There is no fair way of distributing carbon emission rights

The conventional accounts of a just distribution of emission rights not only fail to account for issues of intergenerational fairness and gender distributive effects, but also assume that there is a distributive principle for everything. There cannot be a just distribution of emission rights because emission rights entail a right to pollute, which runs contrary to issues of human rights and global justice.

The idea of distributing emission rights derives from the necessity to limit (and reduce) emissions of greenhouse gases as a key step to tackle climate change. Theorists have proposed many different distributive criteria, the most salient being grandfathering, equality and historical responsibility.

The principle of grandfathering argues that the fair share of emission for any actor should be a function of its past share of emissions, and thus everyone should make proportionate cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions. Although this principle has been defended for promoting efficiency, it is insensitive to people’s needs and would lock members of developing countries into a permanent state of poverty and underdevelopment. By subsidising polluters, grandfathering reduces the rate of technological improvement toward less polluting technologies, as firms have an incentive to maintaining current levels of emissions.

Moreover, grandfathering runs contrary to the principle of historical responsibility by remunerating people for the behaviour that has caused environmental degradation and climate change. Unless emission rights were to be paid for, one fails to see how the principle of grandfathering can be a just one, even if being a ‘necessary first step’ in order to move to a fairer distribution of emission rights.

A second principle for the distribution of emission rights is that of equality. Equality has been generally defended on the basis that all persons have a right to emit an equal amount of greenhouse gases. This principle however fails to acknowledge that people have different needs (think of colder climates) and goals. It also overlooks that people have differential access to acceptable non-fossil-fuel sources.

As the grandfathering principle, it ignores the historical record of polluters, and some theorists see it as a starting point rather than a final principle. There are some interesting variants to this principle such as the ‘contraction and convergence’, principle which assumes a transition period before reaching full equality between affluent and poorer countries. This variant however does not deal with the issues mentioned above, mainly that distributing one particular resource equally may leave people unequal in their ability to pursue various goals.

Another variant of the equality principle worth mentioning is Vanderheiden’s ‘modified equal shares’ model, derived from the ideas of Henry Shue. In his model, Vanderheiden distinguishes between subsistence and luxury emissions. However, this account fails to see that emission are just a means to an end and unproblematically takes emissions rights as a given.

A third principle that has been highly controversial is that of historical responsibility. This principle claims that an appropriate and just distribution of greenhouse gas emissions should reflect the historical fact that industrialised countries have been emitting greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution, and thus the distribution of emission rights should give preference to developing countries that have not enjoyed the same benefits as affluent countries.

The strongest criticism of this argument is that it assumes an antecedently defined ‘fair share’ of carbon emissions, requiring a further principle to specify what a fair share of emissions would have been in the past. It also requires us to identify who the actor is and who was/is responsible for the emissions.

None of these principles are convincing enough as a fair distributive model. They all fail to acknowledge that what is fair is a pervasively intergenerational issue. Although both grandfathering and the historical responsibility principles look at the past to determine the ‘just’ distribution of emission rights, none of them takes into consideration the future generations. If we agree with Shue that the distribution of emission rights is a zero-sum game, taking into consideration the emission rights of future generation is necessary.

Additionally, none of these principles acknowledged how different groups of people may have different needs and may be differently affected. Lena Bendlin has eloquently argued that distributive effects are likely to be gendered, as socially constructed gender roles give rise to different tasks and identities. The aforementioned principles thus seem an insufficient account of distributive justice for carbon emission rights.

There is not a distributive principle for everything, and we do not generally apply distributive principles to all scarce resources. The emission of greenhouse gases does not have value in itself, and thus distributive justice requires the fair distribution of a combined set of good. Whether these ‘goods’ are energy in general as Simon Caney has suggested, or ecological space, as proposed by Tim Hayward, is not the concern of this piece, but taking emission rights on their own assumes an atomist principle difficult to stand by.