This book is an interdisciplinary collection of mainly normative essays written by philosophers, scientists, legal scholars, and an economist. The complex intergenerational ethical issues that climate change raises have been the subjects of a significant body of recent scholarship. The original scholarship collected in this volume is distinctive in that this is the first second-generation collection of essays to appear on the ethics of climate change. The contributors to this volume engage and respond to the first-generation literature, and because climate change is perhaps the largest collective action problem ever confronted by humanity, several contributors argue for new ways of conceptualizing our ethical obligations in order to address a problem of this scope and difficulty. This volume is also the first in which a group of scholars critically engages the outcomes of the Copenhagen climate conference (Conference of the Parties 15) in which the nations of the world once again tried to reach an agreement about how to slow or stop anthropogenic climate change.

It is well understood that the Earth's climate is changing as a result of human activity. More specifically, the climate is changing because of the inefficient consumption of fossil fuels and rapid deforestation. A changing climate will place present and future human populations in jeopardy and the poor will be most adversely impacted. By climatologists, geologists, oceanographers, and other scientists working on problems related to climate change this is well understood.