Climate change and state interference: the case of privacy

Philosophical Studies https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02269-6 Climate change and state interference: the case of privacy Leonhard Menges1 Accepted: 2 December 2024 © The Author(s) 2024 Abstract Climate change is one of the most important issues we are currently facing. There are many ways in which states can fight climate change. Some of them involve interfering with citizens’ personal lives. The question of whether such interference is justified is under-explored in philosophy. This paper focuses on a specific aspect of people’s personal lives, namely their informational privacy. It discusses the question of whether, given certain empirical assumptions, it is proportional of the state to risk its citizens’ privacy or to risk infringing its citizens’ right to privacy to fight climate change. The main claim this paper argues for is that if fighting climate change and protecting our privacy conflict, we have good reason to fight climate change rather than protect our privacy. Keywords Climate change · State interference · Privacy · Right to privacy · Surveillance · Climate justice · Climate ethics 1 Introduction Climate ethics is a growing, diverse, and important field of philosophical research. It seems, however, that there is a striking lacuna in current philosophical discussions about the climate crisis: philosophers have not sufficiently discussed whether and to what extent the state may justifiably interfere with its citizens’ personal lives to fight climate change. The key goal of this paper is to start this debate. I will try to achieve this by conducting a case study. I will focus on a particular aspect of people’s personal lives, namely their informational privacy, and I will discuss the question of whether it would be proportional of the state to risk interfering with it to fight climate Leonhard Menges 1 Department of Philosophy (GW), Salzburg University, Franziskanergasse 1, Salzburg 5020, Austria 13 L. Menges change. The paper relies on a broad notion of interference, according to which a state measure interferes if it infringes on the citizens’ moral rights. Some may wonder how risking informational privacy can be effective in fighting the climate crisis. After all, having privacy does not emit greenhouse gases. However, consider the 2023 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It contends that “socio-cultural and behavioral changes” are among the most important ways to fight the climate crisis (Calvin et al., 2023, sec. C.3.1). These involve changes in very personal matters such as our diets, housing, and mobility (see Calvin et al., 2023, p. 27). The report makes specific suggestions. People should shift to a sustainable diet, reduce food waste, and walk or cycle instead of using cars. This paper is not concerned with our individual obligation to do these things. Rather it is concerned with the justifiability of the state’s implementing measures that make it more likely that we all do these things, regardless of whether we are morally obliged to do them. It is not hard to see how the state’s gaining knowledge about us can help it fight the climate crisis in this way. Let me illustrate. First, data about individual behavior helps states set up a climate-friendly infrastructure. In 2016, the UN set up the “Data for Climate Action” challenge, which was a call for Big Data research projects. It encouraged researchers to, among other things, analyze how “privacy-protected digital data—such as mobile data or bank card transactions—can provide valuable insights into human behavior patterns and climate risk” (“Data for Climate Action – UN Global Pulse,” n.d.). The Grand Prizewinning project uses data about traffic jams and individual mobility in Mexico City to suggest places for charging stations for electric vehicles and to evaluate different electrification policies (“Meet the Winners,” n.d.; see also McKie, 2021). Another winning project combines credit card transaction data with air pollution data in Spain to find out how air pollution and spending behavior relate (“Meet the Winners,” n.d.). These research projects illustrate how helpful it may be for states to learn who drives their cars where and when, or who buys what and when they buy it, in order to facilitate a shift to a climate-friendly infrastructure. Second, there already are laws that help fight the climate crisis. Think of speed limits for vehicles or rules for behavior in wildfire areas. Setting up surveillance systems would discourage people further from breaking these laws, thereby making them more effective. Consider wildfire areas. Studies suggest that 84% of all wildfires in the USA between 1992 and 2012 were caused by humans (see Balch et al., 2017). Wildfires are problematic because they emit greenhouse gases and destroy plants that would otherwise be carbon sinks (see Clarke et al., 2022). Officials have implemented rules to reduce the danger of wildfires, such as a ban on smoking in most parts of parks in California, and are considering implementing regulations on what vegetation can be planted next to a house (e.g., Sommer, 2023; California, n.d.). Surveilling areas that are especially prone to human-caused wildfires may help to enforce these rules and to discourage people from climate-damaging behavior. Imagine a system of drones surveilling wildfire areas, similar to the drones that some countries used during the Covid-19 pandemic to remind people of social distancing rules and track non-compliant citizens (UNICEF, 2020). In what follows I will focus on two privacy-risking measures to fight climate change: first, surveilling every car in a state’s territory to set up a climate-friendly 13 Climate change and state interference: the case of privacy infrastructure and to discourage people from driving too fast and, second, surveilling certain areas to prevent wildfires. To avoid misunderstandings, the idea is not that the state would publish information about, say, who smokes in a forest or violates traffic rules. The idea is that the existence of the surveillance systems would itself discourage climate-damaging behavior, help enforce existing laws, and that the state would use the gained data in a clearly defined and independently controlled way to build a climate-friendly infrastructure. Moreover, I will assume that the surveilled persons have not violated any moral obligations or laws, have not forfeited their rights, and are not liable subjects of surveillance. As it is easier to justify the surveillance of people who are liable to it, I accept a comparably heavy burden of justification (for a discussion of liability in the context of surveillance see Rønn and Lippert-Rasmussen 2020, Sect. 3; see also Hanin, 2022). In the next section, I will present the main question of this paper in more detail. Section 3 is the heart of the paper. Here, I will discuss arguments to the conclusion that risking our privacy to fight the climate crisis is not (...truncated)