PHIL 694: Special Topics in Contemporary Philosophy

PHIL 694-003: Intl Climate Policy and Ethics
(Fall 2025)

04:30 PM to 07:10 PM W

Van Metre Hall (formerly Founders Hall) 210

Section Information for Fall 2025

For over thirty years now, most countries in the world have participated in the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to try to create and implement a global
agreement to address this critical problem. The crowning achievement to date of the
Convention was the creation of the Paris Agreement on climate change in 2015. Among other
elements, Paris was built on a series of “ratcheting” mechanisms, designed to incentivize
parties to make increasingly ambitious pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions every five
years termed “Nationally Determined Contributions” (NDCs). This year, the 195 parties to the
Paris Agreement are due to make their third NDC during the upcoming Conference of the
Parties (COP) to the UNFCCC in November in Belém, Brazil.

Challenges however abound. First, will countries continue to make good on their previous
pledges under the agreement to cut emissions, and make more ambitious pledges for the next
commitment period to 2035? Second, how will parties react to the Trump administration’s
decision to once again withdrawal the United States from the Paris Agreement? The stakes
could not be much higher. At current rates of emissions we could see atmospheric
concentrations of greenhouse gases increase to unacceptable levels. The consequences of
rising temperatures caused by these emissions are not only modeled at this point, but have
been observed: rising sea levels, droughts, impacts on food prices, patterns of increased
intensity of tropical storms, and possible waves of climate refugees. Finally, outside of the
Paris Agreement, what options exist for parties to come together to cooperate on mitigation,
adaptation, carbon removal, and more controversial options like sunlight reflection?

To better understand this cluster of problems and solutions, we will review the current state of
the science of climate change, the literature on the costs and benefits of solving this problem,
the history of the UNFCCC, and various moral evaluations of the ideal solutions to the
problem, and whether these inform or do not inform potentially feasible outcomes against the
backdrop of the difficult geopolitics of climate change. Throughout we will be looking for
places where ethical analysis has, or could potentially, inform an articulation of the policy
responses to the science. 

View 2 Other Sections of this Course in this Semester »

Course Information from the University Catalog