The Lunchtime Lecture Series "Human Rights vs. Emission Rights: Climate Justice and the Equitable Distribution of Ecological Space" Tim Hayward, Reader in the School of Social and Political Studies, University of Edinburgh Tuesday, November 1, 2005 12:00 - 1:15, Mason Hall D3 A & B Co-Sponsored by the Cultural Studies Program and the Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy. Debate about climate justice often focuses on how emissions rights should be distributed. However, this risks losing sight of how equitable strategies for addressing the causes of global warming have to do with responsibilities for reducing emissions. This presentation will first set out a general account of what justice requires by way of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ for addressing the causes and potential effects of climate change. Practical pressures have tended to shift the focus from responsibilities to rights. But Hayward will show that although emissions rights could in theory serve to fulfill responsibilities for emissions reductions, they can in practice serve to evade those responsibilities. Recognizing this potentially ambivalent role of emissions rights as a policy instrument suggests the need for caution in examining claims that emissions rights might be advanced on the basis of human rights. He will argue that emissions rights, as property rights, stand opposed to the most directly relevant human right, namely, the right of each individual to an environment adequate for their health and well-being. Thus proposals to the effect that ‘subsistence emissions’ are human rights overlook important practical, conceptual, and normative differences between the two kinds of rights. While both kinds do need to be comprehended within a single framework of justice, this can only be achieved if the framework encompasses not only issues of climate change narrowly construed, but a recognition of how the command of all natural resources and environmental goods is relevant to wealth and welfare. Hayward’s constructive proposal, in conclusion, is that this more comprehensive framework should be developed in terms of the concept of ‘ecological space’. An equitable distribution of rights to ecological space would in principle ensure an equitable distribution of welfare goods without sanctioning any excess use of natural or environmental services, including the planet’s capacity for absorbing carbon. In practice, distinct principles for the distribution of emissions could be retained, but these would be offset against other claims on the planet’s ecological space. The idea that there might be any uniquely just distribution of emissions rights, determined in isolation from other ecological and economic factors, has to be abandoned. Tim Hayward is Reader in the School of Social and Political Studies, University of Edinburgh. He is author of numerous articles on political philosophy and environmental values, as well as three books: Ecological Thought: an introduction (Polity Press/ Blackwell, 1995), Political Theory and Ecological Values (Polity Press/St Martin’s Press, 1998), and Constitutional Environmental Rights (Oxford University Press, 2005). The Center for Global Ethics and its Director Carol Gould invites George Mason faculty, staff, students and friends to join us for The Lunchtime Lecture Series featuring distinguished intellectuals working in the area of Global Ethics. Discussion and lite refreshments will follow each of our speakers' presentations. Please feel free to bring your lunch.