Climate Justice Beyond the State

Virtually every figure in the climate justice literature agrees that states are presently failing to discharge their duties to take action on climate change. Few, however, have attempted to think through what follows from that fact from a moral point of view. In Climate Justice Beyond the State, Lachlan Umbers and Jeremy Moss argue that states’ failures to take action on climate change have important implications for the duties of the most important actors states contain within them - sub-national political communities, corporations, and individuals - actors that have been largely neglected in the climate justice literature, to date. Sub-national political communities and corporations, they argue, have duties to immediately, aggressively, and unilaterally reduce their emissions. Individuals, on the other hand, have duties to help promote collective action on climate change. Along the way, they contribute to a range of important contemporary debates, including those over the nature of collective duties, what agents are required to do under conditions of partial compliance, and the requirements of fairness.

Targeted at academic philosophers working on climate justice, this book will also be of great interest to students and scholars of global justice, applied ethics, political philosophy, and environmental humanities.

Lachlan Umbers is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Western Australia (UWA), Perth. He works primarily in moral and political philosophy, with a particular focus upon issues in democratic theory and climate justice. His work has been published in journals such as the British Journal of Political Science, Philosophical Studies, Political Studies, Social Theory and Practice, and the European Journal of Political Theory. With Jeremy Moss, he is the co-editor of Climate Justice and Non-State Actors: Corporations, Regions, Cities, and Individuals (Routledge).

Jeremy Moss is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney. His main research interests are in political philosophy and applied philosophy. Current research projects include: climate justice, the ethics of renewable energy, as well as the ethical issues associated with climate transitions. He is Director of the Practice Justice Initiative and leads the Climate Justice Research programme at UNSW. Moss has published several books, including Reassessing Egalitarianism (Springer), Climate Change and Social Justice (Melbourne University Press), Climate Change and Justice (Cambridge University Press), and, with Lachlan Umbers, Climate Justice and Non-State Actors: Corporations, Regions, Cities, and Individuals (Routledge).