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Mobilizing Hope
 Mobilizing Hope
Climate Change and Global Poverty

DA R R E L M O E L L E N D O R F

1
 3
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by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
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© Oxford University Press 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021054465

ISBN 978–​0–​19–​087561–​9

DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190875619.001.0001

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
For Daniel Callies, Eszter Kollar, Ellen Nieβ, and Merten Reglitz,
the original team
The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no
choice. They live, if not in slums, in bungalows that by
tomorrow may be leaf-​huts, trailers, cars, camps, or the
open air.
—​Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

Today, however, we have to realize that a true ecological

approach always becomes a social approach; it must inte-
grate questions of justice in debates on the environment,
so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.
—​Pope Francis, Laudato Si

The work against anxiety about life and the machinations

of fear is that against its creators, who are for the most part
easy to identify, and it looks in the world itself for what can
help the world; this can be found.
—​Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope

Today’s despair is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow’s

justice.
—​Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here
 Contents

Preface  xi

Introduction  1

1. Hope for a Warming Planet  15

 eyond a Reasonable Doubt 
B 15
Well Below 2°C  21
The Anti-​Poverty Principle  25
Hope-​Makers  30

2. Uncertainty and Precaution  35

 New World 
A 35
Visions of Prosperity  36
Epistemic Gaps and Planning Havoc  39
Irreversibly Rising Seas, Abrupt Warming, and
Mass Starvation  41
Risk and Uncertainty  43
The Argument for Precaution  46
The Environment, Bathing Babies, and Space Invaders  49
Legacy  51

3. Intergenerational Justice  54
 oral Judgments and Moral Theory 
M 54
Help and Do No Harm  56
Discounted Utilitarianism  65
Intergenerational Equality  68
Anti-​Catastrophe  70
Musings  72

4. Global Poverty and Responsibility for Climate Change

Mitigation Policy  73
 nequal Progress 
U 73
Human Development  74
viii Contents

 evelopment as Empowerment 
D 77
The Right to Promote Sustainable Development  81
Responsibility for Mitigation  85
Solidarity in Mitigation  90
Solidarity, Justice, and Hope  95

5. Justice and Adaptation  97

 daptation and Mitigation 
A 97
The Aims of Adaptation  99
Poverty and Adaptation Capacity  102
A Pro-​Poor Formula  104
Adaptation and the Right to Promote Sustainable
Development  107
Support for Adaptation  108
Conditions and Threats  112
Solidarity in Adaptation  116
An Abundance of Reasons  119

6. Hope for the Paris Agreement  120

The Paris Agreement and the Right to Promote
Sustainable Development  120
Problems with Paris  121
The Problems of Political Economy  125
Mobilizing for Paris  129
Growth, the Environment, and Technology  134
Green Growth, Zero Growth, and Sustainable Development  140
Hope for Paris  151

7. Supplementing Mitigation: A Pro-​Poor Approach  152

 e Geophysical Limit on Mitigation 
Th 152
The Problems of Political Economy Revisited  153
Negative Emissions Technology  155
Solar Radiation Management  161
Messing with Nature  170
Technology and Innovation  176

8. Hope for the Anthropocene  177

 e Era of Human Impact 
Th 177
Wars and Walls  179
The Misanthropocene  181
 Contents ix

 ealistic Utopias 
R 184
Valuing Nature  192
Human Development and Natural Value  199
Hope in the Anthropocene  202

Notes  205
Index  233
 Preface

I wrote first drafts of both my first article on climate change and my

first article on hope fifteen years ago when I was a visiting scholar
at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. I finished the
first draft of this manuscript back in South Africa (a country I once
made my home), but this time while serving as a Distinguished
Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg. Over 50 per-
cent of the population of South Africa lives in poverty. The coin-
cidental relationship between the surroundings of poverty and
working on justice, climate change, and hope stands out to me.
However, my writings have always stressed that the relationship be-
tween poverty and climate change is more than coincidental. In this
book as well, that is the central theme.
This book contains similarities of theme, argument, and
positions with many of my previous writings on climate change.
There are, however, differences and developments, enough, I hope,
to justify this publication. The arguments are packaged and ar-
ranged differently, and the exposition is, with luck, more accessible.
My discussions of adaptation and the Anthropocene go in entirely
new directions. Hope is also central to the discussion in a way
that it never has been before in my writing about climate change.
Additionally, I had the opportunity to teach a course on the polit-
ical philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr. in the winter semester of
2020–​21. Although I had read King many times before, never sys-
tematically. I expected him to have much interesting to say about
hope, and I was not disappointed. But I was surprised to learn what
a sophisticated theorist of mass mobilization he is. I learned much
from teaching him, and it has been incorporated in the political
xii Preface

discussions in this book, especially those in Chapter 6 related to the

Green New Deal.
Something truly remarkable occurred between the time the idea
for this book came to me and when it was completed. A series of
school strikes and mass demonstrations, inspired in part by the
lone efforts of a brave Swedish schoolgirl, Greta Thunberg, burst
onto the scene. Although those protests have been interrupted by
the COVID-​19 pandemic, I trust and hope that we will soon see
more of them. This is the most important, and certainly the most
hope-​inspiring, development in climate change politics to date.
I’d like this book to reach an audience beyond academic philos-
ophy and political theory, an audience that has also cheered these
protests and perhaps even participated in them. The central con-
viction of this book is relevant beyond academia—​namely, that
a hopeful politics, one based upon a vision of generalized global
prosperity and sustainability, best addresses the problems of cli-
mate change. Hope is a tonic against resignation and debilitating
anxiety. A rapid and thorough transition in the global economy
is needed. A hopeful vision can serve as the basis for mobilizing
broad popular support for the needed transition, and such broad
support is capable of defeating the economic interests and political
inertia that resist change.
Neither hope nor academic work happens alone. I have been
buoyed, inspired, critiqued, corrected, and helped by colleagues,
students, and friends. Two cohorts of undergraduate students in my
climate change and justice course at Goethe University, Frankfurt,
suffered early versions of the manuscript and provided me with
engaging feedback. Students in Claudia Blöser’s class at Johannes
Gutenberg University of Mainz, as well as Claudia herself, gave me
excellent comments on an early version of the manuscript. Many
thanks to all of them. I’m grateful to the students and colleagues of
the Philosophy Department at the University of Johannesburg (UJ),
who have been a source of helpful criticism. That would not have
happened without the efforts of Hennie Lötter, whom I would like
 Preface xiii

especially to thank. The comments of Hennie, David Bilchez, Chad

Harris, Thad Metz, Asheel Singh, and Brian Penrose at a University
of Johannesburg Philosophy Department talk helped me to avoid
some mistakes and to clarify certain arguments. Colleagues in
the Department of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham
offered tough but helpful criticism of the final chapter. I have
Merten Reglitz to thank for organizing that. That chapter was also
discussed at a conference called “Interpreting the Anthropocene”
at Goethe University, Frankfurt. I’m grateful for the comments
from participants and the audience. Just as I was finishing the man-
uscript, Philipp Schink very generously organized a workshop on it
under the auspices of the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften.
I’m immensely grateful to him and to the commentators, Vuko
Andric, Claudia Blöser, Fergus Green, Dominic Lenzi, Fabian
Schuppert, Rosa Sierra, and Eva Weiler. As I was working on
this manuscript, Daniel Callies and I wrote a paper, published as
“Assessing Climate Policies: Catastrophe Avoidance and the Right
to Sustainable Development,” in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics
20 (2021). That was truly a collaborative project; I can’t say con-
fidently where Daniel’s thinking ended and mine began. But sev-
eral of the arguments that we developed in that paper, with some
alterations, found their way into Chapters 6 and 7 of this book. I am
deeply grateful to Daniel for his input there.
I was remarkably lucky to have several friends in the profession
read drafts of the whole manuscript and offer helpful comments.
My warmest thanks for that go to Chris Armstrong, Daniel Callies,
Jamie Draper, Merten Reglitz, Lukas Sparenborg, and Amadeus
Ulrich. It’s an incredible privilege to have such generous and in-
sightful people in my professional life. I am deeply grateful to all of
them. I’m also grateful to Lukas Sparenborg for his help preparing
the manuscript.
Part of the time needed to write the book was provided by sab-
batical leaves from Goethe University, Frankfurt, where I am pro-
fessor in the Departments of Political Science and Philosophy,
xiv Preface

and a member of the research center Normative Orders. I’m

thankful for the leave time provided to me. The Forschungskollege
Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg offered me office space
as I was finishing the manuscript. My thanks to Matthias Lutz-​
Bachmann, the director, and Iris Koban, the managing director,
for their generosity. I am also appreciative of the use of the elec-
tronic library of San Diego State University, which I may access as
an emeritus professor.
Ellen Nieβ keeps my professional life organized, and manages
to keep her sense of humor while confronting the challenges that
I pose to her efforts. I am deeply grateful to her. I have learned a
great deal from my colleague Rainer Forst and the participants in
the Political Theory colloquium at Goethe University, Frankfurt
That colloquium is truly wonderful, and I have benefited much
from being a part of it. The research center Normative Orders at
Goethe University is a remarkable intellectual institution; I am very
fortunate to be a member.
I would like to thank Peter Ohlin at Oxford University Press for
his confidence in the project and his patience with my disappointing
pace of delivery. And I am thankful to an anonymous reader
supplied by the press for the critical comments that improved the
manuscript considerably, and also to Sue Warga, proof reader at the
press, who helped make the book more readable.
Book projects take place within a life of many other facets,
projects, and problems, but when one is lucky the circumstances
and the people of one’s life combine to offer support that makes the
writing possible. I began this book with a brain still addled by che-
motherapy, in recovery from a life-​threatening illness, and I con-
tinued it off and on in a period of profound personal turmoil. The
work itself, I suppose, has been an effort in mobilizing hope. Many
of my friends gave the life counsel and support that encouraged
me to find my way back to the manuscript and to completing it.
Chea, Don, Gerard, Jason, Michael and Theresa, and Per were es-
pecially helpful, as were my siblings. Marino’s good humor and
 Preface xv

companionship have been constants, even when the world was

painfully turned upside down. And Andrea’s companionship has
been zauberhaft. However, none of this would have been possible
without the remarkable generosity of Frank, once an anonymous
benefactor but now my friend. To him I am grateful beyond words.
 Introduction

Most books have many aims. This one is no different. One cen-
tral aim of this book is to explain the important ways in which the
problems of climate change and global poverty are intertwined. The
intertwining that interests me is moral. If we care about poverty,
as we should, we need to be concerned about climate change. But
also, addressing climate change needs to be attentive to poverty.
Although the intertwining is moral, it exists because of complex
causal interactions, such as those between the engines of human
development and the workings of the climate system. There is no
understanding of what to do about climate change without under-
standing these.
As I first wrote this the circumstances in Zambia served as an ex-
ample. From its base at the bottom of the gorge to its upper rim, the
handsome arched wall of the Kariba Dam stands 128 meter (420
feet) high and 579 meters (1,900 feet) wide. The dam construction
was a marvel of engineering, construction, social planning, and
environmental transformation by the administrators of Northern
and Southern Rhodesia (present-​ day Zambia and Zimbabwe)
and Nyasaland (present-​day Malawi). A feat of colonial will, the
construction required the forced relocation of more than 50,000
Batonga people living in the gorge, the stripping and burning of
the valley vegetation, and the transfer of some 6,000 elephants,
antelopes, rhinos, leopards, zebras, and assorted birds and reptiles
in an effort with the grandiose name “Operation Noah.” More than
a million cubic meters of concrete were poured, and $480 mil-
lion was spent. When the construction ended and the sluice gates
closed, the immense Lake Kariba slowly filled the gorge. After five
2 Mobilizing Hope

years, the wall holding back the mighty Zambezi River contained
the world’s largest man-​made lake, extending 220 kilometers (170
miles) in length.
The dam promised electricity and modernity to the people of
the region. Power to the people, of a sort. Independence, how-
ever, would not come to Zambia for several more years. Surely a
democratic idea, power to the people is also an ideal of human
development. There is a well-​ established correlation between
improvements in human development and the wide dissemina-
tion of modern forms of energy, in particular electricity and clean
cooking fuels.
Massive hydroelectric projects that run roughshod over local
people and ecology are hardly commendable, but electrification
that puts an end to energy poverty is. Home electrification extends
the time during which children can do homework, facilitates the
use of computers and internet technology, allows clean cooking that
reduces respiratory illness caused by indoor pollution. Streetlights
provide a measure of safety for women and girls at night. And the
grid powers schools, hospitals, and factories.
In stressing the importance of electrification for advancing the
Russian Revolution, V.I. Lenin once quipped, “Communism is
Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.”1 Like
Karl Marx, Lenin looked forward to a communist era characterized
by such a high level of overall production that human prosperity
would become generalized. Abundance would render obsolete the
need to divide society into classes in order to discipline producers
to work so that a minority would be free to enjoy the social surplus.
Whatever one thinks of the possibility, or even the desirability, of
such a classless society, countries making developmental progress
in the twentieth century have repeatedly demonstrated the impor-
tance of electrification. Significant human development gains are
reliably accompanied by dramatic increases in per capita energy
consumption.
 Introduction 3

A recent United Nations policy brief declares that “reducing the

global disparity in energy is key to reducing income inequalities,
gender inequalities and inequalities in other dimensions such as
rural/​urban income disparities. A lack of adequate, reliable and
affordable supplies of modern energy disproportionally impacts
women and children. It is also more severe in rural communities
and it limits their productive opportunities, enterprise growth and
employment, exacerbating income inequality and persistent pov-
erty.”2 Extreme poverty is horrifically brutal. The anthropologist
and medical doctor Paul Farmer relates a typical story of poverty
and medical neglect in rural Haiti. It is of a woman with metastatic
breast cancer who had been to fourteen different clinics, finding
none willing to operate because she could not pay the $700 fee. “A
young woman takes my arm in a common enough gesture in rural
Haiti. ‘Look at this, doctor.’ She lifts a left breast mass. The tumor
is not at all like the ones I was taught to search for during my med-
ical training in Boston. This lesion started as an occult lump, per-
haps, but by this September day has almost completely replaced
the normal breast. It is a ‘fungating mass,’ in medical jargon, and
clear yellow fluid weeps down the front of a light-​blue dress. Flies
are drawn to the diseased tissue, and the woman waves them away
mechanically.”3 Although every experience of illness is unique,
Farmer’s account of poverty and sickness is sadly illustrative.
Extreme poverty is the leading cause of death globally.
At full capacity the Kariba Dam drives turbines on the north
side that produce more electricity than any other source in Zambia.
Still, energy poverty is endemic. According to the World Bank,
only about 42 percent of Zambia’s population has access to elec-
tricity. And in rural areas, a mere 12 percent have access.4 At the
time of this writing, after two years of drought, the water level be-
hind the dam remained way down. Low water levels diminished the
functioning of the turbines and threatened to halt them altogether.5
Due to insufficient capacity, even those Zambians with access
4 Mobilizing Hope

to electricity experience rolling blackouts for up to twenty hours

every day.
The Zambian drought threatens more than access to electricity.
In the west and south of the country the drought brought mass-​
scale food insecurity. Crops wilted under the heat and aridity. As a
result, some 2.3 million people, 1,500 kilometers to the north of my
temporary residence in Johannesburg, were desperately hungry.
As the terrible Australian bush fires made for dramatic media cov-
erage, with pictures of homes caught in firestorms and tales of her-
oism by ordinary people, comparatively little attention from the
international press was directed at the millions of people on the
brink of famine caused by years of drought.
The drought in Zambia is a harbinger of future trends. As
greenhouse gases bake the planet, climate models predict both
temperature increases above the planetary average and precipi-
tation decreases (with some regional exceptions) against histor-
ical averages in southern Africa.6 The Zambian case illustrates
the vulnerability of the world’s poor to climate change. Suffering
a two-​year drought would put stress on any community. However,
for communities that survive largely by means of subsistence
farming, extended periods of water scarcity are a matter of life and
death. Increased incidence of prolonged drought threatens lives
on the scale of millions. The slow agony of a dearth of water, how-
ever, makes for much less riveting copy than ferocious fires raging
through the bush.
Even before the water through the turbines of Kariba Dam
slowed, the money coming in to modernize the facility dried
up. The utility that runs the generating station, jointly owned by
Zimbabwe and Zambia, has been cash-​strapped for years. Revenues
from electricity rates are a trickle of what is needed to finance the
modernization of the generating stations. Although the popula-
tion of Zambia has been growing, by the governments’ admission
there has been inadequate corresponding investment in hydroelec-
tric power generation since the 1970s, resulting in a failure to keep
 Introduction 5

pace with increasing demand.7 The bad news, however, just keeps
flowing. In March 2014 the Zambezi River Authority reported that
a cavernous crater had been created at the base of the spillway from
fifty years of water pounding onto the ground. Were the grand con-
crete wall to give way, a massive tsunami would tear through the
lower valley, inhabited by some 3.5 million people.
The dream of mass electrification remains deferred. Zimbabwe
is in arrears with international lenders. Zambia’s sovereign debt
nearly matches its gross domestic product. Money to renovate
and shore up the dam is not easy to come by from international
lenders. As debt obligations grow, Zambia defaulted on interna-
tional loans. However, new international financiers have been
willing to step in. The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative has been a
source of finance for infrastructure in the region. But suspicions
mount that China is pursuing debt trap diplomacy in order to
gain access to Zambia’s vast copper mining assets as collateral for
the loans.8
A changing climate threatens famine, energy poverty, and geo-
political vulnerability in southern Africa. Mitigation, to the extent
possible, is an anti-​poverty project, as is adapting to that measure of
change that isn’t mitigated. In this book I defend and deploy what
I call the Anti-​Poverty Principle. Moreover, policy efforts to avoid
dangerous climate change must allow for the differential capacities
of states to absorb the costs of protection, or such efforts risk
creating poverty traps of their own. I argue in these pages that re-
sponsibility for climate change policy must be based on the ability
of states to pay for the needed measures. This conception of respon-
sibility is required if we take seriously the right of states to promote
sustainable development, for both a price on carbon, whether the
result of regulation, markets, or taxes, and new capital investments
in energy generation could raise the costs of human development
in low-​income regions. Responsibility in a climate change policy
regime should rest squarely on the ability of states to take on policy
burdens without harming the human development level of the
6 Mobilizing Hope

population. This is required by the right of states to promote sus-

tainable development.
Recognizing the importance of energy to the human devel-
opment project, the countries negotiating the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992 included in
Article 3 several important norms. Paragraph 1 requires that states
protect the climate system on the basis of equity and in accordance
with differentiated responsibilities and respective capacities, and
specifically that developed countries take the lead in addressing
the problems of climate change. Paragraph 2 asserts the privileges
of low-​and medium-​income countries. Paragraph 3 requires co-
operation on the basis of the recognized different socioeconomic
contexts of countries. Paragraph 4 asserts that states have the right
to promote sustainable development, the liberty to develop and
pursue national development plans appropriate to their needs.
Finally, Paragraph 5 calls for an international economic frame-
work that is supportive of such plans.9 In light of these agreed-​upon
commitments it would be not only disrespectful of poor states
but wildly unrealistic to propose any international climate change
policy that did not leave states at liberty to access inexpensive forms
of energy for purposes of promoting human development. Respect
and realism align in this instance.10
The year 2015 was a landmark year for international ambi-
tion setting. The United Nations agreed to seventeen Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs), the first of which was to end poverty
in all of its forms everywhere.11 As a specific aim, the UN seeks to
end extreme poverty by 2030. SDG 13 is to take urgent action to
combat climate change and its impacts. At the Paris meeting of
the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC) that same year, the member states reaffirmed the goal
limiting warming to “well below 2°C” and to pursue efforts to limit
“temperature increase to 1.5°C.”12 (Hereafter, I use “Framework
Convention” to refer to the treaty document, and “UNFCCC” to
refer to the organization founded on the treaty.) The task for the
 Introduction 7

coming several decades could not be more dramatic: to decar-

bonize the global economy and to expand immensely the produc-
tion and consumption of energy so as to fuel poverty eradication
programs globally.
The ambitions of 2015 are far from realized. A recent
International Energy Agency report asserts that the gaps between
aspiration and reality in both climate change policy and electrifi-
cation are massive: “The energy world is marked by a series of deep
disparities. The gap between the promise of energy for all and the
fact that almost one billion people still do not have access to elec-
tricity. The gap between the latest scientific evidence highlighting
the need for ever-​more-​rapid cuts in global greenhouse gas emis-
sions and the data showing that energy-​related emissions hit an-
other historic high in 2018.”13 There is need for urgent policy action.
Policy, however, must be guided by a sound understanding of what
matters morally. And an understanding of what matters morally for
purposes of guiding policy has to be developed in light of an intel-
ligent diagnosis of the problem and the available levers the public
authorities can pull or could pull if citizens so demanded.
Another aim of this book is to anchor the moral assessments that
are its central message in a realistic explanation of the problem.
I seek to explain the moral intertwining of climate change and
global poverty, but the factual intertwining matters to what I have
to say. No academic discipline is broad enough to provide a full
understanding of climate change. I am a philosopher by training,
but one working in a Political Science department. I often rely on
theories and findings from the social and natural sciences after
working to understand them, though without claiming originality
in doing so. The intertwining that I explicate is important for what
we should do politically. Responding to climate change and global
poverty makes moral demands on us as authors and subjects of
our laws, as democratic citizens. If we fail politically, we fail mor-
ally. Even so, our understanding of the causes of our failings up
to this point requires knowledge gained from the empirical social
8 Mobilizing Hope

sciences. To address the moral problems of climate change and

global poverty, we must go outside of normative philosophy to the
social sciences for explanations of our circumstances. John Dewey
once wrote that when moral philosophers acquire a well-​informed
empirical understanding of the context of their concerns, their
philosophical accounts are improved. Their philosophy “loses its
peculiar flavor of the didactic and pedantic; its ultra-​moralistic and
hortatory tone.”14 And so I seek greater empirical understanding
to inform the moral judgments of this book; we need such under-
standing to guide our attempts at just responses to climate change.
The works of international relations specialists, political scientists,
and economists enrich our moral understanding of the avenues
available for action.
I can’t claim confidence that we have reason to be optimistic that
the problems of climate change and global poverty will get suc-
cessfully addressed in the coming decades. The climate system is
so inadequately understood that there is reason to worry that bad
surprises, thresholds crossed, will overwhelm our capacities to
adapt. Moreover, there are strong economic interests in the fossil
fuel industry tantalizing politicians to slow the response to cli-
mate change, and even outrageously to deny the existence of the
problem. Political support for these views also can be found among
industry workers and their communities whose fates are tied to
the extraction and refining of fossil fuels. Convincing these people
to support political programs that their employers find threat-
ening will require intelligent political mobilization and attention
to their concerns. This is a major and important political task. To
ignore it would put success in doubt. The politics that fall under
the broad banner of the Green New Deal are important in this re-
gard. A failure to mitigate sufficiently could result in, say, a quarter
of the Earth’s population living in fortresses more or less adapted to
a changed climate while the rest are trapped in poverty, struggling
to adapt, and on the move from drought-​prone regions or low-​
lying coastal areas. The disruptions within states and the pressure
 Introduction 9

for cross-​border migration could be immense. More militarized

borders, ever higher walls, frequent resource conflicts, and wide-
spread hunger could be in the forecast.
Nonetheless, this book also aims to show that there is reason
not only to hope, but to act in ways that mobilize hope. Political
mobilization can be supported by a hopeful vision of a possible
better world. Broad mobilization requires a vision of global soli-
darity, increased prosperity for working people, and sustainable
communities. And intelligent political mobilization can inspire
hope that such a vision is within reach. Since 2018 the efforts of
millions of schoolchildren and other young people around the
world have offered inspiration. Fridays for Future and affiliated
groups, such as Scientists for Future, have helped galvanize a global
movement, as have other groups such as Extinction Rebellion and
the Sunrise Movement. Each of these groups has organizational
and political limitations, but importantly they lend encourage-
ment, training, and organizational acumen to a new generation of
activists. Hope is both cause and effect of a certain sort of politics.
Hope does not require optimism. Unlike optimism, hope can
be mobilized and sustained with less confidence that things are
going in the right direction. A hoped-​for end need not be likely, just
reasonably possible. St. Thomas Aquainas identified the object of
hope as the arduous but possible good.15 Hope can be maintained
in darker times than can optimism. And to the extent that there is
hope, there is some light in the darkness. The light is extinguished
only when reasonable possibilities have vanished altogether. That
is not our circumstance. Not yet, anyway. Recalling the great phi-
losopher of hope, Ernst Bloch: “It is not yet the evening to end all
days, every night still has a morning. Even the defeat of the wished
for good includes its future possible victory as long as not all
possibilities of becoming different, becoming better are exhausted
in history and world.”16 The alternatives have not so narrowed;
paths to a prosperous and sustainable global order remain avail-
able. Mobilizing hope involves understanding and communicating
10 Mobilizing Hope

those paths and demanding that political leaders pursue them. This
book aims to make a modest contribution to that effort.
Many worthy books call out to us to be read, far too many good
ones to read them all. Why spend the time to read this one at the
expense of another one? I owe the curious potential reader a short
summary of what she would be getting into if she chose to devote
herself to this book. Chapter 1 argues that, despite some objections
to the contrary, there are good reasons for policymakers to aim to-
ward the goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C. The chapter rejects two
reasons for not making this temperature target a policy goal. One
is the Uncertainty Objection, which stresses our ignorance about
how much warming is produced by our emissions and what the
broader effects of that warming will be. Such uncertainty is real,
but it’s not a reason not to act. The second reason is the Priority
to Global Poverty Eradication, which claims that we should pursue
development first and deal with climate change later. The pursuit of
human development is currently among the most important aims
of humanity, but to neglect climate change mitigation and adap-
tation in order to pursue it would be self-​defeating. This chapter
introduces and defends the Anti-​Poverty Principle. The Anti-​
Poverty Principle identifies dangerous climate change as that which
would prolong or worsen poverty. Finally, the chapter introduces
the idea of hope-​makers, bits of evidence or explanations of the
likelihood of our hopes coming to pass. These may be states of af-
fairs or theories, or even human action capable of contributing to
the outcome. Despite the reasons to worry, there are hope-​makers
that dangerous climate change can be avoided. The most important
among these is the upsurge in climate activism, especially by young
people around the world.
The concerns of the first chapter are developed further in
Chapter 2. Growth in productive capacity suggests the possibility
of realizing a progressive vision of prosperity in which economic
necessity has been overcome for everyone. This attractive vision of
globalized freedom from the drudgery of enforced labor arose in
 Introduction 11

response to possibilities afforded by the Industrial Revolution, but

the activities that have given rise to this unprecedented growth in
productive capacity have also created the Anthropocene. Pervasive
impact on planetary systems has raised the uncertain possibility of
environmental catastrophe. Uncertainty is a reason to take 1.5°C
seriously as a warming limit. This chapter draws a distinction be-
tween risks and uncertainties. There is a reason to take precaution
when there is the real possibility of an uncertain but especially bad
outcome. The possible cataclysmic outcomes of climate change sat-
isfy the conditions in which precaution is required. Although the
case for precaution is moral, we also have reasons of self-​respect to
want our legacy to be positive. And it is better to err on the side of
precaution than to do too little.
Matters become more theoretical in Chapter 3. Indeed, this
is probably the most theory-​centered of all of the chapters in this
book. It is devoted to a discussion of intergenerational justice
and climate change. It takes note of the long-​term, intergener-
ational effects of climate change. Our capacity to affect the living
circumstances of future people raises the question of which prin-
ciple of intergenerational justice best explains our duty to mitigate
climate change on behalf of future generations. In this chapter I ex-
amine four possible principles: Help and Do No Harm, Discounted
Utilitarianism, Intergenerational Equality, and Anti-​Catastrophe.
The survey reveals serious problems with the first three of these
principles. In the end, Anti-​Catastrophe has a considerable degree
of plausibility. Moreover, its plausibility is augmented by the fact
that it is consistent with the Framework Convention.
Chapter 4 takes up international justice and responsibility in cli-
mate change mitigation. It argues that human development, as un-
derstood by the United Nations Human Development Programme
(UNDP), is rightly a high priority, and that respecting the right to
promote sustainable development is a matter of international jus-
tice. Taking that right seriously requires a conception of responsi-
bility in a climate change mitigation regime that protects the human
12 Mobilizing Hope

development interests of states. And the only conception that non-​

contingently does that is one that assigns responsibility based on a
state’s human development level. Solidarity in climate change mit-
igation requires assigning the burdens of achieving a zero-​carbon
global economy in accordance with protecting the right to promote
sustainable development.
Chapter 5 is concerned with the aims of adaptation and the
moral requirement that high-​income industrialized countries sup-
port adaptation in poor countries. As noted previously, the Anti-​
Poverty Principle identifies dangerous climate change as that which
would prolong or worsen poverty. Avoiding such danger requires
prioritizing adaptation projects in poor countries. The Pro-​
Poor Formula offers guidance for doing so in setting adaptation
priorities. It includes factors of effectiveness, size, and the poverty
gap. Support by wealthy countries for adaptation projects in poor
ones has thus far been measly. This chapter explores the reasons
this is the case, and the permissible responses on the part of poor
countries. In addition, it argues that despite the local benefits of ad-
aptation projects, there is a sound basis for the politics of interna-
tional solidarity in adaptation policy.
The prospects for the Paris Agreement of 2015, an important
even if incomplete accomplishment of international climate diplo-
macy, are discussed in Chapter 6. The agreement salvaged an in-
ternational process that was in trouble, and the pledge-​and-​review
process of generating mitigation targets provided a procedural safe-
guard for the right to promote sustainable development. However,
the sum of the mitigation pledges made fell far below that needed
to meet the Paris goals of limiting warming to 1.5°C, or at least well
below 2°C. In order to realize the goal of Paris, mitigation pledges
will have to become more ambitious, and, of course, they will have
to be pursued and realized. However, progress has been frustrat-
ingly slow. By far the most political of the book’s chapters, Chapter 6
details four Problems of Political Economy that help to explain this
unsatisfactory pace. The most serious political problem among
 Introduction 13

these is due to the power of the fossil fuel industry to influence poli-
tics according to its interests. Here I draw on Martin Luther King Jr.’s
theory of mass mobilization to argue that countering the power of
the fossil fuel industry requires popular mobilization. Inspirations
for the politics of mobilization can be found in a hopeful vision of
a sustainable and prosperous world. The political program of the
Green New Deal, based on an expansion of employment and in-
come through green growth, constitutes such a vision. However,
the idea that economic growth must have limits has been raised by
some activists and theorists. But the politics of green growth is su-
perior on several counts to a politics of reduced expectations and
zero growth. A hopeful politics that combines a vision of prosperity
with sustainability can help to motivate a politics of mass mobiliza-
tion for rapid de-​carbonization.
A policy of limiting warming in accordance with the Paris
Agreement limits is a pro-​poor policy. Chapter 7 emphasizes the
Geophysical Limit, the upper limit on concentration of CO2eq in
the atmosphere for maintaining a reasonable likelihood of keep
warming within the Paris Agreement targets. The concentration in
2019 already rendered the likelihood of limiting warming to 2°C
no better than 50 percent. Since there is compelling reason to judge
warming in excess of 1.5°C as dangerous, a realistic appraisal of the
prospects suggests that robust mitigation alone is unlikely to avoid
dangerous climate change. Policy should encourage the research
and development of forms of Negative Emissions Technology to
draw CO2 out of the atmosphere. Because the prospect of having
this technology at sufficient scale is uncertain, and the deployment
of it in any case could lead to a temporary temperature overshoot,
research into the possibility and merits of using Solar Radiation
Management should be carried out. And the best time to develop
a regulatory framework for the possible deployment of such tech-
nology is before it is fully developed. The chapter explores and
rejects the criticism that intentionally manipulating the planetary
climate shows improper regard for nature. Because mitigation
14 Mobilizing Hope

policies alone are unlikely to halt warming in accordance with the

Paris targets, promoting technological developments that might
supplement mitigation is a pro-​poor policy.
Climate change is an example of a planetary system put under
stress by human activity. Importantly, it is not the only such ex-
ample. Indeed, human impact on the planet’s geology, as well
as on other planetary systems, is so profound that there is a call
among planetary scientists to designate a new geological epoch,
the Anthropocene. Chapter 8 discusses both the threats that the
Anthropocene poses and the prospects for a vision of global pros-
perity and sustainability it affords. The threats are characterized
as risks of crossing planetary boundaries that could disrupt the
fragile equilibria of Earth systems that have provided the back-
ground conditions of human civilization. The consequences could
lead to massive suffering caused by environmental disruptions,
and to even more profound global inequalities than now exist. This
would all be the product of human activity, which suggests the ap-
propriateness of calling the era the Misanthropocene. Resisting the
Misanthropocene calls for a conception of a realistic utopia for the
Anthropocene. This chapter examines two such conceptions, the
Arcadian and the Promethean. Such a realistic utopia may focus
efforts at mobilizing hope for the Anthropocene.
 1
Hope for a Warming Planet

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

Weather can change abruptly. In a matter of minutes clouds darken

the sky, the temperature drops several degrees, and thunderous
claps accompanied by drenching showers and bolts of lightning
leave hikers in the Drakensberg Mountains lying flat against an
exposed hillside. Yet a quarter of an hour later sun rays trumpet
through the waning clouds, composing a brilliant rainbow, the
promise of a peaceful evening. Out of nowhere skiers in the Alps
find the top of a slope covered in a treacherous mixture of fog and
flurries, rendering them disoriented without a clear measure of the
slope’s edge and only their balance to tell them which direction is
up and which is down. I’ve experienced both of these events; nei-
ther offers any indication of a changing climate.
By comparison, the climate is changing very slowly. An altera-
tion in weather patterns from one day to the next, even from one
year to the next, is no indication of the long-​term trend that is cli-
mate change. Of course, among the convinced, it’s common to at-
tribute a heat wave to global warming. In fact, however, it might just
be an aberration of the weather. Only measurements over a long
period of time analyzed by statistical methods capture the extent
and speed of our changing climate.
That raises a question. How do scientists take the temperature of
the planet? The ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes boasted
that with a lever long enough he could move the Earth. For accu-
rately taking the Earth’s temperature a single thermometer won’t do
the trick, rather a great many distributed widely around the globe
16 Mobilizing Hope

are needed. Humans have been using thermometers since the six-
teenth century. And weather stations across Europe have been
taking regular temperature readings since the eighteenth century.
This was extended to stations around the globe in the middle of the
nineteenth century.1 The average surface temperature of the Earth
is derived from sources around the globe, and it can be calculated
for a day, or the daily measures can be averaged over a month, a
year, a decade, or more. Just as the weather can vary from one hour
to the next, so temperature can vary from one day to the next, and
from one year to the next. So a more accurate measure of the global
temperature is gleaned by averaging over several years or a decade.
Decades with a hundred or more years in between can be compared
to get an idea of a trend. When the global average temperature of
the decades of the middle of the nineteenth century, around the
beginning of the Industrial Revolution, is compared to the average
temperature at the beginning of the twenty-​first century, the latter
is warmer by over 1°C (1.8°F).
A warming of 1°C might seem slight, certainly not enough to
feel from one day to the next. But the climatic consequences of
somewhat more than a degree of warming have already been sig-
nificant. Water resources have been affected by greater incidences
of droughts in some regions, more precipitation in others, and the
retreat of mountain glaciers. Sea levels have risen, and storm swells
have become bigger problems. Heatwaves have increased, and cold
spells have become fewer. Biodiversity has diminished, and species
have been moving with more or less success in the direction of the
poles and up hillsides. Because oceans cover most of the planet,
they absorb the majority of the solar energy coming our way. But
water changes temperature more slowly than the air. You only
need to think of how cool and refreshing a lake is on a hot summer
day. Chalk that up to the water’s thermal inertia. That same inertia
causes a delay in the temperature increase of the oceans, which
affects air temperature. Even if not a molecule more of carbon were
emitted by humans into the atmosphere, lagging ocean warming
 Hope for a Warming Planet 17

would continue to drive air temperature up slowly for hundreds of

years to come, until air and water temperatures achieved a stable
long-​term equilibrium.
Water temperature increase is one of the major, and certainly
most easily predicted, factors causing sea level rise. Water molecules
expand as they warm; thus the oceans peacefully but relentlessly
encroach on the shoreline, or they violently splash over barricades
during storm swells. The oceans have risen about 19 centimeters
(7½ inches) since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. As
long as the warming continues, sea levels will continue to rise.
There is, however, another major factor in sea level rise: land-​based
ice melting and ice sheet collapse. Melting produces a steady con-
tribution to sea level rise. The collapse of massive ice sheets on the
land or extending above the water produces a large and instanta-
neous increase, like dropping ice cubes into a beverage.
The warming that has been observed has been concurrent with
a steady increase in the growth of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Atmospheric concentrations
of CO2 have been directly measured ever since Charles Keeling
started to do so at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii in
1958. Ingeniously, scientists now obtain measures of pre-​1958
concentrations from ice core samples. The ice contains bubbles
of trapped atmosphere, and the composition of the air trapped in
those bubbles can be analyzed. The deeper the core, the older the
atmospheric sample. The oldest continuous ice core records go
back 123,000 years in Greenland and 800,000 years in Antarctica.
From the analysis of ice cores, scientists have determined that in the
middle of the nineteenth century the amount of CO2 in the atmos-
phere was just under 280 parts per million (ppm); now it is nearly
420 ppm.
Greenhouse gases, such as CO2, permit short-​wave radiation
from the sun to pass through to the Earth’s surface, but they trap
long-​wave radiation bouncing back. So the gases function like a
blanket to warm the air surrounding the Earth. Naturally occurring
18 Mobilizing Hope

greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as water vapor, make

life on Earth possible. By insulating the planet, they make it warm
enough to sustain life. Without these gases the average surface tem-
perature of the planet would be a chilly −18°C (0°F) instead of the
life-​sustaining 15°C (59°F) that it currently is. Water is an impor-
tant greenhouse gas, as is CO2. Additional greenhouse gases include
methane, nitrous oxide, sulfur hexafluoride, chlorofluorocarbons,
hydrofluorocarbons, and perfluorocarbons. The presence of all the
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is often measured by a unit
known as a CO2 equivalent (CO2e). CO2e is a theoretical construct.
One part per million of CO2e is the amount of all the greenhouse
gases that is the equivalent in warming potential to one part per
million of CO2. It’s like measuring a basketful of banknotes of var-
ious currencies in terms of how many dollars they are worth.
Why choose CO2 to be the base measure—​the universal cur-
rency, as it were? The centrality of CO2 for scientific and policy
purposes has to do in large part with its prevalence. There is more
CO2 in the atmosphere than there is of any other anthropogenic
greenhouse gas. But it has also to do with CO2’s longevity in the
atmosphere and the persistence of its climatic effects. A quarter or
more of the CO2 humans emit remains in the atmosphere for sev-
eral centuries before getting absorbed by the oceans or processed
by plant respiration.2 That means today’s emissions are unwelcome
bequests for future generations.
The disruptions to the climate system are already causing
problems, of course, but the problems will continue and worsen for
people living in the future. Even if no additional CO2 were emitted
into the atmosphere, the effects of global warming would not just
go away. They would linger like a guest who has worn out her wel-
come. The severity of the effects of the CO2 presently in the atmos-
phere depends on how much more is emitted, on how the climate
system reacts to an elevated CO2 concentration, and on how we
prepare for the coming changes.
 Hope for a Warming Planet 19

There is some uncertainty about how much warming to expect,

and even more about what the effects of the warming will be. But
there is absolutely no controversy among climate scientists about
three things: (1) the growth of CO2 concentration in the atmos-
phere since the Industrial Revolution from about 280 ppm to nearly
420 ppm, (2) the increase in the temperature of the planet over that
time period by more than 1°C, and (3) that CO2 is a greenhouse
gas. Inferring a causal explanation for the warming is reasonable
given these facts. The scientific body commissioned by the United
Nations to study all the reported evidence, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made that causal connection
between emissions and warming with full conviction in its Fifth
Assessment Report (AR5), published in 2014:

The evidence for human influence on the climate system has

grown since the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). It is
extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase
in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was
caused by the anthropogenic increase in GHG [greenhouse
gas] concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings [human
influences] together. The best estimate of the human-​induced
contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over
this period. Anthropogenic forcings have likely made a substan-
tial contribution to surface temperature increases since the mid-​
20th century over every continental region except Antarctica.
Anthropogenic influences have likely affected the global water
cycle since 1960 and contributed to the retreat of glaciers since
the 1960s and to the increased surface melting of the Greenland
ice sheet since 1993. Anthropogenic influences have very likely
contributed to Arctic sea-​ice loss since 1979 and have very likely
made a substantial contribution to increases in global upper
ocean heat content (0–​700 m) and to global mean sea level rise
observed since the 1970s.3
20 Mobilizing Hope

The anthropogenic origins of climate change are now taken as a fact

in climate science.
As I mentioned previously, there is still uncertainty about what
the effects will be for any given amount of warming. A lot of sci-
entific effort has been directed toward forecasting the likely extent
and consequences of warming. There is sure to be continued wide-
spread loss of species and ecosystems, more frequent heatwaves
and droughts in some locations, more and more extreme precip-
itation events and tropical storms, sea-​level rise causing inunda-
tion in some areas, and glacial melting leading to flooding and later
to water shortages. This much is confidently predicted in general
terms. For humans these effects are likely to bring significant threats
to food security globally and regionally, increased risks from food-​
and water-​borne illnesses as well as vector-​borne diseases (such as
malaria), greater internal and international migration due to envi-
ronmental stress, an increased risk of violent conflicts, diminished
economic growth, and the creation of new poverty traps in some
regions.4
In 2015 the US Department of Defense released a report on cli-
mate change that discussed the many ways in which the effects of
climate change could heighten international tensions and pose
threats to security. The report begins: “The National Security
Strategy, issued in February 2015, is clear that climate change is an
urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing
to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over
basic resources such as food and water. These impacts are already
occurring, and the scope, scale, and intensity of these impacts
are projected to increase over time.” It then continues: “Global
climate change will have wide-​ranging implications for U.S. na-
tional security interests over the foreseeable future because it will
aggravate existing problems—​ such as poverty, social tensions,
environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weak po-
litical institutions—​that threaten domestic stability in a number of
countries.”5 One could object that whether these calamities occur
 Hope for a Warming Planet 21

depends on what we do, but the Pentagon’s assessment of the risks

is certainly alarming.
There is no reasonable doubt in the scientific and military
communities about the existence of anthropogenic climate change
and the threats it poses. But there are important questions about
how best to respond to the warming.

Well Below 2°C

For a number of years international climate negotiators, under

the influence of several countries, the European Union, and civil
society movements, urged that a goal be set to limit mean global
warming to 2°C. In 1996 the European Commission adopted the
goal.6 At the meeting of the UNFCCC in Copenhagen in 2009
member parties affirmed it.7 They reaffirmed the goal the following
year in Cancún.8 In June 2015 the G7 also adopted it. And the text
of the 2015 Paris Agreement pledges to hold “the increase in the
global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-​industrial
levels” and to pursue “efforts to limit the temperature increase to
1.5°C above pre-​industrial levels.”9 Limiting warming to well below
2°C, even to 1.5°C, is now a major policy goal of the international
community.
Generally, any precise temperature target has to be taken with a
grain of salt because there is so much uncertainty involved in our
understanding of the climate system. We could control the temper-
ature increase by stabilizing concentrations of CO2 in the atmos-
phere. But the precise relationship between CO2 concentrations
in the atmosphere and warming is not yet known. The amount of
warming caused by a twofold increase of CO2 in the atmosphere
is referred to as “climate sensitivity.” Current estimates by atmos-
pheric scientists hold that climate sensitivity is between 2°C and
5°C, with a best estimate of 3°C.10 Because we can directly aim
at atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and only indirectly aim at
22 Mobilizing Hope

a temperature target, it is nearly impossible to hit the latter target

without having a fairly narrow range of uncertainty for climate sen-
sitivity. The less certain we are about climate sensitivity, the less pre-
cise our aim will be. It would be a bit like setting a timetable to lose a
specific amount of weight without knowing exactly how many calo-
ries need to be cut from one’s consumption. Additionally, the exact
consequences of any temperature increase are uncertain, and that
makes it impossible to know in detail what the results of hitting our
aim would be. Let’s bundle these two concerns and call them the
Uncertainty Objection to temperature targets.
Is there a defense of the 1.5°C warming limit that can respond
adequately to the Uncertainty Objection? There are several reasons
that add up to the conclusion that the 1.5°C limit is a decent ap-
proximation of what we owe future generations, who will expe-
rience the warmer planet and its climatic effects. First, scientific
understanding about both climate sensitivity and the consequences
of warming is advancing continually. Hence, policy will get more
accurate, and uncertainty in some areas will diminish. Second,
there is no uncertainty that the risks of climate change accumulate
as warming increases. Even the risks of warming limited to 2°C are
significantly greater than those limited to 1.5°C, as a recent major
study by the IPCCC reports.11 So, it seems reasonable to seek a low
target to the extent that it is feasible and morally permissible to do
so. Third, in light of existing warming, limiting warming to 1.5°C is
probably the lowest target that is technologically feasible. Fourth,
although that limit is certainly ambitious, economic studies suggest
that with an early commitment to action, the economic benefits
are considerable.12 Fifth, the cost of producing renewable energy
is dropping rapidly. That reduces the costs of limiting warming for
the present generation, and therefore the burden of achieving it
seems all the more reasonable.
One concern, however, has to do with needed technological
development. To note one important area, the IPCC presents
modeling that assumes the possibility of removing CO2 from the
 Hope for a Warming Planet 23

atmosphere in order to maintain a warming limit of 2°C and the

more ambitious limit of 1.5°C.13 Currently, the technology to do
this has not been sufficiently developed for implementation at
scale. Another area where the technology is still young is the de-
velopment of renewable fuels for use in maritime shipping and air
transport. There is a push from some activists to reduce drastically
international air travel and sea transit. There is no doubt room for
individuals and companies to reduce these activities, but air travel
and cargo shipping are central features of the interconnected global
economy. Barring dramatic global economic shrinkage, the use of
alternative fuels rather than less interconnection has to be the goal.
And although renewable fuel research holds promise, much still
needs to be done.14
Another objection to the goal of substantial limits on warming
comes from those who rightly remind us of the duty to eradicate
global poverty. The criticism holds that we should spend less on
mitigation, continue to promote human development even if it
is carbon intensive, and address climate change later by means
of adaptation policies once all societies are more prosperous.
In the early 2000s Bjørn Lomborg made a name for himself as
the “Skeptical Environmentalist” by popularizing an argument
to this effect.15 Let’s call this view Priority to Global Poverty
Eradication.16 The basic idea is that the first global priority should
be human development. That in fact corresponds with the first
of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals: to end poverty in
all its forms everywhere. Priority to Global Poverty Eradication
holds that pursuit of fossil-​fuel-​intensive human development
combined with poverty eradication efforts is the most cost-​ef-
fective means of achieving the first Sustainable Development
Goal.17 Success in that regard would make the next generation
wealthier and provide more resources for adaptation; mean-
while, adaptation technology will improve and become cheaper,
rendering adaptation capable of dealing with the problem of cli-
mate change. The position is that funding development now and
24 Mobilizing Hope

adapting later would be the most cost-​effective way to respond to

climate change.
There are several important and related problems with Priority
to Global Poverty Eradication. One is that it ignores the existence
of a carbon budget; another is that it overestimates our ability to
adapt to a world in which warming has not been slowed by miti-
gation efforts. To fail to reduce emissions substantially in the very
near future would result in greater cumulative emissions since the
beginning of the Industrial Revolution and thus a higher atmos-
pheric concentration of CO2. A higher concentration of CO2 in the
atmosphere would increase the temperature at which the climate
system finally achieves equilibrium. A report released by the UN in
2021 finds that even if countries honor all of their current pledges
to reduce emissions, there will nonetheless be a “sizable increase in
global GHG emissions in 2030 compared to 2010,” which “may lead
to a temperature of about 2.7C [4.9°F] [higher than preindustrial
levels] by the end of the century.”18 And it is, of course, not a fore-
gone conclusion that countries will honor their pledges. A recent
report by the IPCC includes possible future scenarios produced by
higher emissions in which temperatures by the end of the twenty-​
first century are on average between 3.6°C (6.9°F) and 4.4°C (7.9°F)
higher.19 Consider the implications of these projections: An in-
crease of more than 2.5°C above preindustrial levels would render
the planet hotter than it has been than any time in the last 3 mil-
lion years.20 It would be a temperature that far exceeds anything
experienced during the time in which human civilizations have
developed. But the speed of the warming would be far more im-
portant than the magnitude. In the past when the Earth warmed by
that much, it took 5,000 years to do so. The rate of warming that a
failure to mitigate would bring about would be at least twenty times
faster than any previous warming of that magnitude.21 Ecosystems
and communities would be put under such immense stress that it
is doubtful that adaptation would even be possible in many regions.
The rapid temperature rise would occur simultaneously with what
 Hope for a Warming Planet 25

is expected to be continuous growth in the global population, at

least until 2050 or 2060. That raises serious doubts that agricul-
tural systems and water resources could cope. The specter of mass
hunger would then arise.
These two problems for Priority to Global Poverty Eradication
conspire to create a third and more devastating one, which is that
Priority to Global Poverty Eradication is self-​defeating. To act as
it recommends would almost certainly bring about consequences
that are contrary to its aim. Continuing to emit CO2 and waiting to
address climate change by means of adaptation alone would mas-
sively increase global poverty and desperation. The moral of the
story is that climate change mitigation is a pro-​poor project.
Since the Earth has already warmed by more than 1°C and miti-
gation efforts are in their infancy, a goal of 1.5°C is hugely ambitious.
But as I will discuss in subsequent chapters, it is very significant
that the costs of renewable energy are falling rapidly. Assuming this
trend continues, and assuming the responsibility for mitigation is
fairly assigned, pursuit of the 1.5°C warming limit need not sig-
nificantly slow human development activity by diverting budget
priorities to spending on more costly fuels.

The Anti-​Poverty Principle

The response to the Priority to Global Poverty Eradication is not to

deny the moral duty to eradicate global poverty. Eradicating global
poverty is of the utmost importance. That goal animates much of
the concern about climate change—​not all of it, of course, for the
massive loss of biodiversity is regrettable apart from its effects on
human well-​being, and the disruptions resulting from climate
change threaten other of our most cherished values. But rather than
competing with climate change as a global priority, poverty eradi-
cation drives the concern about climate change in an especially im-
portant way. Pope Francis’s recent papal encyclical, “Laudato Si’,”
26 Mobilizing Hope

stresses the connection between a pro-​poor social agenda and envi-

ronmentalism, proclaiming that “a true ecological approach always
becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in
debates on the environment.”22 This book shares that conviction.
A few years ago a report from the UN Human Development
Programme emphasized the impact that climate change has on the
poor of the world. Sadly, this frightening assessment is still all too
fitting:

Vulnerability to climate shocks is unequally distributed.

Hurricane Katrina provided a potent reminder of human frailty
in the face of climate change even in the richest countries—​espe-
cially when the impacts interact with institutionalized inequality.
Across the developed world, public concern over exposure to ex-
treme climate risks is mounting. With every flood, storm and heat
wave, that concern is increasing. Yet climate disasters are heavily
concentrated in poor countries. Some 262 million people were
affected by climate disasters annually from 2000 to 2004, over
98 percent of them in the developing world. In the Organisation
for Economic Co-​operation and Development (OECD) coun-
tries one in 1,500 people was affected by climate disaster. The
comparable figure for developing countries is one in 19—​a risk
differential of 79.23

Climate change threatens to prolong and worsen the misery of the

poorest people on the planet considerably.
I mentioned earlier a recent report by the IPCC on the 1.5°C
warming limit. That report emphasizes the increased threats that
warming above that target poses to the global poor. It warns that
“limiting global warming to 1.5°C, compared with 2°C, could re-
duce the number of people both exposed to climate-​related risks
and susceptible to poverty by up to several hundred million by
2050.”24 To be clear, even without the threat of irreversible cat-
astrophic changes to the climate system, a mere half a degree of
 Hope for a Warming Planet 27

increased warming could spare hundreds of millions of people

from some of the worst risks of poverty.
I offer two arguments that, taken together, support the view that
warming beyond 1.5°C is dangerous. The first argument concludes
by asserting what I call the Anti-​Poverty Principle. The second argu-
ment uses that principle to defend the warming limit of 1.5°C.
The Anti-​Poverty Principle offers an interpretation of an impor-
tant clause in the Framework Convention. Article Two states that
the convention’s central objective is to “prevent dangerous anthro-
pogenic interference with the climate system.”25 The first step in
the interpretation, I believe, is to notice that Article Two implies
that what is dangerous is what should be avoided. It relies, in other
words, on a normative conception of danger. It is a normative con-
ception in the sense that it directs our action; in the context of this
clause, to identify an action or outcome as dangerous is to judge
there to be a reason that it should be avoided.
The normative conception of danger allows us to distinguish be-
tween danger and risk. Rather than having reason to avoid risks,
people often have reasons to assume or to tolerate them. These
reasons can be based on the degree of the risk, what interests the
risk affects, how resilient the person is to the negative consequences
that could arise and how the alternatives to avoiding the risk af-
fect their interests. For one person a certain job might be too risky
given her alternatives, while for another it is not too risky due to
a lack of alternatives. The point is that risks are not normative in
the same way as the conception of danger used in the Framework
Convention.
The claim that danger is normative, and specifically that it
includes risks that we should avoid, might seem like the kind of
clarification that is unhelpful. What does it gain us to know that
danger includes the idea of what we should avoid? Well, looking at
the matter this way directs our attention beyond risks alone to those
that we have a reason to avoid. However, there are complications.
The example of the risky job seems to suggest that judgments of
28 Mobilizing Hope

danger are hopelessly relative to personal circumstances. Could it

be that no agreement is possible about what Article Two means be-
cause where some people judge the risks to be too great, others will
see compelling reasons to take them? If that were the case, there
would be irresolvable controversy at the very heart of the leading
international treaty designed to combat climate change. A pretty
sobering conclusion.
The task for salvaging the aim of the collective effort to prevent
dangerous climate change, then, is to identify a kind of risk that eve-
ryone has reason to avoid. This is where the Anti-​Poverty Principle
comes in. And this takes us to the first of the two arguments. The
one for the Anti-​Poverty Principle is as follows:

(1) A risky action or policy is dangerous, when, in light of the

alternatives, on balance one has reason to avoid the action or
policy because of the risks.
(2) To the extent that there are alternatives, everyone has good
reasons to avoid actions and policies that result in involun-
tary poverty.
(3) Therefore, climate policy that imposes avoidable involun-
tary poverty is dangerous.

Two premises and a conclusion, but each of the premises could

do with some clarification.
Claim (1) serves to distinguish judgments of risk from judgments
of danger, as I suggested earlier. Claim (2) asserts that involuntary
poverty is the kind of outcome that everyone has reason to avoid. It
is not, however, stating a psychological fact. It is rather a claim about
the relationship between poverty and what people have reason to
value. It might seem dogmatic here, but in Chapter 4 I promise to
argue that we have reason to value education, health, and income.
Insofar as poverty is constituted by deficiencies in one or more of
these, we have reason to avoid it. To the extent that these claims
seem crucial to you, you might have to register your acceptance of
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the child is in reality a demand that injustice shall be done one
person for the sake of another; and where this demand is effective it
serves no end but that of frustration and discord, as might be
expected. It is far better, as modern society is coming to realize, for
the community to content itself with insisting upon the discharge of
parental responsibility, without prescribing too minutely the
conditions under which it shall be done.
It is not, perhaps, so much a concern for the preservation of the
home that makes people afraid of divorce, as it is for other time-
honoured concepts; such, for instance, as the idea that marriage is a
sacrament, that it is made in heaven and is therefore indissoluble in
this world. Curiously enough, this idea of the essential holiness and
consequent indissolubility of the marriage-bond has coexisted in
Christian society with the most cold-blooded practice of marrying for
convenience, for money, for social prestige, for place and power, for
everything that ignores or negates the spiritual element in sexual
union. The marriage arranged for social or mercenary reasons by the
families of the contracting parties, who might not even meet before
the wedding-day, was as sacred as if it had been founded upon an
intimate acquaintance and tender passion between them. Thus was
utilitarianism invested with a spurious holiness. Small wonder that a
mediaeval court of love denied the possibility of romantic attachment
between husband and wife. The Church, to be sure, introduced the
principle of free consent of the contracting parties; but so long as the
subjection of women endured, there could be little more than a
perfunctory regard for this principle. There can be no real freedom of
consent when the alternative to an unwelcome marriage is the
cloister or lifelong celibacy at the mercy of relatives whose wishes
and interests one has defied, in a society where to be unmarried is,
for a woman, to be nobody. A son, because of the greater
independence that his sex gave him, might safely exercise some
degree of choice in marrying. A daughter might safely exercise none.
As women have become more independent, and their economic
opportunities have increased, consent has become more closely
related to inclination, and in many places, notably the United States,
it is actually dependent upon inclination;[24] but while women remain
at an economic disadvantage it is hardly to be expected that the
motives behind inclination and consent will always be entirely free
from an ignoble self-interest.
So long as woman’s economic and social welfare was bound up with
marriage, indissoluble marriage undeniably offered her a certain kind
of protection. It did not, as I have remarked, protect her from cruelty
and infidelity on the part of her husband; but it generally assured her
of a living and a respected position in society—that is, so long as she
violated none of the conventional taboos against her sex. Even now
the chivalrous man often feels that he must endure an unhappy
marriage rather than cause his wife to incur the economic and social
consequences of divorce. He generally feels that her chance of
finding another husband to support her would be considerably worse
than his of getting another wife to support; a feeling which,
considering the relative desirability of supporting and being
supported, will be justified so long as it is considered tolerable for
women to be an economic dead weight on the shoulders of men.

III
The sanctions of monogamic marriage have been enforced on
women only. The Christian Church, after some indecision, finally
decided that indissoluble monogamy was the only allowable form of
marriage; and in theory it exacted from man and woman the same
faithfulness to the marriage-vows. Practically, of course, it did no
such thing. Being dominated by men, it eventually came to condone
the sexual irregularities of men, if it did not sanction them; but sexual
irregularity in the subject sex continued to be both theoretically and
practically intolerable. Woman became the repository of morality in a
society which regarded morality as chiefly a matter of sex. But since
she was at the same time the means of satisfying those sexual
needs which Christianity disparaged, she also bore the brunt of
social displeasure at violation of the ascetic creed. Womankind, as I
have already remarked, was divided into two classes: the virtuous
wives and cloistered virgins who embodied Christian morals; and
those unfortunate social outcasts who sold their bodies to gratify un-
Christian desires. The prostitute, the “companion” of the Greeks,
who had been in the Greek world the only educated woman, the only
woman who enjoyed comparative freedom, became in the Christian
world a social outcast, reviled and persecuted, a convenient
scapegoat for man’s sins of the flesh, who atoned vicariously by her
misery for his failure to live up to the Christian ideal of sexual purity.
Nothing reflects more discredit upon the dominance of the male
under Christianity than the fact that he took advantage of the
economic helplessness which forced millions of women to sell their
sex for a living, and then persecuted them outrageously because he
had outrageously mistreated them. For prostitution, however much it
may reflect upon the morality and, more especially, upon the taste, of
men, has nothing whatever to do with the morality of women. It is,
with women, a question of economics, purely and simply. The man
who buys gratification of his sexual desire has at least an option in
the matter; he will not starve if he abstains; but the woman who sells
her body indiscriminately to any man who will buy, does so because
her need to earn a living for herself or her family forces her to do
violence to her natural selective sexual disposition.
This economic pressure has been strikingly illustrated in Central
Europe since the war, where thousands of women of gentle breeding
have been literally driven to the streets by the compelling scourge of
want. The men upon whom these women in normal times would
have depended for a living had been either killed or incapacitated in
the war, or their power to earn had disappeared in the economic
collapse which followed. When men, in a society so organized as to
give them an economic advantage over women, can no longer earn
enough to maintain their dependents even at the subsistence-level,
the chance of women, for the most part untrained to breadwinning, to
do so will be poor indeed. Under such circumstances the woman
thrown on her own resources may, through some extraordinary
stroke of luck, find a way to self-sufficiency through labour; but more
often she is obliged, after her possessions have been disposed of, to
take refuge from starvation by selling the only marketable commodity
that is left her—her sex. Of course there is the alternative of
starvation, which for herself she may choose; but if this choice would
involve starvation for her children or other dependents she is likelier
to choose prostitution, precisely as so many German and Austrian
mothers and daughters have done. Mrs. O’Shaughnessy’s little story
of Vienna after the war, “Viennese Medley,” depicts a situation which
is not untypical. A middle-class Viennese family which had enjoyed a
mediocre prosperity before the war, is suffering, with all that suffering
city, from the nightmare of want that followed a savage peace. In the
background, unspoken of, the only ray of hope across the bleakness
of their extremity, moves the sister who sells her beauty to foreign
officials and native, war-made millionaires. It is she who, when the
young half-brother is struck by the dreaded plague of tuberculosis,
sends him to the mountains and health. It is she who helps the
sister-in-law to establish herself in trade, after the brilliant young
surgeon, her brother, has come back a nervous ruin from the war. It
is she who buries, with decent ceremony, the child of a sister whose
husband, once a distinguished professor, is now able to do little
more than starve with his numerous family. She even saves from
want the young nobleman whom she loves, and his family as well.
Not every woman who has sold herself in stricken Europe could
command so high a price, but there is no doubt that many of them
stood between their suffering families and death.
War releases all that is brutal in man, and places woman in a
peculiarly helpless position; therefore it is a prolific immediate source
of prostitution. But the ultimate and permanent source is the source
of war itself, the economic exploitation of man by man. So long as
society is organized to protect the exploiter, so long will peace be an
incessant struggle—for more wealth with the privileged classes; for
existence with the exploited masses—and war will be, as it has
always been, merely a final explosion of the struggling forces. So
long as human beings may starve in the midst of plenty, so long will
woman be under temptation to sell the use of her body. She may
prostitute herself because she has literally no other way to get a
living; she may do so in order to eke out an insufficient wage; she
may do so because prostitution seems to offer a relief from hopeless
drudgery; she may do so because she has made what the world
calls a misstep and is cut off thereby from respectability and the
chance to earn a decent living; or she may prostitute herself legally,
in marriage, as women have been forced to do from time
immemorial. In every case there is one motive force, and that motive
force is economic pressure, which bears hardest upon women
because of the social, educational, and economic disadvantages
from which they are forced to suffer in a world dominated by men.
No amount of masculine chivalry has ever mitigated this evil, and no
amount ever will; for chivalry is not compulsory, while prostitution is.
No amount of exhortation, no amount of devoted labour on the part
of reformers will touch it; for it is not a question of morality. No
amount of persecution—of arrests, of manhandling, of night-courts,
public insult, fine and imprisonment—will check it, for the necessity
which prompts it is too imperious to be balked by the
uncomprehending guardians of public decency. The peril of this
necessity threatens all womankind; one turn of fortune’s wheel may
bring its stark aspect before the eyes of the most sheltered of
women. It is the sheltered women, indeed, who are peculiarly in
danger; those women whose preparation for the struggle to wrest a
living from economic injustice has consisted in waiting for men to
marry and support them. The parent who, in a world where celibacy
and prostitution are on the increase, fails to give a girl child
education or training which will enable her to get her living by her
own efforts, forces her to take a dangerous risk; for the woman who
is brought up in the expectation of getting her living by her sex may
ultimately be driven to accept prostitution if she fails to find a
husband, or, having found one, loses him.
There is only one remedy for prostitution, and that remedy is
economic freedom—freedom to labour and to enjoy what one
produces. When women have this freedom there will be no more
prostitution; for no woman will get a living by doing violence to her
deep-rooted selective instinct when opportunities are plentiful and a
little labour will yield an ample living. There may still be women who
are sexually promiscuous; but there is a vast gulf between
promiscuity and prostitution: the sexually promiscuous woman may
choose her men; the prostitute may not. It is the abysmal gulf
between choice and necessity.
 IV
Marriage, illegitimacy and prostitution are so closely related, as
social problems, that it is impossible to draw firm lines of
demarcation between them. The unlegalized union—which is
betrayed by illegitimate birth—may be a marriage in all but law; the
legalized marriage may be merely a respectable form of prostitution;
prostitution may take the form of a more or less permanent union
which may even assume the dignity of a true marriage. Illegitimacy,
marriage, and prostitution do not exist independently; they exist in
relation to one another and are often confused in people’s minds—
as when it is assumed that all mistresses are essentially harlots.
They are the three faces of mankind’s disastrous attempt to impose
arbitrary regulation upon the unruly and terrifying force of sex; they
form a triptych of which the central panel is institutionalized marriage
and the other panels the two chief aspects of its failure. The title
might appropriately be “The Martyrdom of Woman.”
Experience has amply proved that as individualism progresses, it
becomes increasingly difficult to impose upon people more than an
appearance of conformity in sexual matters. Society can not really
regulate anything so essentially personal and private in its nature as
the sexual relation: it can only take revenge upon its natural result—
and thereby encourage the prevention of that result by artificial
means. For every unmarried mother who is persecuted by society,
there are ten unmarried women who escape the social
consequences of an unauthorized sexual relation. For every faithful
husband there is another who deceives his wife with other women;
nor are wedded wives by any means always faithful to their marriage
vows. There are people who live together in the sexual uncleanness
of loveless marriages; and there are those who live purely in extra-
legal union. The sexual impulse is too variable and too imperious to
be compressed into a formula.
Christian society, as I have remarked, early surrendered its
uncompromising asceticism and settled down to an easy acceptance
of the mere appearance of conventional sexual virtue—that is, so far
as men were concerned. Women, as inferior and evil beings, who,
incongruously enough, at the same time embodied Christian
morality, must naturally be under the rigid surveillance of their male
tutors, and no deviation from established rules might be allowed
them. Thus worldly motives in marrying might be united with
sacramental monogamy; for the man might avail himself of extra-
marital union as a safety-valve for the emotional needs to which
marriage gave no scope. The needs of the woman were not
considered, save when savage punishment was visited upon their
illicit satisfaction. Thus hypocrisy and deceit were tacitly encouraged,
and the monogamic ideal was degraded; and countless generations
lived a gigantic social lie which distorted and perverted their spiritual
vision as only an accepted lie can distort and pervert it.
I do not mean by this that there have not been millions of really
monogamous marriages. To intimate that the greater sexual freedom
allowed men by law and custom has led all men into licence would
be as stupid as to assume that repression and surveillance have
kept all women chaste. But the institution of marriage, in Christian
society, has represented compromise, and the fruit of compromise is
insincerity—such insincerity, for example, as the Government of
South Carolina shows when it forbids divorce, and fixes by law what
proportion of his estate a man may leave to his concubine.
Any people which wishes to attain dignity and seriousness in its
collective life must resolve to cast aside compromise and insincerity,
and to look at all questions—even the vexed one of sex—squarely
and honestly. The person who would do this has first some
prepossessions to overcome: he must forget tradition long enough to
appraise institutionalized marriage by its value to the human spirit;
he must resolve for the time to regard men and women as equally
human beings, entitled to be judged by the same standards, and not
by different sets of traditional criteria; and he must put away fear of
sex and fear of autonomy. If he can do these things, he may be able
to look clear-eyed down the long vista of the centuries and realize
the havoc that has been wrought in the souls of men and women by
a sexual code and a system of marriage based on a double standard
of spiritual values and of conduct. He may perceive how constant
tutelage degrades the human spirit, and how much greater would be
the sum of human joy if freedom were substituted for coercion and
regulation—if men and women were without legal power to harass
and bedevil one another simply because the State, through the
marriage-bond, allows them humiliating rights in one another; if
virginity and chastity were matters of self-respect and taste, instead
of being matters of worldly self-interest to women and unconcern to
men; if the relations between the sexes were based on equality and
regulated only by affection and the desire to serve and give
happiness.
The modification which institutionalized marriage has been
undergoing since the partial emergence of woman, its chief victim,
have been in the direction of equality and freedom. The relative ease
with which divorce may now be had marks a long step towards
recognition of marriage as a personal rather than a social concern;
and so does the tendency to abolish the legal disabilities resulting
from the marriage-bond. Nothing augurs better for the elevation of
marriage to a higher plane than the growing economic independence
of women and the consequent improvement in the social position of
the unmarried woman; for only when marriage is placed above all
considerations of economic or social advantage will it be in a way to
satisfy the highest demands of the human spirit.
But the emergence of women has had another significant effect,
namely: an increase in frankness concerning extra-legal sexual
relations, if not in their number. Of late there has been much public
discussion of the wantonness of our modern youth; which, being
interpreted, means the disposition of our girls to take the same
liberty of indulgence in pre-nuptial sexual affairs that has always
been countenanced in boys. This tendency is an entirely natural
result of woman’s increased freedom. The conditions of economic
and social life have undergone revolutionary change in the past half-
century; and codes of morals always yield before economic and
social exigency, for this is imperious. It is for this reason, as Dr. A.
Maude Royden has acutely observed, that women of the lower
classes have always enjoyed a certain immunity from the taboos that
reduced women of the middle and upper classes to virtual slavery. “If
among the poor,” says Dr. Royden, “these ‘protections’ have been
dispensed with, it has not been because the poor have thought
either better or worse of their women, but merely because they are
too poor to dispense with their labour, and labour demands some
small degree of freedom.” Labour not only demands, it gives
freedom. The woman who is economically independent need no
longer observe rules based on male dominance; hence the new
candour in woman’s attitude towards the awe-inspiring fetich of sex.
If there is about this attitude an element of bravado, akin to that of
the youth who thinks it clever and smart to carry a hip-pocket flask, it
bears testimony, not to the dangers of freedom, but to the
bankruptcy of conventional morality. The worst effect of tutelage is
that it negates self-discipline, and therefore people suddenly
released from it are almost bound to make fools of themselves. The
women who are emerging from it, if they have not learned to
substitute an enlightened self-interest for the morality of repression,
are certainly in danger of carrying sexual freedom to dishevelling
extremes, simply to demonstrate to themselves their emancipation
from unjust conventions. There is no reason to expect that women,
emerging from tutelage, will be wiser than men. One should expect
the contrary. It is necessary to grow accustomed to freedom before
one may walk in it sure-footedly. “Everything,” says Goethe, “which
frees our spirit without increasing our self-control, is deteriorating.”
This so-called wantonness, this silly bravado, simply shows that the
new freedom is a step ahead of the self-discipline that will eventually
take the place of surveillance and repression. It would not be so,
perhaps, if girls and boys had ever been enlightened concerning the
real sins of sex, and their true consequences. Women, in the past,
have been taught to keep virgin or chaste for the sake of their
reputations, of their families, of their chances in the marriage-market;
they have been scared into chastity in the name of religion; but they
have not been taught to be chaste for the sake of the spiritual value
of chastity to themselves. Men, having been expected to “sow their
wild oats”, have been taught to sow them with a certain degree of
circumspection. Girls have been intimidated by pictures of the social
consequences of a misstep; boys have been warned of the physical
danger involved in promiscuous sexual relations. This may not have
been the invariable preparation of youth for the experiences of sex;
but it has unquestionably been the usual one, and it is one of utter
levity and indecency.
The real sins of sex are identical for men and women; and they differ
from infractions of the conventional moral code in this respect among
others: that they do not have to be found out in order to be punished.
They carry their punishment in themselves, and that punishment is
their deteriorative effect upon the human spirit. They are infractions
of spiritual law; and there is this significant distinction to be observed
between spiritual laws and the laws of men: that regulation plays no
part in their administration. The law of freedom is the law of God,
who does not attempt to regulate the human soul, but sets instinct
there as a guide and leaves man free to choose whether he will
follow the instinct which prompts obedience to spiritual law, or the
desire which urges disregard of it. The extreme sophistication of the
conventional attitude towards sex has dulled the voice of instinct for
countless generations, with the inevitable result of much
unnecessary suffering and irreparable spiritual loss.
A healthy instinct warns against lightness in sexual relationships;
and with reason, for the impulse of sex is one of the strongest motive
forces in human development and human action. It touches the
obscurest depths of the soul; it affects profoundly the functions of the
mind and the imagination—can not, indeed, be dissociated from
them. The fact that it is also strongly physical leads to
misunderstanding and disregard of its relation to the mind and spirit;
a misunderstanding and disregard which are immensely aggravated
in a society where woman, because of her inferior position, may be
used for the gratification of physical desire, with no consideration of
her own desires or her spiritual claims. Prostitution, for example, has
exerted a most deleterious influence on the attitude of men toward
sex and toward women. But degradation of the sex-impulse is
inevitably punished. The sheerly physical indulgence to which it
leads produces a coarsening of spiritual fibre, an incapacity for
appreciation of spiritual values. Moreover, it produces a cleavage
between passion and affection which renders impossible the highest
and most beautiful form of the sexual relation, the relation in which
passion and affection are fused in a love which offers complete
understanding and fulfilment. It is to this fusion (and not to
monogamy, which, Spencer thought, developed love) that we owe
“the many and keen pleasures derived from music, poetry, fiction,
the drama, etc., all of them having for their predominant theme the
passion of love.” True monogamy, the product of this highest love, is
not a regulation to be observed; it is an ideal to be attained, and it
will not be attained by the person who fails to recognize and to
respect the spiritual aspects of the sexual relation.
Nor will it be attained by the person who mistakes excitement for
love, and who flits from one temporary attachment to another,
thinking always to find the beautiful in the new. Such promiscuous
philandering not only precludes depth of affection and thus renders
constancy impossible; it also blunts perception. Its effect was never
better expressed than by Burns, who was one of its unhappy victims.
 I waive the quantum o’ the sin,
The hazard of concealin’,
But och! it hardens a’ within,
And petrifies the feelin’.

This is the penalty of levity in human relations: that it petrifies feeling.

One pays the price in spiritual deterioration. There is probably no
more striking testimony to this than the first part of Goethe’s “Faust.”
Consider what we know of the nature of Goethe’s relations with
women; and then consider the spiritual insensitivity, the failure to
perceive and draw upon the inexhaustible spiritual treasures that life
holds in store, that are implied in his failure to devise for Faust,
brought back from the brink of the grave at cost of his immortal soul,
any more animating employment for his new-found youth than a low
intrigue with an ignorant peasant girl.
I will pass by the contention that men are by nature polygamous and
women monogamous; for it rests on evidence created by a dual
standard of conduct for the sexes. Certain women of independent
spirit are at present rather conspicuously engaged in proving
themselves not merely polygamous but promiscuous; and a great
many men have always proved themselves to be monogamous.
Probably human beings vary in respect of these tendencies as of
others. All people, perhaps, can not attain the highest plane in love,
either for want of capacity or of opportunity; nor can all people
conform to a single mode of conduct. But all people can attain
sincerity in sexual relations, and at least a certain degree of self-
knowledge. Sincerity, self-knowledge, respect for oneself and for
other people; these are essential to a genuine ethic of sex; and they
are uncontemplated by the sanctions of conventional morality. Yet
the person who violates this ethic sins against his own spirit, which is
to sin against the Holy Ghost, and on the spiritual plane he will be
punished.
An increase in extra-legal relationships does not of itself imply
spiritual retrogression. It might imply instead one of two things, or
both, namely: an increase in the economic obstacles to legal
marriage; or a growing disinclination to admit an affair so personal as
the sex-relation to sanction and regulation by people whom it did not
concern. If men and women were economically equal and
independent, the number of marriages might increase enormously;
on the other hand, institutionalized marriage might be superseded by
marriage without legal sanction, which before the birth of children
might not be even known or recognized as marriage.[25] Free
people would probably want less of official interference in their
personal affairs, rather than more. But for those who wanted to avoid
the terrors of autonomy there would still be marriage; and for those
who wanted to walk in the strait and ennobling way of freedom, there
would be the right to love without official permission, and to bring
forth children unashamed. Those who wished to sell themselves
would be free to do so if they could find buyers; but no one would be
forced to live by violating the law of love which is the law of life.
Freedom implies the right to live badly, but it also implies the right to
live nobly and beautifully; and for one who has faith in the essential
goodness of the human spirit, in the natural aspiration towards
perfection which flowers with touching beauty even in the bleak soil
of that hardship, degradation and crime to which injustice condemns
the mass of humanity—for one who has this faith in the human spirit,
there can be no question what its ultimate choice would be.

FOOTNOTES:
[20] Code Napoléon: “La recherche de la paternité est interdite.” This
provision was expunged in 1913. In Massachusetts, the father’s
name may not be given in the record of birth except on the written
request of both father and mother. No similar protection against
publicity is provided for the mother.
[21] Lecky, “History of European Morals.” Chapter V.
[22] A recent decision in the State of New York declared that a
husband is not required to fulfil his promise to return money loaned
him by his wife, when she has accumulated it through economy in
her housekeeping; because every saving of the kind is the property
of the husband, as are the services of the wife. The wife has no
money of her own.
[23] The State of Wisconsin has made men and women equal before
the law.
[24] In countries where the custom of dowry persists the parents are
obviously in a position to exact a great degree of regard for their
wishes, more particularly where economic opportunity is no longer
plentiful. In this country, where abundance of free land made the
support of a family comparatively easy and secure, marriage early
became a matter to be arranged by the contracting parties. In
modern France, on the other hand, it is still largely a matter to be
arranged between families.
[25] Several feminists have already, indeed, urged public sanction of
extra-legal sexual relations, and C. Gasquoine Hartley, with a
genuinely Teutonic passion for order, has even advocated their
regulation by the State. This is probably impossible, for people who
choose such relationships usually do so to escape regulation.
 CHAPTER V
THE ECONOMIC POSITION OF WOMEN

I
It is to the industrial revolution more than anything else, perhaps,
that women owe such freedom as they now enjoy; yet if proof were
wanting of the distance they have still to cover in order to attain, not
freedom, but mere equality with men, their position in the industrial
world would amply supply it. Men in industry suffer from injustices
and hardships due to the overcrowding of the labour-market. Women
suffer from these same injustices and hardships; and they have an
additional handicap in their sex. The world of work, embracing
industry, business, the professions, is primarily a man’s world.
Women are admitted, but not yet on an equal footing. Their
opportunities for employment are restricted, sometimes by law, but
more often by lack of training; and their remuneration as wage-
earners and salaried workers is generally less than that of men.
They have to contend with traditional notions of what occupations
are fitting for their sex; with the jealousy of male workers; with the
prejudices of employers; and finally with their own inertia and their
own addiction to traditional concepts. All these difficulties are
immensely aggravated by the keenness of the competition for work.
If the opportunity to work were, as it should be, an unimpeded right
instead of a privilege doled out by an employer, these handicaps of
women would be easily overridden by the demand for their labour. I
shall discuss this point more fully later on. It is sufficient here to note
that when the war created a temporary shortage of labour, women
were not only employed in, but were urged in the name of patriotism
to enter, occupations in which until then only men had been
employed. The effect of this temporary shortage on their industrial
opportunities affords a hint of what their position would be if the
glutting of the labour-market were permanently relieved. A shortage
of labour means opportunity for the worker, male or female.
Women have always been industrial workers. Otis T. Mason even
went so far as to declare that “All the peaceful arts of today were
once woman’s peculiar province. Along the lines of industrialism she
was pioneer, inventor, author, originator.” This view is in rather
striking contrast with the contemptuous derogation which has been
for a long time current in European civilization, and has found
expression in such cutting remarks as that of Proudhon, that woman
“could not even invent her own distaff.” It is no doubt a fairer view,
although it is probably somewhat exaggerated. There is certainly no
valid reason to suppose that sex is a barrier to the invention and
improvement of industrial processes. Be this as it may, it is
undeniable that women have always been producers. Among some
primitive tribes, indeed, they are the only industrialists, the men
occupying themselves with war and the chase or, among maritime
peoples, with fishing. The modern invasion of the industrial field by
women does not, then, represent an attempt to do something that
women have never done before. It does represent an attempt to
adapt themselves to the new conditions created by the industrial
revolution.
The range of their opportunities has been considerably restricted by
prejudices arising from the traditional sexual division of labour in
European society. “In the developed barbarism of Europe, only a few
simple household industries were on the whole left to women.”[26] It
was natural, then, when women followed industry into the larger field
of machine-production, that it should be assumed that the industries
in which they might fittingly engage would be those most nearly akin
to the occupations which European society has regarded as
peculiarly feminine. Before the World War, according to the Women’s
Bureau, “over seventy-five per cent of all women engaged in
manufacture were concentrated in the textile and garment-making
industries”; and we have the same authority for the statement that
“except for certain branches of food-manufacture—such as flour
making ... women constitute from a third to two-thirds of the working
forces in the industries concerned with the business of clothing and
feeding both the fighting and the civilian population.” The new
opportunities opened up by the exigency of the war-period widened
considerably the scope of women’s activity; they were employed in
machine-shops and tool-rooms, in steel- and rolling-mills, in
instrument-factories, in factories manufacturing sewing machines
and typewriters, in utensil-factories, in plants working in rubber and
leather, in wood-working industries.
In some of these industries women continue to be employed. In
others they were discharged to make room for men when the
emergency was over. But even where they continue to be employed
their opportunities for training are not equal to those of men. The
Women’s Bureau in 1922 issued a valuable bulletin on “Industrial
Opportunities and Training for Women and Girls.” According to this
bulletin, the war-experience of women in new employments made it
apparent that the most promising future for craftswomen in these
fields lies in (a) machine-shops where light parts are made, (b)
wood-product factories where assembling and finishing are important
processes, (c) optical- and instrument-factories, (d) sheet-metal
shops. The survey made by the Bureau to discover how many of the
country’s industrial training schools were fitting women for these
trades disclosed the fact that in nine States where women, because
of industrial conditions, are most in need of training for machine-
shop, sheet-metal, furniture, or optical work, they are either excluded
by public vocational schools from the courses in such works, or they
are not encouraged, as men are, to enter those courses. In Ohio, for
example, women were enrolled in only five of the fifty-three public
vocational schools reporting, and in these five schools they were
taught dressmaking, costume-design, dress-pattern making,
embroidery, power-machine sewing, and pottery making. Men on the
other hand, received instruction in the following courses which
women needed: machine-shop practice, tool-making, shop
mathematics, mechanical drafting, blue-print reading, metallurgy,
pattern-making, sheet-metal work, welding, auto-mechanics and
repair, motor-cycle mechanics, gas engineering, cabinet-making and
woodworking. Women were not debarred by rule or law from
entering these courses, but they were not encouraged to do so. The
courses, as one superintendent wrote, were “designed for men.” The
situation in Ohio is more or less the same as that in the other eight
States. Women are either not admitted to vocational courses
designed to prepare workers for the industries cited, or they are not
encouraged to enroll. Yet, as the Bureau points out, these institutions
are operated at the expense of the taxpayers, women as well as
men, and their equipment should be used to serve women as well as
men. “It is obvious,” says the Bureau, “that the public vocational
school authorities, with few exceptions, think of trade for women only
in terms of dressmaking and millinery, and are as yet quite oblivious
to the fact that these trades, except in certain clothing centers, are
not the big employers of woman labour, nor are they always the best
trades at which to earn a livelihood. It is the semi-public school that
is beginning first to recognize the new position which woman
occupies in industry as a result of the war and is opening to her its
doors and guiding her into courses leading to efficiency in the new
occupations.”
This blindness of the school authorities to the vocational needs of
women goes to prove how strong is the force of traditional
prejudices. The making of clothing has been largely in the hands of
women for so long that even in cities where the only industries
employing women are mechanical or woodworking, the public
schools offer them courses in sewing and millinery. Prepossession
does not yield all at once to established fact. If women can make a
permanent place for themselves in their new occupations, public
officials will eventually come to associate them with these
occupations and follow the lead of the semi-public schools in fitting
girls to engage in them on an equal footing with boys. But it will take
time; and meanwhile women will continue to be at a disadvantage in
entering these occupations. So will they be at a disadvantage in
entering any occupation where they have not before been employed,
or where they are employed only in insignificant numbers, so long as
prejudice or conservatism continues to debar them, and the
necessary training is not as freely available to them as it is to men.
Above all, so long as their industrial status continues to be, as the
Women’s Bureau expresses it, “subsidiary to their home status,” they
can never be on a really secure footing in the industrial world. While
employers assume that all male workers have families to support
and that all female workers are in industry rather through choice than
necessity and may, in periods when work is slack, fall back on the
support of male relatives, so long will women be the first workers to
suffer from any slowing down of industry. This was strikingly
illustrated during the period of unemployment which succeeded the
intense industrial activity made necessary by the war, when women
were discharged in great numbers to make room for men, and much
resentment was voiced against their retention in places which might
be filled by men. “Back to the home,” says the Women’s Bureau,
“was a slogan all too easily and indiscriminately flung at the wage-
earning woman by those who had little conception of the causes
which forced her into wage-earning pursuits.” In periods of industrial
depression it appears to be the regular practice to lay off the married
women workers first, then the single women, and the men last.
How unjust to the woman worker, and how little justified by actual
facts, is this survival of the idea that woman’s place is the home, has
been shown through investigations undertaken by the Women’s
Bureau and other agencies. The results of these investigations,
published in Bulletin No. 30 of the Women’s Bureau, show that the
woman in industry is not merely working for pin-money, as
thoughtless people assume, but that she is more often not only
supporting herself on her inadequate wage, but contributing
materially to the support of dependents. “Contributing all earnings to
the family fund,” says the Bureau, “is a very general practice among
wage-earning women.” This of course means, as the Bureau
remarks, that however much or little her contribution may mean to
the family, for the woman herself it means a surrender of economic
independence. The contrast between single men and single women
in this respect is significant. In an investigation conducted among
workers in the shoe-making industry of Manchester, New Hampshire,
the Bureau found that “comparing single men and women, the
women contributed (to the family income) more extensively, both
actually and relatively.” The percentage of earnings contributed by
sons and daughters is particularly interesting. The Bureau found that
“in the families with per capita earnings of less than $500, 49.3 per
cent of the sons and 71.6 per cent of the daughters contributed all
their earnings, while in families with per capita earnings of $500 or
more, 36.8 per cent of the sons and 53.4 per cent of the daughters
contributed all earnings.” When one remembers that the wage paid
to women was so much lower than that paid to men that the Bureau
pronounced them to be scarcely comparable, the fact that “the
daughters contributed a somewhat larger proportion of the family
earnings than did the sons” takes on added significance. The sons
contributed almost as much in actual money as the daughters, but
out of their higher wages they retained something for themselves,
“thus assuring themselves of a degree of independence and an
opportunity to strike out for themselves which is denied the
daughters.”
It is evident, then, that women, even in the “emancipation” of the
industrial world, are continuing their immemorial self-sacrifice to the
family, and that it is not the married woman alone, but the single
woman as well, who makes this sacrifice. The conditions of the
sacrifice have changed with the changes in industry, but the sacrifice
continues. The productive labour of women appears to be quite as
indispensable to their families as it was in the days when they spun
and wove and sewed and baked at home. This being the case, there
is obviously no other ground than prejudice for the assumption that
men, as the natural providers, should have preference in the labour-
market. According to the census of 1920, thirty-five per cent of the
men in the country are single; therefore it is fair to assume that thirty-
five per cent of the men in industry are single. Two-thirds of the
women in industry are single, but the available figures show that a
much larger percentage of these women than of single men are
contributing all or most of their earnings to their families, while
married women workers are contributing all of their earnings. In view
of these figures, there is patent injustice in the assumption that all
men and no women have dependents to support.
So is there injustice in the assumption that women are naturally at
least partly dependent on male workers, and therefore may fairly be
forced to accept a smaller wage than men. This assumption is not