Paper short abstract:

The paper argues, first, that structural climate injustices arising from fossil fuel consumption & production impede human development. Second, it will provide a tentative normative framework for how we ought to engage in structural transformation out of fossil fuels to enable human development.

Paper long abstract:

The paper argues, first, that structural climate injustices arising from fossil fuel consumption & production impede human development. Second, it will provide a tentative normative framework for how we ought to engage in structural transformation out of fossil fuels to enable human development.

To achieve the first goal, I defend the argument that climate change is best understood as a structural injustice and that classical accounts of climate justice do not adequately reflect the complicated history of intersecting structures of domination and oppression. Centrally, I will argue that climate injustices are structural in the sense that they affect marginalized social groups as a result of historically unjust relations of power. In order to capture how climate injustices affect marginalized social groups, I will rely on Iris M. Young’s structural injustice account (2011). I argue that it has the advantage of highlighting both distributive and political facets of justice by focusing on self-determination and self-development. Referring to Amartya Sen, Young understands self-development in terms of capabilities, i.e., meeting the basic needs in a distributive sense, but also as an assessment of “the institutional organization of power, status, and communication in ways not reducible to distributions” (Young, 2002: 32). I contend that this can be assessed through the concept of human development. Enhancing human development includes both distributive and political measures that alleviate their impoverished social position of power.

In the second part, I will ask: How can we fight the climate crisis as a structural injustice in a way that enables human development? Understanding human development in terms of capabilities for self-development pushes us to focus on both (distributive) material progress and political empowerment. I argue that this latter point particularly puts an important critical qualifier on climate policies. It allows us to critically assess policy proposals like the Green New Deal in terms of whether they facilitate human development in both distributive and political facets. A line of critique that I will develop here is that achieving and enabling human development in light of intersecting climate injustices is to not merely transition towards renewable energy but rather transform the structures that alleviate the social positions that give rise to climate injustices. In short, we have to make sure that a Green New Deal is not just green but also just, that is, that it does not reproduce or perpetuate already existing unjust relations of power that impede human development.