Social and ethical implications of

mitigation and adaptation

CIE4510 Climate Change: Science & Ethics - Lecture 3 on ethics
Behnam Taebi, Department of Philosophy, TPM, 23 November 2017

Delft
University of
Technology

Challenge the future

What we discussed last time

• The sources of controversy in the climate debate

• Our understanding of scientific knowledge (epistemology)

• Objective truth versus subjective interpretation
• Robustness of scientific knowledge - Bayesian probabilities

• Our expectations from science

• Science versus policy

• Reasoning and argumentation in science

• Challenges of inductive reasoning in scientific practice
• Basic rules of argumentation & fallacies

2 CIE4510 Climate Change: Science & Ethics

To be discussed today

• Solutions for dealing with climate change create new social

problems and ethical issues

• When introducing technology, ‘public acceptance’ is an issue

• Public acceptance versus ethical acceptability

• Several technologies for dealing with climate change

• Biofuel
• Carbon Capture and Storage
• Geoengineering
• Shale gas

3 CIE4510 Climate Change: Science & Ethics

Part 1

Public acceptance studies and

what they cannot do

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Manageable risk of shale gas

• In August 2013 a report was released in the Netherlands on

‘technological risks of shale gas’ (Witteveen+Bos)

• The Dutch minister of Economic Affairs Henk Kamp:

• There are risks involved with extraction of gas under high
pressure; risks such as earthquake and the pollution of ground
water. But the technical analysis shows that the risks are
“manageable”
(Source NRC Handelsblad, 26 August 2013)

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Introduction

• New technology brings great benefits but also new risks

• Various attempts have been made to quantitatively or
qualitatively assess risks, e.g. Probabilistic Risk Assessment

• Risk assessment methods have been criticized for

1)Neglecting social aspects of risk: they requires a value
judgment on what risk to accept (part 3)
2)Neglect issues of ‘public acceptance’

• Opposition by the public is often seen as potential obstacle

• Public acceptance has sometimes been reduced to “marketing
methods to maximize the likelihood of successful introduction” of
technologies (Schulte et al. 2004)

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i. Incomplete or faulty information

• Acceptance could be based on incomplete or faulty information

• Case: Uranium enrichment facility in Louisiana

• Local communities were requested to “nominate potential sites for
a proposed chemical facility”
• First problem: communities were never informed about the nature
of these facilities
• Second problem: no quantitative or qualitative risk assessment
were presented: “it was impossible to know, reliably, the actual
risks associated with the plant”

• Case drawn from (Wigly and Shrade-Frechtte 1996)

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ii. Acceptance for wrong reasons

• Risky technology might be accepted for (morally) wrong

reasons

• Compensation or bribe?
• On the one hand, distributive justice recommends compensation
• On the other hand: without ethical guidelines, compensation
could become an “exploitative, misleading or manipulative
instrument” (Hannis and Rawles 2013)

• How and under which conditions should an affected group be

compensated? Whom to compensate?

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iii. Whose acceptance?

• Which public should accept new technology?

• In the Louisiana case, the opinion of host communities very

close to the proposed facilities were not considered

• Studies on ‘acceptability of renewable energy’ show

• Nation-wide consensus and local opposition
• Of course, this does not mean that local communities should be
overruled, because locals might be affected by a technology
• Example drawn from (Walker 1995)

• Different people have different values and interests

• Whose opinion(s) should be decisive?

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iv. International risks

• Problem iii (whose acceptance) will be exacerbated when

dealing with international risks
• Some risks go in essence beyond national borders

• Example 1: nuclear power plants at the national borders

• Austria is being surrounded by these power plants in Germany,
Italy and the Czech Republic

• Example 2: multinational nuclear waste management

• European Repository Development Organization (ERDO)
• New developments in South Australia

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v. Intergenerational risks

• Problem iii (whose acceptance) will again be exacerbated

when dealing with intergenerational risks
• Risk that stretch beyond the generational borders, into future

• How should we deal with the intergenerational distributions

of risks and benefits
• What level of risks can we transfer to future generations?
• Alternatively, what level of protection should we offer people in
the future?

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vi. Distribution of risks & benefits

• New technology makes new winners and losers

• How are the risks and benefits distributed?

• Often benefits are nation-wide, and burdens local

• More complex: temporal distribution of burdens & benefits

• This gives rise to questions of intergenerational justice

• Intergenerational justice issues are not necessarily taken into

account in social acceptance studies.

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Part 2

Examples

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Solutions for tackling climate change

• Mitigation
• Energy efficiency
• Carbon Capture and storage
• New energy systems with less GHG, even more recently shale gas

• Adaptation
• Urban planning
• Water and waste water systems
• Land use change

• Geoengineering
• Carbon dioxide removal techniques
• Solar radiation management techniques

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Shifting of burdens and benefits

• Climate change is a global problem

• The burdens of which are partly imposed on future generations

• Solutions bring new considerations such as:

• Legitimacy and acceptability of local burdens (e.g. CCS)
• Dealing with the uncertainties and unknown risks of new
technology (e.g. geoengineering)
• Drastically affecting other important issues such as poverty and
famine of food (e.g. biofuel)
• Creating other long-term burdens (e.g. nuclear power)

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Ethics of biofuel

• Since its introduction, biofuel engendered ethical issues

• Food versus fuel dilemma
• Rights of the farmers, especially in developing countries
• Land use issues, water issues and loss of biodiversity

• Several ethical principles proposed

• E.g. it should not be at the expenses of people’s essential rights
(including access to sufficient food, water and land entitlement)
• Costs and benefits distributed in an equitable way

• This equity principle has a strong spatial dimension

• Biofuel also changes temporal distribution of burdens & benefits

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Ethical acceptability of biofuel

• Indeed, some issues could be dealt with new technology

• Second generation biofuel uses only non-food crops

• However, it is unlikely that all ethical aspects could be addressed

with the development of new technology

• Interesting questions to discuss:

• How can we incorporate the other important ethical issues (land
use, water use, farmers’ rights) in the development of technology
• Especially taking into account the forecasted growth
• To what extent are the local burdens of biofuel acceptable?
• (can we intergenerational justice justify intragenerational injustice)
• Should we distinguish between different future production methods?

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Ethical principles & policy-making

1) Biofuels development should not be at the expense of people’s essential rights.

2) Biofuels should be environmentally sustainable.
3) Biofuels should contribute to a net reduction of total GHG emissions and not
exacerbate global climate change.
4) Biofuels should develop in accordance with trade principles that are fair and
recognize the rights of people to just reward (including labor rights and
intellectual property rights).
5) Costs and benefits of biofuels should be distributed in an equitable way.
Source (Buyx and Tait 2011)

1) How these ethical principles have entered policy-making, examples

1) The European Renewable Energy Directive now includes a commitment to monitoring
human rights, and countries such as Brazil or the UK have incorporated social
sustainability criteria into their policies

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Deontology & Informed Consent

• Informed Consent
• The affected person should be fully informed about the
consequences and she should consent to this risk
• This principle is rooted in the moral principle of autonomy

• This principles comes from biomedical ethics, but its expansion

to ‘ethics of technology’ highly problematic,
• because ‘informed consent’ is based on individual veto power

• Different people uphold different values and they have

different interests
• Whose opinion(s) should be decisive?
• This is also the case in the ongoing shale gas debate

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Distribution and acceptability 1

• We will discuss the issue of distribution for CBA

• For risk acceptance, risk distribution is an essential issue too
• Hence, a risky treatment should always have benefits

• Distribution of benefits (and burdens) also determines acceptability

• Aggregative methods do not automatically deal with this issue

• To what extent is the imposition of risk on (a group of) individuals

legitimate when the benefits are unevenly distributed
• In medical ethics this principle is straightforward
• Risky treatment (clinical trials) must benefit the patient
• Less straightforward for technological projects and when collective risks
involved

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Distribution and acceptability 2

• Also Public acceptance studies do not typically take the

distribution into account

• This often causes public opposition

• A response to this opposition has often been: let’s explain one
more time: risks are highly unlikely or manageable
• However, those living close to risky facilities are often those who
are directly exposed: the opposition grows

• After releasing the findings of shale gas technical report in

August 2013 opposition has further grown in the Dutch
municipalities that were chosen as potential sites for
explorations (Boxtel and Haren)

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Carbon Capture and Storage

• One new technology for mitigation is CCS: ‘clean coal’

• In coal production, we should capture the produced CO2 and
store it one way or another
• One way to do so is to store it in empty gas fields underground

• In 2010, Shell planned to run a pilot project in Barendrecht

• With the support of the Dutch Government

• The project failed eventually

• The local community objected fiercely
• Proposed gas fields were below residential area
• Local burdens neglected: no consent
• Decision-making procedures were problematic

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CCS in Barendrecht and justice
• Procedural justice issues
• The local community said we never asked for this project
• The city council voted against the project
• National government & the bill for imposing similar projects (by
limiting the possibility of local citizens to have a say)

• Distributive justice
• CCS (if feasible) is praiseworthy for combatting climate change
• Global benefits versus (very) local burdens
• Questions as compensation and limits of acceptable risks
• ‘Not in my backyard’ is a too simplistic clarification of problem

• (Re)Framing ethical acceptability as complying with both

procedural and distributive justice

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Geoengineering options

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Issues related to geoengineering

• Uncertainties and unforeseen consequences

• We can’t anticipate all risk up front. What does that say about
the (moral) acceptability of the option

• Ethics of risks acceptance and consent

• Responsible innovation of geoengineering

• Governance issues (Pidgeon e.a. 2013)

• Comparison of different methods based on ethical criteria

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Responsible innovation

• How could we introduce new technology in the society in a

socially responsible manner?

• New development in EU towards Responsible Innovation

• Social and ethical aspects of new technologies need to be
anticipated up front
• Interaction between innovators and other stakeholders
• How to get the stakeholders involved?
• E.g. (Van de Hoven 2013)

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Dealing with value conflicts in design
e.g. Easter Scheldt storm surge barrier

• A conflict between safety and ecology

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Shale gas: game changer?

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Past research at TU Delft

• ‘Responsible’ shale gas innovation:

• Appropriately reflect divergent stakeholders’ values
• Both technologies and institutions incorporate values
• Contestation arises when not all values are incorporated

• Two important research questions:

• How can we accommodate the variety of (conflicting)
stakeholder values? (e.g. design change)
• How can technology and institutions be developed in such a way
as to incorporate the variety of (conflicting) stakeholder values?

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Where are the values in design?

• Value sensitive design aims at incorporating human values in

technological design
• First developed in ICT, and furthered in other engineering fields

• Values at three levels

Institutional Stakeholders
Technology
context Participation

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Specifying values
• Values: Generally considered important to be upheld
• Norms: Formulated to realise values
• Design criteria: Very specific criteria for complying with norms

Environmental friendliness

Prevent pollution surface water

Context dependent: e.g. standards for

drinking water purification

July 19, 2022 31

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 Values conflicts in shale gas debate

Source: Dignum, M., Correlje, A., Cuppen, E., Pesch, U. and B. Taebi. 2016. Contested
Technologies and Design for Values: The Case of Shale Gas. Science and Engineering Ethics 22
(4): 1171-1191. available online

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References for today’s lecture

• The Royal Society. 2009. Geoengineering the climate: science, governance and uncertainty. Royal Society: London.

• Nuffield. 2011. Biofuels: ethical issues. Nuffield Council on Bioethics. Nuffield Press: Oxfordshire.

• Corner, A, Pidgeon, N, 2010. Geoengineering the climate: the social and ethical implications. Environment: Science

and Policy for Sustainable Development 52 (1), 24-37.

• Buyx, A. M. and J. Tait. 2011. Biofuels: ethics and policy-making. Biofuels, Bioprod. Bioref. 5 (6): 631-639.

available online

• Dignum, M., Correlje, A., Cuppen, E., Pesch, U. and B. Taebi. 2016. Contested Technologies and Design for Values:

The Case of Shale Gas. Science and Engineering Ehics 22 (4): 1171-1191. available online

• Taebi, B. 2017. Bridging the gap between social acceptance and ethical acceptability. Risk Analysis 37 (10): 1817-

1827. available online

• Van den Hoven, J. 2013. Options for Strengthening Responsible Research and Innovation. Report of the Expert

Group on the State of Art in Europe on Responsible Research and Innovation. Brussels: European Commission.

Available online

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