Book contents
- Climate Justice and Historical Emissions
- Climate Justice and Historical Emissions
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Climate Ethics, Affirmative Action, and Unjust Enrichment
- 2 Historical Responsibility and Climate Change
- 3 Historical Emissions
- 4 How Legal Systems Deal with Issues of Responsibility for Past Harmful Behavior
- 5 Asking Beneficiaries to Pay for Past Pollution
- 6 Benefiting from Unjust Acts and Benefiting from Injustice
- 7 A Luck-Based Moral Defense of Grandfathering
- 8 In Defense of Emissions Egalitarianism?
- 9 In the Name of Political Possibility
- 10 Right to Development and Historical Emissions
- Index
- References
9 - In the Name of Political Possibility
A New Proposal for Thinking About the Role and Relevance of Historical Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 February 2017
Book contents
- Climate Justice and Historical Emissions
- Climate Justice and Historical Emissions
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Climate Ethics, Affirmative Action, and Unjust Enrichment
- 2 Historical Responsibility and Climate Change
- 3 Historical Emissions
- 4 How Legal Systems Deal with Issues of Responsibility for Past Harmful Behavior
- 5 Asking Beneficiaries to Pay for Past Pollution
- 6 Benefiting from Unjust Acts and Benefiting from Injustice
- 7 A Luck-Based Moral Defense of Grandfathering
- 8 In Defense of Emissions Egalitarianism?
- 9 In the Name of Political Possibility
- 10 Right to Development and Historical Emissions
- Index
- References
Summary
Global climate change (GCC) is a complex political and moral phenomenon, as concerns of international justice, intra-national justice, and intergenerational all need to be identified and addressed. Central to these concerns is determining to what extent a nation’s historical contribution to GCC should inform its obligations going forward; this is the question that I will focus on in this essay. I begin by detailing some of the arguments that arise on the policy front when policymakers negotiate over the importance of historical contributions to GCC, and I show that there is a notable gap between what political philosophers talk about and what is presently possible to bring about through negotiations. Given this context, I propose that what is needed is a morally defensible solution that is informed by the virtue of political feasibility. I show that a proposal that allocates partial responsibility to historical emitters is very likely feasible and reflects some important moral values in ways that other options fail to do. As such, I argue that the partial responsibility proposals are the ones that policymakers and philosophers should pursue going forward.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Climate Justice and Historical Emissions , pp. 198 - 218Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2017
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