Introduction

Local ontologies of climate change – how people see the relationship between themselves, others and the changing climate – play an important role in mitigation, adaptation and willingness to assume responsibility for environmental stewardship. In this chapter, we examine contrasting moral readings of climate change, considering how urban residents’ perceptions of climate change in terms of its remoteness or proximity are interwoven with beliefs about the blameworthiness of local and global actors, individual efficacy and personal agency (Jamieson, 2010). The extent to which people view climate change as a distant problem for them, there and then (Marshall, 2014) has significant implications for public engagement. We consider both spatial and temporal framings of responsibility for climate change, including ‘industrial’ and ‘universal’ blame stances (Rudiak-Gould, 2014), how notions of caring for the future vis-à-vis direct descendants contribute to a relatively short-term ‘generational timescape’ (White, 2017), how livelihood insecurity risks ‘unimagining’ the future, and ambivalence towards historical responsibility.

Who is responsible for what? Climate change blame Narratives

The term ‘anthropogenic climate change’ casts human beings as culpable agents who have caused climate change, but climate change blame narratives can range from everyone to no one, variously placing responsibility with fossil fuel companies, affluent consumers, local and national government officials, a provoked God, capitalism, technological hubris, and past or present generations (Rudiak-Gould, 2014; Hulme, 2017). Climate change complicates conventional understandings of moral responsibility, because ‘it is not a matter of a clearly identifiable individual acting intentionally so as to inflict an identifiable harm on another identifiable individual, closely related in time and space’ (Jamieson, 2010: 437).