13. Could Rationing Help to Mitigate Climate Change? With Rob Lawlor

Rob Lawlor, a philosopher at the IDEA Centre, has been involved in an inter-disciplinary collaboration looking at one possible response to climate change, which is the introduction of rationing. With Nathan Wood and Josie Freear, he's been looking at the history of rationing as well as the ethics. So - not just whether rationing would be morally permissible, but also how it might be received by the public. And what we can learn about this from public attitudes to rationing of food during and after the second world war. When it was first published, the paper got an unusual amount of attention in the media for an academic paper, including lots of positive coverage, but also some disparagement from the likes of Nigel Farage and Richard Littlejohn. As well as discussing the content of the paper, we talked about what that reaction has been like and I gave Rob a chance to respond to some of the ways the paper has been discussed in the media.

Here's Rob, Josie and Nathan's paper:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21550085.2023.2166342

A short paper on a similar topic by Mark Roodhouse:

https://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/rationing-returns-a-solution-to-global-warming

In the interview, Rob mentions he thought the best of the news articles about the paper was in the New Republic. Here it is:

https://newrepublic.com/article/170914/climate-case-rationing

And finally, here's what Nigel Farage thought of it:

https://twitter.com/Nigel_Farage/status/1627606639711817728

Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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