving "feasibility" requires strong political power and economic strength as bargaining chips, which perfectly aligns with the thinking of the bloc of developed capitalist countries, such as the United States, that currently occupy a position of world hegemony.
II. The Evasion and Transfer of Responsibility for Reductions
As mentioned above, the appreciation of consequentialist climate justice theory by developed capitalist countries like the United States does not stem from the theory’s ability to more effectively mitigate global climate issues as a whole, but rather because it better fits their own interests. Specifically, it allows them to evade their own responsibility for GHG reductions and transfer that responsibility to developing countries that pose a threat to their global leadership status. Specifically, the consequentialist climate justice theory’s disregard for the responsibility for GHG emissions and the process of allocating reduction tasks meets the needs of contemporary developed capitalist countries, such as the United States, to maintain their own actual interests.
The primary characteristic of consequentialist theory is that the value assessment of an event is derived mainly from the results produced by that event, rather than the motivation behind it or the process of its development and change. Taking the capture of a suspect as an example, consequentialism is only concerned with whether the suspect is ultimately brought to justice; it is not concerned with whether the motivation for the capture was out of a moral imperative for justice or a personal desire for a high reward, nor is it concerned with whether the capture process was legal and compliant, or whether there were issues such as torture during interrogation. John Rawls once criticized it, saying: "It does not matter—except indirectly—how the total sum of satisfactions is distributed among individuals, any more than it matters, except indirectly, how one person distributes his satisfactions over time." Thus, when this characteristic of consequentialist theory is combined with the climate issue, a new weapon for developed capitalist countries to maintain their hegemony is born.
On the climate issue, this characteristic of consequentialism manifests as follows: focusing only on the overall result produced by global GHG reductions, ignoring the historical GHG emission responsibilities of various countries, and using only the maximization of economic interests after reduction as the principle for allocating reduction tasks. In Stern's view, an excellent GHG reduction agreement should enable global reduction actions to obtain the maximization of economic benefits, and he explicitly criticized: "‘Burden-sharing’ is the language and mindset beloved by international bureaucrats. From an economic perspective, if the discussion of fairness is confined to how to divide the pie [the carbon budget], the fundamental question is avoided." It can be said that Stern completely rejects the method of dividing GHG reduction tasks based on each country’s GHG emission responsibility and the degree of imbalanced social and economic development.
Regarding how to achieve the maximization of benefits in reduction actions, Stern suggests adopting a free-market model—treating each country’s GHG emissions as a tradable commodity and conducting free competitive bidding on a global scale—attempting to achieve the optimal allocation of GHG emissions through the "invisible hand" of the free market. To a certain extent, the free-market model does indeed possess the possibility of reaching an optimal solution for GHG reductions. However, the price paid for this possibility is the social and economic development prospects of many developing countries. Marx long ago provided a profound revelation of the capitalist free-market model. He pointed out: "The battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities… It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, and partly vanish." [1] David Harvey also pointed out: "Market liberalization never produces a harmonious state in which everyone lives an affluent life. On the contrary, it will produce greater social inequality than ever before." In other words, the result of the free market will only be this: with the continuous concentration of production and capital, a massive monopoly organization that can control and manipulate the market is eventually formed. The "optimal solution" that Stern hopes for is, in fact, merely a byproduct of the process of monopoly formation.
Specifically, the core of the free market is the equality of rights for market participants, which includes both the recognition of property ownership and the requirement for free and fair exchange. However, equality of political rights is not equivalent to equality in actual practice. In an international environment where the gap between rich and poor nations is widening, the international division of labor is becoming increasingly distinct, and class stratification is gradually solidifying, insisting on the equality of political rights without considering the actual differences in capital and political power can only serve to protect the owners of capital. This is because: First, the recognition of the commodification of GHG emissions allows developed countries to evade scrutiny of their historical GHG emission responsibilities. The respective baselines drawn by the EU and the United States for calculating historical emissions are acts of evading historical responsibility by utilizing the "grandfather principle." [2] In fact, the commodification of GHG emissions is the confirmation of the legitimacy of privatizing the benefits of existing GHG emissions. This is clearly very beneficial to contemporary developed capitalist countries that have massive historical GHG emissions and are currently actively undergoing deindustrialization, because the benefits generated by early GHG emissions have been recognized through "legitimization," while the responsibilities have been erased in one fell swoop. Second, in direct contrast to the development process of contemporary developed capitalist countries, because the industrialization process of developing countries was generally later, the "one-size-fits-all" approach to historical GHG emission responsibility has not benefited the majority of these countries. Even more troublesome is that, due to their later industrialization and the gradual solidification of the global division of labor, they have taken on the high-emission, high-pollution, and high-energy-consumption enterprises transferred out by developed countries during their deindustrialization process. This means that developing countries not only fail to enjoy the benefits of historical GHG emissions but also must shoulder the heavy burden of current GHG reductions. Within these burdens, a considerable portion was inherited from developed countries. In other words, in GHG reduction actions under the free-market model, contemporary developing countries must not only bear their own rightful emission responsibilities but also take on a significant portion of the reduction costs transferred from developed countries.
Unlike Stern’s relatively subtle expression, Posner’s International Paretianism bluntly refuses to examine moral ethics or the principles of fairness and justice. Posner believes that—
“Projects that make the national interest better off may exist alongside keeping the living conditions of some of the country's residents worse off. If a country defines its national interest in a way that considers the interests of only a minority of its residents, that country can also conclude a treaty that, while meeting the requirements of international Pareto theory, would have extremely adverse consequences for the majority of its residents.” It is clear from Posner's explanation that for international Pareto theory, the smooth achievement of objectives is its sole task; whether actions violating morality, ethics, or principles of justice occur in the process of achieving those objectives falls entirely outside its scope of investigation.
Naturally, the ruling parties of contemporary advanced capitalist countries, constrained by voters and opposition parties, will not sacrifice the interests of their own people excessively for greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions, as this would have a serious negative impact on the ruling party's support ratings. Therefore, the sacrifice Posner speaks of can only be the sacrifice of the interests of the people in developing countries—meaning that to complete the ultimate goal, the interests of the people in developing countries, who constitute the majority of the global population, can be sacrificed. Furthermore, such sacrifice is considered legitimate within the horizon of international Pareto theory. This leads to a highly contradictory question: if the interests of the majority can be sacrificed, then what is the purpose of governing global climate issues? Is it only for the interests of a minority of countries and a minority of people? If so, why would developing countries agree to sacrifice their current interests in exchange for benefits they may not necessarily obtain in the future? Thus, the "consent" of developing countries within consequentialist climate justice theory must contain coercive and involuntary components.
III. Climate Exploitation and New Imperialism
If the "consent" of developing countries in consequentialist climate justice theory is a forced and involuntary result, then the only entities capable of exerting pressure on developing countries are the groups of developed nations who hold world leadership today. This pressure is essentially the manifestation of the imperialist logic of capital regarding global climate issues. This imperialist behavior, on the one hand, transfers the costs of GHG emission reductions and, on the other hand, utilizes these reductions to carry out new exploitation of developing countries.
In classical Marxist theory, imperialism refers to monopoly capitalist countries using their monopoly advantages to forcefully acquire resources such as local means of production, labor, and consumer markets in other countries through military plunder, colonial control, and economic sanctions. Its essence is the export of accumulated capital and the pursuit of profit. Lenin once said, "As long as capitalism remains what it is, surplus capital will be utilized not for the purpose of raising the standard of living of the masses in a given country... but for the purpose of increasing profits by exporting capital abroad to the backward countries." Today, the deindustrialization of the bloc of advanced capitalist countries has been largely completed, and the leadership of financial monopolies is limited to the battle for supremacy between New York, London, and Frankfurt. Currently, monopolies are rapidly spreading into the fields of science and technology, culture, and the ecological environment. The climate issue happens to be a global issue where science, technology, culture, and the environment converge. On climate issues, contemporary advanced capitalist countries will never give up using global GHG reduction actions to consolidate their own leadership while simultaneously suppressing and exploiting emerging developing countries that have already posed a challenge to them.
Regarding the climate issue, the most effective solution known currently is the large-scale reduction of GHGs on a global scale. However, due to the tight relationship between GHG emissions and fossil fuel use, emission reductions will inevitably lead to a decline in the volume of fossil energy usage. Therefore, to maintain their own socio-economic stability and development, reducing countries must improve the efficiency of traditional energy use and continuously increase the proportion of new energy sources. Improving energy efficiency and switching to clean energy means that traditional production technologies require upgrading and transformation. However, the industries of developing countries have mostly taken on the industrial transfers [3] from developed countries; the equipment and technology used are generally backward and characterized by high energy consumption and high pollution. Furthermore, these backward technologies that need replacement are also prevalent in agriculture, the service industry, and daily life. Thus, the technological upgrading brought about by GHG reductions is like a "complete transformation" [4] for developing countries. But for developed countries, it signifies the emergence of a vast and brand-new market.
In fact, if developing countries were given enough time and space, technological upgrading would not be an especially difficult problem. However, the increasingly severe reality of climate change has not left sufficient development time for developing countries, forcing them to rely on external forces to accelerate the completion of technological updates. This demand for external force is clearly something the bloc of advanced capitalist countries is "glad to see" [5]. To achieve control over the technological update markets of developing countries, the bloc of advanced capitalist countries needs to further pressure developing countries in terms of timing for GHG reduction actions. As mentioned above, the more urgent the timeframe for reduction, the more pressing the demand from developing countries for foreign technology and financial assistance. To achieve this goal, the bloc of advanced capitalist countries continuously utilizes its monopoly advantage in cultural hegemony [6] to reinforce propaganda regarding the urgency of GHG reduction tasks globally. To be sure, climate change is a fairly urgent and serious global issue. However, does GHG reduction necessarily take priority over the many social problems that developing countries currently face? For some African and South American countries, the answer does not seem to be an unqualified "yes."
Under the guise of consequentialism, this propaganda of urgent reduction exhibits a false sense of noble sentiment—"all for the common good of humanity"—sketching a beautiful picture where the current continuous self-sacrifice of developing countries is for the realization of the future shared happiness of humanity. Under the repeated propaganda of this ideology, the mass of voters gradually accepts this view, which unconsciously manifests in party elections and policy-making processes, where it is regarded as an expression of "the good." Of course, from the perspective of the overall goal of GHG reduction, this is not a bad thing. However, beneath the banner of the "common good" erected by consequentialism lies the concealment of the lack of individual responsibility and the injustice in the distribution process—precisely what the advanced capitalist bloc attempts to hide and evade in climate issues. To focus the public eye on the ultimate "good," Posner even directly abandons the role of morality and justice as value judgments in climate issues, turning instead to "feasibility," which bears obvious characteristics of political realism, as the standard for value judgment. Posner’s "feasibility" is essentially the result of mutual compromises between international political powers. In this contest of international political power, the voices of developing countries and their people are weak and powerless.
Once the "urgency" and "ultimate good" promoted by consequentialism permeate all levels of society, and faced with the pressure of social public opinion and the requirements of the domestic political environment, developing countries are forced to implement GHG reduction actions as quickly as possible while struggling to maintain social development and stability. This simultaneous loss of time and space forces the transformation of developing countries to rely on the help and support of external forces, thereby falling into the trap of contemporary capitalism and accepting the climate exploitation of imperialism.
The monopoly of science and technology is a new field in the development of contemporary monopoly organizations. Science and technology monopolies exchange massive amounts of capital and labor consumption for technological leadership, creating new demands and causing "bottleneck" [7] problems for developing countries. They then sell new technologies to developing countries by collecting patent fees and service fees. For example, Google and Microsoft’s control over mobile and computer operating systems allows them to easily capture huge profits, which are then reinvested into new research and development as expanded reproduction. This is essentially the contemporary version of Marx’s description of industrial capital accumulation and exploitation in the 18th and 19th centuries. Precisely because advanced capitalist countries hold a monopoly on science and technology, developing countries have no other choice when seeking external help for technological upgrading and transformation. Therefore, developing countries must endure technological squeezing and exploitation from monopoly countries. This new imperialist squeezing and exploitation are not only manifested in charging high fees for technology usage rights and high-tech products; more importantly, developing countries must accept the technical rules formulated by the monopoly countries. Consequently, in the future process of scientific and technological development, they are forced to continue using the base modules, parameters, frameworks, and operating systems prescribed by the monopoly countries. This causes the technological development of developing countries to become dependent on and follow the group of advanced capitalist countries that monopolize science and technology.
Therefore, on climate issues, consequentialism helps the advanced capitalist bloc divert public attention from the issue of responsibility for historical GHG emissions. In the allocation of reduction tasks, it replaces the categories of morality and justice—which should be at the core of value judgment—with urgency and economic interests. This allows the advanced capitalist bloc, on one hand, to shift the responsibility for GHG emissions they should have borne and, on the other hand, to use the advantage of technological monopoly to carry out a new round of exploitation against developing countries.
IV. Responses from Developing Countries
Facing the imperialist behavior of the advanced capitalist bloc on climate issues, developing countries must make active and effective responses. General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out: “We should create a future of win-win cooperation where everyone does their best. Regarding global issues such as climate change, if one holds a utilitarian mindset, hoping to take more advantage and bear less responsibility, it will ultimately be a case of harming others without benefiting oneself.” Consequentialist climate justice theory precisely exploits the consensus that addressing climate change requires large-scale GHG reductions globally and provides an "economistic" [8] misinterpretation of this consensus, causing GHG reduction actions—originally intended for the common interest of humanity—to deviate from the correct track. Peter S. Wenz offered severe criticism of replacing ecological value with economic interests: “A more successful economy does not always mean a better life for everyone.” William Leiss argued: “Even if its economic capacity could sustain an infinite growth in material quantity, it is still not a wise choice for a society. The reason is that interpreting the pursuit of happiness entirely in this way poses an increasingly serious threat to people’s integrity as human beings and to the maintenance of our relationship with natural ecosystems.”
In fact, the academic critique of consequentialist climate justice theory has long been underway. Scholars such as Henry Shue, Simon Caney, and Steve Vanderheiden have used deontology—the old rival of consequentialism—to criticize consequentialist climate justice theory. At the level of actual policy, the Brazilian government once proposed an accounting of the historical GHG emissions of developed countries in the form of "effective emissions," and the Chinese government has also proposed GHG reduction strategies based on "per capita cumulative emissions." However, these critiques proceeding from deontology are still confined to the field of distributive justice; they have not launched a critique of the capitalist operational structure behind GHG reduction actions from the perspective of Marxist political economy, nor have they discovered the new imperialist behavior hidden behind it.
To respond to the consequentialist climate justice theory dominated by the contemporary advanced capitalist bloc, one must first recognize its class essence, clarify the imperialist interest groups it represents, and fully realize the antagonistic relationship between it and developing countries. Only in this way can the ideological invasion of the advanced capitalist bloc be resisted more effectively, allowing developing countries to take a place as a collective in the struggle for world leadership. Second, under the prerequisite of opposing imperialist climate exploitation, ways and methods for global cooperation to jointly solve climate problems must be sought. In answering the question of cooperation between the Soviet Union and Western European capitalist countries, Lenin said:
"A supporter of the proletarian revolution may make a compromise or an agreement with capitalists. It all depends on what kind of agreement is reached and under what circumstances." [9] Therefore, regarding the climate issue, cooperation between developing countries and imperialist nations requires the maximum possible avoidance of potential climate exploitation. Furthermore, on the issue of technological upgrading and transformation, developing countries must strive to break free from dependence on nations that hold technological monopolies and instead pursue a path of self-development. Finally, global cooperation to resolve the climate issue is for the sake of a community with a shared future for humanity. However, this shared future cannot be interpreted—as it is in consequentialist climate justice theory—as merely singular economic development or the growth of material interests. Rather, it should encompass all aspects of a beautiful life for humanity and run through the entire process of the objectives, development, and results of these events. Only in this way can developing countries maintain solidarity on the climate issue, united in opposing the imperialist actions of contemporary developed capitalist blocs while reaching cooperation with them on a basis of equality.
(Notes omitted)
(Author affiliations: School of Marxism, Shandong Normal University; Institute of Philosophy, Jinan University)
Web Editor: Zhang Jian Source: Journal of Poyang Lake, Issue 3, 2021