The limit of climate justice: unfair sacrifice and aggregate harm

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate justice
• distributive justice
• climate change burden sharing
• subsistence and luxury emissions
• poverty

Acknowledgments

This paper has emerged from my PhD thesis, and I am grateful first and foremost to my supervisors, Catriona McKinnon and Rob Jubb. Both are incredibly generous with their time and advice, and they have provided feedback on numerous earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to thank Chris Armstrong, Jamie Draper and Josh Wells for their helpful comments. This paper was presented at the University of Reading, and at the ‘Current Perspectives on Climate Justice’ workshop at the University of Graz. I owe a special thanks to Bennet Francis, who acted as a respondent in Graz. This research has been supported by the Leverhulme Trust.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflicts of interest were reported by the author.

Notes

1. Jamieson qualifies that this is on a straight-line extrapolation but notes the consensus on this general point that the costs of mitigation are relatively manageable. For a notable analysis which is even more optimistic than the figures cited by Jamieson see Stern (2015).

2. For a powerful and illuminating outline of this bind see Shue (2014, ch.17).

3. For a very striking representation of the remaining space in the different budgets see: http://www.trillionthtonne.org/ See also, Figueres et al. (2017).

4. Caney seems to want this distinction to have a specific normative role, where each side of climate justice demands its own account of agent’s obligations and where our overall account would then instruct us on how to trade them against each other. I do not want to endorse this prescriptive reading of the distinction, but it seems to me to a useful and intuitive heuristic that captures well two central considerations of climate justice.

5. For the purposes of this paper, I will not take a view on the specific agents that should be exempt from climate change costs. In my view, the exemption should ideally protect individuals, for whom these interests are so important. There are, it has to be acknowledged, some well-trodden difficulties in the context of climate justice in applying principles to individuals. Climate change policy is mostly addressed directly to states who are considered the most effective actors in this domain. For some interesting discussion on this see Baer et al. (2010, pp. 217–220). Baer et al want to endorse the exemption, but they highlight some problematic implications of applying it to the state level of agency. For a useful discussion of their view, and of issues relating to the exemption generally, see Page, 2008, p. 564-ff.)

6. ‘Intolerable’ here is a placeholder, which substantive accounts will have to elaborate. I will have more to say about how this principle interacts with the temperature target of climate change policy later.

7. See Jamieson (2014, pp. 156–159) for a helpful discussion of the challenges that will be encountered when attempting out this threshold.

8. David Miller, ‘Global Justice and Climate Change: How should Responsibilities be Distributed?’, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values 28 (Miller, 2009) pp.117–156 also frames his exemption in terms of poverty. He writes, ‘The first step is to draw a line between societies in which poverty is endemic and those in which it is not (p. 145)’ This may, however, turn out to be just a turn of phrase, as at other points he indicates that his concern is with sufficiency (e.g., p. 141). This broader concern would be consistent with his general view, which takes global justice to satisfied so long as people everywhere attain a sufficient standard of living. See Miller (2007, ch.7).

9. References to Shue’s principle are ubiquitous. See, for example, Jamieson (2014); Lawford-Smith (2016); Miller (2008); Odenbaugh (2010). Shue’s original article has recently been the subject of a special issue of the British Journal of Politics and International Relations celebrating ‘Breakthrough’ contributions to the study of politics. In this issue see, Shue (2019), McLaughlin (2019), McKinnon (2019), and Hayward (2019).

10. Gardiner (2017, p. 445) seems to miss this point, describing HS2 as ‘a gloss on HS1, and so to tell us how to interpret it’.

11. Indeed, it is worth noting that at the time Shue was initially writing, the carbon budget framing had not been developed as way to conceptualise the issue. His concern was primarily to reduce ‘flows’ of emissions, not the ‘stocks’ which we now know are the fundamentally important measure.

12. On the modified version, a larger part of the sacrifice from the rich will have to be through renewable transfers, and so less subsistence emissions will be justified by the distinction.

13. It is worth mentioning that in his criticisms of Moellendorf, Gardiner does gesture toward an alternative interpretation of the permission. The permission, he suggests, should be viewed as a right to self-defence, where those making claims to subsistence emissions should do so on the basis that they are defending their basic interests against an external threat (Gardiner, 2017, p. 446). It is hard to know what to make of this suggestion, as Gardiner leaves it largely unelaborated. It is certainly not a natural interpretation of Shue, and so would have to be justified on its own terms. I am very sceptical about the prospects of developing an account of subsistence emissions in self-defence, but I lack the space to articulate and critique such a view here. As it stands, we certainly have not heard enough about this proposal to consider it as an alternative version of the limit. For a slightly lengthier, although still insufficiently detailed, discussion of this potential view see Gardiner and Weisbach (2016, pp. 122–126).

14. It is worth mentioning that some of Gardiner’s criticisms are inspired by a concern that Moellendorf’s answer to noncompliance is to take more seriously the prospect of Geoengineering (Gardiner, 2017, p. 455-ff). We do not need to take Moellendorf’s (2014, pp. 192–202) line, however.

15. The literature on sufficientarianism might be a good place to look when articulating this principle. This literature has devoted considerable attention to considering how to adjudicate between sub-threshold harms, and theorists have identified a range of potentially relevant distinctions. For example, the relative distance different cost-bearing agents sit below the minimal threshold might be important factor, so too might the net cost or benefit that results from a particular course of action. For discussion of these issues see, Brock (2018, p. 96-ff); Huseby (2010). For a detailed and informative discussion of some of these issues in relation to climate change in particular see, Meyer and Stelzer (2018).

16. It seems likely to me that the narrowness of Moellendorf’s account is explained by its pragmatic framing (Moellendorf, 2014, pp. 3–6). Moellendorf is very concerned, as we know, with the possibility that those in poverty will bear the cost of climate change mitigation. But aside from this he does not express any further concerns about an aggressive mitigation policy; in fact, at numerous points (e.g., p.19; ch.2) he registers the dangers of climate change impacts that are not linked to poverty, which would be protected by setting a lower target. Thus if we were to put to Moellendorf an incredible policy which mitigated climate change to, say, to 1°C, without impose costs upon those in poverty, it would seem to me very easy for him to endorse it.

17. For an insightful discussion, in a more specific climate justice debate, which relates to my response here and in the previous paragraph see Schuppert (2016, p. 112-ff.), ‘Carbon Sink Conservation and Global Justice: Benefitting, Free Riding and Non-compliance, Res Publica 22 (Schuppert, 2016) pp.99–116 at pp.112-ff.

18. The exact level of aggregate harm that would prompt this concession is not important, so long as there is such a level.

19. His first response is simply to restate the reasonableness of the conviction not to set back poverty alleviation that we started with. His second is a concern that weakening this hard commitment will require to mark out a line or threshold that looks arbitrary and which does will not carry the requisite moral urgency. I do not find either of these two responses entirely convincing, but I lack the space to engage with them here.

20. This point also suggests Gardiner’s concern about the exemption undermining other considerations of value is overdrawn. If the concern is that poor mitigation will lead to the loss of other things we care about, this empirical observation suggests the exemption will at least partly protect them as an indirect effect of protecting the minimal threshold against climate impacts.

21. Notice something important: the claim here is not that the rich will always be able to act in a way that ensures climate change is successfully mitigated and a dangerous aggregate level harm avoided. We have reason to doubt, in fact, that this will be the case. The point is that unless something significant changes, it will also be relatively easy at t1 for rich agents to make the transition away from fossil fuels in order to ensure that the harm does not become considerably worse than what was unavoidable at t1.

22. Indeed, this is a motif that recurs through his work. See, for example, Shue (2014, pp. 235, p.239) See also Cripps (2013, pp. 64–66). Cripps is dismissing a related objection about the demandingness of mitigation duties. For some economic analysis of this point see note 1, above.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust. The grant number is DS-2014-002.

Notes on contributors

Alex McLaughlin

Alex McLaughlin is teaching fellow in political theory at the University of Reading. He completed his PhD as part of the Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Programme in Climate Justice. His research interests include climate justice, global distributive justice and methodology in political theory.