Subsistence Emissions and Luxury Emissions

Abstract

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change adopted in Rio de Janeiro at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in June 1992 establishes no dates and no dollars. No dates are specified by which emissions are to be reduced by the wealthy states, and no dollars are specified with which the wealthy states will assist the poor states to avoid an environmentally dirty development like our own. The convention is toothless because throughout the negotiations in the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee during 1991 to 1992, the United States played the role of dentist: whenever virtually all the other states in the world (with the notable exceptions of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) agreed to convention language with teeth, the United States insisted that the teeth be pulled out. The Clinton administration now faces a strategic question: should the next step aim at a comprehensive treaty covering all greenhouse gases (GHGs) or at a narrower protocol covering only one, or a few, gases, for example, only fossil-fuel carbon dioxide (CO2)? Richard Stewart and Jonathan Wiener (1992) have argued for moving directly to a comprehensive treaty, while Thomas Drennen (1993) has argued for a more focused beginning. I will suggest that Drennen is essentially correct that we should not try to go straight to a comprehensive treaty, at least not of the kind advocated by Stewart and Wiener. First I would like to develop a framework into which to set issues of equity or justice of the kind introduced by Drennen. It would be easier if we faced only one question about justice, but several questions are not only unavoidable individually but are entangled with one another. In addition, each question can be given not simply alternative answers but answers of different kinds. In spite of this multiplicity of possible answers to the multiplicity of inevitable and interconnected questions, I think we can lay out the issues fairly clearly and establish that commonsense principles converge to a remarkable extent upon what ought to be done, at least for the next decade or so.

Can Growth Be Green?

“…Third, as Henry Shue has argued, there is a normative distinction to be made between basic and luxury emissions: “It is not equitable to ask some people to surrender necessities so that other people can retain luxuries…The costs ought to be partitioned.” 27 This argument was mainly advanced at the global level, but it can also be applied within countries. To have purchase on policymaking, it requires a rigorous normative distinction between necessities and luxuries.…”

How legitimate expectations matter in climate justice

“…Now, because of what we above called the ubiquity of emissions, they are a necessary by-product of many activities required for individuals to be able to live lives such that their basic rights are not violated. Consequently, in order to be consistent with the reasons given for the necessity of the cap, it is necessary for Phi to hold that all other members of Shi must be permitted to emit at least as much as is necessary for the protection of their basic rights; to use a famous term, we can say that all members of Shi must be permitted subsistence emissions (Shue, 1993). This further helps limit and determine the range at the individual level of expectations of future personal emissions, because those expectations have to be such that they are consistent with a distribution of the overall cap of Shi such that each member of Shi is guaranteed subsistence emissions.…”

Multiple crises and global health: New and necessary frontiers of health politics

“…Supplying it adequately will involve nothing less than converting the world economy to low-carbon energy over just a few decades, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% or more in order to stabilise global temperatures and simultaneously supplying the urgent energy service needs of, most conspicuously, ‘2.4 billion people who rely on biomass for cooking and heating and 1.5 billion people who have no access to electricity’ ( Costello et al 2009 , p. 1706). This will require reaching agreement on carbon taxes or similar pricing mechanisms, while somehow recognising a distinction between survival or subsistence and luxury emissions ( Shue 1993 , Costello et al 2009 , p. 1694) – likely to prove highly contentious even within national borders – and mobilising an estimated US$10 trillion of investment in low-carbon energy sources. Costello et al (2011 , p. 1872) point out that much of this cost might be offset by savings in fossil fuel costs and, correctly, that ‘[t]he net balance of US$1.4 trillion is less than half the [value of the] global bail-out’ of financial firms.…”