Consumption-based emissions accounting: the normative debate

ABSTRACT

The normative debate surrounding consumption-based emissions accounting, conceived of as a method for constructing national emissions inventories, is investigated. The focus is to examine whether such accounting would be more just than the current method of production-based accounting. It is argued that there is no good reason to think that consumption-based accounting would be less just, and some reason to think that it would be more just. The consequences of this for the overall question of whether to adopt consumption-based accounting are also investigated.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• climate mitigation
• consumption-based accounting
• justice
• production-based accounting

Acknowledgments

Previous versions were presented at the 2017 Oslo/Gothenburg workshop in political theory and at the 2017 Nordic Network for Political Theory in Stockholm. We thank everyone who attended those events for valuable feedback; in particular our discussants Henrik Friberg-Fernros and Markus Furendal. We also thank Åsa Löfgren and two anonymous referees of this journal. This research is part of the projects: ‘Pollution-Sensitive Climate Justice: Sources, Thresholds, and Patterns,’ funded by the Swedish Research Council (grant number 2015-01346); and ‘Climate Ethics and Future Generations,’ funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (grant number M17-0372:1). We gratefully acknowledge their financial support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. There are different methods for CB accounting. One favored by many researchers is multi-regional input-output analysis, or MRIO (see, e.g., Peters 2008, IPCC 2014, p. 373). The differences between the methods are due to technical details that do not matter much for the normative discussion.

2. For the difficulty of using political feasibility in normative arguments, see Caney (2014, pp. 128–131).

3. Strong carbon leakage occurs when emissions move because of variation in climate policy. Weak carbon leakage occurs when emissions move for other reasons (Peters and Hertwich 2008a). Weak carbon leakage is widespread, but the evidence for strong carbon leakage is contested (Afionis et al. 2017). Supporters of CB accounting mostly focus on the so-called relocation channel of carbon leakage (Steininger et al. 2016).

4. Different accounts of PPP may index ‘share of emissions’ to different time-periods, but a dominant version states that countries should shoulder a share of the global climate burden that is proportional to their share of post-1990 emissions. We will here leave out important questions such as whether ‘polluters’ should ultimately be understood as individuals, how to handle emissions of dead polluters, etc. For instructive discussions, see Caney (2010), Page (2011) and Roser and Seidel (2017, pp. 118–129).

5. For moral responsibility, see Miller (2007, pp. 100–102). Understanding responsibility for emissions as a question of moral responsibility means asking who is to blame for the emissions. We focus on the wider concept of agent responsibility not because we think that GHG emissions cannot be blameworthy but because attributing blame does not add anything that is not captured by the quest for attributing control over emissions.

6. For the argument that CB accounting tracks agent-responsibility better when the exporter is very poor, see Roser and Tomlinson (2014). For exploitation, see Valdman (2008). For coercion in an international context, see Valentini (2011).

7. Partly for this reason, some have explored shared responsibility models in which emissions or costs are split between producers and consumers (Lenzen et al. 2007). For reasons of space, we cannot explore this intriguing idea here.

8. In a different version, the principle defines ‘ability to pay’ in terms of the welfare costs of shouldering burdens as opposed to absolute ability (Miller 2007). The Ability to Pay Principle is usually considered as a supplement to the Polluter Pays Principle (Caney 2010). Here, however, we treat it as a freestanding principle.

9. BPP is typically considered a complement to the Polluter Pays Principle, e.g., by being sensitive to historical emissions while avoiding the problem of ‘disappearing perpetrators’ (Caney 2010, Page 2011). For further discussion, see Page (2012), Roser and Seidel (2017, pp. 130–139).

10. For some exploration of this difficult issue, see Ferng (2003) and Marques et al. (2012).

11. For the difficulty of setting the baseline for BPP, see Goodin (2013, p. 485) and Lippert-Rasmussen (2017, pp. 85–86).

12. For an instructive discussion of incomparability, see Chang (2014).

13. The distinction between duty-bearer justice and entitlement-bearer justice is developed in Caney (2009). See also Caney (2014) for a related distinction between justice as burden sharing and justice as harm avoidance.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Vetenskapsrådet [2015-01346] and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond [M17-0372:1].