Academic and Political Responsibility in Confronting Climate Change: A Personal Trajectory

Abstract

The notion of responsibility has become part and parcel of climate change discourse. Roberts and Parks (2007:135), for example, seek to address three questions: "Who is responsible for climate change? What are the different ways of accounting for responsibility? Who is making progress toward resolving the problem?" In their view, climate change is an issue of global inequality: "inequality in who is suffering from the problem, who caused it in the first place, who is expected to address the problem, and who currently benefits disproportionately from the goods produced by the global economy" (Roberts and Parks 2007:135).