Panel 2 - Law and Justice in Times of Climate Change

This program contains 30 minutes of EDI Professionalism Content
---
Climate change is acting as an accelerant of inequality and injustice locally, nationally and internationally. The drive to decarbonize raises issues of who bears the costs of and who is benefiting from the transition including the vague but important call to promote a ‘just transition’, within and among countries. Adaptation to climate change similarly gives rise to questions about who has to adapt, who will pay for the adaptation, who is included in our concerns about adaptation (both in terms of different people as well as other species and the natural environment) and how we should think about the health effects of climate change. This part will explore these themes of climate justice and injustice.
CHAIR: Richard Stacey
Chris Essert & Olivia O’Connor, “Reconciling Climate and Housing Justice”
Among the many pressing challenges facing liberal societies in a changing world are the climate crisis and the housing crisis. The need to lower greenhouse gas emissions quickly and sharply is well known. And Canada, for instance, desperately needs more housing, both to alleviate homelessness and to make housing more affordable. But residential construction (or construction generally) is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. So it seems as though addressing the housing crisis head-on will make the climate crisis worse; conversely, while ceasing all construction would make a major difference on the climate front, it would obviously do nothing to address the housing crisis, and likely would make it worse. In this chapter we set out an approach to this apparent conflict, by describing the two crises in terms of justice and public law rights against the state and discussing a model for reconciling competing rights of that form.
Brenda Cossman, “Climate Anxiety and Self Governance”
Eco-anxiety -- the fear of environmental damage, climate change and ecological disaster -- has been recognized by The American Psychiatric Association as a growing threat to mental health. Studies are showing that individuals are experiencing extreme or chronic anxiety because they feel unable to control environmental problems, particularly climate change. My paper explores the role of eco-anxiety in projects of self governance produced in part from a pervasive sense of regulatory failure. I have previously explored the role of anxiety in self governance: the way that free-floating discourses of anxiety produce anxious subjects, who with the help of experts then undertake a range of self-governing projects in order to manage, mitigate, and reduce the unpleasant emotion. Here, I will consider the role of eco-anxiety in individualizing and depoliticizing solutions to climate change.
Trudo Lemmens & Gabrielle Peters, “Inequitable Resilience to Climate Change as a Policy Failure: Disability and Collective Responsibility and BC’s 2021 Heat Dome”
Negative impacts of climate-change are disproportionately experienced by disabled people, particularly those who are Indigenous, poor, or living on low incomes, negatively racialized and/or older. In response, discussions often revolve around the vulnerability of affected individuals, as if it is a personal trait that explains away the impact. Recognizing vulnerability as intrinsic and universal to all human beings, Martha Fineman’s Vulnerability Theory challenges us to examine when institutions fail to create resilience. Much of current climate change debates, adaptations, measures, emergency planning and response initiatives are ableist and veer into thinly disguised Social Darwinism. Neoliberalism’s individualistic tendencies pose heightened risk of morbidity and mortality to disabled people who are poor or low income by linking access to resources and support to individual income and wealth. The risk of harm to those who cannot mitigate the impact of, for example, extreme heat or poor air quality, are known and yet the state has largely focused on alerts to the public. Collective responsibility is rejected in favour of personal responsibility. Identifying discrimination or focusing on disability inclusion within the existing rights framework is insufficient and clashes with Fineman’s notion of inevitable social dependency. To illustrate these points, we discuss measures taken during and after the recent BC heat dome, which resulted in the deaths of approximately 600 people in one week. These deaths occurred in the same year that Medically Administered Death was expanded to disabled people who were not near the end of life, providing a stark contrast between proactive policy to hasten death, presented as safeguarding individual rights, and paucity of policy to support life. We provide specific recommendations while situating them in the larger discussion about climate change and justice.