Warming first – failure to solve magnifies the impacts of the K.

Over and over again, the question of how to realize this justice led Táíwò to climate change. Given its disproportionate effects on populations for whom the legacies of colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade loom the largest — think the tens of millions of Bangladeshis who stand to be displaced by sea-level rise, or the unique vulnerability of the entire African continent to temperature rise and decreased rainfall — each additional degree of global warming seemed to undermine the good that any reparations project could do.

“Are any of these other measures that we take toward racial justice going to have staying power in a world that’s 3 degrees hotter?” he has said. “In a world where there is rampant instability in our energy and housing systems? In a world of mass human displacement? In a world where the elites of the world feel very threatened?”

Though Táíwò is loath to declare loyalty to a particular ideology, he readily identifies as a leftist, and his views on climate change perhaps sit most comfortably under the umbrella of eco-socialism. Still, he is willing to follow his philosophical arguments to positions that are controversial in some leftist quarters. He has argued, for example, that carbon removal is an essential tactic in the pursuit of environmental justice, and he has opposed calls for bans on solar geo-engineering research, calling such arguments “performatively colonial.” What he opposes most of all is moralizing: If political purity gets in the way of improving the actual life experience of people now and in the future, then it has no place in his account of justice.

“He’s not a doctrinaire anything, in the end. You really see this in his interest in climate politics. He’s like, ‘Let’s just do whatever works when it comes to this really urgent problem,’” said Daniela Dover, a philosophy professor at the University of Oxford who taught Táíwò when he was a graduate student. “I don’t feel like I can predict what he’s going to say.”

While Táíwò’s ultimate vision is of a world where economic and political power is massively redistributed, it’s clear that he thinks rapid decarbonization is the world’s most immediate priority. Every degree of warming puts his conception of a just world further out of reach.

“It’s very difficult to not treat climate change as one of the central questions confronting philosophers and people in general,” he told me.