Climate justice and historical emissions

Abstract

Climate change can be interpreted as a unique case of historical injustice involving issues of both intergenerational and global justice. We split the issue into two separate questions. First, how should emission rights be distributed? Second, who should come up for the costs of coping with climate change? We regard the first question as being an issue of pure distributive justice and argue on prioritarian grounds that the developing world should receive higher per capita emission rights than the developed world. This is justified by the fact that the latter already owns a larger share of benefits associated with emission generating activities because of its past record of industrialisation. The second question appears to be an issue of compensatory justice. After defining what we mean by compensation, we show that different kinds of compensatory principles run into problems when used to justify payments by historical emitters of the North to people suffering from climate change in the South. As an alternative, we propose to view payments from wealthy countries for adaptation to climate change in vulnerable countries rather as a measure based on concerns of global distributive justice.

Keywords:

• intergenerational justice
• global justice
• climate change
• historical emissions

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Keith Bustos, Simon Caney, Axel Gosseries, Sarah Kenehan, Pranay Sanklecha and participants at the Manchester Political Theory Workshops for their helpful comments and criticisms.

Notes

1. For simplicity's sake, we refer also to deforestation and other ways of decreasing sinks as emission generating activities. An umbrella term which would more precisely capture both activities which add emissions to the atmosphere and activities which diminish the removal of emissions from the atmosphere would for example be ‘emission concentration enhancing activities’.

2. By emissions we always refer to greenhouse gas emissions. In a more complete treatment one would not only cite greenhouse gas emissions as responsible for exposing people to climate damages, but also include the removal of sinks which absorb emissions (in particular deforestation) as well as activities which increase the vulnerability of people to a changed climate.

3. Cf. Gosseries (2004, p. 37). On the topic of historical injustice in general see Meyer (2004, 2005.)

4. One implication of this is that it makes one of the answers to historical injustice more difficult to sustain, namely the answer which argues that one should compensate descendants of wronged persons because those descendants were wronged in that their parents did not receive the appropriate compensation and that as a result of this lack of payments the descendants are worse off than they would be if the compensation to their parents had been paid (after their conception), see Sher (2005) and Meyer (2008, sec. 5.1)

5. For plausible attempts at answering this question, see e.g. Caney (2006b) or Page (2006).

6. When we speak of the North and the South we always implicitly either take those terms as an abbreviation for an individual of the North or the South or else we assume a two‐stage process where in a first stage climate justice between the countries of the North and the South is determined after which each country will then, in a second stage, internally distribute its mitigation and adaptation burdens fairly to individuals.

7. See Depledge (2002, p. 37).

8. Grandfathering refers to the scheme that grants high current emission rights to those with high past emissions. Because this scheme plays an important role in policy debates, it is important to deal with this proposal: see Meyer and Roser (2006, pp. 229ff.) If polluters are actually entitled to (a certain proportion of) the emissions level they have historically acquired, then there would be no scope for distributing emissions according to some pattern such as the priority view.

9. See Bartsch and Müller (2000, p. 227).

10. Some people speak of giving everyone a share of the atmosphere (Friends of the Earth 2006) or a share of the climate (Christian Aid 1999). This is less than precise since the issue is not more or less atmosphere or climate. Others speak of fairly distributing the absorptive capacity of the atmosphere (Neumayer 2000). This is not the best description of the good in question either because what is limited is not really the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb greenhouse gases but rather the willingness of humans to put up with the climate quality that ensues from high concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

11. Besides this, emissions can also be beneficial in a different way, namely through the climate change they cause: selected people (e.g. some farmers in Northern latitudes) profit from a warming world.

12. For a more extensive discussion see e.g. Meyer and Roser (2006), Casal (2007) and Holtug and Lippert‐Rasmussen (2007).

13. See Gosseries’ remark on this issue in Gosseries (2007) as well as similar remarks in Gosseries (2004). He relies on Elster (1992).

14. See Baumert et al. (2005, p.32)

15. For an overview see La Rovere et al. (2002)

16. Gosseries (2004) lists some salient dates which might serve as an alternative to 1990.

17. According to Holtug and Lippert‐Rasmussen (2007, p. 10) most egalitarians find this latter option more plausible.

18. This approximate conclusion has to be qualified somewhat as a matter of transitory justice (cf. Gosseries 2007): if people were legitimately ignorant about the problematic nature of their emissions then some legitimate expectations accompany the ownership of their emission benefits.

19. Caney (2006a) argues that evening out inequalities in emissions over time relies on a collectivist framework. Note that by focusing on the benefits of past emissions enjoyed by the presently living, we can eschew this problem.

20. Note also that there is something peculiar about seeing mitigation as a kind of compensation for not mitigating: it can only be applied in the sense of seeing present mitigation as compensation for past lack of mitigation, but of course not in the synchronic fashion of seeing present mitigation as compensation for a lack of present mitigation. This is in contrast to paying for adaptation costs, which can be seen as compensation for a lack of present mitigation.

21. If the background distribution were taken into account (i.e. the second option) when determining the just distribution of emission rights according to prioritarian standards, we would be faced with a more complex picture but which most plausibly still ascribes much higher emission rights to the South. First, we would additionally have to take into account which countries can draw many benefits from emission rights, based on factors such as geographical circumstances and the current living standards. Second, the interaction between emission rights and the background distribution would also have to be taken into account in that the allocation scheme can influence economic growth and population growth.

22. North‐Young could blame North‐Middle for emitting so much in period I as a result of which the whole North gets few emission rights in period II. North‐Young might punish North‐Middle for this by, for example, cutting its social security.

23. These distinctions and the discussion of problems associated with each principle in the context of climate change justice have been most helpfully introduced and discussed by Simon Caney (2005, 2006a) and Axel Gosseries (2004). In many ways our argument in this section is indebted to their interpretations and analyses.

24. By potential payers we mean people who were either causally responsible for climate change or who grew up in beneficial circumstances that are partly due to emission‐generating activities. By potential recipients we mean people who grew up in a place which would exhibit more favourable living conditions if it were not for climate change.

25. The non‐identity problem precludes us from saying that future people are harmed (or benefited) by actions that are necessary conditions of their existence (cf. Parfit 1984). This is so if we understand harm in the sense of being made worse off by an action than one would otherwise be. There is however another conception of harm which successfully evades the non‐identity problem: by claiming that people can be said to be harmed by actions which make them fall below a certain pre‐specified threshold, future people can also be said to be harmed by actions which are a necessary condition of their existence. For a treatment of these issues, see Meyer (2008).

26. Note that we distinguish this principle from ‘polluter pays principles’ (or also ‘strict liability principles’) by focusing only on wrongful emitters while the polluter pays principle or a strict liability principle or also Moellendorf’s (2002, p. 98) causal principle make any emitter – whether wrongful or not – pay. Such principles, which make people pay who are causally responsible for emissions irrespective of their culpability, can obviously not serve as principles of compensatory justice in the narrow sense defined above. This is not to say, however, that in practice policies relying on such a polluter pays principle could never be justified for certain areas of environmental policy. It can legitimately be put into practice for three reasons:

(1) In practice, in some areas of environmental policy it might be difficult to hold wrongful and non‐wrongful emitters apart; or the two categories might overlap to such a large degree that it would be too cumbersome to hold them apart. Thus, enacting a polluter pays principle might serve as an approximation for the policy, which demands compensation from wrongdoers.

(2) The policy might also serve as an approximation for a policy based on the redistributive rationale: because polluters often benefit from their polluting action, making them pay something to the harmed can be seen as evening out undeserved deviations from a just baseline.

(3) A third and completely unrelated justification is based on instrumental grounds in the following way: According to economists, making people pay for harmful activities sets the right incentives and thus generates efficiency. If emitters (who are assumed to act self‐interestedly) have to bear the external costs that appear as side effects of their actions they will only perform an emitting action in case the benefits exceed the costs. Thus, in a society where emitters (whether wrongful or not) are made to pay, all and only those emitting actions will be performed that have a net benefit which brings forth efficiency. However, such an instrumental justification for making emitters pay has no necessary link to the idea of compensatory or redistributive justice. This can also be seen by noting that such an instrumental justification in fact provides no rationale at all for why the emitters’ payments should be handed over to the people harmed by the emissions. The principle’s whole idea is to deter people from emitting on a non‐optimal level by making them pay, where the optimal level of emissions is set by some pre‐specified goals.

27. See note 25.

28. However, in our non‐ideal world benefits from wrongdoing can bring an individual closer to the well‐being he or she ideally ought to enjoy.

29. See Anwander (2005, p. 40).

30. Ibid.

31. See Gosseries (2004).

32. See Butt (2007, p. 143).

33. For an extensive treatment, see Meyer (2005), chapters IV and V.

34. See among others Pogge (1989).

35. See Miller (2004, p. 241, fn. 1) and Gosseries (2004, p. 55).

36. In terms of figure 3, enacting a prioritarian distribution between the North and the South of the specific good of climate damages would amount to a transfer of 5 units of benefits from the North to the South.

37. Cf. the second option from section. The good to be distributed and the standard to be applied.

38. In terms of figure 2, enacting a prioritarian distribution of both benefits and damages jointly would demand giving all the 10 emission rights which are up for distribution in period II to the South and in addition demanding a transfer of two units of benefits from the North to the South. This would leave the people in the South who are alive in period II taken together with zero net benefits and the same is true for the people in the North who are alive in period II taken together.