Invited contributions
[in preparation; due September 2024] “Political obligation and climate catastrophe”
The Oxford Handbook of Political Obligation, ed. George Klosko, Oxford University Press (under contract)
While still in the earliest stages of development, the aim of this chapter will be to examine the relationship between climate policy and political obligation. It will advance two key theses: (1) that citizens have a duty to comply with even demanding and unfair climate policies, so long as said policies are necessary for preventing or significantly limiting climate catastrophe; (2) states that fail to promulgate effective climate policy face a legitimacy crisis, which may weaken or wholly dissolve citizens' general moral obligations to obey the law.
"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, 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.