Climate Justice and Historical Emissions

Lukas H. Meyer is a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Austria. Professor Meyer's research focuses on intergenerational justice, the ethics of climate change, and historical justice. He was leader of the research project 'Climate Change and Justice. The Significance of Historical Emissions from 2010 to 2014', and one of the lead authors of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Pranay Sanklecha is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Austria. Professor Sanklecha's teaching and research interests cover topics including the meaning of life, intergenerational justice, the ethics of climate change, methods of justification in normative philosophy, and philosophy as a way of life. He has written articles on intergenerational justice, particularly as it relates to climate change in Politics, Philosophy and Economics and Analyse and Kritik, amongst others.

List of contributors; Introduction. On the significance of historical emissions for climate ethics Lukas Meyer and Pranay Sanklecha; 1. Climate ethics, affirmative action and unjust enrichment David Heyd; 2. Historical responsibility and climate change Janna Thompson; 3. Historical emissions: does ignorance matter? Daniel Butt; 4. How legal systems deal with issues of responsibility for past harmful behavior Daniel A. Farber; 5. Asking beneficiaries to pay for past pollution Anja Karnein; 6. Benefiting from unjust acts and benefiting from injustice: historical emissions and the beneficiary pays principle Brian Berkey; 7. A luck-based moral defense of grandfathering Rudolf Schuessler; 8. In defense of emissions egalitarianism Konrad Ott and Christian Baatz; 9. In the name of political possibility: a new proposal for thinking about the role and relevance of historical greenhouse gas emissions Sarah Kenehan; 10. Right to development and historical emissions: a perspective from the particularly vulnerable countries (PVCs) Mizan R. Khan; Index.