“This distinction between subsistence emissions and luxury emissions was my main contribution to these debates. And it has recently been calculated that the richest 1% of people in the world produce more emissions than the bottom 50%. A whole lot more. And a lot of these emissions are by those of us who are in the richest 1%. And I'm probably one of those people. A lot of our emissions are from things we don't really need to do. We don't need to constantly fly for our vacations. We can walk in natural places near where we live, or at worst, we can drive in an electric car and so on. That of course means changing some of the things that we take for granted and noticing how great the emissions that they cause are and doing something to reduce our emissions.

One thing we can do and which I've tried to do is spell out the ways in which this is an ethical or moral problem. People don't need philosophers to tell them that they're facing problems. I first became interested in this problem by talking to delegates from India who said, 'You people in the rich countries keep saying we have a problem. And our question is, who are we? You industrialized countries, and it's mainly the greenhouse gas from your industrialization that's created climate change. We haven't done that much industrialization yet.' This was 25 years ago. Of course, now India is beginning to industrialize, but their point then was, and it's still largely true, that a lot of the problems are going to hit countries that haven't caused climate change. And so this strikes people just intuitively as unfair.

What a philosopher like me can do is just spell out exactly why it is unfair. It is unfair if one person causes a problem, and then someone else has to deal with it. That makes it as if the one who's dealing with it is the slave of the one who caused the problem. I make a mess. And then you have to clean it up. That's as if you worked for me. And that's really incompatible with equal respect for all human beings. And that's the sort of thing philosophers can spell out. And there is now a lot of good philosophical work being done spelling these things out.”

Henry Shue is Professor Emeritus of Politics and International Relations at University of Oxford’s Merton College. He's the author of Basic Rights, as well as The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now, among many other publications. In 1976, he co-founded the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland. He was a supporter of the successful campaign by Virginia's Augusta County Alliance to stop the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, and now works primarily on explanations for the urgency of far more ambitious policies to eliminate fossil fuels in order to avoid irreversible damage for future generations.

www.merton.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-henry-shue
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691202280/basic-rights
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691226248/the-pivotal-generation

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