Climate Change and the Long-Term Future

Background of the summer school

After several successful installments, the Centre for PPE and the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Groningen will again host their annual Winter School, aimed primarily at advanced undergraduate students and early-stage graduate students. The theme of the Winter School is “Climate Change and Sustainability”. It consists of 4 lecture tutorials discussing related issues from different disciplinary perspectives under the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) umbrella. To facilitate attendance by people from outside the Netherlands and Europe, the winter school will be held online.

Climate change from a PPE lens

Climate change and sustainability are among today’s biggest challenges. How should individuals, societies, and humanity at-large respond? Far from being a question for engineers or climate scientists only, any good answer requires a multi-disciplinary, integrated perspective, combining, for example, philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE).

In this winter school, different researchers from the University of Groningen take a PPE perspective in exploring climate change and sustainability and our ethical and political obligations towards future people.

The winter school asks fundamental normative questions, such as: What are our moral obligations to future people? Do they extend to all future people and, if so, does this imply that our longtermist moral duties trump any short-term concerns?

A social-psychological perspective asks: What explains people’s attitudes and actions towards the environment and future generations and how can those be improved?

From the field of operations management, a PPE-inspired point of view reflects on sustainability problems in global agriculture.

And finally, is the energy transition simply a relatively shallow matter of finding technological solutions to “unplug” fossil fuels and “plug in” low-carbon alternatives, or is it much deeper, requiring radical changes to all the cultural and economic building blocks of society?