“Climate Change, Legitimacy, and the Limits of Political Obligation”
The Oxford Handbook of Political Obligation, ed. George Klosko, Oxford University Press, 2025, pp.308-321 [SITE]
Climate change is clearly a political problem but how is it a problem for political obligation? This chapter argues that if we accept: (i) the uncontroversial view that political legitimacy functions as a hard constraint on the moral duty to obey the law (such that no obligations are owed to illegitimate states); (ii) that legitimacy requires, at minimum, a capacity for and commitment to provisioning order, security, and justice; and (iii) the unequivocal empirical evidence that climate change is undermining (the very possibility of) order, security, and justice everywhere; then, it follows that climate change threatens the legitimacy of all states and thus the moral force and validity of whatever duties to obey citizens might be said to have. And this is true for any plausible theory of political obligation—i.e., whether one believes duties follow from consent, fair play, associative membership, or some other font. Understanding this helps to account for the increasing extent to which climate activism is moving beyond lawful protest to disobedience and rebellion. Should the climate crisis continue to erode political legitimacy and the moral authority of law, (justified) revolution may soon follow.
"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.