Fairness in Emissions Accounting: a Moral Responsibility Approach

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. ... mehrWe 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.