Greenhouse Development Rights

A Proposal for a Fair Global Climate Treaty

Bibliographic Data

ID12596233
AuthorsPaul E Baer (Georgia Institute of Technology, corresponding author), Paul Baer (Georgia Institute of Technology), Tom Athanasiou (b EcoEquity , Albany, CA, USA), Sivan Kartha (0000-0002-6014-2161, c Stockholm Environment Institute , Boston, MA, USA), Eric Kemp-Benedict (0000-0001-5794-7172, c Stockholm Environment Institute , Boston, MA, USA)
Year2009
Volume12
Issue3
Pages267-281
Publication date2009-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEthics Place & Environment (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1366-879X • E-ISSN: 1469-6703
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13668790903195495
OpenAlexW2025634205
LanguageEN
Citations received26
References cited9

One of the core debates concerning equity in the response to the threat of anthropogenic climate change is how the responsibility to reduce greenhouse gas emissions should be allocated, or, correspondingly, how the right to emit greenhouse gases should be allocated. Two alternative approaches that have been widely promoted are, first, to assign obligations to the industrialized countries on the basis of both their ability to pay (wealth) and their responsibility for the majority of prior emissions, or, second, to assign emissions rights on a (possibly modified) equal per capita basis. Both these proposals ignore intra-national distributional equity. Instead, we develop a policy framework we call ‘Greenhouse Development Rights’ (GDRs) which allocates obligations to pay for climate policies (both mitigation and adaptation) on the basis of an individually quantified metric of capacity (ability to pay) and responsibility (prior emissions). Crucially, the GDRs framework looks at the distribution of income within countries and treats people of equal wealth similarly, whatever country they live in. Thus even poor countries have obligations proportional to the size and wealth of their middle and upper classes, defined relative to a ‘development threshold’. While this method nominally identifies the ‘right to development’ as applying to people, not countries, as a proposal for a treaty among sovereign nations, there is no obvious way to give legal meaning to that right. In this paper, then, we raise some of the philosophical and political questions that arise in trying to quantify capacity and responsibility and to use the ‘right to development’ as a principle for allocating costs.* *The ‘Greenhouse Development Rights’ (GDRs) framework is a collective project. The core team includes the author, Tom Athanasiou, Sivan Kartha and Eric Kemp-Benedict; this is the ‘we’ that appears where the text refers to the project, as in ‘we intended this’, and so on. This paper, however, is primarily the author's own product and, beyond the description of GDRs, my collaborators have not read or approved it; thus much of the writing and philosophical speculation uses the first person singular. And, while credit for useful work goes to all team members, the blame for philosophical sloppiness remains with the author

Business · Climate change · Climate change mitigation · Climate justice · Economics · Equity (law · Greenhouse gas · Per capita · Political science · Public economics · Sociology · Treaty · Climate Change and Geoengineering · Climate Change Policy and Economics · Law · Sustainable Development and Environmental Policy

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