{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.011397720455908818, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004799040191961607, 'mean_word_length': 5.465116279069767, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Misplaced Ethics of Climate Change: Political vs. Environmental Geography

Climate change diplomacy is routinely characterized by preoccupation with narrow and short-term perceived national interests rather than the pressing need to mitigate global warming and respond aggressively to its impacts. This was amply demonstrated by the much-anticipated December 2009 United Nations conference on climate change in Copenhagen, which failed to reach any formal or binding agreement on steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or to deal with the impacts of global warming. The Copenhagen conference revealed a fundamental flaw in the international politics of climate change, namely underlying norms and ethics that place nearly all value and importance in states and their national interests, rather than in the people who ultimately cause and are affected by climate change. A major manifestation of this problem is recurring debate over the historical responsibility of developed states for greenhouse gas pollution. While those states surely deserve blame if we think in terms of states, this focus on state responsibility fails to account for rising greenhouse gas emissions among affluent people in less responsible states of the developing world. Given the misfit between historical responsibility and current emissions, this misplaced emphasis on states rather than people will have to be mitigated if the world is to take the extraordinary steps necessary to combat climate change aggressively in coming decades. One major step toward this objective would be to apply cosmopolitan conceptions of ethics to climate politics, policy and diplomacy (see Harris 2010).