Reframe climate change as a grand opportunity

Editor’s note: This is the last in a series of stories in which we asked UB faculty mem­bers to think big: If they had unlimited time, money and persuasion techniques, what audacious idea from their fields would they want to implement today?

Reprinted from At Buffalo

The problem: Climate change

The big idea: Reframe the threat as a grand opportunity.

Kenneth Shockley is an associate professor of philosophy and former academic director of UB’s Sustainability Academy.

Climate change is one of the greatest moral challenges of our age. There’s no way around that. But sometimes monumental challenges can bring about monumental change — they can motivate us to think dif­ferently and to work together to think more carefully about the costs of our actions.

First, we may be inspired to communicate more effectively. In the recent Paris climate talks, for exam­ple, at a key moment when the talks were on the edge of breaking down, climate negotiators took a page from the traditional “indaba” process, wherein each party voices its opinion and is required to provide solutions drawing all toward a common ground. The effectiveness of this method in the face of a problem on the scale of climate change provides promise for a new era of communication.

Second, we may start thinking of ourselves as a global community and rethink how we understand vulnerable populations. They’re not “vulnerable people from country X”; they’re vulnerable human beings. That’s a morally important shift. Because we can recognize and respond to problems worldwide in a way that was unimaginable 200 years ago, we can also begin to think of ourselves as a global community.

Finally, climate change gives us an opportunity to take full stock of the costs of our actions. Once we see our problems as global problems, then it is much harder to justify ignoring the economic, environmen­tal or social costs of our actions — whether in terms of energy use or resource extraction or manufacturing — when those costs are borne by someone else. It’s not easy to make these kinds of measurements, but it is vitally important to acknowledge what we’re actually spending and what we’re kicking down the road for future generations or other populations to pay for.

Climate change is a huge, multifaceted problem, but it’s also an opportunity to fix grave injustices, to fix the relationships among humans and to fix the relationship between humans and the world itself.