Climate Change Mitigation Justice and the No-Harm Principle (original) (raw)

Distributive justice and climate change. The allocation of emission rights

Analyse & kritik, 2006

The emission of greenhouse gases causes climate change. Therefore, many support a global cap on emissions. How then should the emissions allowed under this cap be distributed? We first show that above average past emissions cannot be used to justify a right to above average current emissions. We then sketch three basic principles of distributive justice (egalitarianism, prioritarianism, and sufficientarianism) and argue, first, that prioritarian standards are the most plausible and, second, that they speak in favour of giving people of developing countries higher emission rights than people of industrialised countries. In order to support this point it has to be shown, inter alia, in what ways the higher past emissions of industrialised countries are relevant for today's distribution of emission rights.

Climate Change Individual Obligations and the Virtue of Justice

Studies in Christian Ethics, 2019

Over the last decade, a number of climate ethicists have turned their attention to the question of individual moral obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Important problems face their efforts, especially what is called the problem of inconsequentialism. The problems, I argue, arise largely from the failure to treat individual obligations as a matter of justice, a failure that stems from the common modern assumption that justice primarily concerns social institutions. I develop an alternative approach by appealing to the account of justice as a virtue in Thomas Aquinas. This approach allows us to talk about individual obligations to reduce emissions as obligations of justice, even in the current context of institutional failure. At the same time, I argue that approaching climate change in Thomistic terms requires an important modification of Aquinas' understanding of justice.

Distributive Justice and Climate Change

This paper discusses two distinct questions of distributive justice raised by climate change. Stated very roughly, one question concerns how much protection is owed to the potential victims of climate change (the Just Target Question), and the second concerns how the burdens (and benefits) involved in preventing dangerous climate change should be distributed (the Just Burden Question). In Section II, I focus on the first of these questions, the Just Target Question. The rest of the paper examines the second question, the Just Burden Question. To answer this question, I argue, it is necessary to address two important methodological questions (one concerning the choice between what I term Integrationism and Isolationism and the other concerning the choice between what I term Holism and Atomism). Sections III-V, thus, set out and explore these two methodological issues. Having done so, the paper then turns from methodological issues to substantive analysis, and in Section VI it examines three principles of distributive justice that, it has been suggested, should determine how the burden of addressing dangerous climatic changes should be distributed (the Polluter Pays Principle, the Ability to Pay Principle and the Beneficiary Pays Principle).

Conceptualizations of justice in climate policy

Climate Policy, 2009

Distributive justice in climate change has been of interest both to the ethics and to the climate policy communities, but the two have remained relatively isolated. By combining an applied ethics approach with a focus on the details of a wide range of proposed international climate policies, this article proposes two arguments. First, three categories of proposals are identified, each characterized by its assumptions about the nature of the 'problem' of climate change, the burdens that this problem imposes, and its application of distribution rules. Each category presents potential implications for distributive justice. The second, related, argument is that assumptions about technology, sovereignty, substitution and public perceptions of ethics shape the distributive justice outcomes of proposed policies even though these areas have largely been overlooked in discussions of the subject in either literature. The final lesson of this study is that the definition, measurement and distribution of burdens are all critical variables for distributive justice in climate policy.

How Fairness Principles in the Climate Debate Relate to Theories of Distributive Justice

Sustainability

A central question in international climate policy making is how to distribute the burdens of keeping global average temperature increase to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. In particular, there are four distributional issues: how to allocate the total amount of greenhouse gases that can still be emitted, who should bear the costs of mitigation, who should bear the costs of adaptation to unavoidable climate change, and who should bear the costs of residual climate damage. Regarding these distributional issues the academic literature offers a plethora of fairness principles, such as ‘polluter pays’, ‘beneficiary pays’, ‘equal per capita rights’, ‘grandfathering’, ‘ability to pay’, ‘historical responsibility’ and ‘cost effectiveness’. Remarkably, there is a theoretical gap between these principles and the central theories of distributive justice in moral and political philosophy. As a consequence, it is unclear how these principles are related, whether they can be combined...

Towards a climate change justice theory?

Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2016

Approaches to justice are an infrequent phenomenon in the analysis of global change policies pursued by states and international organizations but are writ large in global civil society protests and advocacy. I hope to initiate, through this paper, a different conversation concerning theories of climate justice (TCJ) in the offing and ask questions about how different TCJs may be from theories about global justice (TGJ) and environmental justice (TEJ). These approaches are all related of coursebut the questions that interest me pertain to the distinctions and differences between them. Although TEJs remain tethered to domestic and regional social orderings, they generally come closer to TCJs than TGJs do. I argue here that another important difference between TEJs and TCJs concerns the notion of 'generations' in TCJs. This goes beyond the three generations (past, present and future) in most accounts of TGJ to encompass infinite generations. In addition, I examine the notion that there is a human right to do harm and the ways in which TCJ may address harm prevention as the cornerstone of a new planetary approach to justice.

The limit of climate justice: unfair sacrifice and aggregate harm

Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2020

This article revisits a principle of distributive justice accepted by most, if not all, scholars of climate justice. The principle at stake, the limit, protects those who are very badly off from bearing the costs of climate change mitigation. The persistent noncompliance of developed states with their obligations toward burden sharing, however, means that this principle is increasingly in tension with successful climate change mitigation, given it seems to require that those in poverty have continued access to emissions in cases where alternative forms of energy are not provided. In the first half of the paper I outline this tension and show how the dominant expression of the limit in the literature, advanced by Henry Shue, must be abandoned. I argue that any attempt to articulate the limit in current circumstance, where the carbon budget is very scarce, must consider the climate harm associated with continued subsistence emissions. The second half of the article defends a principle, the exemption, which is best able to maintain the strong commitment to shielding those below the minimal threshold from the costs of mitigation, even in light of the potential harm that will result if they require emissions to fuel their energy needs.

Climate change and global justice

Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 2012

In this article, I examine matters concerning justice and climate change in light of current work in global justice. I briefly discuss some of the most important contemporary work by political philosophers and theorist on global justice and relate it to various considerations regarding justice and climate change. After briefly surveying the international treaty context, I critically discuss several issues, including climate change and human rights, responsibility for historical emissions and the polluter-pays principle, the ability to pay principle, grandfathering entitlements to emit greenhouse gasses, equal per capita emissions entitlements, the right to sustainable development, and responsibility for financing adaptation to climate change. This set of issues does not exhaust the list of considerations of global justice and climate change, but it includes some of the most important of those considerations.

Review of Posner and Weisbach's Climate Change Justice (2010)

Many discussions of how to justly distribute the costs of mitigating climate change arrive at a conclusion that is, if not pleasing, at least pleasingly uncomplicated. The three most compelling principles that we might use to settle the issue -'ability to pay', 'polluter pays' and equal rights to the global atmosphere -seemingly all point in the same direction. The U.S. and E.U. should bear almost all of the burden. Chief among the many novel contributions of this provocative book is an upsetting of that neat consensus. In fact, Posner and Weisbach argue, it turns out that these three principles imply quite different distributions of the burden. Moreover, still more controversially, the principles themselves are morally suspect when used in this context. This conclusion, and the thorough and original arguments that lead to it, should shake up the existing literature on this vital and still underexplored topic in productive ways.