Climate Change Justice.

• Author: Farber, Daniel A.
• Position: Book review

CLIMATE CHANCE JUSTICE. By Eric A. Posner and David Weisbach. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2010. Pp. viii, 220. $27.95.

INTRODUCTION

Eric Posner and David Weisbach (1) take the threat of climate change seriously. Their book Climate Change Justice offers policy prescriptions that deserve serious attention. (2) While the authors adopt the framework of conventional welfare economics, they show a willingness to engage with noneconomic perspectives, which softens their conclusions. Although they are right to see a risk that overly aggressive ethical claims could derail international agreement on restricting greenhouse gases, their analysis makes climate justice too marginal to climate policy. (3) The developed world does have a special responsibility for the current climate problem, and we should be willing both to agree to more stringent restrictions on emissions to protect future generations and the global poor and to agree to assist poor nations with their own adaptation and mitigation measures.

Climate Change Justice has not had a friendly reception from the readers who care most about the topic. One review bears the pungent title How Not to Think About Climate Change Justice. (4) Another reviewer complains that "it is hard to see the justice in Posner and Weisbach's Climate Change Justice." (5) Yet another is disappointed by "such perfunctory and sweeping dismissals of existing climate justice work." (6)

This hostile reaction is understandable for reasons of style as well as substance. The book is briskly paced; it often brushes aside opposing viewpoints rather brusquely. It is written from a philosophical perspective (welfarism) that many reject. It also takes for granted the basic validity of a controversial economic approach to social policy that is based on cost-benefit analysis--an approach that holds, for example, that we ought to put a dollar value on human life. In short, the hostile reaction is no wonder.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to dismiss Climate Change Justice as just another Chicago School brief for cost-benefit analysis. The book is not simply a cookie-cutter example of conventional economic analysis. It makes some important pragmatic and ethical points that may surprise readers with a stereotyped view of Chicago-style law and economics. As the authors explain, their "argument is unusual" because they "favor a climate change agreement, especially because it would help poor people in poor nations" (and they also more generally "favor redistribution from the rich to the poor"), but they simultaneously "reject the claim that certain intuitive ideas about justice should play a major role in the design of a climate agreement" (p. 5). Climate justice advocates who view issues of equity as centrally important to climate policy are understandably negative in their view of the book.

Posner and Weisbach's rejection of these ethical arguments would seem to justify the hostile response of advocates of climate justice. But Posner and Weisbach are far from advocating that we should ignore the issue of climate change or the interests of the global poor and future generations. Posner and Weisbach have no hesitation in stating that "[c]limate change ranks among the most serious problems facing the world today" (p. 1), that it is "entirely beyond debate" that humans are causing significant climate change (p. 16), and that failure to reach an international agreement would "create exceedingly serious risks to human welfare, above all in poor nations." (7) Given the state of American political discourse, support for these points cannot simply be taken for granted.

Moreover, parts of Posner and Weisbach's position should be congenial to their critics. Posner and Weisbach agree with climate justice advocates that the "moral worth of individuals transcends spatial and temporal boundaries" (p. 169), and that "choosing projects solely through cost-benefit analysis with discounting can result in serious injustice to the future" (p. 159). They also go on record as "favoring a great deal of redistribution from rich people in rich nations to poor people in poor nations--far more redistribution, in fact, than is being seriously proposed today" (p. 190). Finally, Posner and Weisbach believe that it is unethical for nations to refuse to join a climate treaty because those nations would prefer to free ride, allowing other countries to make the necessary sacrifices to eliminate a threat to global well-being (p. 182).

Despite these areas of harmony between Climate Change Justice and the views of climate justice advocates, there is also a large gap between the two. Posner and Weisbach criticize claims that developed countries should have greater responsibility because of their wealth ("distributive justice") or because their past emissions have disproportionately contributed to climate change ("compensatory justice") (pp. 72, 100). They are also skeptical of the claim that climate regulations should be tightened because of our ethical duties to later generations (p. 145).

The next three sections of this Review critique Posner and Weisbach's analysis of key ethical issues. Part I assesses their analysis of wealth distribution issues. They favor strenuous efforts to improve the lot of poor countries, but are skeptical of pursuing this objective as part of a climate agreement. Part II then considers their analysis of compensatory justice (which they often call "corrective justice"). The two issues are closely related to the extent that rich nations have disproportionately contributed to climate change and the poorest nations are likely to be the greatest victims of climate change. Posner and Weisbach reject claims for compensation, partly because they are concerned about whether it is possible to identify victims and culpable actors with sufficient precision, but primarily because they reject the idea of collective national responsibility for wrongdoing. Part III considers another set of victims, the people of later generations. Posner and Weisbach admit that climate change could impose unjust harms on later generations, but they believe that the proper response is to provide compensation through increased savings and investment.

Whether the issue is distributive justice, compensatory justice, or the rights of future generations, Posner and Weisbach vigorously question the relevance of ethical claims as opposed to cost-benefit analysis in climate policy. In each situation, however, they also qualify their criticisms in important ways. This Review suggests that these qualifications may have more validity than the arguments themselves and that ethical claims are more relevant to climate policy than the authors suggest.

Finally, Part IV focuses on two dimensions of climate policy slighted by Posner and Weisbach: the high degree of uncertainty surrounding the impacts of climate change, which makes economic analysis problematic, and the closely connected possibility of local or global catastrophic outcomes. These factors weaken the usefulness of cost-benefit analysis in climate policy and correspondingly call for more weight to be placed on ethical factors.

This Review will focus on the ethical arguments advanced by Posner and Weisbach, but they also make an important pragmatic argument. They worry that aggressive pursuit of ethical issues could derail any possibility of a climate agreement. (8) Given the severity of the climate change problem, they are correct that "[i]t would be a cruel irony if the consequence of justice-related arguments were to doom the prospects for an international agreement--and thus to create exceedingly serious risks to human welfare, above all in poor nations" (p. 192). But this is not an argument against the validity of the ethical claims themselves, and it is particularly weak as a response to more nuanced, less extreme claims that would be less disruptive to negotiations. Moreover, refusing to take developing countries' ethical arguments seriously has the potential to derail negotiations.

1. CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE GLOBAL POOR

   Chapter Four of Climate Change Justice asks "whether rich nations have a special obligation to deal with climate change, not because they are principally responsible for the problem, but simply because they are rich" (p. 73). The authors hedge their answer to this question, saying "[t]o a great extent, these issues are and should be separate" (p. 73). "Other things being equal," they reason, "the more sensible kind of redistribution would be a cash transfer, so that poor nations can use the money as they see fit" (p. 78).

   It is important to be clear about the baseline for determining whether a redistribution has taken place. For Posner and Weisbach, the baseline is an optimal climate treaty, where "optimal" means the most efficient in terms of economic analysis. Because costs and benefits in such an analysis are assessed in economic terms, the interests of the poor are necessarily downgraded in designing such a treaty. Consider the issue of rising sea levels. The destruction of a Hollywood star's getaway beach house might translate into millions of dollars in the economic analysis, while the destruction of a Bangladeshi family's home might account for a fraction of one percent of that amount. The same is true of the value of human life: the deaths of many Bangladeshis might be considered equal to that of a single American because the American is wealthier and willing to pay much more to reduce risks. So Posner and Weisbach's baseline is one in which the interests of the poor count for little. Given this baseline, any move toward equal treatment of those interests constitutes redistribution, a form of in-kind foreign aid.

   Putting aside the question of whether this is a valid way to frame the question, Posner and Weisbach's argument against this form of "redistribution" is weak if not halfhearted, and in the end even they themselves do not seem persuaded by...