Climate Justice - by Cass R Sunstein

About the Book

"It explores the importance of the social cost of carbon and questions the obligations rich nations have to poor nations and raises questions about the rights of future generations"--

Book Synopsis

The social cost of carbon: The most important number you've never heard of--and what it means.

If you're injuring someone, you should stop--and pay for the damage you've caused. Why, this book asks, does this simple proposition, generally accepted, not apply to climate change? In Climate Justice, a bracing challenge to status-quo thinking on the ethics of climate change, renowned author and legal scholar Cass Sunstein clearly frames what's at stake and lays out the moral imperative: When it comes to climate change, everyone must be counted equally, regardless of when they live or where they live--which means that wealthy nations, which have disproportionately benefited from greenhouse gas emissions, are obliged to help future generations and people in poor nations that are particularly vulnerable.

Invoking principles of corrective justice and distributive justice, Sunstein argues that rich countries should pay for the harms that they have caused and that all of us are obliged to take steps to protect future generations from serious climate-related damage. He shows how "choice engines," informed by artificial intelligence, can enable people to save money and to reduce the harms they produce. The book casts new light on the "social cost of carbon," the most important number in climate change debates--and explains how intergenerational neutrality and international neutrality can help all nations, above all the United States and China, do what must be done.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

Cass R. Sunstein is Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard University, where he is the cofounder and codirector of the Initiative on Artificial Intelligence and the Law. Former Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, he is the author of The Cost-Benefit Revolution, How Change Happens, Too Much Information, Sludge (all published by the MIT Press), Nudge (with Richard H. Thaler), How to Become Famous, and other books.