Climate justice demands polluters to take responsibility for both present and future harm caused by past GHG emissions and for future harm caused by future GHG emissions. One problem with this is double climate taxation: people living in historical polluting countries must both shoulder the burden of an effective and inclusive climate transition and repay the climate debt incurred by their predecessors. Although double climate taxation might be defensible on normative grounds, it risks making climate justice politically infeasible. I therefore (...) maintain that global climate justice should focus on future, rather than past, climate harms. The forward-looking polluter pays principle (FL-PPP) can ensure both a cost-effective climate transition and a fair distribution of the climate burden, provided it is applied as follows: i) each country must introduce a carbon price calibrated to the global social cost of carbon; ii) each country must transfer part of carbon revenues collected at the country level to an international fund; iii) global carbon revenues must be redistributed on the basis of the country-level social cost of carbon. The FL-PPP burden can be made more progressive, moreover, if the formula for allocating global carbon revenues is adjusted through two coefficients, one consumption-based and one priority-sensitive. (shrink)

This paper focuses on one particular case that connects climate justice and climate economics. Its contribution is twofold. First, it aims at providing a sound normative foundation for carbon pricing mechanisms around the notions of a ‘right to energy’, the ‘duty not-to-harm’ and an argument for ‘restricted compensation’. Second, it identifies the normative elements from theories of climate justice that should guide the design of market-based instruments for climate change mitigation. This will cast light on the particular moral relevance of (...) the act of internalizing a negative externality and of the funds generated by putting a price on carbon. (shrink)