This is a surprising book. Its ostensible purpose is to analyze how climate change mitigation going forward can be informed by ethics and equity. Its conclusion, however, is that ethics and equity have virtually no role to play, and that any future agreement should be based on ‘International Paretianism’. This ‘principle’ essentially means that any agreement going forward must be perceived to be in every participating country's best interest and no country should have to suffer costs that its domestic politics cannot handle. International Paretianism, at best, thus is really a euphemism for pragmatism; at worst, it is a legitimization of the inequitable status quo because countries with large current greenhouse gas emissions will face the greatest costs in any move toward redressing these inequities. They will naturally resist cooperation informed by equity concerns, and International Paretianism would appear to bless this obstructionism. To accord legitimacy to the US to continue consuming energy at a rate which is more than twenty times that in India (in per capita terms) because that is the political reality and that asking the US to cut more would be infeasible seems an odd application of justice.

The book takes on three ethical principles that might guide the allocation of emissions rights (or emissions entitlements) between industrial and developing countries: distributive justice, retributive justice, and fairness. The value of the book, which is substantial despite its slant and conclusions, resides very much in the detailed discussion of these principles. As excellent legal scholars, the authors push the logic of the arguments underlying these principles in a manner that extracts clarity out of a thicket of confusing and conflicting considerations.

The book is clearly aimed at a developing country audience or at least readers that instinctively sympathize with the developing country view that the rich should do a lot more going forward than the poor. It has the virtue that such readers will be made uncomfortable with some of the positions they might hold or at least be forced to re-evaluate why they hold such positions. Ultimately, though, the book is unpersuasive, and is unlikely to win over hearts and minds in Beijing, Brasilia, or New Delhi. If anything, it will only reinforce the hardliners in the tropics.

How do the authors analyze the three ethical principles? The principle of distributive justice – that the rich should pay more for climate change than the poor – is problematic because, in the view of the authors, climate change cannot be an instrument for distributing wealth from rich to poor countries. Moreover, to the extent that redistribution is called for, it is better achieved through more direct forms of assistance, such as aid. Climate change is an inefficient instrument for achieving wealth redistribution, especially since the beneficiaries of climate change would be the future poor in low-income countries who are likely to be better off than the current poor. So, it is the current poor that should be targeted via foreign assistance today.

It is a bit extreme to claim that developing countries seek to use climate change negotiations as a generalized transfer scheme. Distributive justice on climate change can be applied more narrowly to the question of how mitigation burdens should be distributed: if cuts by rich and poor reduce income and welfare, it seems completely reasonable to say that reductions in income and welfare for the poor should count more because of diminishing marginal utility of income. Thus, mitigation burdens within climate change need to reflect capacity to pay, and to argue for such distributive justice is in no way equivalent to making climate change a wealth transfer mechanism.

Moreover, the authors consistently confuse efficiency with equity. For example, at the top of page 82, they say that it will often be cheaper to finance efficient new power plants in poor countries than to replace inefficient power plants in rich countries. They then invoke this fact to conclude in the next para that ‘it is hard to defend the idea that wealthy nations should reduce their emissions while poor nations should be permitted to continue their business as usual’. Now, it is true that abatement costs may well be cheaper in poor countries than in rich, but that has absolutely no bearing on the equity question of emissions entitlements or emissions rights. Once the latter is decided, hopefully on the basis of some ethical considerations, efficiency in global abatement will be achieved as long as emissions rights can be internationally traded.

On retributive justice, Posner and Weisbach (2010) mount a strong case. Applying this principle would normally require establishing an injurer who behaved in a ‘morally culpable’ way and establishing the identity of the injured or the victim. In the climate change context, this argument leads to the question of whether the perpetrator has to be an individual or a country. If only individuals can be responsible, then according to calculations from the Climate Analysis Indicator Tool (CAIT), only 8% of the stock of emissions in 2000 can be traced to the flow of emissions from individuals who are still alive and might be responsible for those emissions (Table 5.1 from the book). Vijay Joshi (Reference Joshi2009) of Oxford University pithily echoes the arguments of the authors: the notion of historic responsibility is: ‘a persuasive claim but it runs up against some powerful moral intuitions. The ACs (advanced countries) did not expropriate knowingly. They acted in the belief, universally held until quite recently, that the atmosphere was an infinite resource. Moreover, the expropriators are mostly dead and gone. Their descendants, even if they could be identified, cannot be held responsible for actions they did not themselves commit.’

Whether corrective justice requires establishment of culpability on the part of the perpetrator is still debated by philosophers. Dietz et al. (2007) note that:

Even on retributive justice, it is worth noting a tension in the authors' exposition. They consistently invoke feasibility to temper ethical claims. Typical is this sentence on page 96: ‘here as elsewhere, arguments from principles are likely to run into the practical realities of the state system’. But in their exposition of the principle of retributive justice, one of their key arguments for the non-applicability of this principle in a climate change context is that wrong-doing and blame are about individuals not states. So, the practical realities of the ‘state system’ are there to be invoked, but selectively.

The third ethical principle, namely fairness, leads to equal per capita emissions allocations across countries. The case that the authors mount against equal per capita emissions allocations is threefold. First, that it is not well targeted to the poor because population and incomes are not perfectly correlated. An equal per capita emissions allocation might favor some rich and populous countries and disfavor some poor and small countries. Second, repeating their discussion of the distributive justice principle, it is an inefficient way of redistributing wealth. Third, and most surprising of all, the authors reject the per capita approach because it will be costly for some rich countries. Consider what they have to say on this:

In some ways, this quote illustrates the problem with the whole book: climate change cannot be the basis for redistribution because it is an inefficient means of wealth transfer, so more direct means should be considered. But hey, it is not feasible to ask for such transfers because rich countries have shown a revealed preference for not effecting such transfers (evidenced in modest levels of foreign aid). Futhermore, any allocation of emissions rights that will require rich countries to reduce their level of emissions to that in poor countries is infeasible. But, of course, poor nations should make emissions reductions starting from the low levels that rich countries would not remotely contemplate approaching. And if they do not, they are unethical free-riders.

So, ironically, the strongest condemnation in this book is reserved not for a country like the United States that consumes more than 20 times as much energy as poorer nations, that has consistently increased emissions even after the international community agreed in spirit that emissions reductions by the rich are desirable, and that is unable to initiate domestic legislative action to reduce emissions that would pass political muster because of the stranglehold of an influential fringe that denies the science of climate change. Rather, the strong condemnation is reserved for those, who are free-riding, because they are unwilling to reduce emissions that would have the effect of denying large parts of their population the rudiments of modernity such as access to basic energy and transportation needs.

It seems as if the authors' starting point is to legitimize the American position on climate change and their lack of objectivity is betrayed by remarks of the following sort peppered throughout the book:

In sum, it is hard to see the justice in Posner and Weisbach's Climate Change Justice.