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As we saw in chapter 5, the problem of climate change is permeated with inequity. Neither responsibility for causing global warming nor vulnerability to its effects is distributed equally across space or time. With just 20 percent of the world’s population, the developed countries have contributed 80 percent of total accumulated greenhouse gases currently in the atmosphere.1 This is not surprising, since greenhouse gas emissions are generally correlated with consumption levels and wealth.The wealthy drive big cars, fly in airplanes, heat and cool large houses and offices, and generally consume large quantities of manufactured goods. Moreover, most of the increase in greenhouse gases that is driving climate disruption has occurred just since the mid-twentieth century.2 Indeed, fully half of the increase in atmospheric concentrations of CO2 since 1750 has occurred in the last three decades.3 Thus, it is the wealthy and powerful of present generations who are responsible for the vast bulk of the greenhouse gases currently accumulated in the atmosphere. Conversely, it is the poor and future generations—those with the least culpability in causing the problem—who will bear the brunt of its effects. As we have also seen, the tendency of U.S. policymakers to frame the climate change issue in the language and logic of welfare economics obscures this aspect of the problem while simultaneously exacerbating it. Yet, any just and workable solution must confront the question that economics ignores: how should the burdens of responding to climate change be distributed across the globe and across generations? These are questions of fairness and ethics, on which the efficiency principle offers no guidance. As we explore below, however, certain fundamental principles that are widely shared across cultures, religions, and ethical systems can provide guideposts for resolving these questions.4 If the United States is to regain credibility in international negotiations, we must recognize the 11 Toward Distributional Justice Amy Sinden and Carl Cranor 238 A. Sinden and C. Cranor limitations of the efficiency principle and instead take these principles of justice as our starting point in crafting a new climate change policy. In the following pages we discuss these principles and offer some ideas about what form a new climate change policy shaped by them might take. Our focus here is primarily on the costs of mitigation—efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases or increase sequestration of such gases in natural or human-made carbon sinks. Specifically, we consider what a just distribution of these costs might look like. (We leave the question of adaptation costs primarily to chapter 13.) Part I considers how the burdens of mitigation should be distributed within present generations , and part II considers how these burdens should be distributed between present and future generations. I. Equity within Present Generations There is now a broad international consensus that anthropogenic climate disruption is occurring and that global emissions of greenhouse gases must be reduced in order to mitigate its effects.5 We begin from that premise. Given that global emissions must be reduced, what is a fair distribution of the burden of emissions reduction among individuals or countries? One argument is that everyone around the world should reduce their emissions by the same percentage. This is effectively the position the United States took when it refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, asserting that the United States should not have to agree to binding emissions cuts until the developing world did the same.6 During the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush reiterated the same position: I’ll tell you one thing I’m not going to do is I’m not going to let the United States carry the burden for cleaning up the world’s air like the Kyoto treaty would have done. China and India were exempted from that treaty. I think we need to be more even handed.7 This is also the position of many economists, who advocate either a globally uniform emissions tax or an emissions trading program that allocates allowances on the basis of existing emissions.8 A globally uniform tax would induce roughly the same percentage of emissions reduction around the world, assuming that it cost polluters in different countries roughly the same amount to reduce emissions levels.9 If every country imposed a tax of $20 per ton of CO2, for example, we might expect that to result in emissions reductions of roughly 15 percent in [3.14.70.203] Project MUSE (2024-04-16 20:28...

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