Eike Düvel

Mitigating climate change requires staying within safe greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions levels. International climate treaties, such as the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2014 Paris Agreement, are intended to distribute emissions entitlements and mitigation burdens among different countries. But before we can decide how much countries are left to emit or which countries should reduce GHG emissions and by how much, we need to know who emitted how much. The most prominent carbon emissions accounting mechanisms are production-based (PBEA), and consumption-based emissions accounting (CBEA). PBEA assigns emissions based on the production of goods and services while CBEA assigns emissions based on the consumption of those goods and services. One way of deciding between emissions accounting mechanisms is based on fairness considerations. We call this ‘fair emissions accounting’. In this paper we present a common approach to fair emissions accounting (Common Approach) and argue that it is misguided. Instead, we offer our Moral Responsibility Approach as an alternative. We argue that the primary consideration for choosing an emissions accounting mechanism from a fairness perspective ought to be who ought to take moral responsibility for emissions. We provide some criteria for moral responsibility in the context of climate change and present a moderate defense of CBEA as the mechanism that, on balance, best meets these criteria.

Many of the problems currently facing our societies are long-term. Long-term problems are complex, often large-scale, and may require considerable planning and resources to avert undesirable outcomes in the (far) future. Consider issues such as climate change, nuclear waste disposal, and the sustainable management of ecosystems. The ability of a society to adequately address the most relevant problems depends on appropriate long-term governance, i.e., strategic, consistent, and coherent governance over an extended period of time. Serious obstacles are inherent in long-term governance. These include short election cycles, intergenerational trade-offs, and the uncertainties involved in long-term decision-making. Liberal democracies appear to encounter difficulties in providing adequate responses to pertinent long-term issues, such as climate change, due to the institutions’ current design, which primarily focuses on safeguarding the interests of the present generation. This paper introduces long-term governance as a distinct philosophical topic by defining it in relation to a novel perspective on long-term challenges. The paper defends an obligation to engage in long-term governance based on the basic rights of those who do not yet vote. This includes, in particular, an obligation to engage in research into long-term governance institutions.