Climate Change, Lawyers and the Creed of Expertise

I. A problem: Climate change is a priority justice issue

Climate change is an issue which is frequently cast in popular discourse in scientific terms. This is due in part to the fact that climate change is a highly complex phenomenon which unfolds on a time scale which is rather long compared to contemporary attention spans. But mostly the framing of climate change as a scientific issue is the result of a successful campaign by skeptics and status-quo interests to sow doubt about the science of climate change. The recent kerfuffle over the emails stolen from the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit is an example of these efforts.

Despite these complexities and obfuscations, there is an international scientific consensus that climate change is real, and that it will hurt us badly and our children worse. Thus, it is past time to focus public debate on the justice dimension of climate change. Climate change should be considered a top priority justice issue because it is a phenomenon which will inflict great amounts of irreversible damage and unjust suffering on many people. This damage and suffering is unjust because it can be ameliorated but we are not taking the steps necessary to do so.

Having identified a moral problem which needs to be addressed, the next step is to organize a foray into politics to alter the conditions which are feeding the problem. Sociologist Harold Lasswell usefully defined politics as the process of determining "who gets what when and how." Identifying political opportunities and exploiting them requires a strategy, which can be defined as the matching of finite resources to objectives with a plan.

Lawyers have played an important role in achieving stronger environmental protections in the United States because they have access, through their training, social capital, and law licenses, to resources which can usefully be applied to those objectives.

A set of resources which have been used to great effect by those seeking change in America are what Thurman Arnold calls creeds.

Subsection A

Subsub 1

Subsection B

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Subsub 2

II. A resource: The creed of expertise

Subsection A

Subsection B

III. A strategy: Climate change and the creed of expertise

Case Study: Mass v. EPA