I t is no longer seriously disputed that, in the face of climate change, carbon emissions must be reduced. There is agreement internationally that responsibility for making these reductions should be shared with equitable differentiation. In contemporary debates, however, the question of how responsibilities should be differentiated has been all but eclipsed by contestation over how emissions rights should be apportioned.1 The shift is significant-conceptually and practically.There is, of course, a clear rationale for this shift of focus: Determining a responsibility not to emit more than a certain amount of CO 2 is, in effect, to license emissions up to that amount, and it is this amount that people want to know and negotiate about. Yet the risk in debating this question is that we lose sight of how addressing the causes of climate change has fundamentally to do with responsibilities for reducing emissions. The focus on rights instead of responsibilities tends to encourage claims of a self-interested character, the competition between which has an inherently expansionary logic. Rights, moreover, can give normative force to imperatives other than that of reducing emissions. This is particularly pronounced when emissions rights become property rights to be traded on markets and, additionally, acquired by such means as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which creates emissions entitlements on the basis of putative emissions forgone rather than actual reductions. When

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Ethical implications of the concept of ecological space can be drawn from the focus it brings to issues arising from the finitude and vulnerability of habitats. An evident ethical concern is that each person should have sufficient access to support at least a minimally decent life. The demands placed by the world’s human population on its ecological space, however, are such that some members do not have enough of it for their health and well-being. One aspect of this problem is the finitude of the earth’s aggregate biophysical capacity; another is that some humans make vastly more use of the planet’s ecological space than others do. In relation to the normative assessment and regulation of human activities, I recommend differentiating between using, occupying, and commanding ecological space. It is in relation to these activities that deontic categories—of prescription, proscription and permission—can be applied.

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