Climate Change and Energy Ethics

Climate related energy ethics is still an underdeveloped field of normative ethics. While it is urgent to achieve truly decarbonized and otherwise climate friendly global energy systems as fast as possible, contrary to what is often assumed in current climate ethics we do not yet know in sufficient detail how this can be achieved. Thus, there is a need for Climate Ethics 2.0 which focuses more on the solution side of the required energy transition and the involved problem of the needed knowledge base. It is important and difficult to develop realistic scenarios of net-zero global energy systems and to develop expedient national climate policies and climate related energy policies. All this involves plenty of normative problems and normatively relevant tasks. We especially focus on the problem that for economic development energy and power dense energy sources are needed, so that poor countries have every incentive to overcome their poverty with the help of fossil fuels. This, combined with the recognition that immense amounts of climate friendly electricity are needed for climate neutral global energy systems, raises the question of the role of nuclear energy in climate change mitigation. To answer this question may be considered to be one of the most important tasks of current climate related energy ethics.