Nonrenewable Resources and The Inevitability of Outcomes

Many argue that environmental degradation, particularly of the noxious pollutant and carbon-emissions variety, eventuates from a kind of prisoner’s dilemma. In doing so, they suggest that it culminates in a disastrous tragedy of the commons (Hardin 1968; Gardiner 2001). Others are concerned that it arises not due to a dilemma as such, but that it is the result of externalized costs (Stern 2007), or because costs are so widely distributed, either across disconnected populations or across multiple generations (Broome 1994; Gardiner 2006; Andreou 2007). Still others have argued that we can gain a handle on the issue if we assume intransitive preferences, as with the case of the “puzzle of the self-torturer ” (Andreou 2006). These are all helpful, but I believe normatively problematic, characterizations of the climate-change challenge. Each captures only one narrow dimension of what has become the “super wicked problem ” of the millennium (Lazarus 2009). More importantly, each explanatory characterization carries with it a set of normative prescriptions about how best to approach the climate problem, and each implies, I think, that we ought to take action in order to mitigate climate change by reducing our emissions. I argue in this paper that the release of climate-altering CO 2 into the atmosphere is best understood as temporally inevitable, at least from the standpoint of moral theory. Namely, I reason that, in the absence of alternative energy technologies and robust global remediation strategies, human activity is headed toward the same end: the complete exhaustion of fossilfuel resources. In turn, as these fuels are used, the near certain outcome is that carbon, otherwise deeply sequestered in rock and sediment at the bottom of the carbon cycle, will enter the atmosphere and the terrestrial biosphere. The current climate crisis is therefore only partially characterized by each of the above factors—ranging from the consumption of nonrenewable resources to the emission and subsequent accumulation of