This document discusses the ethics of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies based on climate change policy. It notes that while CCS has potential to reduce emissions, it also raises ethical issues regarding distributive justice, technology choice, safety, and public engagement. The document advocates for participatory ethical technology assessment (PETA) to help evaluate CCS and other climate technologies through inclusive public deliberation on risks and values. PETA aims to give affected communities strong democratic control over decisions that shape their moral and technological landscape.

1. Climate change policy and the moral agency of CCS technologies
MATTHEW COTTON
UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD

2. STRUCTURE
1.
Ethics and AR5
2.
Ethics of CCS
3.
Different ways to skin an ethical cat
4.
Technology assessment
5.
Participatory ethical technology assessment

3. CCS AND AR5
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UNFFCC ethical position to avoid dangerous anthropogenic interference
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IPCC latest contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5):
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Need for a mix of mitigation technologies
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Clear need for both institutional and technological developments, inter alia, CCS being an essential component
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Graeme Sweeney (Zero Emissions Platform Chairman): “we require well developed regulation to facilitate a level playing field vis-à-vis other low carbon technologies”
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European-level discussions around the 2030 Climate and Energy Framework
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CCS can help to achieve Europe’s CO2 emission reduction goals (at least 4% of the agreed GHG reduction on 1990 levels).
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Can also maintain competitiveness, retain jobs and preserve the industrial base (ecological modernisation)

4. ETHICS, CLIMATE JUSTICE AND AR5
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AR5 creates a new emphasis on ethics and justice implications of climate change
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Whereby national responses to climate change must avoid economic rationality and self-interest alone (i.e. global ethical issues)
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Climate change is an ethical issue in a number of respects:
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It is caused by high-emitting nations, often putting lower emitting nations at most risk (it is intra-generational and unevenly spatially distributed)
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Risks are potentially existential threats to ecological systems on which all biological life depends (ecologically unjust), and is at least disruptive to civil society (affects life and liberty)
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Risk horizons extend overlong timeframes (it is inter-generational, non-reciprocal)
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Those most poorest are both the least contributors and the most vulnerable (uneven distribution of responsibility and adaptive capacity)
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Political decision-making often excludes minority voices, including indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, developed nations, the working poor etc… (it is procedurally unjust)

5. SOME ETHICAL ISSUES OF CCS
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The climate change mitigation potential of CCS is global whilst the storage is local (potentially negative aspects of distributive environmental justice)
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CCS could prolong reliance upon fossil fuels thus diverting resources from the development of alternative energy production system (ethics of technology choice)
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Whether or not CCS is safe (for example concerning the toxicity of amine solvents – do we use utilitarian ethics?).
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Comparing CCS risk within a broader framework of climate risks – (tradeoffs – no such thing as a zero risk scenario, again utilitarian ethics)
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Decision-making, public engagement and technology choice – to what extent are ‘publics’ CCS- capable? (discourse ethics)

6. THEN THERE ARE THE ETHICS OF NOT DOING SOMETHING….
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International energy agency (2012): “those technologies with the greatest potential for energy and carbon dioxide emissions savings are making the slowest progress. Carbon capture and storage is not seeing the necessary rates of investment into full-scale demonstration projects and nearly one-half of new coal-fired power plants are still being built with inefficient technology”.
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There are ethical issues in the governance of technology, in investment and implementation strategies as well as the impacts of the technology itself
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What I want to emphasise is that the ethics of CCS is predicated upon the concept of choice, rather than the intrinsic qualities of the technology itself

7. DIFFERENT WAYS TO SKIN AN ETHICAL CAT
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Normative ethics,
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Applied ethics and special ethics
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Engineering ethics
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Environmental ethics
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Technology ethics
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Meta-ethics

8. NORMATIVE ETHICS
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Ethics of action, concerning how individuals should act in an imperfect world with imperfect nature
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Prescriptive, it has to bind moral behaviour in some way
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Differs from descriptive ethics – empirical evaluation of moral beliefs
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The is/ought conundrum – normative ethics cannot take the form of a list of rights and wrongs
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Deontology, consequentialism, ethics of virtue, ethics of care etc… a cornucopia of theoretical frameworks (isms)

9. APPLIED ETHICS AND SPECIAL ETHICS
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The application of normative ethical theories to moral problems (like applied maths)
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The implication of real world phenomena to moral theories (situationist ethics, casuistry)
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Special ethics – do we need new ethics for new situations? E.g. Environmental ethics, do the standard moral theories apply to the evaluation of non-human wellbeing (the land ethic for example)?

10. TECHNOLOGY ETHICS
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Engineering ethics concerns conduct – the obligations of engineers to civil society
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Technology ethics concerns the impacts of the development and application of novel technological solutions to societal problems
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Whether it is right or wrong to invent and then implement a technological solution.
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The ways in which technology extends or curtails the power of individuals
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The processes by which such ethical issues can be decided (Ethical Technology Assessment)
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However! The question is whether we adopt an instrumentalist view of technology or something else.

11. INSTRUMENTALIST VIEW
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Guns don’t kill people, people kill people
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Ethics concerns the conduct of individuals, technologies are tools in the hands of moral actors
Technology is inert without human interaction
Human agents make choices (sometimes using technologies as a result)

12. NON-INSTRUMENTALIST VIEW
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A form of meta-ethics – understanding what has moral value, who makes decisions and how ethics are negotiated, rather than just which set of rules to apply
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New technologies create new moral choices –
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for example prenatal scanning and amniocentesis allows us to diagnose conditions before birth – the foetus becomes “medicalised”, and the quality and scope of moral decisions (such as to terminate pregnancy or not) is altered through a technologically mediated process
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Technologies are therefore “morally charged” they create different moral landscapes and different potential courses of action
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In short they create different choices and thus have a kind of moral agency

13. WHY CCS HAS STRUGGLED
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CCS is not (really all that) unethical in a consequentialist sense – it has moral benefits that are comparative (against unrestrained fossil fuel use), though some risks remain (preventing intrusion to underground storage, the chemicals used in capture etc.).
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However, it represents an embodied set of moral choices:
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Look at the ethical implications of current UK climate change policy – Act on CO2 for example – emphasis on personal responsibility for climate change mitigation
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CCS potentially diminishes human moral agency by transferring responsibility to a technological process – CCS becomes “enrolled” in the making of moral decisions
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So what is the solution?

14. TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT
Technology assessment advice to governing body
Consider impacts of technology options
Project current trends into the future
Be optimistic, but speak truth to power
Implement technology, reassess if necessary

15. ETHICAL TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT
Traditional steps of technology assessment
Explicit consideration of diverse public social and moral values
Socially and morally robust technology implementation

16. PARTICIPATORY ETHICAL TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT
Public ethical values
Technological choices
Assessment of technology choices
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PETA – ethical values are implicit in the choice of technological options
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If we accept that technologies are socio-technical systems that require democratic control, so must our ethics be democratic and technologically sensitive
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Deliberation in the hands of those that are affected
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Avoid technocracy, empower communities (strong deliberative democratic control)

17. DELIBERATIVE ETHICAL TOOLS
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THE ETHICAL MATRIX (MEPHAM)
Wellbeing
Autonomy
Fairness
Nuclear industry
Profit generation, growing employment
Freedom from regulation and planning constraints
Low cost electricity to consumers, alleviating fuel poverty
Citizens
Protection from risk of radiation leaks and accidents
Decision-making input to site selection
Compensation in the face of elevated risks
Future generations
An environment free of radiological contamination
Knowledge about past practices and impacts
Reciprocity across time frames, avoiding discounting of future lives
The biosphere
Environmental remediation of contaminated sites
Maintenance of biodiversity and ecological health
Non-anthropocentric valuation of natural resources
Ethical matrix for new build nuclear power

18. ETHICAL GRID (SEEDHOUSE)

19. HEXAGON MAPPING (COTTON)
Biota
Actors who don’t have a say in decision- making
Future generations
Can never have a say in current decisions
Trust fund – for future ecological conservation
People who can’t vote
HM Treasury
Don’t currently have a say
Ensuring safety is most important
Children
A ring
A chain
A cross-link
Will likely be harmed as a result
Can we make decisions on their behalf? Is it fair?
Actants – stakeholders, technologies, organisms and environments
Questions, issues or concerns raised by the technology in question
Consequences, outcomes or effects
Actions, behaviours, intentions and procedures
Ethical questions or issues resulting from interactions

20. REFLECTIVE ETHICAL MAPPING (COTTON)

21. CONCLUSIONS
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Climate change and CCS ethics could be comparative (in which case CCS ‘wins’)
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…But CCS implicitly embodies moral values and choices, some of which seem antithetical to environmentally-sensitive ethical principles – moral responsibility (in human agency) vs technological responsibility (non-human agency)
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Elucidating these dimensions through PETA is a key research priority – to avoid making assumptions about ‘whose ethics counts’
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A tool-based approach avoids moral monism, is grounded in a real world decision-making context, is amenable to value pluralism.