The latest issue of the journal Ethics, Place & Environment is now out. I co-edit the journal with Andrew Light, and just took on responsibilities as co-editor over the summer. One ambitious thing we’re doing is inaugurating a new format for our environmental ethics articles, partly modeled off of the American Journal of Bioethics. Namely, every issue will have at least one “target article” that proposes a controversial position in environmental ethics. We will then invite open peer commentaries on that article from scholars across the spectrum.
For the next few days, I’ll release information in dribs and drabs about the responses of commentators.
Our target article for volume 12, issue 3 is on “Greenhouse Development Rights.” It was written by Paul Baer in the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech, in collaboration with his colleagues Tom Athanasiou, Sivan Kartha, and Eric Kemp-Benedict. We have open peer commentaries from a host of scholars — David Schlosberg, Marion Hourdequin, Jozef Keulartz, Steve Vanderheiden, Kenneth Shockley, Walter Block, and William Vanderburgh. University-based readers with library subscriptions to the journal may be interested in reading the full exchange.
Here’s the abstract to the Baer piece:
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.
Cruel Mistress 