The talk took place on October 4, 2023, from 4-5:30pm in the Fralin Auditorium. Klick here to get to the website of the event with pictures.
Abstract of the talk: I will explain an interdisciplinary approach to allocating the remaining global carbon budget among countries. The initial work on this was done by a climate physicist, two economists, and a philosopher (me) at the University of Graz, and we have been developing the approach further in collaboration with also other colleagues. In my talk I, first, identify an estimate for the remaining global carbon budget. Second, I discuss the two basic burden-sharing approaches, equal per capita and per capita convergence (better known as contraction and convergence). Third, I present criticisms of these simple approaches. Neither takes into account important normative dimensions of the distribution of benefits and costs of transformation. Fourth, I propose qualifications of the simple approaches to make them compatible with minimal requirements of justice and explain how they can be operationalized. I argue for a qualified equal per capita burden sharing approach that reflects considerations of sufficientarianism, historical responsibility, and feasibility constraints. In doing so, I make explicit the normative considerations taken into account, find convergence points between different approaches, and show that minimal justice requirements critically condition the distribution of the global carbon budget.
