Shue, Henry. "Climate Hope: Implementing the Exit Strategy". Chicago Journal of International Law, Vol.13, No.2 (2013): 381-402.

Shue, Henry. "Climate Hope: Implementing the Exit Strategy". Chicago Journal of International Law, Vol.13, No.2 (2013): 381-402.

• Eric Posner and David Weisbach argue that, while both extreme poverty and climate change are serious problems requiring a solution, there is no principle of justice which requires that they be solved simultaneously. The author contends that these problems are inseparably linked and cannot be handled separately (382).
• The most common ways to think about climate change in terms of philosophical justice are either a responsibility to prevent the harm caused by releasing too much greenhouse gases or to guarantee that the development of the Third World will not be impaired by the measures taken to curb emissions. There is currently a conflict between these goals because current carbon tax schemes would increase energy prices, thus reducing the ability of the global poor to develop (383).
• This problem is acute because economic development is currently dependent on access to cheap forms of energy, and the cheapest form of energy is fossil fuels. Yet, allowing this development to occur would cause devestating climate change effects. Since they are currently opposed, any solution to climate change will have to factor in development concerns, and visa-versa (385-386).
• Continuing to destroy the planet through global warming would automatically affect the global poor, since it would both harm them through the effects of climate change, and it would deny future generations of the poor access to the resources and circumstances they need to engage in their own development (400).
• Human history is defined by two major revolutions: the Agrarian Revolution occuring 10,000 years ago and the Industrial Revolution occuring in the 1800s. The methods of generating wealth created by the Industrial Revolution pose a major threat to agriculture, meaning that major changes in energy production are needed if the effects of second revolution is not to undercut the gains of the first revolution (386-387).
• Climate and atmospheric scientists have shown that cumulative emissions of carbon gases in excess of what the atmosphere can support have been occuring since the late 1700s, meaning that reductions in emissions must not only reach a balance, but also diminish to the degree that cumulative greenhouse gas buildup can degrade, otherwise global temperatures will continue to rise over the 2 degrees Celcius limit (387-389, 394).
• The severe cuts in greenhouse gas emissions required by this conception of the atmosphere's capacity could motivate both cuts in existing emissions and prohibitions on new emissions, but this would prevent the world's poorest from being able to develop economically (390-391).
• Such a position would also be deeply unjust, because the world's poorest would suffer the most under this regime, despite having contributed almost nothing to the problem. Essentially, they would be suffering for the past mistakes of wealthy and developed states (391-392).
• Part of the solution needs to be the creation of alternative clean energy sources, especially for use in developed countries who are already producing more emissions than their fair share (395-396). This should be created through programs to subsidize the price of green energy to make it more economically competative than fossil fuels (397-398).
• For the global poor to be guaranteed the right to economic development, the fact that this process requires producing carbon emissions needs to be accounted for. The author proposes, as a way of securing rights to the energy needed for development, a right for each person to an amount of carbon emissions (392).
• The final proposal of the author is simultaneously implementing a cap-and-trade regime on countries to prevent the total carbon emissions from exceeding dangerous levels, and massively subsidizing alternative energy programs across the world to make these forms of green energy cheap and accessable to the global poor (398-399).