Scrap emission rights. It is time to talk about responsibilities

Carbon emissions do not have value in themselves but only serve to valuable goals; there is no (human) right to pollute. For this reason, talking about responsibilities to reduce emissions rather than emission rights is the most coherent approach for dealing with climate change. The empirical and the normative are deeply intertwined in this questions, as emission rights have a dubious track record in the real world, and thus the starting point must be one grounded in reality.

Emission rights have become the mainstream approach for dealing with climate change. Although its fair share is very much contested, the notion of emission rights derives from the idea that the emission of some amount of CO2 should be assured to people as a human right, as we all need energy for production and consumption, and energy is most commonly obtained in today’s world through processes that emit CO2.

Emission rights are both appealing to affluent and poor countries. They allow carbon intensive industries to continue their operations and poorer nation-states to have a claim over the emission of CO2 to improve the living conditions of their citizens. Moreover, if we recognise the huge threats of anthropogenic climate change, talking about emission rights might be seen as an effective ‘first step’ to limit emissions following the Lockean ‘enough, and as good’ proviso.

Although emission rights have proven relatively ‘easy’ to implement in the real world, most of the arguments presented above fall when we acknowledge that carbon emissions do not have a value in themselves, and that having emission rights is equivalent to having a right to pollute. This idea, raised by Tim Hayward among others, seems highly contradictory to our goals of protecting human rights by dealing with climate change.

Hayward has pointed out how responsibilities to reduce emissions have been eclipsed by contestation over how emission rights should be apportioned. Emission rights encourage self-interested claims and can give normative force to property rights to be traded on the market, leading to carbon trading schemes that do not deal with the imminent threat of climate change.

Talking about emission rights means focusing on a good, greenhouse gases emissions, in isolation from the bigger picture, and implies what Amartya Sen has called ‘resource fetishism’, a focus on resources that overlooks the fact that all human interactions within the non-human natural world occur within a single biophysical reality.

It is a mistake to entrench emission rights more deeply in our normative theory (and in the real world), as it is the carbon intensive industries whose emissions it is most important to challenge rather than indulge through emission rights. If we agree with Hayward that there is no human right to pollute, but a human right to live in an environment free of harmful pollution (a right itself derived from a more basic right to subsistence), stressing responsibilities over rights can be a more fruitful approach to tackling climate change.

Responsibilities to reduce emission should obviously take into account subsistence claims, but to the extent that carbon emissions are not the only or the necessary means of subsistence and to the extent that they are avoidable, we should not talk about rights to carbon emissions.

Stressing responsibilities over rights would also lead to a better account of the differences between affluent and poor countries. The ‘responsibilities to reduce emissions’ approach provides a better grounding for claiming that the rich owe the poor a share of the benefit that they have derived from the historical and present emissions for which the poor have not been responsible.

Overall, there is need for a paradigm shift within the discourse from a reactive to a proactive stance, from an individual and short-term focus on emission rights to one that focuses on responsibilities and incorporates a collective and intergenerational perspective.