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Human Rights Versus Emissions Rights: Climate Justice and the Equitable Distribution of Ecological Space

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Tim Hayward
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Abstract

There is agreement internationally that responsibility for reducing emissions should be equitably shared, but debate about the principles for determining equitable shares frequently focuses on the distribution of emissions rights. This shift of focus from responsibilities to rights is not necessarily conducive to reducing emissions. There is reason for caution, particularly, regarding suggestions that emissions rights should be assimilated to human rights. Concerns about the situation of the worst off globally have led to calls for recognition of a human right to some baseline amount of emissions per capita in order to secure subsistence. However, given the reasons to support a human right to an adequate environment, it would be a mistake to recognize any human right to pollute. What the worst off have a right to is secure access to the means to a decent life. Arguing that issues of both emissions and subsistence should be comprehended within a single framework of justice, the proposal here is that this broader framework be developed by reference to the idea of “ecological space.” An equitable distribution of rights to ecological space would in principle ensure an equitable distribution of welfare goods without sanctioning any excess use of natural resources or environmental services, including the planet's capacity for absorbing carbon.

Type
Features
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , Winter 2007 , pp. 431 - 450
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2007

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References

Notes

1 See, e.g., Priyadarshi Shukla, “Development and Climate: A View from the South” (paper delivered at IDDRI-CIDRA conference Atelier Climat et développement, Nogent-Sur-Marne, 2002), pp. 4–5.

2 See, e.g., Roland Ismer and Karsten Neuhoff, “Commitments through Financial Options: A Way to Facilitate Compliance with Climate Change Obligations,” University of Cambridge Electricity Policy Research Group Working Paper 06/25 (2006).

3 Tim Hayward, Constitutional Environmental Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), ch. 1.

4 Larry Lohmann, “Democracy or Carbocracy? Intellectual Corruption and the Future of the Climate Debate,” Cornerhouse Briefing Paper 24 (2001), p. 7.

5 T. Banuri and S. Gupta, “The Clean Development Mechanism and Sustainable Development: An Economic Analysis,” in Prodipto Ghosh, ed., Implementation of the Kyoto Protocol (Manila: Asian Development Bank, 2000), p. 79.

6 Larry Lohmann, Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and Power (Uppsala, Sweden: The Dag Hammarskjold Centre, 2006), p. 90.

7 Whether this putative advantage holds over “green taxes” is a question I shall not attempt to go into. Some argue that if initial allocations are auctioned and the market is appropriately regulated, the effect would be equivalent to taxation. Some argue there are independent reasons to prefer taxes. Reviewing such debates, it quickly emerges that the economic considerations cannot be divorced from political ones (see Donald Mackenzie, “The Political Economy of Carbon Trading,” London Review of Books 29, no. 7 [April 2007]).

8 Lohmann, Carbon Trading, p. 107.

9 Ibid., p. 118.

10 Compare Leigh Raymond, “Cutting the ‘Gordian Knot’ in Climate Change Policy,” Energy Policy 34 (2004), pp. 655–58.

11 See the following by Henry Shue: “Subsistence Emissions and Luxury Emissions,” Law and Policy 15, no. 1 (1993), pp. 39–59; “Avoidable Necessity: Global Warming, International Fairness, and Alternative Energy,” in Ian Shapiro and Judith Wagner DeCew, eds., Theory and Practice (New York: New York University Press, 1995); “Environmental Change and the Varieties of Justice,” in Fen Osler Hampson and Judith Reppy, eds., Earthly Goods: Environmental Change and Social Justice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996); and “Global Environment and International Inequality,” International Affairs 75, no. 3 (1999), pp. 531–45.

12 Shue originally coined the term “subsistence emissions” in the context of a since-superseded debate referring to the methane emissions from cattle kept by people in a subsistence economy. Although its extension to carbon emissions has caught on, this is less obviously apposite.

13 Shue, “Avoidable Necessity,” p. 252.

14 Stephen M. Gardiner, “Ethics and Global Climate Change,” Ethics 114 (2004), p. 585.

15 See, e.g., Eric Neumayer, “In Defence of Historical Accountability for Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” Ecological Economics 33 (2000), pp. 185–92; and Dale Jamieson, “Climate Change and Global Environmental Justice,” in Clark A. Miller and Paul N. Edwards, eds., Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001).

16 Jamieson, “Climate Change and Global Environmental Justice,” p. 301.

17 Ibid., p. 303.

18 For fuller discussion, see Tim Hayward, “Global Justice and the Distribution of Natural Resources,” Political Studies 54, no. 2 (2006), pp. 349–69.

19 The concepts of ecological space and ecological debt clearly require more detailed explication than I am able to offer here, particularly with regard to how they might be operationalized in the formulation of policy. My present aim is simply to sketch a general theoretical orientation to questions of justice and human rights.

20 A more general objection that might be pressed against my position here would hold that resources per se should not be the distribuendum of fundamental justice or the object of human rights at all. While I cannot do justice here to the subtle varieties of this objection, I would note that the basic thought underlying my position is that secure access to the means to a decent life is a fundamental human right and that this is better promoted in practice by affirming rather than denying the key role of resources in meeting it.

21 See Hayward, “Global Justice and the Distribution of Natural Resources.”

22 In this article I have not developed an explicit argument for equal per capita shares of ecological space, and it might be thought that my argument tends rather to support a right to sufficient ecological space—that is, sufficient for secure access to the means to a decent human life. In view of the current global overuse of ecological space, however, I am doubtful whether there would be any surplus to distribute if everyone on the planet were secured sufficiently, so I am also doubtful whether the philosophical distinction between equality and sufficiency has any pressing practical implications in this context. Combining these doubts with the thought that any departure from equality requires a positive justification, I am prepared for the time being to refer simply to an equal right. (On this point, see also ibid., p. 360).