01

About the Speaker

Lachlan Umbers is a moral and political philosopher, currently a post-doctoral research fellow in the Practical Justice Initiative at the University of New South Wales. He was awarded his PhD from the Australian National University. In January 2019, he will join the University of Western Australia as a Lecturer (assistant professor equivalent) in Political Philosophy. His research specialisations are in democratic theory and climate justice. He also has interests in egalitarianism, the history of political thought, collective action, global justice, ethics, applied ethics, and meta-ethics. He is the author of a number of published and/or forthcoming articles in journals including The British Journal of Political Science, European Journal of Political Theory, and Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.

02

Abstact

In recent years, several actors at the sub-national level (e.g. California, British Columbia, New York City) have taken unilateral steps to mitigate climate change by reducing their emissions. These developments have commanded considerable attention in the empirical literature. In this piece, we consider the philosophical dimensions of climate action at the sub-national level. Specifically, we argue that many sub-national political communities have moral duties to take unilateral action on climate change, where the national communities to which they belong fail to do so. Along the way, we consider complications arising out of the inevitable fact of partial compliance, and the phenomenon of carbon leakage.

(Note – this piece is co-authored with Jeremy Moss of UNSW).

03

When and Where

When: 15:00-17:00 on Thursday 13 September 2018

Where: B214, School of Philosophy