A Review of “Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection,” by Henry Shue

Abstract

A Review of “Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection,” by Henry Shue Edwardo L. Rhodes (bio) Henry Shue’s Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection offers an extremely useful and readable guide to the key challenges, workable objectives, and possible responses to a major—if not the major—global problem faced today. For anyone interested or working in the area of international carbon emission control and remediation, this book places the subject in a combined philosophical and economic development framework while imposing an overarching principle of fairness. Henry Shue presents an interesting and informative collection of essays and articles on climate change and the need for a method of global response to deal with the prickly issues of global warming. (In some of the later chapters or essays, “global warming” is replaced with the term “climate change.”) Shue covers a wide array of issues including classification and identification of the major players in the global climate justice drama, the vastly different perspectives of the major players, the essential elements of any viable global warming solution, and his repeated theme: the four fundamental questions that any plan of climate justice must address. The seventeen chapters of the book represent seventeen essays or articles written by Henry Shue between 1992 and 2013. The earliest ones lay the foundation for those that follow. Given the twenty-year span of the readings, the reader is afforded a rare opportunity to actually observe and track the evolution of how Henry Shue understands climate justice. As one small example, in the earliest chapters, Shue argues for a minimum subsistence level of emission for a poor country necessary for it to survive.1 He later modifies that position, arguing for a minimum subsistence level of energy availability or access.2 This more advanced position indicates that the key issue for [End Page 697] poor countries is not what their level of emission from carbon fuel consumption is, but rather whether it has access to adequate levels of energy necessary for production and development.3 The relatively long introduction is very important to read. It provides the reader with the information necessary to connect the chapters of the book, which were originally written as freestanding, independent articles. In fact, in contrast to most policy books, the reader can jump around the book, focusing on just the topic of a particular chapter without needing a great deal of preparation from previous chapters or leaving some issues uncovered for later chapters. At the same time, because the chapters were independent essays, with minimum modification when combined into book form, one encounters considerable repetition of the same arguments and the same outline of positions throughout the book. Beginning in the introduction and really developed in the first several essays (chapters) of the book, Henry Shue paints a very rich and detailed picture of the central issues of “climate justice.”4 To begin, the central question for him is “[h]ow can we limit the dangers resulting from climate change without driving additional hundreds of millions of people into poverty?”5 Shue posits that the major dividing lines are between rich countries that have exploited carbon resources in the past to get to their current level of economic development and poor countries that have not realized such economic development.6 Furthermore, in the current context of climate change, these poor countries face the very real problem of being forced to make developmental sacrifices to correct or limit global climate wrongs or climate distortions, which they had no part in creating. Introduced formally in chapter two and repeated in each of the subsequent early chapters comes what are called the four questions of justice7: 1. What is a fair allocation of the costs of preventing global warming that is still avoidable? 2. What is a fair allocation of the cost of coping with the social consequences of global warming that will not in fact be avoided? [End Page 698] 3. What background allocation of wealth would allow international bargaining (about topics like issues one and two) to be a fair process? 4. What is a fair allocation of emission of greenhouse gases (over the long term and during the transition to the long term...