Climate Justice

“Climate Justice is a measured meditation on our obligations to one another in a warming world, and a reminder that, among all its other dizzying and distressing features, global warming is a red-hot problem from moral philosophy, asking of us, who counts and who doesn’t?”
—the New York Times

“Climate Justice analyzes arguments around intergenerational equity, distributive justice, foreign aid, and consumer choices, weighing the merits and morals of policy tools like subsidies, mandates, and taxes and even more idealistic strategies, such as providing consumers with sufficient information to encourage choices that can help fend off climate catastrophe…Reading Climate Justice at this moment, when the Trump administration is doing all it can to ramp up fossil fuel emissions and end humanitarian aid to poorer countries, is unsettling. The book feels like a postcard from a time, deep in the past and yet only weeks ago, when the officials at the helm of our government understood the gravity of global leadership, cared about our neighbors, and dealt in facts….Climate change is still a global crisis, growing more urgent by the day. Inevitably, the time will come when the United States will be forced to wake up and choose to lead the world to climate solutions by example. Those who have read Sunstein’s book will be ready to participate.”
—the Washington Post Book World

“In this tightly argued treatise on climate justice, Sunstein contends that rich countries, which have emitted most of the carbon in the atmosphere, have a moral imperative to aid poor countries, as well as future generations. He poses a thought experiment: if each person were equally counted, no matter where or when he or she lived, what policies would comprise a fair and just attempt to deal with climate change and its implications? Drawing on utilitarian calculations of costs and benefits, the book develops a logic of obligations over space and time: wealthy countries owe much to poorer ones, just as the current generation owes much to future generations. Sunstein creatively wrestles with how to quantify gains and losses resulting from climate policies. The basic intuition underlying his redistribution proposal is that in terms of mitigating the harms of climate change, any given sum of money would have a bigger impact in the developing world than it would in the developed world.”
—Foreign Affairs