A Luck-Based Moral Defense of Grandfathering

Distributive justice and the global emissions budget

“…To stop harmful emissions requires a massive societal and economic transformation involving huge burdens. Since this is a form of bad brute luck for which citizens of the Global North are not to blame, negative consequences of reducing emissions should be buffered for those people by temporarily providing them with additional emissions when developing a sustainable way of life (Schüssler, 2017, 157, 162). However, knowledge about anthropogenic climate change built up over several decades, starting in 1958 with Keeling's measure of atmospheric CO 2 concentrations and the publication of a number of scientific reports in the 1960s and 1970s (Anderson et al, 2017; Frumhoff et al, 2015; Mulvey et al, 2015).…”

“…Since there was a time when investments causing high emissions did not violate the enough‐and‐as‐good condition of the Lockean Proviso, these previous investments should have moral weight in the distribution of the emissions budget today (Bovens, 2011, 134). This argument for temporary grandfathering has been rejected on the grounds that industrialized countries did not acquire emission entitlements in virtue of Lockean principles, as the enough‐and‐as‐good condition was already violated in the early process of industrialization, given the very long time periods until the atmosphere recovers to absorb new greenhouse gases without thereby causing dangerous climate change (Schüssler, 2017, 147–150).…”

Fair National Carbon Accountability for past and future emissions

“…Per capita convergence, sometimes called Contraction and convergence 11 , starts with grandfathering 12 and converges over time into an equal annual per capita approach by the end of a specified carbon budget period 13 . 56% of the NDCs consider fairness in relation to the countries' past, current and future shares of global emissions, drawing on a variety of equal per capita principles or relating to trends applying different metrics 4 .…”