Climate Justice

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.Chapter 1: Climate Change Cosmopolitanism
Chapter 2: Rich Nations, Poor Nations
Chapter 3: Future Generations
Chapter 4: Valuing Life: Who Wins, Who Loses?
Chapter 5: Adaptation
Chapter 6: Consumers
Epilogue: Theory and Practice
Appendix: Excerpts from the Paris Agreement
Acknowledgements“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

"This book provides an incisive and thoughtful guide to the ethics and economics of climate change, focusing on the obligations of wealthy countries to address it."
—CHOICE“This book is quintessential Sunstein: engaging prose, wise insights, useful parables, and crucial policy context, all on the important topic of how the world effectively and equitably addresses climate change.”
—Catherine Wolfram, William Barton Rogers Professor inEnergy and Applied Economics, MIT Sloan
 
“Climate Justice compellingly argues for a cosmopolitan approach to climate change, in which rich nations take seriously the harms they have inflicted on poor nations and respect future generations’ interests as much as our own.”
—Lisa Heinzerling, Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center; coauthor of Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing
 
“Cass Sunstein’s masterful book provides a top-level policy briefing on climate change policy coupled with an insightful examination of diverse ethical challenges. Climate Justice is the one book that everyone engaged in climate change policy must read.”
—W. Kip Viscusi, University Distinguished Professor of Law, Economics, and Management, Vanderbilt University; author of Pricing Lives: Guideposts for a Safer Society
 
“With direct and ruthless prose, Sunstein turns the ethical screw on those responsible for climate change. An effective demonstration of how to blend climate ethics and policy, all nourished by a relentless sense of humanity.”
—Christopher J. Preston, Professor of Philosophy, University of Montana; author of Tenacious Beasts
 
“A powerful and deeply moral guide, enriched by theoretical chops and years of experience in government, through the defining issue of our era: in an age of global warning, who are our neighbors, and what do we owe them?”
—Esther Duflo, Nobel Laureate; Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics, MIT
 
“Justice is at the center of all difficult discussions about climate change policy, whether domestically or internationally. Sunstein brings his incisive intellect to bear on these issues, addressing them with his usual wit and clarity.”
—Gilbert E. Metcalf, Professor of Economics Emeritus, Tufts University; author of Paying for Pollution
 
“Scholarly excellence. Sunstein’s analysis is always unbendingly rigorous. But Climate Justice subjects Sunstein’s own prior views to such scrutiny and embraces a strikingly new view of the primacy of “rough justice” in addressing climate change.”
—Richard J. Lazarus, Charles Stebbins Fairchild Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; author of The Making of Environmental LawCass 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.