Emissions Rights and Environmental Justice

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Introduction

Climate change is one of the most important problems of our time. A critical aspect of this problem is determining who should bear its costs.In this respect, climate change is a problem of distributive justice.

My aim in this essay is to sketch a view about how to distribute the costs of climate change. This approach will consist of two claims: one analytical and the other normative. The analytical claim is that we should think about the atmosphere—specifically, its ability to absorb greenhouse gases—as a scarce natural resource that commands an economic rent. The normative claim is that we should use Georgist rather than Lockean principles to distribute this economic rent. John Locke held that the person who first improves a natural resource can claim ownership of the resource (Locke, 1689). Henry George, by contrast, held that improvers can only obtain an entitlement to the value of their improvement, but not to the additional value of the resource.

In his magnum opus, George wrote: “The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air—it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world and others no right” (George, 1879, book 7 chapter 1). Following George, I will argue that everyone has an equal right to use the atmosphere, and that this entails that rights to emit should be allocated on an egalitarian basis to everyone in the world.

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