[forthcoming] “Climate Change, Legitimacy, and the Limits of Political Obligation”
The Oxford Handbook of Political Obligation, ed. George Klosko, Oxford University Press
This chapter argues that climate change poses severe challenges for prevailing theories of political obligation, casting doubt on whether citizens (above all in the heaviest-polluting states) have a moral duty to obey the law.
"How to Confront No Ordinary Danger"
The Journal of Democracy, January 2025, Vol. 36, No. 1, pp. 151-161 [HTML/PDF]
This essay examines the debate over whether states can legitimately use emergency powers to address climate change. The author challenges Lazar and Wallace's arguments against climate authoritarianism, arguing that climate change constitutes a genuine emergency requiring urgent action. While rejecting both purely authoritarian approaches and the status quo of Western liberal democracy, the essay proposes a third way: empowering citizens through targeted activism and climate assemblies. This solution may paradoxically require both more democratic and more authoritarian elements. The author contends that current evidence does not support claims of democratic superiority in climate action, and suggests that radical but principled reform is necessary.
"Allocating the Burdens of Climate Action: Consumption-based Carbon Accounting and the Polluter-Pays Principle" [PDF/BOOK]
Transformative Climates and Accountable Governance, eds. Beth Edmondson and Stuart Gray, Palgrave MacMillan, 2018, pp. 157-194
Action must be taken to combat climate change. Yet, how the costs of climate action should be allocated among states remains a question. One popular answer—the polluter-pays principle (PPP)—stipulates that those responsible for causing the problem should pay to address it. While intuitively plausible, in recent years, the PPP has been subject to withering criticism. In this paper, I develop a new version of the PPP. Unlike most accounts, which focus on historical production-based emissions, mine allocates climate burdens in proportion to each state’s annual consumption-based emissions. This change in carbon accounting results in a fairer and more environmentally effective principle. Yet, the revised PPP is incomplete in one key respect: it cannot allocate burdens in the (distant) future, when climate change endures but consumption emissions are low. I therefore supplement it with an ability-to-pay principle. The end-result is a pluralist, bi-phasic account of climate justice that covers all the major climate burdens while remaining sensitive to states’ differing contributions and capacities.