Whose danger, which climate? Mesopotamian versus liberal accounts of climate justice

Abstract

Dangerous climate change was first defined as globally averaged warming of 2° above the pre-industrial average by an economist, not a natural scientist. A global average rise of 2° equates to significantly more climatological effects in some earth regions. Food and energy price rises sparked by rising temperatures and enduring drought in the Middle East and North Africa, combined with increased pumping of ground water, are implicated in the rise of civil conflict, revolution, and war in these regions since 2009. The inability of industrial civilisation to adapt to the climatological limits of the biosphere arises from the refusal of liberal economists and others to recognize that justice is contextual to the boundaried nature of political communities, and to the limits of the earth system. In the history of Western culture, discourses about justice first appear in association with the development of agriculture and irrigation systems in Mesopotamian cultures. Agriculture in the Levant made possible more densely populated societies, and the division of labour. It also permitted the emergence of great inequality and slavery. Hebrew discourses of government and justice evolved which sustained limits on the asymmetric distribution of land and its product in a bordered political community. These discourses also suggest that just land distribution not only makes for solidarity in self-sufficient communities, but for benign climates. Modern liberal theories of justice as procedural, and grounded in political rights and freedoms, miss the antique contextualisation of standards of justice in political and economic communities, and the role of restraints on power and wealth, and territorial limits, in the construction of justice.