Abstract
The distinction between subsistence emissions and luxury emissions was originally devised in 1992 to guard people so poor as to be able to afford only fossil fuels from being priced out of energy by market mechanisms like cap-and-trade that were proposed to assist with limiting climate change. Non-carbon energy can now be made as affordable and accessible as fossil fuel, but tensions remain between measures to support sustainable development and measures to control climate change. Consequently, the distinction between subsistence energy and luxury energy continues to be surprisingly relevant to current international political struggles. The most fully justified method for normative assessment of Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement, the Climate Equity Reference Framework, presupposes the distinction. Normative evaluation of the choice between maximally ambitious ratcheting-up of Nationally Determined Contributions in the immediate future and lazy reliance upon hoped-for carbon dioxide removal in future decades depends on it.
Keywords
I want to reflect critically on my proposal, launched in two articles in 1992 and 1993 and then wrestled with for decades, that ‘subsistence emissions’ and ‘luxury emissions’ ought to be distinguished from each other and treated differently (Shue, 1992, 1993, 2014a: 7). My ‘breakthrough’ in this regard had two features that I suspect many ‘breakthroughs’ have: I stood on the shoulders of others, and I too did not break nearly all the way through. The others in this case included Anil Agarwal (1947–2002) and Sunita Narain (still very active in India), who had advocated distinguishing ‘“survival emissions” of the poor, from “luxury emissions”‘ of the rich (Agarwal and Narain, 1991). Since Agarwal and Narain had not elaborated their distinction, I re-named ‘survival emissions’ as ‘subsistence emissions’ to reflect more fully its focus on economic necessities and to show the consistency of this understanding with my own earlier work on rights, which had focused heavily on ‘subsistence rights’ Shue (1996 [1980]). 1
Agarwal and Narain appealed to ‘a right to live’ and subsistence needs: The methane issue raises further questions of justice and morality. Can we really equate the carbon dioxide contributions of gas guzzling automobiles in Europe and North America or, for that matter, anywhere in the Third World with the methane emissions of draught cattle and rice fields of subsistence farmers in West Bengal or Thailand? Do these people not have a right to live? (Agarwal and Narain, 1991: 5 [emphasis original])
The fundamental thought was that we might treat greenhouse gases differently depending on the necessity and urgency of the activities that give rise to them. My 1993 distinction between subsistence emissions and luxury emissions was a less colourful version of the distinction suggested in my previous article on climate change and embraced, with elaboration, in a chapter in the next IPCC Report: ‘All ethical systems, and all the applied literature, appear to point in the same direction. As Shue (1992) has put it: Even in an emergency one pawns the jewellery before selling the blankets …. Whatever justice may positively require, it does not permit that poor nations be told to sell their blankets [compromise their development strategies] in order that the rich nations keep their jewellery [continue their unsustainable lifestyles]. (Banuri et al., 1996: 103)
In 1993 I put the point more straightforwardly, partly echoing Agarwal and Narain: the central point about equity is that it is not equitable to ask some people to surrender necessities so that other people can retain luxuries. It would be unfair to the point of being outrageous to ask that some (poor) people spend more on better feed for their ruminants in order to reduce methane emissions so that other (affluent) people do not have to pay more for steak from less crowded feedlots in order to reduce their methane and nitrous oxide emissions … (Shue, 1993: 56; 2014b: 64)
Most public policy – certainly including climate policy – is dominated by economists and economistic thinking that relies on what I called ‘homogenising calculations of cost-effectiveness’: for standard economic analysis everything is a preference: the epicure’s wish for a little more seasoning and the starving child’s wish for a little water, the collector’s wish for one more painting and the homeless person’s wish for privacy and warmth, all are preferences. Quantitatively, they are different because some are backed up by a greater ‘willingness to pay’ than others, but qualitatively a preference is a preference … To discard [thus] all the qualitative distinctions built up during the evolution of human history is to deprive ourselves of a rich treasure of sophistication and subtlety. Some so-called preferences are vital, and some are frivolous. Some are needs, and some are mere wants … (Shue, 1993: 54–55; 2014b: 62–63)
2
The economist-dominated policy discussions about climate change were concentrating in the early 1990s on emissions trading, or ‘cap-and-trade’ (or ‘cap-and-dividend’), schemes that assumed that the energy regime would continue to rely heavily on fossil fuels and that were designed nevertheless to reduce total carbon emissions (Falkner, this issue). My normative concern was that, if in order to reduce emissions we were to use such market mechanisms in which emissions would require allowances, or permits, and the allowances would be tradable, some form of protection for the energy needs of the poor had to be included. Accepting for the sake of the argument that we were operating inside a fossil fuel regime, my thesis was: we should not have a homogenized–undifferentiated–market in emissions allowances in which the wealthy can buy up the allowances of the poor and leave the poor unable to satisfy even their basic needs for lack of emissions allowances … If there is to be an international market in emissions allowances, the populations of poor regions could be allotted inalienable–unmarketable–allowances for whatever use they themselves consider best … This would allow them some measure of control over their lives … (Shue, 1993: 58; 2014b: 66)
This sketchy suggestion of a specific mechanism for reserving unmarketable allowances for poor populations within any scheme for emissions trading within a fossil fuel regime was not, I now think, particularly helpful. Two other fully worked out, and quantified, proposals that were not restricted to trading schemes, but still assumed a dominantly fossil fuel regime, subsequently showed how to accomplish the same end by starting from the question of how responsibility to reduce emissions ought to be assigned within any scheme for mitigating climate change and explaining why this responsibility need not fall upon the poorest. Benito Müller, Niklas Höhne, and Christian Ellermann argued that: allowances may be allocated to emitters, which they can use against their emissions in calculating their level of responsibility. It is, in general terms, analogous to the system of tax allowances used in most countries in differentiating the tax burden … Other allowances could be allocated on the basis of basic needs, in turn justified by way of the Aristotelian “control condition” that one cannot be held responsible for what is not under one’s control. This kind of allowance has been implemented by looking at ‘subsistence allowances’, based on the assumption that poverty eradication is an overriding moral aim, and that in present circumstances it can only be achieved through activities which generate a certain amount of emissions. (Müller et al., 2009: 598 [emphasis original)
3
Complementarily, the ‘Princeton Plan’ proposed the principle that ‘nations derive their obligations from the emissions of their high-emitting citizens’ (Chakravarty et al., 2009: 11888). So ‘country-level emission targets … reflect the number of “high emitter” individuals in that country and their aggregate emissions’, and what I had conceived as protection of subsistence emissions would be achieved by establishing a floor under the responsibility to reduce emissions that was above the emissions level of the low-emitting citizens, thus ‘shielding the lowest one-third of the world’s emitters from the CO2 reduction strategies that will need to permeate the activities of the other two-thirds of the world’s population to achieve significant global CO2 emission reductions’ (Chakravarty et al., 2009: 11886).
Meanwhile, Tim Hayward had responded to my initial discussions by emphasising the fundamental point that: as long as people are locked into a carbon-dependent economic system they have a right not to be deprived of their basic subsistence rights in virtue of that fact. But it is the ends of subsistence that are significant for human rights, not the emission rights that may contingently (but not always necessarily or without qualification) be a suitable means for promoting those rights. (Hayward, 2007: 441)
4
To escape poverty most people need to use more energy, but using more energy need involve producing more emissions only if no source of energy except fossil fuel is accessible and affordable for them. Make alternative energy accessible and affordable for the poorest populations, and there would be no need for unmarketable emissions permits, subsistence allowances for emissions, or a floor under responsibility for emissions, all of which are means, not ends. What must be guaranteed ultimately is subsistence and the exit from poverty, not emissions.
Empirical change, conceptual change
In the quarter of a century from 1993 until now, at least three empirical factors have taken radical paths. The negative one is national-level politics: in spite of the promisingly warm reception accorded to the Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio in 1992 in government rhetoric, the actions in response by most of the world’s national governments have been pathetically and shamefully unambitious, and business-as-usual national emissions have been allowed to soar decade after decade while political initiative stagnated. Half of all the global emissions since 1850 have occurred since 1986. And the empirically measured accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continues to rise: the 3.5 ± 0.1 ppm rise in global annual carbon dioxide from 2015 to 2016 was the largest annual increase observed in the 58-year measurement record. The annual global average carbon dioxide concentration at Earth’s surface surpassed 400 ppm (402.9 ± 0.1 ppm) for the first time in the modern atmospheric measurement record and in ice core records dating back as far as 800,000 years. (Blunden and Arndt, 2017: Sxvi)
One obvious worrying possibility is that the government reports of emissions are under-stating the actual measurable emissions.
A few of the Nationally Determined Commitments (NDCs) announced in connection with the Paris Agreement of 2015 might have been minimally adequate first steps if they had been taken two decades sooner, but many ranged from paltry to pitiful even as belated first steps. The latest edition of the Emissions Gap Report reaches this sombre conclusion: The NDCs that form the foundation of the Paris Agreement cover only approximately one third of the emissions reductions needed to be on a least-cost pathway for the goal of staying well below 2° C. The gap between the reductions needed and the national pledges made in Paris is alarmingly high. (United Nations Environment Program, 2017: xiv)
One positive factor has been climate science: the multiple contributing sub-fields have broadened and deepened, enabling scientists to specify the nature and seriousness of our situation – and to identify the corresponding failure of political responses – much more accurately, fully, and understandably than could be done in 1992. The most recent science also makes clear the incorrectness of some of the central empirical assumptions made by the earlier normative analyses, including mine, as we will see presently. The other positive factor has been technological innovation and its economics: the prices of renewable energy have declined far more rapidly than anyone expected in spite of the inaction of many national governments, although thanks in part to increases in demand mandated by the German, Danish, and a few other active governments and increases in supply mandated by the Chinese government; and the alternative technologies are growing significantly in sophistication while dropping in price.
One way in which normative theory can guarantee being irrelevant is to keep discussing the same formulations of the issues while the world moves on. The deepest elements of politics may not change: ‘when the elephants fight, the grass is trampled’; or, more elegantly, ‘the strong do what they will and the weak accept what they must’ (Thucydides, n.d.: V.89, lines 401–402). 5 Or rather, this heartless process is what happens unless humans show solidarity by creating social institutions to protect the most vulnerable against the standard threats of this form, that is, unless we create institutions to protect basic rights against violation by the powerful. But the nature of at least some of the threats changes over time and so correspondingly must the nature of the protective institutions, which requires normative theorists to pay attention to empirical understanding.
I tried to get a grip on the evolution of the issues resulting from political inaction, scientific advance, and technological change in ‘Changing Images of Climate Change’ (Shue, 2014a). In the 1990s we had focused on annual emission flows, not accumulated emission stocks – how to share global annual emissions while gradually reducing their annual totals. The primary normative issue appeared to be how to arrange to protect a minimum level of emissions for the poorest populations who were trying to escape poverty when most of those thinking about emissions were formulating mechanisms to reduce them. My normative suggestions originally amounted to the positive formulation: ‘make room’ – create pressure for reductions in carbon emissions by the rich (by, for example, carbon taxes or permit trading) in order to create space for emissions increases by the poor within a shrinking annual total of emissions – and the negative formulation: ‘avoid encroaching’ – do not use up the portion of the shrinking, that is, zero-sum, annual total actually needed by others for non-essential indulgences of your own (Shue, 2014a: 51–53).
But the advancing science has shown that what matters is the carbon stock: the cumulative atmospheric concentration of CO2 across the time from the initial surge in carbon emissions at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution until net carbon emissions into the atmosphere completely end. The relentless accumulation of atmospheric CO2 can be ended only by the total decarbonisation of the global energy regime. This unforgiving constraint has now been lucidly conceptualised as staying within, or – much inferior – returning after an overshoot to, a single cumulative carbon budget for all foreseeable time, beginning from the start of significant additional accumulation in the atmosphere (Frame et al., 2014).
And – the worst news – because national governments have largely ignored the alarms sounded by the IPCC in the 1990s (and other scientists much earlier), the annual flows of carbon emissions have continued to accelerate over the decades until now the carbon budget (for a reasonable probability of a temperature rise of no more than 2°C above temperatures prior to the Industrial Revolution) is nearly exhausted. The humanly endurable stock of CO2 in the atmosphere, given its effects on the surface climate, has almost all been released. But – the best news – technological innovation and economies of scale (and other factors) have nevertheless made alternative energy, especially renewable energy, far more accessible and affordable. Where fossil fuels remain more affordable, it is usually because of outrageously counter-productive subsidies provided misguidedly, if not simply corruptly, by governments out of public funds – another grotesque political failure (Coady et al., 2017; Doukas, 2017). The total global subsidies for fossil fuels in 2015 are estimated at US$5.3 trillion, which is 6.5% of the global GDP.
Path-breaking energy economist Dieter Helm has argued persuasively that: the fossil fuel industries are doomed in the long run … Exxon, Shell and BP will not be around in anything like their current form by mid-century. The implication is that the reserves-to-production ratio is going to be redundant as a measure of value for investors: beyond the envelope, the reserves will be worthless, because they cannot be burnt. (Helm, 2017: 197)
The questions are: exactly how far away the long run is and how badly the climate will be wounded during the interim political struggles between the vested interests in the carbon regime and the bulk of humanity.
The time when gradual annual reductions in carbon flows might have been sufficient was wasted by political inaction. Now we need a prompt end, not a gradual decline, in carbon emissions. Where does this leave the normative issues? All this may suggest that subsistence emissions are now a dead issue, relevant as long as we were trapped inside a global fossil fuel regime, but irrelevant now that we can see routes of escape to energy regimes that do not undermine the climate with polluting CO2. Not true. I want to sketch two related reasons why.
New era, new issues?
Subsistence emissions
First, although various paths to decarbonisation of the global economy are now much clearer, some of them must still actually be taken to their destination. One attempt to move in the right direction is the Paris Agreement of 2015 under which each government chooses entirely for itself what commitments – NDCs – it will make. Since the Agreement contains no enforcement mechanisms and, so far, no sanctions except possible moral pressure (Rajamani, 2016), it cannot accomplish much unless the NDCs put forward are subjected to fair, rigorous, and transparent moral evaluation from the point of view: is the nation in question fulfilling its obligations? Obviously this assessment is going to be bitterly contentious. For instance, Russia’s initial NDCs are obviously farcical, and the notorious Trump Administration of environmental vandals has renounced any effort to meet the unambitious initial US NDCs. But most governments claim that they will try to make the Agreement accomplish something. So it is critical that what they propose, and what they do, be assessed against a reasonable understanding of what their responsibilities are.
The most impressive methodology for normatively assessing the adequacy of the NDCs under the Paris Agreement of 2015 is the Climate Equity Reference Framework ([CERF] (Holz et al., 2017). CERF is a ‘generalisation’ of the Greenhouse Development Rights (GDRs) equity framework, where being a generalisation means that rather than specifying and arguing for one particular choice of equity settings, as the original GDRs did, the CERF allows for ‘user-specified choices of all the available equity variables’ in a manner that allows for a deliberative process among users, who have initially been civil society organisations (Civil Society Equity Review, 2017; Holz et al., 2017: 121). From the GDRs, the CERF retains the fundamental choice to specify each agent’s fair mitigation effort by combining (1) responsibility, specified on the basis of cumulative emissions since a chosen start year, adjusted for development needs, as we will see below and (2) capacity, specified fundamentally on the basis of GDP, into a responsibility-capacity-indicator. 6
As Paul Baer (1962–2016), one of the now much-missed original creators of the GDRs framework, had noted: the moral arguments that justify particular forms of burden sharing attach primarily to [individual] people rather than countries … In the GDRs framework, we have begun to grapple with this by calculating “capacity” and “responsibility” in ways that take account of the distribution of income and emissions within countries … (Baer et al., 2010: 219).
The CERF continues with this effort to focus as much as possible on individual obligations while calculating national obligations in order to assess the NDCs under the Paris Agreement: ‘conceptually, the CERF calculates responsibility and capacity of individuals and then aggregates those to larger units, most commonly the nation state’ (Holz et al., 2017: 122).
What amounts to subsistence emissions are protected when, like Müller, Höhne, and Ellermann in 2009, Holz, Kartha, and Athanasiou draw an analogy with standard allowances in income tax systems: Importantly, in calculating capacity, the CERF allows for interpreting GDP in a progressive manner, analogous to the progressive consideration of income in virtually all income tax systems. It can exempt income below a specified per-capita income level (set in terms of purchasing power parity, or PPP, to account for local buying power of a country’s currency). This exemption level can, for instance, be set at [a] point that represents a ‘development threshold’, signifying a level of income below which people are so poor as to legitimately place development as their principal priority, and not to be expected to contribute toward the costs of the climate transition. Likewise, the emissions associated with consumption below the development threshold are excluded from the calculation of responsibility. (Holz et al., 2017: 122)
CERF is another attractive and plausible way of protecting subsistence during efforts to gain control of climate change, and it is now part of a carefully designed but evolving methodology for evaluating implementation of the 2015 Paris Agreement in the crucial next few years. 7
As individual NDCs begin to be assessed, rich countries will obviously continue to assert that poor countries are increasing their emissions to unreasonable levels, and poor countries will continue to assert that rich countries are maintaining their emissions at unreasonable levels. Consequently, it is impossible to avoid public deliberation about how great the obligations of each country are, including what level of emissions is permissible for it, and why. CERF construes this question, as explained above, as some combination of how much responsibility the country bears in light of its past contribution to the problem and how much capacity it has in light of its general wealth. This enters a dense thicket of issues, but these normative issues remain absolutely unavoidable because the politically crucial question of the fair sharing of burdens cannot be evaded and will not be forgotten, especially by countries that think others are shirking or free-riding (as, I would agree, many countries now are). 8 Understanding that the shared goal is completely stopping the expansion of the atmospheric stock of CO2 unfortunately does not eliminate political tension over the division of the flows during the transition out of the carbon regime.
One crucial part of any decision about acceptable levels of emissions is the determination of which people, if any, still have no choice but to increase emissions in order to escape poverty. This is effectively the question: whose emissions remain ‘subsistence emissions’ during the transition between energy regimes? And the next question becomes: how do we urgently provide another option that enables the escape from poverty but does not undermine the climate? CERF deals plausibly with both questions. Regarding the first question, it establishes a ‘development threshold’ beneath which emissions are currently permissible.
And CERF deals with the second question by arguing for ‘dual obligations’ on the part of those countries with the greatest combination of historic responsibility and current capability. Crudely speaking, insofar as it makes economic sense for these nations to reduce their own domestic emissions, they ought, first, to make those reductions. But, second, insofar as making those domestic reductions in emissions does not fully discharge their overall mitigation obligation, they ought, then, to provide financial transfers to poorer countries where emission reductions are more economically sensible, but money to pay for making those lower cost reductions is not available domestically. Crucially, financing reductions in emissions while enabling movement away from poverty means urgently supporting the prompt transfer and wide dissemination of alternative forms of energy. Subsistence emissions stop being necessary when financial transfers from wealthy nations have made non-carbon energy affordable and accessible in poor nations. When adequate non-carbon energy is both affordable and accessible, no one will need to generate carbon emissions in order to provide for subsistence. 9 Subsistence emissions will then no longer need to occur. But until this transition occurs in fact, we need to protect subsistence emissions against the rich and powerful who prefer, and persist in willingness to pay for, luxury emissions for themselves.
Subsistence itself
Once subsistence emissions cease to be needed because humanity has escaped from the carbon energy regime, climate policy can, it might seem, finally stop worrying about subsistence. Unfortunately, subsistence is profoundly at stake in perhaps surprising ways as a relatively new issue for climate policy rears high its potentially very ugly head: the appropriate role for negative emission technologies (NETs), or carbon dioxide removal (CDR). Subsistence will likely be threatened from new directions. 10
‘It has become clear that staying “well below 2° C” will require the large-scale application of CDR’ (Peters and Geden, 2017: 621). Staying ‘well below 2° C’ is of course the goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement. Using the other label for the same technologies, I have noted that ‘87% of the IPCC’s scenarios that allow the target of 2° C to be achieved rely on NETs. This dependence on NETs is not widely appreciated’ (Shue, 2017: 204). These scenarios are generated by the various Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) that are a central basis for the IPCC’s reports. The technology that is assumed by most IAMs is bioenergy combined with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), which has the strong appeal of claiming both to remove carbon from the atmosphere (the CCS) and to generate energy (the BE). Biological feedstocks – plants or trees – will remove CO2 from the atmosphere as they grow; the feedstocks (e.g. wood pellets) will be burned to generate energy; and the CO2 from the combustion during the energy generation will be captured and sequestered.
While this hybrid technology sounds splendid, many serious questions arise about BECCS. The questions most directly about subsistence arise because BECCS is extremely land intensive and water intensive and therefore likely competes with food for both land and water. In order to conduct BECCS at the scale required to produce any significant global reductions in atmospheric carbon in 2100 would take, depending on which plants or trees were grown, ‘a land area of approximately 380–700 Mha’ (Smith et al., 2016: 46), which is from one to two times the size of India, and, depending on how much of that land was irrigated (more irrigation, less land, but obviously more water), would use an amount of water equal to ‘~3% of the freshwater currently appropriated for human use’ (Smith et al., 2016: 47)! Whose land and water is to be used for BECCS, and by what political process is control of it to be acquired? The rich and powerful will be tempted simply to dispossess the poor, as has happened repeatedly through history. Whether this environmental colonialism happens depends on which future path of political economy is now chosen by societies. 11
It may be that some CDR is indefinitely unavoidable ‘to counteract residual emissions in hard-to-mitigate sectors, such as industrial and transport subsectors and CH4 (methane) from agriculture’, but as things are going now, most CDR would be needed to ‘offset some earlier or ongoing carbon emissions’ that could have been mitigated but were not because earlier mitigation was insufficiently ambitious through political failure (Peters and Geden, 2017: 619). While much, much more needs to be said about the politics of CDR (Shue, 2018), two points seem clear. First, how much ‘CH4 from agriculture’, for instance, we have to assume depends on who is living on rice and who is living on steak, the production of each of which produces methane – the specific issue Agarwal and Narain underlined in 1991. As has long been understood, growing and directly eating grain requires several times fewer hectares of land than raising enough grain to feed livestock and then butchering and eating the livestock (Ripple et al., 2014). On the principle that ‘even in an emergency one pawns the jewellery before selling the blankets’, societies most certainly ought not to demand land from rice production in order to conduct BECCS to remove the carbon equivalent of the methane released by feedlots for producing prime steaks and analogous luxury emissions! In fact, one of the few feasible and justifiable ways of gaining large amounts of additional land and water for BECCS would be as the result of large reductions in the demand for land and water produced by shifts from meat-eating to vegetarian diets (Bajželj et al., 2014).
Second, and supremely important, it will be necessary later to extract anthropogenically mainly the CO2 that we anthropogenically inject into the atmosphere between now and then. Some future CDR is already necessary today. One of the morally most compelling reasons for maximally aggressive mitigation now is precisely in order to minimise the pressure later for further CDR, such as massive BECCS that could become a dire threat to subsistence by encroaching on the land and water available for growing food. Here we find yet another respect in which the protection of subsistence requires us to ratchet up mitigation efforts robustly and urgently now. 12
Conclusion
An Energy Revolution is a necessity because the dominant fossil-fuel regime is undermining the physical preconditions of civilised human life (and of the physical lives of tens of thousands of other species), but this necessary transition to an alternative energy regime can take any of several sharply different economic and political paths. It would be contemptible to choose – or blunder into – a path on which the sacrifices were imposed on those struggling away from the threatening edge of subsistence tomorrow, by those consuming along in the secure lap of luxury today.
