Environmental Values

Fracking or the extraction of shale gas through hydraulic fracturing of rock has become a contested topic, especially in the United States, where it has been deployed on a large scale, and in Europe where it is still largely speculative. Research is beginning to investigate the environmental and economic costs and benefits as well as public perceptions of this new energy technology. However, so far the social and psychological impact of fracking on those involved in it, such as gas workers, or those living in the vicinity of fracking sites, has escaped the attention of the social science research community. In this article we begin to fill this gap through a small-scale thematic analysis of representations of fracking in fifty YouTube videos, where the trailer of a controversial film, Gasland (Fox, 2010), has had a marked impact. Results show that the videos discuss not only environmental and economic costs and benefits of fracking but also social and psychological impacts on individuals and communities. These videos reveal a human face of fracking that remains all too often hidden from view.

This paper examines the hypothesis that all public policies are based, at least in part, on rhetorical strategies. By analysing public policies implemented in the context of sustainable development, this article emphasises the need for and the challenges of providing legitimate foundations for the rhetorical means used to encourage change; it is these foundations that determine a given policy's efficacy. To do so, historical analyses are used, as well as socio-economic perspectives examined through textual analysis. The text concludes by showing the importance of a common framework for action based on shared values at the regional level for legitimising the political use of rhetoric to change behaviours and attitudes.

Philosophical discussions of climate change have mainly conceived of it as a moral or ethical problem, but climate change also raises new challenges for aesthetics. In this paper I show that, in particular, climate change (1) raises difficult questions about the status of aesthetic judgments about the future, or ‘future aesthetics’; and (2) puts into relief some challenging issues at the intersection of aesthetics and ethics. I maintain that we can rely on aesthetic predictions to enable us to grasp, in some sense, aesthetic value in environments affected by climate change and, through a discussion of three hypothetical cases, I argue that, although moral considerations will press on aesthetic judgments, aesthetic value will not necessarily be trumped by them.

Emissions grandfathering holds that a history of emissions strengthens an agent's claim for future emission entitlements. Though grandfathering appears to have been influential in actual emission control frameworks, it is rarely taken seriously by philosophers. This article presents an argument for thinking this an oversight. The core of the argument is that members of countries with higher historical emissions are typically burdened with higher costs when tran-sitioning to a given lower level of emissions. According to several appealing views in political philosophy (utilitarianism, egalitarianism, prioritarianism and sufficientarianism) they are therefore entitled to greater resources, including emission entitlements, than those in similar positions but with lower emissions. This grandfathering may play an especially important role in allocating emission entitlements among rich countries.

Activities protesting against major polluters who cause climate change may cause damage to private property in the process. This paper investigates the case for a more international general basis of moral justification for such protests. Specific reference is made to the Kingsnorth case, which involved a protest by Greenpeace against coal-powered electricity generation in the UK. An appeal is made to Rawlsian fairness arguments, traditionally employed to support the obligation of citizens to their national governments as opposed to their international duties. The argument made here, however, is that there seem to be sufficient reasons for holding that a stable climate is one of the first truly global public goods that is indispensable to acceptable standards of living everywhere. This would suffice to justify international and intergenerational ‘atmospheric’ political obligations, which in turn may justify protests – even those causing some damage to private property – against the laws and policies that violate the fair terms of cooperation in providing a stable climate. The fairness argument aims also to provide a ground from which Green political theory could integrate accounts of radical forms of citizenship into appeals to state political authority. This leads to justifying acts of civil disobedience on the basis of novel understandings of ‘atmospheric’ citizenship obligations.