What’s ‘Fair’ When It Comes to Carbon Emissions?

That Climate Change is a crisis, no question about it. That the rich industrialized countries are the main culprits, as their carbon consumption exceeds that of poorer countries, is a fact. That no one is 'doing' enough to protect the environment from us humans is obvious. As to why we remain hipnotized into ignoring the warnings is pure idiocy. For now, we seem to think the solution belongs to someone else...while we remain complacent in this warming planet....until we are cooked. Remember when Einstein was asked whether the universe was unlimited in space...or not? His answer: 'about the universe, I do not know; the only thing I am certain of is that human stupidity has no limits'. Yes, he meant us!

Here is the reality: Homo sapiens extinction is under way. By the turn of the century, irreversible tipping points in the Arctic and elsewhere will have begun. www.InquiryAbraham.com

FAIRNESS? How fair is it that carbon pollution has killed and sickened so many people? How fair is it that carbon has polluted and killed so many organisms in the global environment? You can put a price on cleanup. But the cost of the death and destruction already caused is in the trillions and counting!

Don’t forget to add fast fashion to this equation. Inditex is destroying the world! (As I wrote this in my Zara sweater, ironic, I know.) Take a look at research surrounding the environmental toll of producing clothing for the market of disposable, rotating carousel of clothing items worn once and then thrown away. Instagram is cashing in on this mentality by turning it into a shopping platform. Remember the pioneer women with one or two work dresses and a Sunday best? Those were the days.

If Americans produce 17 tons each of CO2, that's 5.4 gigatons annually. If half of the world, roughly 4 billion, is underdeveloped and produces 2 tons per person, that's 8 gigatons. If the underdeveloped half rises to European levels at half our rate, 8.5 tons, that's 34 gigatons, and increase of 24 gigatons. That means the global load will increase by a factor of nearly 5 times what the US is producing now. That's game over. We are toast, literally. Current levels are cooking the planet. If the underdeveloped population reaches half of our levels, America could disappear and global production would increase by nearly four times our rate. That's how serious the problem really is. Some of the highest density and poorest populations live in low lying areas like southeast and south central Asia. Their lands will be flooded out and they won't have any place to grow crops. Infact, coastal regions generally contain a much higher population density than interior areas, worldwide. Coastal populations eat a lot of fish and the oceans are being depleted as the water heats up and marine life dies off. But we can't do anything about it because of stock prices and profits. How do you have economic prosperity if billions can't find anything to eat nor a place to live? What you have is war.

You can't deal with fairness without looking at the cumulative emissions, we are in this fix because of all the carbon emitted to get us to where we are now. That has OVERWHELMINGLY been done by Americans and Europeans.

The basic problem is overpopulation - Too many people using too many resources to produce too mush stuff, waste and pollutants.

This article does not remotely address the question. First, it does not even provide the reader with any philosophy for defining fair. For example, a Rawlsian might say: after time period x, everyone gets the same amount of carbon emissions over their lifetime. A utilitarian might say: what would a particular carbon emissions allocation system do to overall economic well-being? Answering these question is difficult, but at least we would have a framework for discussion. Second, there is the issue of prior emissions. Again, there is a whole jurisprudence literature to look at. Yes, the US is responsible for prior emissions. But basic jurisprudence begins with "no crime, then no punishment", so the issue becomes: at what point do we think emissions became "criminal"? On a critical question dogging all international negotiations about climate change, this opinion piece is just too weak.

Tell me anything that's fair in this world. If you haven't noticed Australia has a population of 25 million in a nation the size of Continental US. It's big. It's sparse. Our biggest exports are coal, iron ore, some services and food. Sure we could clobber the lot and live like Indians. Maybe the US could let in 500 million indians just to reduce the average car ownership. What is the point of this article, do you actually have solutions that the people of the US and Australia will accept? I'm doubtful of your emission rates re Europe. They have nuclear we're aren't allowed it by the environmentalists. They have hydro, we have a bit, but most of the country doesn't have the water. Europe also counts biomass as a renewable, that is it burns wood chips to generate power. Germany is also reliant on gas from Russia. Natural gas burns without CO2 emissions, yet over 20% is CO2 at the production stage - in Russia, not Germany. Thing is geo-politics won't solve climate change no matter how hard you dream.

"Is that fair?" Actually, what's not fair is that billions of people in India, Africa and other places have to swelter throughout the summer because they have inadequate electricity to allow them to have one single room air conditioner in their homes. But their governments are working on that. And the quickest way to solve the problem is by building filthy coal power plants, often with the assistance of the Chinese.

"Or that, while emissions in the United States have decreased, they have done so at a rate slower than for many peer nations in Europe." A notable exception is Germany, which killed off its nuclear plants and is now more reliant on coal than it has been in decades. And the American Left also wants to kill off our nuclear power plants. Interesting.

Interesting discussion of a crucial question, "What does “fair” mean in the case of greenhouse gas emissions?" My thought is that when one considers the SCALE of finding economic replacements for fossil fuels, it is probably the greatest challenge that humankind has ever confronted. My late colleague, Dr. James Powell and I have considered this question for nearly 50 years and we concluded that market competitive technologies would need to be developed to replace fossil energy. The new technologies need to be cheap enough for the market to do its work. Developing very cheap electricity sources such as Maglev launched (less than 1% of chemical rockets) photoelectric arrays to collect energy 24/7, convert to low energy microwaves and then beaming to receiving antennae fields on Earth for conversion to grid distributed electricity are projected to cost about 2 cents per kilowatt-hour. With very cheap electricity it would be possible to make jet fuel from air and water, cheaply desalinate water, power our surface logistics and charge our electric passenger vehicles and power drills for geothermal wells, make very cheap solar cells, communications etc, etc. Powell and I believe this must be an international effort, funded so that all Nations share in the development cost. A system of about 2,500 space satellites in geosynchronous orbit (fixed) could provide very cheap electricity to virtually the entire population of the Earth. There is much work and we should start.

No, it is not fair. Globally, each and every one of is in the 1%. We need to start thinking of ourselves in that context, and act accordingly.

Last March, the furnace where I lived broke and I couldn't afford to fix it. The house was uncomfortable at 50F, bearable at 55F, and surprisingly comfortable at 64F. (I did fix it in mid-July, when the house was 90F even at midnight, bc most of its windows were built not to open, and none had a sill that could support a box fan -- couldn't breathe.) Now I live elsewhere, and I keep the heat at 60F overnight and 64F during the day (I work from home). I've also committed to giving up AC despite living in a mid-Atlantic state with hot, humid summers. (Couldn't afford it for most of my adult life anyway.) Are we or are we not willing to modify how we live? Are we willing to stop talking about "sacrifices" and instead acknowledge that we've been living with unearned, and costly-to-the-planet, luxuries for far too long? Are we willing to acknowledge that some of these changes are really not that big a deal -- or are we such spoiled infants that we won't subject ourselves to a fraction of the discomfort that was typical for humans for millennia?

I looked at the recent NYTimes article on how different air compares to each other city's pollution levels. My city is almost as bad as San Francisco and worse than New York. One more reason to get an electric bike. I've got health issues so it has to be electric. I wish there were more bike paths and bike lanes where I live. I'd use them. I wish it were safer to ride a bike. We've got to overhaul our entire infrastructure. Make public transportation more accessible, even free. Make trains the better option than flying. Make biking and walking feasible alternatives.

Most Americans think dealing with climate change means getting those evil oil billionaires to stop clubbing baby seals and cutting down the Amazon. It's about "the environment," about black-and-white heroes and villains, about things that happen somewhere else. It's not about us and what we do day to day. But it is about us. It's easy to nod when people say "drive and fly much less" - it's much harder to give up your car when you live 45 minutes from your job, or to tell your family on the other coast that you won't be visiting anymore. It's easy to recycle, and to ignore the fact that most of what goes in the blue bin gets sent to China and thrown away - it's nearly impossible to buy food or any daily necessities that don't involve single-use plastic. It's easy to go to a farm-to-table restaurant - it's extremely difficult to actually commit to not eating out-of-season food shipped in from Chile when you just need groceries to get dinner on the table. Confronting climate change at all - and especially doing so "fairly" - will require the average American to take steps that will feel like drastically lowering our standard of living. It will require giving up things the vast majority of environmentalists have not begun to conceive of going without. That's why there are no real political plans for action, why every developed country keeps blowing past their emissions reduction commitments, and why in all likelihood we will burn ourselves up before solving the problem.

Fairness means you pay for what you pollute. That is what a carbon fee does. People make choices about energy, and they pay more if those choices pollute more. That is unequivocally fair. There are 15 carbon pricing bills in the House. Pick one and start calling and emailing.

I hate to be the one to point this out, but the goal of "...greenhouse gas emissions" at "zero, before 2050..." is completely unrealistic. A fools's errand. The tremendous amount of effort, from the experts and scientists as well as their more vocal fans, has so far produced mostly anxiety. Even the scant results we've seen in the post-industrial nations are not likely to be repeated in the parts of the world where all our stuff gets made. The authors and their fellow advocate/scientists have the public's attention. Perhaps it would be more helpful to advocate for ways to mitigate the damages they expect.

I have eliminated 80% of my driving miles because I now work from home full time. This isn’t practical for everyone, however. The government should provide incentives to develop new technologies or improve existing technology.

Too much debate on climate change is driven by scientists who fail to see the economic drivers that will make or break any attempt to change the curve on carbon emissions. They make it seem like carbon build up is simply an ethical issue (if you were a "good person" you'd stop driving and flying). Eliminating cars and planes would certainly help, but is that realistic? We need fewer scientists and more economists to devise incentives to de-carbonize the economy. All this scolding is counter productive.

Natural gas may have helped to reduce carbon dioxide in the U.S. in the last few years. However, much of that natural gas came from fracking, which releases enormous quantities of methane during production and distribution. Methane is roughly 30 times more potent in its ability as a heat-trapping gas. A fact that is conveniently omitted when BigOil advertises natural gas as a “clean fuel”. The other major toxin from fracking, among others? Benzene.

I applaud the author for mentioning car ownership and flying, which are big sources of emissions and should be avoided. On the other hand, driving those cars is less of an issue than most people believe and fuel efficiency standards might have very little net effect now that cars are already reasonably efficient - they will at some point make cars less durable. We need to remember that, very roughly, half the emissions from a typical driver's car comes from manufacturing the car. If newer tech like CVTs and cylinder shut off technology reduce the service life of a car by wearing out the transmission or engine, they may be doing more harm than good - and if they are not, they are saving very little in the grand scheme of things. CVTs might be perfectly fine for small cars with small engines because they are stressed less in such applications (such as the Corolla with a 1.8 liter engine). In heavier cars or cars with more powerful engines, we may find that they do not last as long as the rest of the car. If they fail after several years, a car that might otherwise have lasted two decades will be scrapped and the energy to manufacture a new car will be expended to replace it. The "green" thing to do is engineer your life so you do not need a car, and if this is not possible, drive as little as possible and keep your car as long as possible. Do this and your MPG rating make little difference. Oh, and if you must drive a lot on a highway, get a car and not a wind-blocking SUV!

Sorry Western (and modern Human) civilisation. Libertarian Conservatism and Neo-liberalism killed the moral and intellectual authority of the Anglosphere.

"Lets wait and see" seems to be the response of most Americans and Australians, as if they were trying on new clothes at the Mall. And if they didn't like what they saw, they would just put them back on the rack and not pay for them. Listen, folks: you try on these clothes and it doesn't really matter if you like what you see or not, because they are never coming off again. And you'll pay for them regardless of whether you like them or not. And the longer you stay in this store, the more clothes will pile on top of you and the more you'll pay, until you're suffocated and broke. We should all be looking for the exit right now, but we keep getting told that, as in the Mall, if you don't like it you can return it. Folks: this is the Mall from Hell.

Sadly, but nonetheless telling is this simple fact screamed at the world by climate activists: There is no Planet B

I told Grammy the other day she should start riding one of them scooters you find on the street if she wants to go to the grocery store. They keep the roads plowed in the winter.

Technology advances are coming in the next few years. Those that are aggressive with development and deployment of those techs will win the future. Those that fight it will be tomorrow’s poor.

Fairness is inherent in a climate-action bill, H.R. 763, the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act. The bill’s essentials are a tax on fossil fuels and the distribution of the proceeds to Americans equally in monthly dividends. Economic modeling predicts that greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced by nearly 40% in 10 years, and reductions would increase with annual increases in the tax rate. How is this fair? (1) Economic modeling predicts that for low- and middle-income families, the dividends would more than offset the rise in their cost of living. (2) Cutting back the production and burning of fossil fuels would avert hundreds of thousands of premature deaths caused by air pollution, especially among low-income citizens who tend to reside near sources of that pollution.

The solution is carbon capture, i.e., the capture of CO2 and chemical reduction using clean, abundant, affordable energy, to convert the CO2 to liquid fuel. This is what we have to strive for.

We all live on the same planet, and facing a possible civilization ending crisis like climate change, fairness is irrelevant. What matters is swift and decisive action. Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, we as a species are utterly incapable of making even the most trivial short term sacrifice for the common good. So nothing will be done, except for a few token and inadequate gestures. We are doomed.

Fairness is one of the lurking issues (maybe now not so much) preventing us from making any decent progress in addressing climate change. Among other things, we see how any hard-gained agreement at the U.N. can fall apart. As if the other barriers aren’t enough, this one by itself would likely prevent the huge progress we really need. And this article doesn’t even mention the climate refugees or “retreat” issues. No one really knows the solutions. This article gives one view about fairness—one I’m personally OK with, but those who don’t buy it are not going away. We’ll need a fairness argument that persuades them. (This is one of the reasons I’ve argued at college forums we need to stop implying to students that “Addressing climate change is simple.” No it’s not!) Pointing out the Administration’s argument doesn’t make sense as the Paris Agreement allows countries to set their own goals, won’t work.) So we need to develop a more sophisticated approach to it. While long shots, to start us off: Apply classical (and maybe current) ethical theories to this problem, using teams of sustainability and philosophy professors and students, and see where this takes us. Practice a higher level of often-espoused systems thinking to help already-climate change concerned, developed country citizens better identify with poorer countries already suffering from it. Now that climate change is (finally!) getting mainstream attention, make a more rigorous view of fairness part of the discussion.

Of course, you can TALK about fairness, but this pales in comparison to the urgency to act in the face of global warming which scientists like the authors claim (with good reason) may lead to the extinction of humans. As the tropics heat up, deaths will soar, streams of refugees will try to enter the US and Europe. There will be continued fights over "fairness", and politics will become fragmented. the rise of Urban in Hungary and Duda in Poland are a harbinger. As conditions become desperate democracies may be replaced by autocratic governments. Resource wars may become common. The ultimate cause of global warming is population growth. While conservatives often deny global warming itself, liberals often regard even discussion of its cause as "racist." Paul Ehrlich tried to warn us in 1968. The book Limits to Growth by Meadows et al in 1972 repeated the warning. If you want to blame Americans, you should look in the mirror and realize that we all held these pioneers up as crackpots and fools because we didn't want to hear the message! Biologist Garrett Hardin wrote an essay, "the tragedy of the commons" which appeared in Nature in 1968. Not only did liberals not listen, but Hardin has been characterized as a purveyor of hate speech by the Southern Poverty Law Center! It is NOT racist to provide the poor of the world with access to family planning. By ignoring overpopulation we doom Africa to a destruction of native cultures and brutish lives in crowded slums.

The individual solution to climate change is to make enough money to afford to live in one of the areas that will still be livable -- not flooded or baked or burned over or underwater. This money may be made in ways that make climate change worse, but what is relevant to the individual is how much he or she makes, not whether making it adds a smidgeon to climate change. From the individual viewpoint, Republican policies on climate change make perfect sense and are the only non-socialist, non-collectivist responses. Winners win and losers lose, and, as Thatcher said, there is no such thing as society. Fairness is for losers; it is how losers keep winners down. We finally elected a president who knows and lives this.

These authors have validated the old saying on statistics. In effect, the numbers can be massaged so that just about any outcome is supported. The reality is that the US and Australia ARE DEVELOPED COUNTRIES. Our collective per unit use of energy IS HIGHER than for those who live in the less developed countries and our collective per unit use of energy will continue to be higher than in these other countries for the foreseeable future. The solution is NOT to reduce our energy consumption to the levels of these other countries (due to the catastrophic impact on our respective economies), but to transition to less carbon rich energy sources for cooling, heating, and transportation applications.

I wrote an earlier comment. But realized that I may not have adequately explained the point I was making. When biologists warned about population growth in 1968 (Ehrlich) and 1972 (Meadows et al, Limits to Growth), they were putting forth an essentially mathematical argument. They looked at the implications of exponential growth in nature and realized that it always came to an end. Growth of fish in a pond ultimately stops when the population reaches the carrying capacity of the pond. Similarly, growth of people on planet earth would have to stop when the population reached carrying capacity. What they were less sure of was what limited the carrying capacity of the earth. Perhaps it was food. Or running out of oil. Limits to Growth emphasized destruction of the environment as one possibility. It also raised the disturbing possibility of "overshoot and collapse," in which population would temporarily exceed carrying capacity following which would be a die off as populations fell to a lower sustainable level. We now have an understanding of climate change, which provides us with an explanation of WHAT will limit world population growth. The planet will heat up and parts of the tropics and subtropics may become uninhabitable. If we found a technological fix and cooled the planet, but allowed population growth to continue, we would simply encounter a new constraint that would limit growth. That's why stopping population growth is essential to fight climate change.

One of my children and I calculated our annual household CO2 production from direct consumption of fuel - gasoline, electricity, and natural gas. We averaged 1.8 tons of CO2 per household member in direct usage. Very low by US standards. What we can't control, though, is the approximately 8.5 tons of CO2 per person that is a structural baseline for the country. Add that to our 1.8 and we are at 10.3 tons annually per household member. The 8.5 is going to require structural, national level change and reorganization of the economy, defense, etc.

Deaths from pollution don't come from carbon dioxide, which is harmless. They are unrelated to mileage standards. They come from particulates, oxides of nitrogen, ozone and carbon monoxide. These can be reduced (and have been) by exhaust controls on engines and smokestack scrubbers.

Fair is giving the other seven billion the same chance that Americans have. Air conditioning, safe, thus solid, cars, air travel.

I don't know the answer, and I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that there is no answer, no solution, to climate change. Proposals listed include less driving and less flying. So they don't want people to travel? Sorry, but I'm not giving up my yearly road-trips and plane trips to see friends, and of course I have to drive to work every day because I don't live in a city. Until they make electric cars that don't take an hour+ to recharge, they simply won't work for people like me who enjoy long road-trips across the country. Every person, IMO, should take a long road-trip every year to see how different Americans eat, live, and love. Oh, and hands off my steak!!! I like my life. I'm not willing to change and become a vegetarian hermit. Sorry. I'd rather enjoy what I can for a short time rather than live a long, but boring and uneventful life. Until you can convince people like me to vote against our own self-interests, this problem will not be solved. (Hence, it will not be solved).

“Fair” is a human value. Human values are irrelevant to nature. Only cause-and-effect apply. The authors are reluctant to state the logical conclusion to their argument: If we’re to avoid the worst of climate change, then not only will the U.S. and Australia have to drastically cut back on their fossil fuel consumption, but places like China and India will never be able to have the freedom to drive and fly that Americans and Australians have enjoyed up to now. Yes it’s unfair. But if people really are serious about stopping climate change, it’s an inescapable conclusion—and a reminder that combating climate change won’t always line up nicely with progressive issues.

"For the world to meet the goal of keeping the increase in global warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit from preindustrial days, global greenhouse gas emissions must be zero before 2050." Well good luck with that. For that to happen you'd need a near wipeout of humanity in a nuclear blast or Black Plague 4.0. I'd rather live 5 more years in comfort than 20 years in misery. These scientists have any better ideas?

The authors don't go far enough in describing historical responsibility for the climate problem, which is a result of the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere relative to pre-industrial times. Simple fact: most of the extra CO2 causing warming today, emitted from fossil fuel burning since the 1850s, is still in the atmosphere. And the USA emitted more of it than any other nation. Consider a pool of toxic waste. If one factory put most of the waste there, but another has a greater current flow into the pool, who should be more responsible for the cleanup?

Without serious advances in clean energy technology, we are going to continue to run into dilemmas such as these. However, improvements in solar, wind, tidal, and carbon capture may produce (depending on your definitions) a disproportional benefit for low income people and third world countries.

Fair? Nature is not fair, it’s consistent. Fairness is a concern of people interacting with people, nature just does what it does. Global warming is not some kind of social policy created by man, it’s nature just doing what it must do. It does not matter which people are doing more to cause global warming it’s the total results of what all are doing. Nature is not going to protect those who seek to reduce global warming nor to make those who don’t suffer. All will experience the same consequences.

In a rational world developed countries would be buying solar panels manufactured cheaply in China to be installed in underdeveloped countries using their own domestic labor. In Trump World, by contrast, we're withdrawing from the Paris Accords while imposing tariffs on Chinese solar panels.

The fair solution would be to give every person in the world the same annual carbon budget. This reflects the fact that the global environment truly belongs to all people in common. Companies that wanted to emit would then buy those budgets off people, and use those budgets to emit. Environmentalists who wanted to reduce emissions further could also buy up budgets and keep them in reserve. This system would take the issue out of the hands of individual countries, thus preventing climate change from being held hostage to geopolitics. Finally, it would also go a long way to solving global poverty because even the poorest people in the world would suddenly have a valuable asset they could sell.

Another article that entirely misses the point. We should be focused on the question, "What's fair for the planet?", rather than what's fair for individual countries. It's abundantly clear that human populations have grown far beyond Earth's ability to sustain them. Until and unless we can restore population levels to a sustainable figure we will face an ecological catastrophe. Maybe not politically correct to discuss the elephant in the climate change room, but we know it by its name, Homo sapiens.

What’s fair in carbon emissions? Good question. But the authors don’t even touch a responsible answer. They don’t even understand their own question. It is not which countries should do what percentage of our pouring up emissions now. The far bigger question of fairness is how much ALL our countries together should do now to be fair to our grandchildren and future generations. To that, the answer is zero. We’ve already emitted too much. We’ve started and are still driving processes of change that have momentum to doom our grandchildren to agony, and continue until our civilization is shattered and all or most of our species are gone. This column is an illustration of our suicidal selfishness. It’s all about who-gets-how-much in our current generations’ fossil-fuel-fattened pie. It should instead be how much fossil-fueled pie we should all be gorging on to be fair to future generations. None.

If we're going to talk about what's fair from country to country, we also need to address what's fair *within* individual countries. The per capita emissions rates vary widely in the U.S. based on socio-economic class. The fairest proposals I've heard amount to carbon rations where everyone gets the same "rations" in terms of electricity, gasoline, flying, etc. Because right now, those global jet-setters who are boarding international or transcontinental flights every month or two are responsible for many times more carbon outputs per year compared to lower income U.S. residents who can't even afford a simple local vacation. The same can be said about big houses, big cars, excessive driving, and excessive consumption of material goods (like fashion) that are essentially embedded carbon.

Given the existential threat from climate change, future generations, assuming that the species survives, will see our dithering over "what's fair" as an absurd example of fiddling while Rome burns. What's necessary is to reduce carbon emissions and other climate change factors as far as our technology allows, and to make our chief secondary goal ameliorating the resulting drastic changes to the daily lives of ordinary people, because of course making such big changes will cause all sorts of short term problems. The changes are necessary, even so.