Global war against a common enemy: a paradigm for unifying against climate change–The path to a just sustainable future avoids claims of historical climate injustice

Claims are heard that because the developed world has created the global warming problem through their invention and profiting from emissions-producing technologies, they have a moral duty to sacrifice for the developing world and if reluctant to volunteer reparations, their duty should be enforced by supranational tribunals. We argue that the developed world can deny guilt for creating the climate change problem because, not only has their technological progress greatly improved standards of living for humanity since the 1700 s, such progress has given us tools needed to defeat global warming and other catastrophic threats to humanity. We contend that the citizens of the developed world will be their own jury and find themselves not guilty of claims that their technological progress has been unjustly harming developing nations. Applying affirmative wartime motivational psychology, not divisive claims of injustice, provides a unifying answer. Characterizing defense against climate change as analogous to war against a common enemy that threatens humanity with catastrophe, protection motivation theory and real-life wartime experience instruct how leaders of the strongest nations should tap visceral protectiveness towards all humankind to rally their constituencies to regard all nations as allies and to accept sacrifices to protect the world’s more climate-vulnerable. • Given extreme uncertainty, prudence demands nations plan their fight against climate change by backcasting from an imagined worst plausible fate. • Given a worst case where all nations face catastrophe, it would be in their self-interests to ally against climate change as their common enemy. • Developed nations must lead the fight against climate change which requires persuading their citizens to sacrifice for the world’s more vulnerable. • Instead of rhetoric to redress injustice, wartime reasoning and rhetoric is needed to rally developed-nation citizens to sacrifice for all humanity. • Rallying nations to unify against a common enemy offers the prospect of avoiding climate catastrophe and attaining a just sustainable future.