A Methodological Point and A Substantial Worry on Sayegh’s ‘Pricing Carbon for Climate Justice’

Citation

Lo Re S & Lo Re L (2019) A Methodological Point and A Substantial Worry on Sayegh’s ‘Pricing Carbon for Climate Justice’. Ethics, Policy and Environment, 22 (2), pp. 135-137. https://doi.org/10.1080/21550085.2019.1625536

Abstract
First paragraph: In his ‘Pricing Carbon for Climate Justice’, Alexandre Sayegh develops the connections between climate justice and climate economics. More specifically, the paper focuses on how ‘market-based instruments for climate change mitigation (MBIs) [should] respond to requirements of justice’. Sayegh seeks to provide a normative framework for the moral justification of MBIs, and to show that MBIs can be interpreted as ‘instruments of justice’ once their design is suitably constrained by theories of climate justice. With regard to both aims, Sayegh offers a number of interesting contributions. At the level of the normative foundation, besides arguing in favour of a turn from a ‘right to emit’ to a ‘right to energy’, the way he connects pricing carbon mechanisms to the duty not-toharm is quite sophisticated. In addition to this, when turning to the interaction between considerations of justice and the design of MBIs Sayegh offers a detailed analysis of alternatives to address trade-offs between efficiency in emissions reduction and fairness.

Journal
Ethics, Policy and Environment: Volume 22, Issue 2