Edward Page

Abstract This article focuses on the normative problem of establishing how the burdens associated with implementing policies designed to prevent, or manage, climate change should be shared amongst states involved in ongoing international climate change negotiations.

Abstract This article examines the question of whether international markets in allowances conferring the right to emit greenhouse gases are consistent with a cosmopolitan approach to global and intergenerational justice. After placing emissions trading within the context of both climate change policy and cosmopolitan political theory, three normative objections are examined to the use of emissions trading to mitigate the threat of dangerous climate change.

Global climate change raises profound questions for social and political theorists. The human impacts of climate change are sufficiently broad, and generally adverse, to threaten the rights and freedoms of existing and future members of all countries. These impacts will also exacerbate inequalities between rich and poor countries despite the limited role of the latter in their origins. Responding to these impacts will require the implementation of environmental and social policies that are both environmentally effective and consistent with the equality and liberty of populations to which they are applied. This article considers whether global emissions trading, namely, the creation of a global market for tradable allowances conferring the right to emit a certain amount of greenhouse gas over a specified time period, is normatively defensible from a liberal egalitarian perspective. After a brief review of the theory and practice of emissions trading, a number of normative objections to the international trade in emissions allowances are analysed. These objections appeal to one, or a combination, of two claims. First, emissions trading schemes are likely to produce undesirable outcomes, such as environmental neglect, in the further future. I call these ‘instrumental objections’. Second, emissions trading schemes violate non‐consequential norms of justice and fairness. I call these ‘intrinsic objections’. It is argued that, when combined, instrumental and intrinsic objections indicate that instituting a global network of emissions trading schemes, as envisioned by a number of parties to the Kyoto Protocol and Copenhagen Accord, would be illegitimate in absence of significant procedural and consequential safeguards.

There has been a strong convergence in recent years in the conceptual tools adopted by, and the analytical focus of, scholars of international security, international relations theory and normative political philosophy. One driver, and reflector, of this convergence has been the increasing salience of environmental problems such as declining species diversity; transboundary air pollution; resource depletion; and, above all, climate change.

Anthropogenic climate change, understood as the ongoing and complex pattern of changes in the composition of the earth's atmosphere arising from human activity, has in recent years prompted a re-thinking of the scope and content of justice. A consensus is emerging that a theory of obligation is required that takes seriously the special features, and global reach, of climate change (Singer 2002 17. Singer, P. 2002. One world, London: Yale University Press.

CURRENT ISSUES IN ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS Series Editors: Sylvie Faucheux, Professor of Economic Science and Martin O'Connor, Associate Professor of Economic Science, C3ED, Universite de Versailles-Saint Quentin en Yvelines, France, John Proops, Professor of Ecological Economics, School of Politics, International Relations and the Environment, Keele University, UK and Jan van der Straaten, Retired Senior Lecturer, Department of Leisure Studies, Tilburg University, The Netherlands The field of ecological economics has ...

In the post-Cold War era, the pre-eminent threats to our security derive from human degradation of vital ecosystems as well as the possibility of war and terrorist attack. This substantial book examines this new security-environment paradigm and the way in which the activities of societies are shifting the balance with nature. The distinguished authors investigate this redefinition of security with particular reference to environmental threats such as climate change and the availability of adequate supplies of food and water.