LEXONOMICA 
Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 147–188, December 2023  
 
https://doi.org/10.18690/lexonomica.15.2.147-188.2023 
CC-BY, text © Sritharan, 2023 
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THE ETHICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE, CLIMATE 
POLICY AND CLIMATE JUSTICE 
  
Accepted  
26. 10. 2023 
 
Revised 
13. 11. 2023 
 
Published 
6. 12. 2023 
ELIJAH S. SRITHARAN 
University of Maribor, Faculty of Law, Maribor, Slovenia 
elijah.sritharan@gmail.com 
 
CORRESPONDING AUTHOR 
elijah.sritharan@gmail.com 
 
Keywords 
climate ethics,  
causal responsibility, 
moral responsibility, 
historical responsibility, 
legal responsibility, 
climate justice, 
sustainable development, 
polluter pays principle, 
loss and damage, 
environmental human 
rights-based climate 
litigation 
Abstract The fossil fuel industry is the driving force behind 
our current carbon-centric socioeconomic systems. The 
industry has imposed fossil fuel-dependent business models 
and behaviours on the global socioeconomic system. The 
actions and plans of the industry are far from being aligned 
with the 1.5°C target set by the Paris Agreement. Moreover, 
they remain overlooked in the global climate discourse and 
negotiations. This paper builds its arguments starting from a 
moral issue: climate change is an ethical failure, and the 
industry has had a unique role in causing, shaping, advancing, 
and defending the current unsustainable fossil fuel-dependent 
global economy, and thus bears responsibility and has duties 
of reparation to limit consequent harm. This paper examines 
the various moral principles of rectifying the unjust situation 
created by the actions that produced climate change. Although 
the Paris Agreement assigns responsibilities to states, climate 
lawsuits against fossil fuel companies are also on the rise. This 
paper helps link legal frameworks and the relationship between 
climate justice, sustainable development, and environmental 
human rights to make radical, systemic changes to ensure a 
sustainable future. 

148 LEXONOMICA.   
 
1 Introduction 
 
The world is reeling from record-breaking heatwaves, raging wildfires and torrential 
rainfall. We see them play out on our TV screens, in our newspaper headlines and 
in our social media feeds. The summer of 2023 has brought one climate disaster 
after another, as climate change supercharges storms, rainfall, heat, and drought, and 
produces devastating weather patterns. Climate scientists confirmed July 2023 was 
the hottest month ever recorded on Earth (Stillman, 2023) and July 6th was the 
hottest day ever recorded (Jacobo, 2023). The first three quarters of 2023 saw 
exceptional heat globally, putting 2023 on track to be the warmest year since records 
began in the mid-1800s (Hausfather, 2023). In August, torrential rains and heavy 
floods in Slovenia caused millions of dollars’ worth of damage, affecting two-thirds 
of the country; many villages were cut off from the outside world (Johnston, 2023). 
Wildfires ripped through Canada, southern Europe and the Hawaiian island of Maui 
(Lukiv and Walsh, 2023; Cooney and Roberts, 2023; Drenon, 2023). 
 
We are facing a climate catastrophe. There is nowhere to hide and no one can deny 
the impacts of climate change anymore. Gone now is the era of the 1970s and 1980s, 
when the scientific evidence for climate change was meaningfully debated by 
scientists themselves. The 21
st
 century saw the dawn of a new era of climate 
consensus: one in which the scientific agreement was bolstered by high-profile 
empirical evidence (Parsons 2023, p. 16). Of all the prominent environmental issues 
in recent decades, global climate change is the most serious and has been widely 
regarded as the most pressing global environmental problem of the current age 
(Woods 2020, p. 297). However, multilateral climate policymaking and cooperation 
are currently at a low ebb. There is an obvious divide between who has caused 
climate change and who is suffering its effects. Climate changes projected for the 
next several decades are substantially larger than those observed now. 
 
There are two primary physical drivers of current climate change: human emissions 
of greenhouse gases (GHGs), and human destruction of carbon sinks (forests, soil, 
and oceans all serve as vital carbon sinks) (McKinnon 2022, p. 3-4). Human-caused 
climate change has long been acknowledged as essentially an ethical issue that 
threatens humanity and ravages the planet (Heede and Grasso 2023). Anthropogenic 

E. S. Sritharan: The Ethics of Climate Change, Climate Policy and Climate Justice 149. 
 
 
climate change
1
 is predicted to have severe impacts on human well-being. These 
impacts will have clear implications for human rights to life, health, and subsistence. 
Human rights theory and practice are beginning to reflect the fact that humans are 
ecologically embedded beings (Woods 2020, p. 297). UN human rights entities and 
European courts
2
 confirm that climate change and pollution endanger human 
rights.
3
 Human rights standards are justified moral claims universally held by all 
persons vis-à-vis their governments, allowing them the opportunity to enjoy, at the 
very least, the bare minimums of a decent life. The climate crisis threatens to 
undermine the fulfilment of many human rights. Therefore, human rights norms 
serve as the clear moral standard against which a government’s climate policies and 
practices must be measured (Kerns 2022, p. 45-46). 
 
In July 2022, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) declared the existence 
of an international human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment by 
an overwhelming vote of 161-0.
4
 Although the UNGA resolution is not legally 
binding on UN Member States, it has the moral force and will empower people to 
claim their rights to a healthy environment and encourage states to implement 
national laws and regional treaties that safeguard the environment. A healthy and 
functioning environment is a precondition for human welfare. Moreover, 
environmental rights (or human rights and the environment or environmental 
human rights
5
) have been articulated and refined by regional human rights bodies 
and judiciaries around the world (Atapattu and Schapper, 2019: p. 36; Kotze, 2021: 
p. 89). 
 
The climate extremes seen this year have come when global average temperatures 
are 1.2 degrees Celsius (°C) higher than they were before the Industrial Revolution; 
 
1
 Anthropogenic climate change is a result of increasing human emissions of GHGs into the atmosphere since 
industrialisation. It is recognised by the majority of the international scientific community that anthropogenic GHGs 
have been increasingly distorting the earth’s climate system. CO2 is the most potent contributor and the main sources 
of the increasing atmospheric concentrations of these gases are the combustion of fossil fuels as well as land use 
change. 
2
 The European Court of Human Rights is expected to rule on three cases that further question states’ obligation 
to protect human rights through the adoption of ambitious mitigation targets; KlimaSeniorinnen v. Switzerland and 
Careme v. France, heard in May 2023, and Duarte Agostinho et al. v. Portugal and 32 Others, heard in September 2023. 
3
 The ruling of the Dutch Supreme Court on 20 December 2019 in state of the Netherlands v. Urgenda, confirming 
that Article 2 (right to life) and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (right to private and family life) 
entail legal duties of the Dutch government to reduce GHG emissions by at least 25 percent (compared to 1990 
levels) by the end of 2020. 
4
 “In historic move, UN declares healthy environment a human right,” UNEP, July 28, 2022, In historic move, UN 
declares healthy environment a human right (unep.org) (accessed on August 15, 2023). 
5
 Environmental human rights have emerged as a link between environmental protection and human rights agenda, 
and ultimately, as a language within which to frame environment-related social justice claims. 

150 LEXONOMICA.   
 
this year’s sweltering summer of record heat saw global temperatures reach the Paris 
Agreement
6
 target of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for more than one month 
(Nilsen, 2023).
7
 While science has played a fundamental role in the United Nations 
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
8
 from the start, its role 
became particularly significant during the preparation of the Paris Agreement, where 
a new science-policy interface enabled improved collaboration between the scientific 
community spearheaded by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 
(IPCC)
9
 and the policy community generally and negotiators more specifically 
(Fischlin, 2017: p. 3). Paris Agreement states a commitment to keeping global 
average temperatures “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels…pursuing efforts 
to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C” (Nicholas, 2021: p. 20). Humanity is not 
currently remotely on track to succeed in limiting temperature increase to 1.5°C, the 
aspirational goal of the Paris Agreement. Reaching a 1.5°C world would be an epic 
victory for humans and nature (Nicholas, 2021: p. 28). It has been frustrating to 
realise the human and economic toll of extreme weather events related to climate 
change, and yet not have it be part of the political conversation. The concept of 
contemporary climate change did not invade the earth from somewhere else in the 
universe. Climate change is a product of this planet, made here by particular choices 
by particular people in specific nations at specific times (Shue, 2021: p. 30). 
 
The planet has previously experienced warmer and colder times. Today, however, 
Earth’s climate is changing rapidly because of human activity. Successive findings of 
the IPCC attest to a worldwide near-consensus among scientists that atmospheric 
concentrations of GHGs are rising, and have the effect of raising temperatures 
through the greenhouse effect, and that these increases are anthropogenic or due to 
human-generated emissions of these gases (Attfield 2015, p. 202). The latest IPCC 
report projects that without more urgent climate action, the world will pass the key 
1.5°C threshold by the early 2030s, risking a far deadlier future for our children and 
future generations (Hausfather, 2021). 
 
6
 Paris Agreement (adopted 12 December 2015, entered into force 4 November 2016), UN Doc 
FCCC/CP/2015/L.9/Rev.1. 
7
 It must be stressed that the 1.5°C and 2°C limits set in the Paris Agreement are targets for the average temperature 
of the planet over the twenty or thirty-year periods typically used to define climate.  
8
 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (adopted 9 May 1992, entered into force 
21 March 1994) UNTC XVII.7. 
9
 The IPCC (the world’s leading authority on climate science) was established by the United Nations Environment 
Programme (UNEP), the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), and the World Health Organisation in1988 
to synthesize research on climate change. IPCC reports intended to provide policymakers with regular scientific 
assessments on climate change, its implications, and potential future risks, as well as to put forward adaptation and 
mitigation options. 

E. S. Sritharan: The Ethics of Climate Change, Climate Policy and Climate Justice 151. 
 
 
 
In this paper, I explore how the organisation of our fossil fuel-centred economies 
has driven climate change, one of the defining challenges of the 21
st
 century. Who 
should bear the rapidly increasing burdens of the harm caused by anthropogenic 
climate change? Is it states, or affected individuals, families, and future generations, 
who had no role in creating the harm?  Or should the burden fall on those agents 
that have contributed the most while simultaneously greatly profiting? I argue that 
the fossil fuel industry bears substantial responsibility for the cost of redressing 
climate harm. It seems that the international community is ignoring the elephant in 
the room of the global climate debate. Fossil fuel companies have a moral 
responsibility to affected parties for climate harm and have a duty to correct such 
harm. Climate ethics literature refers in this regard to three moral principles of 
rectifying the unjust situation created by the actions that produced climate change.  
 
In the international law world, the polluter pays principle
10
 forms the backbone of 
Principle 16 of the 1992 Rio Declaration,
11
 which requires polluters to pay for the 
damage caused by their activities. An essential innovation of the Rio Declaration is 
that it embraces the principle of sustainable development as a way of balancing two 
potentially competing priorities, namely economic development and environmental 
protection (Rose, Blokker and Dam-De Jong, et al. 2022, p. 325). After the 
establishment of the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage 
(WIM)
12
 in 2013, the concept of loss and damage,
13
 whereby the nations that emit 
the bulk of GHGs help address the needs of lower-emitting nations who nonetheless 
bear the brunt of the climate change impacts, is now considered the third pillar 
(Broberg and Romera, 2021) of climate action under the UNFCCC. Loss and 
damage as a climate strategy was recognised in a stand-alone article (Article 8) in the 
Paris Agreement. At the 2022 Conference of the Parties (COP27) summit in Egypt, 
all of the world’s governments agreed to establish a loss and damage fund for 
 
10
 The polluter pays principle, whereby a state should ensure that it is the actor responsible for pollution that bears 
both the more immediate and the longer term costs thereof. While the principle is hardly reflective of customary 
international law, it features as an important guiding principle in a wide range of conventions and legal instruments. 
See: Henriksen, 2023: p. 198. 
11
 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, UN Doc. A/CONF. 151/26/Rev.1, annex I (June 14, 1992). 
12
 Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage Associated with Climate Change Impacts (22 November 
2013) UN Doc FCCC/CP/2013/L.15. 
13
 Loss and damage refers to the harms associated with the adverse effects of human-induced climate change, 
including the inability to respond adequately to climate stressors and the costs and adverse effects associated with 
the adaptation and coping measures themselves. 

152 LEXONOMICA.   
 
countries worst-hit by climate change.
14
 However, it is too early to determine 
whether the loss and damage provisions of the Paris Agreement will deliver climate 
justice as rich nations are not obligated under the Paris Agreement to pay for loss 
and damage.  
 
Despite that, climate lawsuits against fossil fuel companies and governments, which 
are a rapidly developing field, are on the rise. One of the cases was brought by 
Milieudefensie, a Dutch environmental organisation, against Royal Dutch Shell. On 
26 May 2021, the District Court of the Hague passed a judgement recognising the 
obligation of Shell to mitigate climate change (Mayer, 2021). International climate 
agreements have reflected climate justice repeatedly, emphasising the principle of 
“common but differentiated responsibilities” (CBDR)
15
. However, developed 
countries have failed to live up to their commitment to help their poorer 
counterparts adapt (Worland, 2022). 
 
This paper does not claim to be the first to have pointed the finger at the fossil fuel 
industry for its role in the climate crisis, nor should the industry become the only 
agent responsible for addressing climate change. Different agents have different 
roles and responsibilities in tackling climate change; most importantly states should 
provide the appropriate legislative and political frameworks for ensuring that, in 
accordance with their responsibility, the fossil fuel industry complies with their 
duties. Climate impacts will not be mitigated or avoided without collective action 
and governmental regulation; moreover, individuals also have duties to bring about 
effective collective action on climate change. Of course, a hesitant yet accusatory 
finger has long been aimed at the industry’s way over broader issues such as 
environmental degradation, economic exploitation, social disruption, political 
instability, and cultural estrangement. 
 
This paper has six sections in addition to the Introduction and Conclusion. I begin 
in section two with a brief overview of the global climate change problem and 
summarise the present state of scientific knowledge which documents the human 
 
14
 See “COP27 Reaches Breakthrough Agreement on New “Loss and Damage” Fund for Vulnerable Countries,” 
UN Climate Change News, COP27 Reaches Breakthrough Agreement on New “Loss and Damage” Fund for 
Vulnerable Countries | UNFCCC (accessed January 26, 2023). 
15
 The CBDR principle seeks to take account of the special needs of developing states and the fact that developed 
states generally hold greater responsibility for existing environmental damage and are better equipped to deal with 
the consequences than developing states. There is both an element of contribution or responsibility for the creation 
of an environmental problem and an element of ability to offer a remedy inherent in the principle. See: Henriksen, 
2023: p. 198. 

E. S. Sritharan: The Ethics of Climate Change, Climate Policy and Climate Justice 153. 
 
 
causes and disastrous impacts of climate change. Section three examines the moral 
responsibility of the fossil fuel industry for the climate crisis and explores the role 
the industry has played and still plays in climate change. Section four explores the 
moral arguments for responding to climate change and discusses the types of moral 
duty that govern our response to climate change. Section five discusses the concept 
of climate justice, recognising that those least responsible for climate change are 
those who are most vulnerable to its effects. Section six considers people’s 
fundamental rights and interests and the planet they inhabit. Section seven outlines 
the fossil fuel industry’s causal responsibility and duties towards society and outlines 
the present deadlock on the issue. 
 
2 Overview of the Human-Caused Climate Change Problem  
 
The Earth is in uncharted territory now due to global warming from burning fossil 
fuels, and further irreversible damage is likely without accelerated efforts to reduce 
GHG emissions. Scientific research is crucial in the face of these threats, to help 
better understand these changes now and over the longer term and to feed into 
climate policy interventions. The Industrial Revolution and the discovery and 
widespread use of fossil fuels kicked climate change into overdrive and now the 
situation is dire. The Industrial Revolution was powered by an energy revolution that 
produced today’s global energy regime based on the exploration for and the 
extraction, transport, and combustion of fossil fuels. The damage from 
industrialisation has been universally distributed in the form of the growing dangers 
constituting climate change that face everyone, including everyone in future 
generations of all nations, and the massive problems of air pollution that kill millions 
every year (Shue, 2021: p. 33 and 36).  
 
While the Global North’s historical carbon emissions have exceeded their fair share 
of the planetary boundary by an estimated 92 per cent, the impacts of climate change 
fall disproportionally on the Global South, which is responsible for a trivial share of 
excess emissions (8 percent) (Heede and Grasso, 2023). Humans are exceeding 
planetary limits on multiple fronts, and the impacts of human activity in different 
areas are interrelated and create synergistic effects. The latest assessment on the 
“planetary boundaries” framework, published in the journal Science Advances and 
based on 2000 studies found that six of the nine planetary boundaries had been 
broken because of human-caused pollution and destruction of the natural world 
(Guardian Editorial, 2023). 

154 LEXONOMICA.   
 
 
By far the most important factor causing climate change is the accumulation in the 
planet’s atmosphere of carbon dioxide (CO 2) from the burning of fossil fuels. It 
turns out that because CO 2 remains in the atmosphere for almost unimaginably long 
times, the crucial factor is the cumulative amount of CO 2 emitted since around 1750 
(Shue, 2021: p. 62). CO 2 represents 75 per cent of GHG emissions; methane and 
nitrous oxide make up most of the rest (Nicholas 2021, p.16). It is firmly established 
as long as the atmospheric concentration of GHGs – and especially CO 2 – continues 
to expand, climate change will continue to become more severe (Shue, 2021: p. 19). 
Present and future emissions matter primarily because we humans have already 
injected so much CO 2 into the atmosphere in the past. The earth’s climate system 
has a single carbon budget for any given probability for any given amount of change 
in the foreseeable future. This means that the carbon budget is both global and 
cumulative, which means there can be no separate budgets for the past, present, and 
future. There is one carbon budget for all the centuries of any relevance to humans 
(Shue, 2021: p. 29). 
 
The 2022 Emissions Gap Report
16
 found: “The world is still falling short of the 
Paris climate goals, with no credible pathway to 1.5°C in place.” The report finds 
that the nationally determined contributions
17
 (NDCs) that governments have put 
on the table currently leave us on course for warming up to 2.8°C this century. The 
latest IPCC report uses 2019 as a baseline, indicating that GHG emissions need to 
be cut by 43 per cent by 2030. This is critical to meeti ng the Paris Agreement goal 
of limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C by the end of this century and avoiding the 
worst impacts of climate change. 
 
It is critical for global emissions to peak and then start declining sharply very soon, 
which is physically and technologically possible. It simply has to be made politically 
possible by acts of determination and will that unseat incumbent politicians blocking 
action (Shue, 2021: p. 63). Studies have outlined a range of political activities that 
preserve fossil energy’s near stranglehold on public policy, including using political 
 
16
 The Emissions Gap Report (EGR) series tracks our progress in limiting global warming well below 2°C and 
pursuing 1.5°C in line with the Paris Agreement. With the aim to inform the climate negotiations among UN 
Member states, the ECR is launched every year ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP).  
17
 The Paris Agreement has a pledge and review structure, whereby countries commit to making emissions 
reductions, and collectively review progress overtime. These pledges are made in countries nationally determined 
contributions (NDCs). Parties to the Agreement are legally required to submit their NDCs but there are no legal 
requirements for them to make any specific commitments in those NDCSs. 

E. S. Sritharan: The Ethics of Climate Change, Climate Policy and Climate Justice 155. 
 
 
campaigns to outflank arguments for renewable energy, discrediting opponents 
(especially climate scientists), lobbying and funding politicians and funding 
conservative think tanks and social movements supportive of the industry (Nyberg, 
Wright and Bowden 2023, p. 24). By about 2050, CO 2 emissions from energy use 
must completely stop, which means humanity must exit the fossil fuel, or carbon, 
energy regime entirely and use nothing but alternative energy, that is, noncarbon 
energy, meaning, anything but fossil fuel. This is because if we keep adding to the 
cumulative total, the atmospheric concentration will exceed the carbon budget by 
2°C (Shue, 2021: p. 63). 
 
It is the extent to which governments manage the energy transition that will 
ultimately define them. That is difficult, when more than 75 per cent of global GHG 
emissions and close to 90 per cent of all CO 2 (Shue, 2021: p. 32) come from burning 
fossil fuels that still supply about 80 per cent of the world’s energy (Nyberg, Wright 
and Bowden 2023, p. 12). Fossil fuels are deeply woven into our industrial society 
and global economy. They played a central role in creating the material comforts 
many of us take for granted, as well as the harrowing inequalities that characterise 
our world. Moreover, their continued use threatens human life as we know it on this 
planet (Chomsky, 2022: p. 180). Fossil fuel companies and their allies actively 
promote business models and economic systems that cause carbon emissions. The 
energy transition is a shift from a concentrated, expensive, polluting commodity-
based system with no learning curve, to an efficient, manufactured, technology-
driven system that offers continuously falling costs and is available everywhere. The 
powerful state-owned companies as well as public investor-owned companies have 
to decide whether they transition to the energies of the 21
st
 century and thereby 
accelerate the exponential curve of the energy transition, or if their flame dies out 
while they remain blind and in pernicious resistance. The challenges in making the 
transition from a carbon-burning energy regime to alternative sources of energy are, 
on the whole, relatively minor compared to the gargantuan consequences of 
persisting in the carbon energy business as usual (Shue, 2021: p. 80). 
 
By framing climate change as an ethical challenge requiring the reduction of injustice, 
the first step is to think about the victims (sufferers of harm, loss, or damage) of 
climate change. The fact that vulnerability, resilience, power, and emissions flows 
are not evenly distributed across people, combined with the fact that climate change 
is being caused by human activity - and that its impacts on some people can be 
addressed by other people in positions of advantage - brings climate change into the 

156 LEXONOMICA.   
 
domain of justice (McKinnon, 2022: p. 36). Climate change is one of the cruellest 
manifestations of injustice confronting humanity. Caused primarily by the world’s 
most affluent populations, its consequences are being borne disproportionately by 
the planet’s most vulnerable states and peoples (Gonzalez, 2021: p. 72). The impacts 
of climate change on poor people in developing countries allow further ethical 
themes to be emphasised. It is widely agreed to be wrong to impose risks on others, 
particularly when those others have no ability to avoid them; this is uncontested in 
cases of reckless driving and of reckless endangerment of workers by factory owners, 
and should be equally clear in cases where the potential climate victims live further 
away from those who cause the risks, and are harder to identify (Attfield, 2015: p. 
204). 
 
3 The Fossil Fuel Industry’s Direct Contribution to Climate Change: A 
Moral Perspective 
 
Ongoing emissions from burning fossil fuels are behind the planet’s warming trend 
and thus it is accurate to say that the burning of fossil fuels is causally responsible 
for most of the climate change (Shue, 2021: p. 37). The fossil fuel industry has had 
a unique role in causing, shaping, advancing, and defending the current unsustainable 
fossil fuel-dependent global economy: by indiscriminately providing their products 
to the global economy, the carbon majors are the heartbeat of the current carbon-
intensive socioeconomic system (Grasso, 2022: p. 35). The contribution to the 
damage done begins with the role played in the creation of the global carbon energy 
regime that relies on extracting, transporting, refining, and burning fossil fuels, 
whose emissions continue to force the climate to become increasingly inhospitable 
to human flourishing (Shue, 2021: p. 34).  
 
Questions of responsibility for climate change also address causal responsibility, 
duties to address injustice, and the agent to which these duties attach. However, the 
answers to these questions in the climate case are far from straightforward. This is 
in part because climate change is arguably a perfect moral storm: its causes and 
impacts are geographically and temporally splintered and dispersed; the agency fit to 
tackle it is fragmented; and the nature of the wrongs at the heart of climate justice is 
disputed (McKinnon, 2022: p. 91). Causal responsibility alone is not sufficient to 
justify the consequent duties that the fossil fuel industry must shoulder. 
Furthermore, moral responsibility is a complex matter. 
  

E. S. Sritharan: The Ethics of Climate Change, Climate Policy and Climate Justice 157. 
 
 
Marco Grasso develops a moral framework that lays out the fossil fuel industry’s 
duties of reparation and decarbonisation to mitigate the harm it has done in his book 
From Big Oil to Big Green: Holding the Oil Industry to Account for the Climate Crisis. Grasso 
argues that the fossil fuel companies enabled harm to humanity and the planet as 
opposed to their direct contributions in terms of emissions that did harm. He 
highlights the industry’s harm-related morally relevant facts thwarted harm 
prevention, giving rise to costs in terms of the climate harm generated.  
 
In brief, Fact 1, Awareness: fossil fuel companies have known for several decades that 
their activities were causing long-term damage to the climate; Fact 2, Behaviour: for 
decades after their internal knowledge of climate change, the industry did not change 
its carbon-intensive business models to less carbon-intensive and sustainable 
business models. On the contrary, they continued to explore, produce, refine, and 
distribute fossil fuels; Fact 3, Capacity: studies show that the largest fossil fuel 
companies held the technical capacity for clean energy well within their grasp: they 
were the proud holders of several early patents on various technologies that would 
have helped reduce their carbon output; Fact 4, Denial: through an intensive, 
systematic, and sophisticated denial campaign, major fossil fuel companies have 
successfully opposed any political efforts to move socio-economic systems away 
from fossil fuels, thereby inducing decision makers to commit a morally relevant 
omission that has seriously aggravated the negative repercussions of the climate 
crisis on a global scale; Fact 5, Enrichment: The fossil fuel companies have made 
substantial profits that have seen them acquiring extraordinary wealth through their 
fossil fuel-related activities.  
 
In this regard, climate ethics literature refers to two backward-looking moral 
principles, the polluter pays principle (PPP) and the beneficiary pays principle (BPP), 
and one forward-looking moral principle, the ability to pay principle (APP). While 
the morally relevant Facts 1, 2, 3, and 4 are all related to harm and therefore refer 
mostly to the PPP, Fact 5, which is not related to harm, refers to the BPP and the 
APP. In other words, the inclusion of the wealth component intrinsic to Fact 5 
reinforces the justifications for the industry’s moral responsibility, especially in view 
of a consequent duty of reparation that should take the form of disbursement of 
funds (Grasso, 2022: p. 38-60 and 81-83). All these principles aim to establish and 
justify a positive responsibility for sharing the burden of correcting the unjust 
situation caused by climate change and will be covered in detail in Section 7. 

158 LEXONOMICA.   
 
For decades, public funds have been guided into the coffers of politically connected 
fossil fuel companies as subsidies. Fossil fuels cannot compete on their own: more 
than ever, they need the political favouritism and subsidies that they have enjoyed. 
According to the most recent International Monetary Fund
18
 (IMF) analysis, despite 
being the primary cause of the climate crisis and at a time when the world is starting 
to experience worsening impacts of climate change from heatwaves, wildfires and 
floods from the Americas to Europe to Asia, fossil fuels benefited from record 
subsidies of US$13 million a minute in 2022. The total subsidies for fossil fuels in 
2022 were US$7 trillion, which is equivalent to 7 per cent of global GDP. Implicit 
subsidies, which represent the enormous costs of the damage caused by fossil fuels 
through climate change and air pollution, made up 80% of the total (Black, et al., 
2023).  
 
In 2009, the G20 nations, which cause 80 per cent of global carbon emissions, 
pledged to phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies. However, according to an 
estimate by the International Institute for Sustainable Development think tank, the 
G20 poured a record US$1.4 trillion into fossil fuel subsidies in 2022 (Laan and 
Geddes, 2023). In June 2023, the World Bank reported that fossil fuel and 
agricultural subsidies combined could amount to US$12 trillion a year and were 
causing environmental havoc (Carrington, 2023).  
 
With fossil fuel companies gaining record profits amid the energy crisis in 2022, 
resulting from Russia’s war in Ukraine, there is little incentive for them to change 
their business models in line with what is needed to limit global warming. The scale 
of fossil fuel subsidies is a worrying sign for energy transitions. By underpricing fossil 
fuels, governments not only incentivise overuse but also perpetuate inefficient 
polluting technologies and entrench inequality. There would be enormous benefits 
from subsidy reforms, and governments have the power to push them in the right 
direction. To stabilise global temperatures, we must move away from fossil fuels 
instead of propping up an industry that is contributing directly to climate change.  
 
While 2022 inflicted hardship upon many people around the world due to inflation, 
war, and climate-driven disasters, the fossil fuel industry had its most profitable year 
in history. The world’s biggest fossil fuel companies released their earnings reports, 
 
18
 The negotiations at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference resulted in the creation of what are known as the Bretton 
Woods Institutions, namely the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The IMF was established 
to regulate monetary relations between states.  

E. S. Sritharan: The Ethics of Climate Change, Climate Policy and Climate Justice 159. 
 
 
revealing record-breaking profits; just five companies (ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, 
Chevron, and Total Energies) reported a total of nearly US$200 billion in profits in 
2022 (Milman, 2023). Saudi Arabia’s state-controlled oil company Aramco reported 
a record profit of US$161 billion for 2022, the highest-ever annual profit by an 
energy company (BBC News, 2023). While these companies are making hundreds 
of billions of dollars in profit, the world is incurring record losses due to extreme 
weather events. As the field of attribution science advances, researchers are 
increasingly able to show when and how particular extreme events are occurring due 
to human-caused climate change and trace these changes back to the source of the 
GHG emissions. While climate impacts are often discussed in terms of economic 
damages, we must never lose sight of the fact that much of the loss and damage 
suffered involves things so precious that it is impossible to place a monetary value 
on them, including losses of life, cultural heritage, and a sense of safety.   
 
Ending the fossil fuel subsidies should be the centrepiece of efforts over the next 
f e w y e a r s t o g e t o n t r a c k w i t h l i m i t i n g g l o b a l w a r m i n g t o b e l o w 2 ° C , a s w e l l a s 
preventing 6.7 million (World Health Organisation, 2022) premature deaths annually 
due to air pollution and household air pollution. If we are to have any chance of 
avoiding the irreversible and tragic consequences of climate change, governments 
simply have to show bolder leadership by phasing out their support for the 
production and consumption of fossil fuels. The researchers of the IMF report 
found that ending fossil fuel subsidies would cut GHG emissions by 34 per cent by 
2030 compared with 2019 levels, representing a large chunk of the 43 per cent cut 
needed to ensure a reasonable chance of keeping global warming below 1.5°C 
(Black, et al., 2023). 
 
By and large, states are the principal players involved in addressing climate change. 
Other stakeholders, such as civil society, individuals, local authorities and 
communities, private-sector actors, and international institutions are considered 
subordinate players. While all stakeholders are involved in global efforts to combat 
climate change, fossil fuel companies are the truly overlooked players in the current 
climate policies and initiatives. Fossil fuels should now be looked upon as a harmful 
product, the use of which is affecting the health, lives, and well-being of present and 
future generations of all Earth’s inhabitants. It is time to acknowledge not only the 
role of the fossil fuel industry but also the moral and political implications deriving 
from its involvement in such harmful products. Indeed, climate activists have started 
to train their focus on fossil fuel companies and projects (Grasso, 2022: p.33-36). It 

160 LEXONOMICA.   
 
is vital that humanity close down the fossil fuel regime and make the transition to a 
safe and sustainable energy regime. Energy-poor developing countries must be 
enabled to the greatest extent possible to leap-frog over carbon-based energy to 
noncarbon energy, because their carbon emissions will exceed the remaining carbon 
budget if they follow the same high-polluting path originally taken by the now-
developed countries (Shue, 2021: p. 38). 
 
Climate change discussions need to be based on facts. The fact remains that the 
accumulated effects of the fossil fuel regime have long been undermining human 
economies and societies. The most straightforward testament to the role the fossil 
fuel industry has played and still plays in climate change is the direct contribution of 
GHG emissions generated by its activities. Research by Richard Heede’s Climate 
Accountability Institute has focused on the contribution of the large carbon 
producers, providing overwhelming grounds for an investigation into Big Oil’s 
contribution to climate change in terms of emissions, thus paving the way for an 
analysis of its responsibility and its consequent duties. Heede’s findings demonstrate 
that 62 per cent of the global industrial emissions of GHGs from 1751 to 2015 can 
be traced to the activities of one hundred currently operating carbon majors (41 
public investor-owned companies, 16 private investor-owned, 36 stated-owned and 
seven government-run) and eight non-extant ones. Heede’s data also demonstrates 
that the one hundred currently operating carbon majors have produced 71 per cent 
of the global industrial emissions since 1988. The top twenty were responsible for 
more than 30 per cent and the top ten accounted for almost 22 per cent of 
cumulative global industrial emissions in the period of 1988-2015 (Grasso, 2022: p. 
31).  
 
Through its informed and self-advantageous choice to continue the exploration, 
production, refinement, and distribution of fossil fuels – all the time denying the 
harmfulness of such products and using its lobbying clout on political decision-
makers – the industry has imposed this reliance on fossil fuels on other industries, 
which have had to shape their business models accordingly with a limited number 
of costly alternative options; the same is true for individuals, whose lifestyles have 
evolved in parallel to the business choices made by this influential industry. 
However, an increasing number of people are waking up to the prominent role the 
fossil fuel industry plays in the climate crisis. The bad news is the world will continue 
to heat and extremes of heat and rainfall will worsen until net zero is reached globally 
– in every country and every sector. 

E. S. Sritharan: The Ethics of Climate Change, Climate Policy and Climate Justice 161. 
 
 
4 Moral Foundations of Climate Action: A Philosophical Perspective 
 
Environmental ethicists and moral and political philosophers who have engaged 
with climate change have pulled no punches in their condemnation of our many 
ethical failures in the face of climate challenges. Climate action is not a luxury but a 
must. At the most fundamental level, the reasons to respond to climate change arise 
from the enormous human suffering and loss that climate change could bring. If 
humanity cannot prevent climate change through mitigation, people will face 
increased climate-related hazards, including both extreme events, such as droughts, 
and wildfires, and slow-onset events, such as rising temperatures and oceans. If 
people cannot adapt to protect themselves against those hazards, they will suffer. 
Thus, suffering is sometimes listed as a third kind of response to climate change: it 
is what remains to be done where mitigation and adaptation fall short (Morrow, 
2020: p. 91).  
 
One simple moral argument for responding to climate change is as follows: death, 
human suffering, and loss are very bad things. Morally speaking, we ought to prevent 
very bad things from happening when we can do so without excessive sacrifice. We 
can prevent much of the death, disease, mental and physical suffering, and cultural 
and social losses around the world that climate change could bring by mitigating and 
adapting to climate change, and we could do so with relatively little sacrifice 
compared to the scope of the problem. However, mitigation and support for 
adaptation are not only about preventing harm but also about stopping ourselves 
from inflicting harm on others (Morrow, 2020: p. 92-95).  
 
Two different types of moral duty govern our response to climate change. The moral 
philosopher John Broome put the point this way: We have “duties of goodness” that 
require us to make the world a better place, but we also have far more stringent 
“duties of justice.” Broome explains that duties of goodness are not owed to people. 
Morality requires you to try and improve the world, and not make it worse. For 
instance, when you are getting rid of surplus clothing, you should give it to someone 
who can use it rather than throw it out. That person has no right to your clothing. 
If you do not give it to her, you do her no injustice. You do not owe it to her to give 
it to her. Morality also requires governments to make the world better. For instance, 
it requires them to design their regulations about carbon emissions (Broome, 2012: 
p. 49-54). 

162 LEXONOMICA.   
 
Broome states that duties of justice plainly differ from duties of goodness. Duties of 
justice are owed by one person to another particular person, or to other particular 
people. To express the fact that the duty is owed to some person, we often say that 
the person has a right to your performance of the duty. The notion of a right goes 
along with a duty of justice. For instance, you have a right not to have your house 
demolished without compensation, and people have a right not to have their 
property stolen or to be killed. If you breach a duty of justice, you are doing an 
injustice. Some moral rights are also legal rights; for example, the right to private 
property is among them. Individuals do indeed have a duty of justice to reduce 
emissions by their private actions. The duty to promote good is a very serious moral 
duty, as justice is (Broome, 2012: p. 49-54). 
 
Duties of goodness and duties of justice do not always conflict. In the case of climate 
change, they generally pull in the same direction. When you cause emissions, they 
harm other people. This is an injustice done to those people, and it also makes the 
world worse. Therefore, reducing emissions is a duty of justice and also a duty of 
goodness. These are obligations that we owe to particular people, specifically, those 
whom we wrong if we fail to live up to those obligations. Much of what we owe to 
one another is governed by morality and, as such, has the force of moral duty. This 
is certainly true of duties to reduce climate injustice. These are duties either to avoid 
action that causes climate change and/or to take remedial action to address the 
damage done to the victims of climate change (McKinnon, 2022: p. 109-110). 
 
Broome argues the harms we inflict through our GHG emissions are unjust because 
several features of those harms mean that we lack adequate justification. First, the 
harm results from something we do; we cannot try to justify it by appealing to the 
distinction between what we do and what we merely allow to happen. Second, the 
harms are serious harms that cannot be easily excused. Third, even if they are not 
exactly deliberate – we are not emitting GHGs for the purpose of harming others – 
they are not accidental; we can no longer excuse ourselves by saying that we did not 
expect the harm to occur. Fourth, we do not compensate the victims of these harms. 
Fifth, each person’s emissions are produced in the pursuit of their own self-interest; 
we cannot try to justify them as regrettable side effects of our pursuit of the greater 
good. Sixth, they are not fully reciprocated, meaning that the harms are largely 
inflicted by one group of people (wealthier people in the current generation) on 
other groups (poorer people and future generations); we cannot try to excuse them 
by noting that the victims are doing the same to us. Seventh, we could easily avoid 

E. S. Sritharan: The Ethics of Climate Change, Climate Policy and Climate Justice 163. 
 
 
these harms; while the costs of mitigation will not be trivial, they are small in 
comparison to the harms we would inflict through unmitigated climate change. 
Taken together, Broome concludes, these facts mean that we are harming others 
unjustly (Morrow, 2020: p. 96; Broome, 2012: p. 54-59).   
 
Climate change is essentially a matter of justice and is nothing new. All major ethical 
systems would strongly condemn behaviour that poses serious risks to the things 
that humans hold value, such as life, health, family and the ability to make a living. 
Thus imposing mortal threats on fellow-humans, however distant, and without the 
strongest of justifications, is manifestly wrong. Yet this is what disproportionate 
emissions of GHGs standardly do if the general scientific consensus is to be 
accepted. Furthermore, this means that ignoring the precautionary principle
19
 in 
these circumstances is ethically intolerable (Attfield, 2015: p. 204). The UNFCCC 
Article 3(3) provides, “Parties should take precautionary measures to anticipate, 
prevent or minimise the causes of climate change and mitigate its adverse effects. 
Where there are threats of serious irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty 
should not be used as a reason for postponing such measures.”  
 
T h e c u s t o m a r y l a w s t a t u s o f t h e precautionary principle has been confirmed by 
numerous findings of international courts and tribunals. In general terms, this 
principle declares that where there is reason to regard a substance or process as 
environmentally damaging, preventive action or regulation should be undertaken 
despite the absence of scientific certainty (Attfield, 2015: p. 156). That principle 
applies wherever there is reason to credit a risk of environmental damage that is 
severe or irreversible (or both); and even those who do not fully accept climate 
change science can hardly deny that, even in the absence of complete scientific 
consensus, reasons exist for regarding these as serious dangers, and ones likely to be 
caused by human activity (Attfield, 2015: p. 203). 
 
As Simon Caney (Caney, 2010 a; Caney 2010 b) argues, the unjust disadvantages 
suffered by victims of climate change, for example, loss of livelihoods, illness, and 
displacement, are not new, and the distribution of these disadvantages by climate 
impacts are deeply intertwined with other injustices such as global poverty, histories 
 
19
 The so-called precautionary approach stipulates that a lack of scientific certainty about the negative effects of an 
activity must not prevent states from taking preventive measures. Notions of precaution are found in many treaties 
in international environmental law, including in the 1985 Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer 
and the 1992 UNFCCC. See also Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration. 

164 LEXONOMICA.   
 
of colonialism, injustice in trade, and corporate tax avoidance (McKinnon 2022, 
p.37). A common way of understanding the damage done to people in the Global 
South by climate change is in terms of human rights. They are legally enforceable 
protections and/or claims that correlate with obligations held by others. Human 
rights provide a prima facie attractive framework for thinking about climate injustice 
because they focus on people, are action-guiding, and already exist in multiple legal 
agreements in the international domain that reach within state borders (McKinnon, 
2022: p. 40-41).  
 
Caney notes a human rights-based approach focuses our attention on individuals’ 
overriding moral claims not to be treated in certain ways – claims that cannot be 
trumped by benefits to other people or even to the people whose rights are violated. 
A human rights approach focuses on protecting individuals’ rights. The most 
straightforward argument of this sort starts from the claim that climate change will 
violate people’s basic human rights. Caney argues that by causing climate change, 
emitters are collectively violating individuals’ rights to life, understood as the right 
not to be arbitrarily deprived of one’s life; as well as individuals’ right to health, 
understood as a right against others’ creating serious threats to one’s health; and 
individuals’ right to subsistence, understood as a right not to be deprived of the 
means of subsistence. A human rights approach highlights emitters’ moral obligation 
to address loss and damage, particularly by compensating victims, and emitters’ 
obligation to help people adapt to climate change (Morrow, 2020: p. 96-97).  
 
Steve Vanderheiden (Vanderheiden, 2008) argues for a human right to an "adequate 
environment", which includes a right to a "stable climate." Principle 1 of the 
Stockholm Declaration
20
 from the 1972 UN Conference on the Human 
Environment declares that humans have "the fundamental right to freedom, 
equality, and adequate conditions of life, in an environment of a quality that permits 
a life of dignity and well-being," and that as a result, humanity "bears a solemn 
responsibility to protect and improve the environment for present and future 
generations. " In this view, the right to an "adequate environment" follows from 
basic rights to life, freedom, equality, and dignity because it protects the necessary 
physical conditions for human flourishing. He asserts that the right to "climatic 
stability" appears to be an obvious corollary of such a right, to the extent that the 
"preventing dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system" 
 
20
 Stockholm Declaration on the Human Environment (A/Conf/48/14/Rev.I, United Nations 1972). 

E. S. Sritharan: The Ethics of Climate Change, Climate Policy and Climate Justice 165. 
 
 
mentioned in the UNFCCC (the ultimate aim of the UNFCCC) poses a direct threat 
to the basic environmental conditions for a decent life (Morrow, 2020: p. 97).  
 
As Stephen Gardiner (Gardiner, 2011) argues, there are some special features of 
climate change that open the door to morally corrupt reasoning about action on 
climate policy. These special features are as follows. First, scientific uncertainty about 
the severity and distribution of climate impacts; these uncertainties can be exploited 
by ideologically motivated groups to thwart action on climate change. Second, the 
deep roots of the problem in the infrastructures and ways of life of the global rich 
whose emissions have done most to cause climate change. The massive increases in 
GHG emissions are the result of a transformation in the lives of those living in 
consumerist, highly industrialised countries. In the long term, the transition to zero 
carbon economies need not be damaging to the quality of people in these countries. 
In the short term, the changes necessary to reach net zero emissions by 2050 would 
have an impact, and it is naïve to think that this would not be resisted by those who 
have to make sacrifices. Finally, the skewed vulnerabilities of people who will be 
worst affected by climate change. People in rich, industrialised countries are causing 
most of the climate problem and also have the power to tackle it. Given the 
entrenchment of luxury in these societies, these people have the least incentive to 
exercise that power to deliver just and effective climate policy (McKinnon, 2022: p. 
21-22). 
 
5 Anthropogenic Global Climate Change: Through the Lens of Climate 
Justice  
 
Human beings and their communities are not all in this together. Some people are 
much better placed than others to adapt to climate impacts. Certainly, some 
communities and nations are more able than others to influence which climate 
scenarios for the future become history. This could be because their historical 
and/or present emissions make a large contribution to climate change, or because 
they have more power to influence the political and economic direction of travel on 
climate change, or both (McKinnon, 2022: p. 35). The world’s most vulnerable 
people – those with the lowest average incomes, least wealth, and worst health – are 
not well protected from climate impacts by climate policy. Current climate policy 
fails even on the minimum content of climate justice. These minimal standards for 
climate justice involve the requirement on at least states and regional bodies to 
radically reduce emissions and enable adaptation; the commitment to protect the 

166 LEXONOMICA.   
 
world’s most vulnerable people from climate impacts that will exacerbate their 
disadvantage; the adoption of a long-term frame for just and effective climate policy 
that inter alia recognises the interests, needs, and claims of future people 
(McKinnon, 2022: p. 12). 
 
Climate change is an issue for all people, especially the world’s poorest people or 
members of socially marginalised communities from developing countries, who are 
more likely to live in the world’s vulnerable areas and less likely to have the resources. 
Globally, poor and working class people have been disproportionally relegated to 
lands that are less fertile and more vulnerable to climate -caused disasters. They have 
benefited the least from the advances of industrial society enjoyed by the world’s 
wealthy. They often lack access to clean food, water, and air. They have poorer 
infrastructure and fewer resources to protect themselves and recover. Living closer 
to the edge of survival, they are less able to withstand losses or rising prices. They 
also hold less power to enact policies that protect their interests. They are also those 
who have suffered the most from fossil fuel extraction, which continues to displace 
them as it poisons and destroys their lands. Their lack of economic resources and 
political power leaves them more vulnerable to environmental hazards of all sorts 
(Chomsky, 2022: p. 100).  
 
Climate change is treated as a global responsibility in spite of the fact that the bulk 
of the CO 2 emissions were until recently produced by the minority consisting of the 
now-wealthiest nations in the process of generating their own national wealth (Shue, 
2021: p. 43). Furthermore, climate change disproportionately affects the rights of 
people in vulnerable situations more severely and rapidly, such as those in low-lying 
small islands or the least developed countries, the global poor, the elderly, the 
disabled and children. Moreover, climate change amplifies hunger and poverty, 
increasing risks of resource scarcity that can in turn exacerbate political instability 
and even create or worsen refugee crises (climate refugees). According to the 
Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre’s annual report, the number of internally 
displaced people around the world due to climate-related natural disasters reached 
32.6 million as of the end of 2022.
21
 According to the IPCC, the adverse effects of 
the global climate crisis due to the "intensification of heavy precipitation and 
associated flooding, tropical cyclones, drought and, increasingly, sea level rise" linked 
 
21
 “All-Time High of 71 Million People Internally Displaced Worldwide,” IDMC Media Centre, May 11, 2023, All-
time high of 71 million people internally displaced worldwide | IDMC - Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre 
(internal-displacement.org) (accessed on August 25, 2023).  

E. S. Sritharan: The Ethics of Climate Change, Climate Policy and Climate Justice 167. 
 
 
to global warming will force millions to leave their homes in the coming decades 
(Kalin, 2023: p. 3).  
 
While everyone will suffer in some way from climate change, most of us in the 
temperate zones of industrial societies have benefitted from the economic growth 
that accompanied the burning of fossil fuels. This is, therefore, a straightforward 
case in which one group benefits at the expense of another: a classic case of 
distributive injustice. The impacts are problems for retributive justice because the 
most severely affected people are not the people responsible for the emissions that 
cause climate change. From this perspective, the harm suffered from climate change 
is something that was done to you by someone else. If the emissions occurred in the 
distant past, there is no way for the legal system to punish them, but a retributive 
justice might hold that victims of climate harms are owed reparations paid by those 
who benefitted the most from the unjust actions of past generations (Thompson 
and Norris, 2021: p. 138-139). 
 
The climate justice approach recognises that those least responsible for climate 
change, such as indigenous peoples, the low-lying small-island nations, and the 
global poor, are also those who are most vulnerable to its effects, and those who 
lack the resources to protect themselves from extreme weather, rising seas, famine, 
and other environmental disasters. Climate justice means recognising climate change 
as a moral, political, and economic issue that requires fundamentally reorganising 
our global society and economy. A climate justice approach asks how the social and 
economic divisions that characterise our world relate to the causes of climate change 
and its impacts (Chomsky, 2022: p. 101). How have our institutions and structures 
enabled an elite minority to over-extract, overproduce, and overconsume to the 
extent that their squandering of resources threatens human survival, while the 
consequences fall disproportionately on the global poor? Not only do rich people 
consume more of virtually every resource than poor people, but rich people control 
the global economy and the institutions that have overseen and profited from this 
global system based on ever-increasing consumption and destruction of resources 
(Chomsky, 2022: p. 102). For many of the low-lying small-island nations and 
indigenous peoples around the world, the catastrophe has already occurred, and they 
are currently involved in picking up the pieces and adapting to a world in which their 
traditional way of life is no longer feasible (Thompson and Norris, 2021: p. 139).  
 

168 LEXONOMICA.   
 
Rich countries – the former European colonial powers and their settler colonial, 
industrialised  offspring like United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, 
populated primarily by Euro-descended people, along with a few small outliers like 
the oil-producing countries of the Middle East – grew rich mostly by exploiting the 
land, labour, resources of their colonies (which are today poor countries) and using 
those advantages, along with fossil fuels, to develop their own industry and increase 
their own consumption and emissions. Every one of these wealthy countries 
maintains internal colonies of poor people. Everywhere, wealth came from finding 
ways to intensify production, thus consumption, which meant using more resources 
and increasing pollution and emissions (Chomsky, 2022: p. 102). Overconsumption 
of resources by the few creates dangerous pressure on the other planetary 
boundaries. Extreme weather is hitting the world’s poorest communities the hardest, 
despite their negligible contributions to global emissions. The rich can insulate 
themselves from the full impact of these human-made threats or even profit from 
them; the poor cannot (Chomsky, 2022: p. 103 and 108).  
 
The concept of climate justice calls for a recognition of the unfair burden placed on 
those who are the least responsible for climate change yet who will suffer its effects 
more acutely. The early industrialising nations that today count as developed have 
clung to the wealth produced by their respective Industrial Revolutions but some 
have treated the problems produced as shared by all, beneficiaries and non-
beneficiaries alike. Climate change is treated as a global responsibility in spite of the 
fact that the bulk of the carbon emissions were until recently produced by the 
minority consisting of the now-wealthiest nations in the process of generating their 
own national wealth (Shue, 2021: p. 43).  
 
Despite innumerable studies, meetings, international agreements, and increased 
public awareness and concern about the climate emergency and despite generations 
of scientific and technological advances, we inhabitants of planet Earth collectively 
continue to emit more GHGs into the atmosphere each year than the one before. 
People alive right now are living through the decade that will define the future for 
both humanity and life on Earth. Climate change affects nearly everything that we 
already care about. It will make us and our children less healthy, our communities 
less prosperous, and our world less stable. We humans know that we are causing 
profound damage with our climate pollution and the destruction of nature. 
 

E. S. Sritharan: The Ethics of Climate Change, Climate Policy and Climate Justice 169. 
 
 
The climate breakdown is the result of a social and economic system that relies on 
extracting and consuming the earth’s resources in ever-increasing quantities. If we 
are not able to change our habits at the fundamental, systemic scale needed, the 
consequences for humanity will be incalculable. The fossil fuel industry itself, and 
the industries and institutions that rely on it for their profits, collectively have a 
strong interest in maintaining the current system (Chomsky, 2022: p. 184). 
Therefore, the challenge of climate change is political – which is to say this i s a 
question of addressing the political by constructing a new foundation for societies. 
This foundation must not be built on the notion of fossil energy as the basis for 
perpetual growth and endless consumer capitalism (Nyberg, Wright and Bowden, 
2023: p. 166).   
 
Gardiner presents climate change as being not only a global challenge raising 
questions of international fairness but also an intergenerational one. He implies that 
looking at climate change as a matter of intra-generational equity misses the point. 
In other words, the intergenerational problem is the more pressing one of the two, 
and the allocation of moral responsibility should be guided by a sense of obligation 
toward future generations (Gardiner, 2011). Gardiner is right to claim that the 
presentation of climate change as creating duties for members of the current 
generation to future people because those to whom these duties are owed can do 
nothing whatsoever to influence our performance of them: they are entirely at our 
mercy (McKinnon, 2022: p. 23).  
 
Shue takes on this issue in his important book The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a 
Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now. He argues that today’s citizens of 
developed countries – inheritors of fossil fuel benefits and liabilities – have an 
undeniable moral responsibility to tackle climate change. He states that we are the 
pivotal generation to change the direction of our climate, and at the date-of-last-
opportunity to prevent a disastrous event. Unlike previous generations, which did 
not fully understand the danger of burning carbon, we have the knowledge to 
control rising carbon emissions. Moreover, unlike future generations, this generation 
still has the power and time to mitigate the worst effects of global warming. He 
warns that shirking that responsibility only leaves the future generation with an even 
heavier burden (Shue, 2021). Vanderheiden also incorporates sustained discussions 
on taking into account intergenerational cooperation and discusses the analytic 
challenges it poses.  

170 LEXONOMICA.   
 
The case is clear for fossil fuel companies to pay reparations for the harm their 
products have caused. In May 2023, a ground-breaking study, published in the 
journal One Earth, calculated that the top 21 fossil fuel companies owe (are liable 
for) climate reparations of $209 billion annually to compensate communities and 
countries which have contributed the least but are losing the most as the climate 
breaks down. It is the first time researchers have quantified the economic burden 
caused by major carbon fuel producers that have extracted wealth from planet-
heating fossil fuels, providing a starting point for discussion of the financial duty 
owed by the fossil fuel industry to climate victims. This is only a conservative 
estimation as the methodology excludes the economic value of lost lives and 
livelihoods, species extinction and other biodiversity loss (Heede and Grasso, 2023).  
 
This new study, which reframes the debate on international climate funding by 
focusing on the financial responsibility of fossil fuel companies, could help shift the 
focus in the loss and damage negotiations. As climate litigation moves forward in 
jurisdictions across the world, evidence-based methodologies may assist courts in 
calculating damages. This is the next step in holding fossil fuel companies 
accountable for their trillions of dollars of climate impacts. Not only have their 
products wrecked the climate, but they have, in many cases, spent millions of dollars 
on lobbying and misinformation to prevent climate action.  
 
Concerning harm related to the environment, the idea of corrective justice is most 
concretely enshrined in the polluter pays principle, which holds that those who 
pollute and thereby cause harm, loss or damage should meet the costs related to 
ceasing the polluting activity and those related to any ill effects which have arisen 
(Thornton, 2018: p. 73-74). The matter of loss and damage associated with climate 
impacts in developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects 
of climate change is addressed in a stand-alone article (Article 8) in the Paris 
Agreement. At the 2022 Conference of the Parties (COP27) summit, a landmark 
decision was struck to establish a loss and damage fund for countries worst hit by 
climate change (Sritharan, 2023: p. 8).  
 
6 Climate Change Problem under International Law 
 
Few would argue that climate change does not pose severe existential threats to 
people’s fundamental rights and interests and to the planet they inhabit. The knock-
on effects of climate change are causing havoc to the planet. A novel, more effective 

E. S. Sritharan: The Ethics of Climate Change, Climate Policy and Climate Justice 171. 
 
 
approach to dealing with the disastrous consequences of the climate crisis can be 
had in calling attention to the significant role fossil fuel companies have played in 
engendering the climate problem and placing a burden on them to urgently help 
make amends (Grasso, 2022: p. 80).  
 
The drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
22
 never dreamed of 
including environmental rights in the list of rights that are fundamental to a decent 
human life. However, by the early years of the 21
st
 century, it had become clear that 
environmental problems generate profound human rights impacts and that a 
sustainable environment is essential to the enjoyment of all human rights (Woods, 
2020: p. 297). An environment of a particular quality is necessary to enjoy many of 
the rights recognised under human rights law. In a degraded or polluted 
environment, it becomes difficult to enjoy protected rights. Indeed, human beings 
need services provided by nature to survive.   
 
The link between human rights and environmental degradation was recognised fairly 
recently under international law. The decision of the International Court of Justice 
(ICJ) in the Gabcikovo Nagymaros Project case
23
 Judge Christopher Weeramantry noted:  
 
The protection of the environment is a vital part of contemporary human rights 
doctrine, for it is a sine qua non for numerous human rights such as the right to 
health and the right to life itself. It is scarcely necessary to elaborate on this, as 
damage to the environment can impair and undermine all the human rights spoken 
of in the Universal Declaration and other human rights instruments. 
 
This clearly explains the link between environmental damage and human rights. The 
first seeds of the link between human rights and environmental degradation were 
sown by the Stockholm Declaration on the Human Environment itself. Principle 1 
of the Declaration stated: 
 
Man has the fundamental right to freedom, equality and adequate conditions of life, 
in an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being, and he 
bears a solemn responsibility to protect and improve the environment for present 
and future generations.  
 
22
 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 (UNHR) (GA Resolution 217A (III) 1948) 
23
 Gabcikovo – Nagymaros Project (Hungary v Slovakia) [1997] ICJ Rep 7. 

172 LEXONOMICA.   
 
Principle 1 of the Stockholm Declaration clearly recognised that an environment of 
a certain quality is necessary for human beings to lead a life of dignity and well -being. 
In other words, a degraded environment could result in a violation of protected 
rights (Atapattu and Schapper, 2019: p. 35). 
 
In 1992, the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro 
(also known as the "Earth Summit") avoided using "rights" language. Instead, it 
states, in the first principle of the Rio Declaration, that human beings "are entitled 
to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature" (Knox and Pejan, 2018: p. 
2). The 1992 Earth Summit also produced Agenda 21, a plan of action calling for 
further development of international law on sustainable development (Crawford, 
2019: p. 339). Some of the principles included in the Stockholm and Rio 
Declarations restate existing international law. The no-harm principle (also known 
as the principle of due diligence) is an example (Rose, Blokker and Dam-de Jong, et 
al., 2022: p. 323). The no-harm principle can be traced back to the 1941 Trail Smelter
24
 
Arbitration, from the ICJ, Gabcikovo Nagymaros Project case, Pulp Mills
25
 case, and was 
included in the Preamble to the UNFCCC (Sritharan, 2023: p. 24).  
 
The Paris Agreement was the first environmental treaty on climate change that 
explicitly liked climate change and human rights and it has thus helped pave the way 
for the rights-based approach to climate litigation (Henriksen, 2023: p. 202). 
Together with the 1992 UNFCCC, the Paris Agreement established a legal 
framework that will shape climate actions at the national and international levels for 
decades to come. The Paris Agreement has been described as a human rights treaty. 
It states that "Parties should, when taking action to address climate change, respect, 
promote and consider their respective obligations on human rights," thereby making 
it the first global environmental agreement to recognise that human rights 
obligations are an integral element of the regime it establishes (Knox, 2020: p. 323). 
To be more specific, a government has three primary obligations to protect people’s 
rights and meet its primary obligations as a government. It must respect, protect, 
and fulfil people’s rights. All three kinds of duties, to respect, protect, and fulfil, bear 
directly on a government’s obligation to specifically secure the rights put at risk by 
climate change. This is particularly true if that government is involved in any way 
 
24
 Trail Smelter Case (United States v Canada) (1941) III RIAA 1905. 
25
 Pulp Mills on the River Uruguay (Argentina v Uruguay) [2010] ICJ Rep 14. 

E. S. Sritharan: The Ethics of Climate Change, Climate Policy and Climate Justice 173. 
 
 
with licensing, permitting, monitoring, subsidizing, or otherwise supporting fossil 
fuel extraction, infrastructure, distribution, or usage (Kerns, 2022: p. 52). 
 
At the outset of any consideration of the global recognition of a human right to a 
healthy environment, it is important to bear in mind that the right to live in a healthy 
environment is a firmly established legal principle throughout most countries in 
Africa, Latin America, and Europe. According to the UN Special Rapporteur on 
Human Rights and the Environment, David Boyd, 161 out of 193 UN Member 
States recognised in their domestic law the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable 
environment. In the 2019 United Nations Safe Climate report, David Boyd wrote that 
climate change is already having “a major impact on a wide range of human rights 
today, and could have a cataclysmic impact in the future unless ambitious actions 
are undertaken immediately (Kerns, 2022: p. 79 and 42-43). 
 
In the United States, the right to a healthy environment is found in six state 
constitutions. This right has been the subject of many court decisions. Montana, one 
of the nation’s largest coal producers, is one of a handful of states with a clause that 
guarantees citizens a clean and healthy environment included in its constitution. On 
August 14, 2023, in a landmark ruling in a climate lawsuit, Held et al. v. State of Montana 
(Columbia Climate School, 2023) a Montana state court ruled in favour of 16 young 
Montanans who sued their state, claiming its continued fossil fuel development 
without considering the future impacts to the state and the world’s climate, violated 
their right to clean and healthy environment. District Court Judge Kathy Seeley 
agreed with the youths, writing in her ruling that Montanans "have a fundamental 
constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment, which includes climate as 
part of the environmental life-support system." The ruling is a paradigm shift in 
climate litigation that will have a ripple effect across the world. It could also set a 
ground-breaking precedent for other legal cases outside of Montana and in 
answering the question: Does the government need to protect its citizens from 
climate change?  
 
In recent years, one notable development has been an explosion in climate litigation. 
As the climate emergency intensifies, rights-based climate cases are becoming an 
increasingly important tool for securing more ambitious climate action. The cases 
are being brought against governments for breach of environmental and human 
rights obligations to pressure them to take more ambitious climate action, for 
example in recent high-profile cases against the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, 

174 LEXONOMICA.   
 
and the United States, and against corporate emitters seeking compensation for 
damage caused, such as those brought against large fossil fuel companies.  
 
In the first of what may be more of its kind, in the Urgenda
26
 case, the Dutch Supreme 
Court in December 2019 concluded that the European Convention on Human 
Rights (Article 2 and Article 8) obliged the Netherlands to reduce its GHG emissions 
by a minimum of 25 percent by the end of 2020 when compared to 1990 levels. The 
Court noted that the Netherlands is a party to the UNFCCC that is based on the 
premise that all member states must take measures to prevent climate change, in 
accordance with their specific responsibilities. A state, therefore, cannot escape its 
own share of the responsibility to take measures by arguing that its emissions are 
relatively limited in scope compared to that of other states and that a reduction of 
its own emissions would thus have little impact on a global scale (Henriksen, 2023: 
p. 202-203). 
 
Cases have been brought before regional human rights courts, such as the European 
Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice, and before international 
human rights bodies, including the UN Human Rights Committee. Some of the 
recent climate litigation has involved litigants asking courts to treat the climate goals 
of the Paris Agreement as benchmarks by which to judge government action while 
using human rights provisions and enforcement mechanisms to hold those 
governments to account (De Burca, 2021: p. 212). 
 
There is another framework that is useful to articulate, interpret, and give context to 
environmental rights: sustainable development, including a high-profile agenda, the 
2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, with its seventeen Sustainable 
Development Goals
27
 (SDGs) adopted by the international community in 2015. 
Agenda 2030 further recognised that each country faces specific challenges in its 
pursuit of sustainable development and that vulnerable people must be protected. 
The 2030 Agenda and the SDGs are explicitly based on human rights (Atapattu, 
Gonzalez and Seck, 2021: p. 5). The 1987 Brundtland Report is commonly 
recognised as having created the term sustainable development
28
 (Bosselmann, 2021: 
p. 31). The report of the Brundtland Commission sought to reconcile the economic 
 
26
 Supreme Court of the Netherlands, State of the Netherlands v Urgenda, Case19/00135, 20 December 2019. 
27
 UNGA Res 70/1 ‘Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ (21 October 2015). 
28
 UN World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, Report of the World Commission on 
Environment and Development (Oxford: OUP, 1987).   

E. S. Sritharan: The Ethics of Climate Change, Climate Policy and Climate Justice 175. 
 
 
imperative of economic growth, poverty alleviation, and development with the aims 
and objectives of environmental protection (Crossley, 2022: p. 37). Since its 
expression in the Brundtland Report in 1987, the legal concept of sustainable 
development has had far-reaching implications on a global scale: forming the subject 
of three Earth Summits (1992, 2002, 2012), being incorporated into a multitude of 
(hard and soft law) international agreements and being given weight in international 
and national jurisprudence.  
 
Sustainable Development has been recognised in international jurisprudence. 
Examples of this include the aforementioned Gabcikovo Nagymaros Project and the Pulp 
Mills cases, both of which are decisions of the ICJ. The decision in Gabcikovo 
Nagymaros Project was the first time sustainable development was given express 
recognition in international jurisprudence. The Court expressly referred to the 
concept of sustainable development and defined it as "the need to reconcile 
economic development with protection of the environment". In the Separate 
Opinion of Judge Weeramantry, it was stated that sustainable development was 
"more than a mere concept […] - a principle with a normative value which is crucial 
to the determination of this case." (Bosselmann, 2021:  p. 40). By invoking the 
concept of sustainable development, the ICJ indicated that the term has a legal 
function (Sands, et al., 2018: p. 220). Sustainable development has been referred to 
in many key treaties, including the 1992 UNFCCC (Bosselmann, 2021: p. 41).  
 
The central message of the Brundtland Report revolves around the concept of 
sustainable development, defined as "Development that meets the needs of the 
present generation without compromising the ability of the future generations to 
meet their needs". The Brundtland formulation of sustainable development refers 
to balancing two pillars – economic development and environmental protection. A 
third pillar – social development – was added by the international community at the 
Copenhagen Summit
29
 for Social Development in 1995. Thus, sustainable 
development now comprises three pillars: environmental protection, economic 
development, and social development. To meet the needs of the current generation 
and those of future generations, economic, social, and environmental objectives 
must be balanced (Atapattu and Schapper, 2019: p. 18-19). The third pillar, social 
development, seems to encompass basic human needs such as access to food, water, 
 
29
 UN, Report of the World Summit for Social Development, Copenhagen, Mar. 6-12, 1995, UN Doc. A/CONF.166/9 
[Copenhagen Declaration].   

176 LEXONOMICA.   
 
healthcare, shelter, and education. Thus, the social pillar intersects with human rights 
because many of these basic needs are expressed in the rights language (Atapattu, 
Gonzalez and Seck, 2021: p. 4). 
 
The 1992 Rio Declaration did not define the concept of sustainable development. 
Instead, it laid out a series of principles relevant to achieving sustainable 
development. Principle 2, for example, provides for development to meet the needs 
of present and future generations. Principle 3 of the Declaration refers to the right 
to development that needs to be implemented to equally meet the developmental 
and environmental needs of present and future generations. Notably, Principle 7 
stipulates the duty of states t o " c o -operate in a spirit of global partnership to 
conserve, protect and restore the health and integrity of the Earth’s ecosystem." The 
duty of states to cooperate to protect and restore the integrity of the Earth’s 
ecosystem has since been repeated in more than 25 international environmental 
agreements, including, for example, the 2015 Paris Agreement (Bosselmann, 2021: 
p. 34), which emphasises "the intrinsic relationship that climate change actions, 
responses and impacts have with equitable access to sustainable development and 
eradication of poverty" (Sands, et al., 2018: p. 219).  
 
In the world of international law, the polluter pays principle (in the form of soft law) 
forms the backbone of Principle 16 of the Rio Declaration (Thornton, 2018: p. 73). 
In hindsight, the absence of a specific reference to the private sector in the Rio 
Declaration is remarkable. The private sector drew attention at the 2002 
Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development,
30
 which called for the 
promotion of public-private partnerships, especially in its Plan of Implementation.
31
 
The Johannesburg Declaration refers to the duty of the private sector “to contribute 
to the evolution of equitable and sustainable communities and societies” and to the 
need of the private sector to "enforce corporate accountability" (Hey, 2016: p. 58). 
Philippe Sands outlined seven general principles "having particular relevance in the 
field of sustainable development," and the polluter pays principle is one of them 
(Bosselmann, 2021, p. 37). While the principle is hardly reflective of customary 
 
30
 Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development, UN Doc. A/CONF.199/20 (2002), para. 32 (reaffirming 
“commitment to the principles and purposes of the Charter of the United Nations and international law, as well as 
to the strengthening of multilateralism”). 
31
 The 2002 Johannesburg Declaration did recognise the importance of international law and multilateralism in 
confronting global environmental degradation. The accompanying Plan of Implementation was more explicit in 
linking human rights and environmental concerns.   

E. S. Sritharan: The Ethics of Climate Change, Climate Policy and Climate Justice 177. 
 
 
international law, it features as an important guiding principle in a wide range of 
conventions and legal instruments, including in EU law (Henriksen, 2023: p. 198). 
 
7 Climate Policy: The Fossil Fuel Industry’s Responsibility and Duties 
Toward Society 
 
Few issues attract as much interest in climate ethics and climate policy as the 
question of how the burdens of climate policy ought to be distributed within 
generations. In other words, who is going to pay for the various aspects of climate 
policy? Or, who are the agents among whom we must divide the burdens? In the 
context of international climate policy, states are the relevant agents as the UNFCCC 
applies directly to states. For example, the Paris Agreement assigns responsibilities 
to states and lets them decide how to discharge their legal duties under the 
Agreement. This is part of what is reported in states’ NDCs (McKinnon, 2022: p. 
108). However, environmental scholars have raised concerns about this approach, 
suggesting we ought to focus on corporations (fossil fuel companies and projects), 
individuals or other kinds of entities (Morrow, 2020: p. 106; Grasso, 2022: p. 33; 
Shue, 2021: p. 43). Furthermore, it is worth bearing in mind that the world’s largest 
fossil fuel firms are all state-owned and, in this respect, part of a sovereign state. 
While sovereign states readily claim the wealth resulting from national 
industrialisation, they do not readily claim the damage resulting (Shue, 2021: p. 43).  
 
There is much disagreement about the full demands of climate justice and on whom 
these demands fall most heavily. When we ask, "who is responsible?" for an injustice, 
we can mean a number of things. We could be asking who perpetrated the injustice, 
that is, who is causally responsible for it. We could be asking who ought to address 
the injustice, that is, who has a duty to bear the burden of action to make good on 
the injustice. We could be asking about the agents (individuals, communities, states, 
or multinational corporations) to whom or to which these responsibilities attach 
(McKinnon, 2022: p. 90). The core claim of climate justice movements is that richer 
agents, including corporations (the fossil fuel industry), repay their climate debt, 
divided into impacts debt and emissions debt. The impacts debt implies a 
rectification of the harm brought about by climate change, while the emissions debt 
requires action to reduce carbon emissions overall and the associated future harm, 
possibly in conjunction with some form of historical contribution to the problem 
(Grasso, 2022: p. 64).   

178 LEXONOMICA.   
 
The various moral principles that climate ethics literature usually refers to in this 
regard on the industry for divvying up burdens within a generation come in different 
forms. On whom should these burdens fall? Who ought to do most, soonest, to 
absorb these burdens? Call these the primary duties questions. There are three types 
of answers in the literature. First, those who have caused (and are causing) climate 
change bear primary responsibility (the polluter pays principle). Second, those who 
benefit from activities that cause climate change bear primary responsibility (the 
beneficiaries pay principle). Third, those who can afford to take on primary 
responsibilities for reducing climate injustice bear primary responsibility (the ability 
to pay principle) (McKinnon, 2022: p. 97-98). The idea of climate justice emphasises 
the historical responsibility of rich countries for the current climate change the world 
is facing (Parsons, 2023: p. 4). 
 
7.1 The Concept of Cumulative or Historical Responsibility 
 
Both environmental ethicists and climate negotiators have wrestled with the 
question of historical responsibility since the earliest days of the international climate 
regime.
32
 The nations with historical responsibility are those who contributed to 
climate change by deriving the energy for their industrialisation from the combustion 
of carbon-based fuels. Within scientific and political discussions, the concept of 
historical responsibility appears in two forms: proportional responsibility, according 
to which historically high-emitting countries’ responsibility increases in proportion 
to their historical emissions, and conceptual responsibility, according to which 
historically high-emitting countries have some kind of greater responsibility but not 
necessarily proportion to their historical emissions (Morrow, 2020: p. 111). 
Decisions on how to count emissions are political ones, with social justice 
implications. International climate agreements have required emissions reporting 
and national plans to reduce emissions on a country-by-country basis (Chomsky, 
2022: p. 112) 
 
Two main factors motivate calls for historical responsibility. The first is that because 
CO 2 lingers in the atmosphere for so long, emissions from the 19
th
 and 20
th
 centuries 
continue to affect the climate and constrain the amount of emissions that current 
and future generations can emit without exceeding any given climate policy target. 
 
32
 Currently, the financial costs associated with losses and damages are borne by those experiencing the climate 
impacts. As a matter of justice, this needs to change so that polluting companies and rich nations – who bear much 
more responsibility for causing climate change – bear the financial cost of addressing loss and damage impacts.  

E. S. Sritharan: The Ethics of Climate Change, Climate Policy and Climate Justice 179. 
 
 
The second is that because the process of industrialisation began so much earlier in 
some countries than in others, the vast majority of historical emissions originated in 
a relatively small number of countries containing a relatively small fraction of the 
world’s population. Civil society groups and activists in developing nations have a 
strong intuition that these historically high-emitting countries bear a special 
responsibility for climate change precisely because of their historical emissions. 
Counting cumulative emissions shows that the United States and the European 
Union have by far the greatest responsibility. From this perspective, the United 
States and Europe owe a huge climate debt to the world
33
 (Chomsky, 2022: p. 113). 
 
However, calls for historical responsibility face two main theoretical problems. The 
first theoretical problem is the Excusable Ignorance objection: although the basics 
of climate science had emerged well before then, most people did not know that 
GHG emissions could harm anyone until sometime in the late 20
th
 century. 
Furthermore, it would have been unreasonable to expect them to know this. They 
were, therefore, excusably ignorant of the risks they were creating through their 
emissions. Since we do not generally hold people responsible for the damage they 
do out of excusable ignorance, it would be unfair to hold parties responsible for 
historical emissions (Morrow, 2020: p. 112).  
 
The second theoretical problem for historical responsibility is the Disappearing 
Perpetrators objection. Many of the individuals and corporations responsible for 
historical emissions no longer exist. It is simply not possible to make those polluters 
pay for their own emissions and it is not fair for present and future individuals to 
suffer for the sins of past individuals. Having current generations in the 
industrialised nations inherit the climate debts of past generations arguably violates 
the polluter pays approach since it does not hold deceased polluters themselves 
accountable (Morrow, 2020: p. 112).  
 
One common suggestion for dealing with both the Excusable Ignorance objection 
and Disappearing Perpetrators objection is to introduce a beneficiary pays principle 
(Morrow, 2020: p. 112).  
 
33
 A study published by the Sustainability Research Institute at the University of Leeds and the Doughnut Economics 
Action Lab in Oxford claims industrialised nations responsible for excessive levels of CO2 emissions could be liable 
for $170 trillion in compensation by 2050 to ensure climate targets are met. See: “Global North owes $170 trillion 
for excessive CO2 emissions,” Faculty of Environment News, University of Leeds, June 6, 2023, 'Global North owes $170 
trillion for excessive CO2 emissions' | Faculty of Environment | University of Leeds (accessed on November 15, 
2023).  

180 LEXONOMICA.   
 
7.1.1 The Beneficiary Pays Principle 
 
According to the beneficiary pays principle, states that have benefitted the most 
from GHG emissions in the past bear the greatest responsibility for taking climate 
action. The basic idea is that even if the individuals and corporations that emitted so 
many GHGs in the 19
th
 and 20
th
 centuries are gone, the benefits they enjoyed, as a 
result, have passed on to their descendants in the form of accumulated capital, and 
that as a result of having inherited those benefits, those descendants ought to bear 
more of the burden of climate action. Therefore, the argument asserts that it is 
reasonable to ask them to contribute more to climate action than those who did not 
inherit such benefits, even if the actual emitters have disappeared and even if those 
emitters were excusably ignorant of the harm their emissions would do (Morrow, 
2020: p. 113). Contribution to solving the problem ought to bear some relation to 
contribution to creating the problem, especially when those who have, in fact, 
created the problem have benefited so handsomely from doing so, and those who 
suffer most have made little or no contribution to the problem (Shue, 2021: p. 55).  
 
7.1.2 The Ability to Pay Principle 
 
According to the ability to pay principle, states should bear the burden of climate 
policy in proportion to their per capita wealth and/or income. Shue suggests that 
the ability-to-pay approach follows from the pure fairness argument. He notes 
China’s and India’s present and future emissions are a problem only because of the 
United States’ and the European Union’s past (and present and future) emissions 
(Shue, 2021: p. 40). In the case of climate change, it seems fairer that richer or higher-
income states should pay more, at least in absolute terms, than poorer or low-income 
states. Furthermore, this approach rests on a general duty of beneficence – that is, 
an obligation to help others, especially when you can do so at relatively little cost. 
Wealthy countries can afford to contribute a great deal to deal with climate change, 
whereas poor countries can afford much less. Therefore, the duty of fairness 
demands more from the wealthier countries. Whatever its appeal as a general 
principle, it runs into problems as a way of dividing up the burdens of climate policy. 
The principle ignores moral and causal responsibility. It distributes burdens without 
any concern for the fact that some countries have contributed far more to climate 
change than others. However, it proves irrelevant in the case of climate change 
because most GHG emissions have come from industrialised and developed 
nations, and industrialised nations are generally wealthier than non-industrialised 

E. S. Sritharan: The Ethics of Climate Change, Climate Policy and Climate Justice 181. 
 
 
nations, and consumption-based accounting reveals how the people of those 
countries are still reaping the benefits of this history by enjoying high consumption 
levels (Morrow, 2020: p. 107-108; Chomsky, 2022: p. 116).  
 
7.1.3 The Polluter Pays Principle 
 
The polluter pays principle indicates that the costs of pollution should be borne by 
the person responsible for causing the pollution (Sands, et al., 2018: p. 240). The 
principle determines that the perpetrator of pollution should pay for the 
environmental damage that its activity generates. The principle calls for states to 
adopt measures that internalise the cost of pollution. According to this conception, 
negative externalities are the costs of a transaction between two market actors that 
are borne by third parties and not reflected in the price. Internalisation is thus seen 
as a way of correcting this side effect by making the actors engaged in the transaction 
bear the cost they impose on society (Gaeta, Vinuales and Zappala, 2020: p. 465). In 
other words, it should not be public funds that pay for the rehabilitation of polluted 
ecosystems; such costs should instead be defrayed and internalised by the polluter 
(Hey, 2016: p. 77). This principle has an economic dimension that differentiates it 
from other environmental principles. It can be understood as a principle that seeks 
to correct market failures by internalising the costs of environmental pollution; in 
broad terms, it requires that polluters pay for the environmental harm they cause 
(Fisher, Lange and Scotford, 2019: p. 224). According to the principle, those who 
have emitted more GHGs should bear greater responsibility for addressing climate 
change.  
 
The polluter pays principle could rest on two distinct philosophical foundations. The 
more familiar foundation is corrective justice: when one party wrongs another party, 
they incur an obligation to correct that wrong, either by fixing the problem they 
created or by compensating the wronged party. In the case of climate policy, it 
implies that those who wrong others through their GHG emissions bear 
responsibility for fixing the problem and for compensating those who are wronged, 
and that because those who have emitted more GHG emissions have committed a 
more serious wrong, they bear more responsibility than those who have emitted less. 
Another possible philosophical foundation for the polluter pays principle is more 
economic policy-related: making polluters pay discourages pollution. If a company 
knows that it will have to pay a fee for emitting CO 2, it will look for ways to reduce 
or eliminate its emissions (Morrow, 2020: p. 109). Birnie, Boyle, and Redgwell 

182 LEXONOMICA.   
 
describe the principle as "an economic policy for allocating the costs of pollution or 
environmental damage borne by public authorities" with "implications for the 
development of international and national law on liability for damage" (Birnie, Boyle 
and Redgwell, 2009: p. 322).   
 
The most common objection to the principle concerns its impact on poorer 
countries. Wealthier countries can more easily afford to pay for climate action. 
However, developing countries like India and many poorer countries, whose 
economies currently depend heavily on fossil fuels, face a stark short-term trade-off 
between climate action and urgently needed economic and human development. 
Perhaps, variants of the polluter pays principle can help address this problem. 
Typically, the polluter pays principle has focused on emissions produced within a 
country (territorial GHG emissions accounting approach), rather than on the carbon 
emissions embodied in goods consumed within that country, wherever the goods 
were made (consumption-based GHG emissions accounting approach). Therefore, 
a consumption-based emissions accounting approach accounts for the full 
international impact of final demand for products; this is a vital step towards global 
equity and acknowledging the UN principle that states have a "common but 
differentiated responsibility" to decarbonise, given the disparities in economic 
development and historical carbon emissions between developed and developing 
nations (Morrow, 2020: p. 110). Because of the importance of global trade and the 
ways rich countries have outsourced their production to poor countries, it makes 
more sense to measure emissions by what is consumed in a country. Wealthy, high-
consuming countries should be held responsible for the emissions of everything they 
consume, even if they have outsourced the dirtiest aspects of their economies 
(Chomsky, 2022: p. 113). 
 
Other approaches focus on the fact that the biggest emitters are industries. After all, 
it is the fossil fuel and related industries that make the decisions and investments 
that are expanding the extraction, production, and sale of fossil fuels.  
 
8 Conclusion 
 
Climate change is not just an environmental problem or a political issue, but also a 
moral issue of the 21
st
 century, one that affects the survival of human civilisation. It 
has long been acknowledged as fundamentally an ethical issue that threatens our 
lives and our world. Unjust climate impacts are a symptom of deep, historical, and 

E. S. Sritharan: The Ethics of Climate Change, Climate Policy and Climate Justice 183. 
 
 
structural injustices, and those with the most power and riches in the world (the 
fossil fuel industry) continue to serve their narrow self-interest in resisting real 
change. Despite the growing recognition that urgent action will need to be deployed 
to sustainably avert the uncertainties of the Anthropocene, explicit and agreed moral 
guidance to tackle the climate breakdown is still very much lacking. A lack of moral 
guidance could lead to a paralysis of policy and governance and worsen moral 
corruption in engaging sustainably with the climate crisis. Bringing climate change 
under control will require tough political fights against ruthless, mendacious, and 
entrenched combinations of political and economic power.  
 
States have been the main agents of action against climate change for decades. 
However, by far the most important factor in causing climate change is the 
accumulation in the planet’s atmosphere of CO 2 from the burning of fossil fuels. 
The fossil fuel industry bears substantial responsibility for the cost of redressing 
climate harm. Fossil fuel companies have a moral responsibility to affected parties 
for climate harm and have a duty to correct such harm. Holding the fossil fuel 
industry accountable for their harmful activity, with very precise and unique moral 
responsibility, is crucial to advancing efforts to combat climate change. The fossil 
fuel industry has contributed to climate change by causing, shaping, advancing, and 
defending the current unsustainable fossil fuel-dependent global economy.  
 
The industry has essentially imposed on the global socioeconomic system a carbon-
intensive model of development rather than engaging in a concerted search for 
alternatives and phasing out fossil fuels, as warranted by the urgency of climate 
change. In this light, it is morally unacceptable to equate the fossil fuel industry’s 
responsibility with those of other agents. Climate justice and governance should 
reflect the unique agency of the industry, as it has played a very significant role in 
climate change and should contribute to tackling it. Our global economic system is 
the result of colonialism, extraction, production, profit, and economic growth. A 
climate justice approach positions the cause of climate change in the political and 
economic systems that place the interests of humanity above the interests of profits 
and increasing production. The idea of climate justice emphasises the historical 
responsibility of rich countries for the current climate change the world is facing.  
 
Climate ethics literature refers to three moral principles (the beneficiary pays 
principle, the ability to pay principle, and the polluter pays principle) of rectifying 
the unjust situation created by the actions that produced climate change. All these 

184 LEXONOMICA.   
 
principles aim to establish and justify a positive responsibility for sharing the burden 
of correcting the unjust situation caused by climate change. However, it is better to 
prevent the harm done by climate change than to repair (the prevention principle, 
Environmental Impact Assessment, the duty to cooperate and precautionary 
principle) and then move to principles which are mostly concerned with distributive 
justice (polluter-pays, intergeneration equity, common but differentiated 
responsibilities and sustainable development).  
 
Human suffering (the victims of harm, loss, or damage of climate change) is listed 
as a third kind of response to climate change. A human rights approach highlights 
emitters’ moral obligation to address loss and damage, particularly by compensating 
victims, and emitters’ obligation to help people adapt to climate change. Basic 
human rights are not just lofty aspirational ideals. Most, rather, are moral floors, 
moral minimums, delineating the most basic requirements for a person to live a 
minimally decent life. Human rights are recognised as both moral imperatives to 
guide the behaviour of governments and as legally binding law. Climate change is 
already undermining the realisation of a broad range of internationally protected 
human rights. So, just as civil laws represent hard legal boundaries outside of which 
certain behaviours are not legally permissible, human rights norms represent hard 
ethical boundaries outside of which certain behaviours are not permissible.    
 
Exploring the concepts of justice and goodness that have long guided the morality 
of climate change, the acclaimed moral philosopher Broome elaborates the harms 
we inflict through our GHG emissions are unjust human because they harm other 
people. This is an injustice done to those people, and it also makes the world worse. 
So reducing emissions is a duty of justice and also a duty of goodness. Morality 
requires governments to make the world better. It requires them to design their 
regulations about carbon emissions. A more just and equal world would use its scarce 
resources at a sustainable level and distribute the benefits more equally. It would 
allow the global poor access to the resources necessary to fulfil basic needs and 
obligate the global elite to reduce their consumption and emissions to a just and 
sustainable level. Restructuring how we use our knowledge, science, and technology 
in a way that is equitable and sustainable is the political and moral problem that now 
faces us. It is more a question of political and moral change.  
  

E. S. Sritharan: The Ethics of Climate Change, Climate Policy and Climate Justice 185. 
 
 
Confronting climate change means challenging some of the basic ways our society 
and economy are organised. Almost everything we buy makes a contribution to 
climate breakdown, through emissions, local environmental degradation, or most 
commonly both. Fighting climate change means transforming our current global 
economic and political systems that are embedded in fossil fuel-centred economies, 
placing the interests of humanity above the interests of profits, and reducing 
production and consumption to a just and sustainable level. Due to webs of 
economic oppression, the largest polluters on the planet tend to suffer less, while 
those who contribute the least – low-income populations, working-class people, the 
Global South – are tragically the most affected. Yet no one is safe, for no region will 
be untouched by climate change. Scientifically, we know what we must do: we must 
phase out coal, oil, and gas at once, reshape our transit systems and housing plans, 
design a more humane and sustainable food system, and decarbonise every sector of 
the economy. Politically though, this can seem like an impossible undertaking. 
 
 
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