Abstract
According to the Budget Approach proposed by the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU), allocating CO2 emission rights to countries on an equal per-capita basis would provide an ethically justified response to global climate change. In this paper, we will highlight four normative issues which beset the WBGU’s Budget Approach: (1) the approach’s core principle of distributive justice, the principle of equality, and its associated policy of emissions egalitarianism are much more complex than it initially appears; (2) the “official” rationale for determining the size of the budget should be modified in order to avoid implausible normative assumptions about the imposition of permissible intergenerational risks; (3) the approach heavily relies on trade-offs between justice and feasibility which should be stated more explicitly; and (4) part of the approach’s ethical appeal depends on policy instruments which are “detachable” from the approach’s core principle of distributive justice.
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Notes
The WBGU sees the budget approach draw on an even wider range of normative principles and considerations, including the principle of ability-to-pay and countries’ mitigation capacities (WBGU 2009, 22). Note that strictly speaking one cannot please all these widely differing principles, since taken together, they are inconsistent. However, this is an issue we will not address in this paper.
To be fair, the WBGUBA is supplemented with a scheme of financing adaptation, which at least partially takes into account that there are climate change duties beyond mitigation. We will return to this point in Section 5.
We are grateful to Christian Baatz for forcing us to make the argument in this paragraph clearer.
Note that strictly speaking, Meinshausen et al. specify probability ranges only; WBGU’s preferred 33 % risk of exceeding the 2 °C guardrail is just an “illustrative default case” of a probability range from 16 to 51 % (Meinshausen et al. 2009: 1161, Table 1). Moreover, the probability ranges would have been even larger, if the Bayesian priors were varied more systematically. We are indebted to Gregor Betz for pointing this out.
One might object that limiting the risk to 0.33 % is no longer possible (WBGU 2009: 24). Even if true, it would still remain questionable whether 33 % is the smallest possible risk which we can still achieve. This leads directly to the following discussion.
Moreover, outsourcing justice to other policy instruments may generate inconsistencies in the WBGUBA’s normative underpinnings. E.g. when discussing various possibilities of generating funds for the WCB, the WBGU (2009, 37) considers auctioning off permits, which would be withdrawn from the national budget of low emitting countries who will not use their budget up even under high growth scenarios. This does not fit well with the WBGU’s favoured interpretation of the principle of equality.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Christian Baatz, Gregor Betz and the editors of the special issue for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. The authors also would like to thank Mercator Stiftung Switzerland and the UFSP Ethik at the University of Zurich for financial support of research without which this paper would not have been possible.
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This article is part of a Special Issue on “Climate Justice in Interdisciplinary Research” edited by Christian Huggel, Markus Ohndorf, Dominic Roser, Ivo Wallimann-Helmer.
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Schuppert, F., Seidel, C. Equality, justice and feasibility: an ethical analysis of the WBGU’s budget approach. Climatic Change 133, 397–406 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-015-1409-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-015-1409-z