118 Global Political Philosophy Requiem for a Nun; "The past is never dead. It's not even past.*' But past violence not only produces ill-gotten gains. It also cie- -! ates difficulties in making good on what obligations the vum| have to the poor (a subject we discuss in various chapters). 7 hi will often be doubts about whether certain measures are requj]-. .. to satisfy such obligations. In light of what we have now argued ', there is a compensatory aspect to these duties. That is, in many cases where we have doubts about whether something ought to be done by way of satisfying obligations towards the world's desti- : tute, this compensatory aspect should make us answer the question affirmatively. Past injustice creates considerable obligations for the present. Environmental Justice The anthropocene Further reading Questions of domestic justice are discussed in all introduction! , political philosophy that focus on one state (see again the lis) , the introduction to this book). Beitz (1999) is the second editioi. a work that appeared in 1979 and thus long before philosophizing about global justice became wide-spread. His work is the cla; ■ account of globalism. Pogge (2002) defends the provocative thesis that the global order harms the poor; the work appeared in ■ extended second edition in 2008. See Cohen (2010) and Risse (201-for critical assessments. Important recent accounts of global ji n.-tice include Caney (2005), David Miller (2007), Richard Miller (2010), Moellendorff (2002), Tan (2004) and Brock (2009). RawK (1999b) plays an important role in the debate about global justii c but is not stage-setting in that area as Rawls (1999a) has been -domestic justice. Risse (2012) develops pluralist internation.diNm. Blake (2001a) is a seminal text on the grounds-of-justice deba ■ Miller (1995) is an excellent discussion of nationalism. ill! Our species of homo sapiens has been around for about 200,000 years. For 50,000 years, our major traits have been fully developed, and our brains have barely changed. The earth, however, is almost 100,000 times as old. It has been through a turbulent history that included several mass extinctions. Let me mention a few highlights. According to the "giant impact hypothesis", about four billion years ago the earth was hit by a Mars-sized body. The moon was created from debris that was left over from this collision. About 650 million years ago, our planet was covered by ice, an era known as "snowball earth." About 250 million years ago, in a period called the "great dying," most life perished in a brief moment of geological time. Massive volcanic eruptions may have been at fault. It appears that 65 million years ago, an asteroid the size of Mount Everest hit in the Gulf of Mexico, triggering the extinction of the dinosaurs that had been the dominant species for many millions of years. The biospheric conditions that made the ascent of our own species possible, and even the physical shape and composition of the earth, have resulted from a series of cataclysmic events and periods. In one way or another, the occurrence of natural disasters is apart of our lives. But the short presence of human beings on this planet (geologically speaking) has so far been blessed by conditions that, by and large, are strikingly hospitable to the flourishing of human life. As its history reveals, however, the earth is not inevitably friendly to humanity's ongoing existence. 119 120 Global Political Philosophy Environmental Justice 121 The relationship between humans and their environment ^ entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene, a period whe/ humankind has surpassed the rest of nature in its impact oti thf. structure and function of the earth system. Short of events i\\.f head-on collision with an asteroid, massive changes in the esrthV interior or vehement sun storms, it is humans that have the big'^J impact on the future of all life on this planet. One kind of irrinacj is that humanity has caused a change in global climate. Natural^ occurring greenhouse gases, such as water vapor, carbon dio\idfl and methane, form a thermal blanket that traps sun energy in -.Ufr the atmosphere and thereby makes the earth inhabitable in ;he first place. However, in recent centuries hitman activities 1 ^ greatly increased greenhouse gas concentrations. Considerable quantities of carbon dioxide have resulted from burning fossil fuels and from deforestation. Increasing evaporation of watfip amplifies the warming effects of these gases by causing large?, greenhouse effects than combustion and deforestation alone, I hp • result is climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate - Change concluded that most of the increase in average tempera-""' tures is very likely due to increases in man-made greenhouse gag concentrations. In the Introduction we noted how dramatically - an increase of average temperature by more than 3 or 4 degrees / f Celsius may change the way we live on this planet. Our brains emerged through an evolutionary process in which survival depended on an organism's ability to navigate its imtne- ; oral storm diate environment. The kind of brain that succeeded in evolution ;;- f Climate change as the perfect m and that we still possess does not naturally prompt us to pro* vide for future generations. As far as our attitude towards nature is concerned, several decades ago, long before climate change became an acknowledged issue, historian Lynn White's article "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis" triggered somi soul-searching. White argued that Christianity created a frame of . mind that sees human beings as separate from the rest of nature, The dominant reading of the Christian story of creation granted human beings mastery over nature. Subsequently, the development of science and technology was a sustained effort to exploit nature for human purposes, and it originally proceeded in this Christian frame of mind. This attitude towards nature has since Income entrenched at a global level. So evolution has generated gidfid of brain that not only did not prepare our species for the "'perf'° ta^e care °1 future generations, but that has also made us .jascept ible to an attitude that appreciates nature only in terms of pvalueforus. In his fascinating and tremendously important 2005 book Collapse, the American geographer fared Diamond looks at several societies that have existed at different times, and disappeared. Several of them were located In remote areas, such as the medieval Viking colonies In Greenland, or the civilization on the faster Islands that left behind numerous monumental statues, gut some were far less isolated, such as several Central American cultures that met the same fate. Environmental disasters always precipitated the collapse. What is remarkable is that the environmental problems that led to such devastation normally will have been as visible to decision makers at the time as they are today. The reason why they took no resolute measures to avert the incipi-... ent disaster was because the decision makers had vested interests in the status quo. The earth as a whole, and thus humanity as - such, in an era of human-caused climate change is in much the same situation as was the case with these perished human living •• arrangements. Again the problem is that vested interests prevent decisive action. Moral philosopher Stephen Gardiner's 2011 Perfect Moral Storm: The .Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change aptly characterizes the challenges we confront when dealing with climate change. A perfect storm involves the unusual intersection of several serious, mutually reinforcing storms. In the case of climate change, three major problems interfere with our ability to behave ethically: the global, intergenerational and theoretical storms. The global storm concerns our difficulties in reaching any kind of international agreement on measures to combat climate change. It is collectively rational for humanity to reach an agreement on how to control emissions. It is nonetheless also rational for each country 122 Global Political Philosophy Environmental Justice 123 to exempt itself from such regulation hoping that others take > lead. The intergenerational storm consists in the fact that1 he i i)r rent generation has asymmetric power over future generalk Earlier generations can affect the prospects of future g('iind. lions, but not vice versa. Any generation has incentives to geiier- ; ate front-loaded goods, goods that largely benefit the present hut for which later generations pay. All goods whose production j>r-fh erates greenhouse gas emissions are such goods given how ]i some of these gases stay in the atmosphere. The third storm is theoretical storm: there are no robust general theories to gu. . us. Existing theories are underdeveloped in many of the relevant areas, including intergenerational ethics, international jiistu c. scientific uncertainty and questions about the human relationship to animals and the rest of nature. Let me illustrate the point that our theories are underdeveloj to deal with climate change by discussing Cost-Benefit Arial\si& (CBA). CBA goes back to the 19th-century development of welfare economics, and thus to a time when social-scientific meth ••. started to bear on politics, CBA systematically captures the differ- . ..--J, ent available options, and makes sure ail relevant costs and ben- - | efits inform the decision process. For instance, CBA registers thar money invested into improving life for future generations cannot also be invested into improving the present, with whatever positive spill-over effects on the future that may have. CBA keep-, alternative social objectives in view. At the same time, the system- ■ atic virtues of CBA might deceive us when it comes to problenii -I the complexity of climate change, where the needed information ' is not reliably available and the time horizon too extended. \ The common way of integrating future costs and benefits - \ into CBA is by discounting them. Discount rates mirror expectations about the economy, and formally are inverse interest rales Discounting the future means assigning a lower value to future costs and benefits than to those occurring in the present. We ".; can most straightforwardly motivate discounting for individual behavior. An individual should prefer receiving $500 today to receiving $500 at future time t since in between she could invest \ the $500. Receiving $500 at t is equivalent to receiving x<$500 \ now, where x delivers $500 at t under the expected interest rate. ; flie present value of future benefits and future costs thus is a discounted adjustment of future values. Therefore substantial future costs may be acceptable for relatively minor gains in the present. Similar considerations apply to certain public expenditures of a collective. Among the costs that might arise are those of human lives themselves. A monetary equivalent would be assigned to human life. Because of the effects of compounding, the choice of a discount rate matters enormously, the more so the longer the decision horizon. For a 1% annual rate, one unit of benefit in the present is equivalent to 1.3, 1.6, 2.7, and 144,7 units in the future if the benefits occur after 30, 50, 100, and 500 years, respectively. The corresponding numbers for 3% are 2.4, 4.3, 19.2, 2,621,877; for 5%, 4.3,11.4, 131.5, and 39,323,261,827; and for 10%, 17.4, 117.3, 13, 781, and 4.96xl0A20. In policy choices that affect future generations, the lives of people living 100-200 years from now are severely discounted. Moreover, even minor differences in the discount rates make an enormous difference for the extent to which they are discounted. There are two reasons why one would want to discount future values. First, one might value the future less because it is the future ("pure time preference"). Second, one might do so because the passage of time correlates with other phenomena, such as increasing wealth, availability of technology, or more pronounced uncertainty. In support of pure time preferences one finds appeals to revealed preferences (people commonly caring more about the nearest and dearest, as well as their own immediate future), and a corresponding reference to the alleged anti-democratic arrogance of social planners dismissive of such preferences. Another point is that we would be overburdened giving equal consideration to all people across the ages. There are likely to be many more people whose birth is yet to happen than are currently alive. If all of them counted for the same, the interests of the living might carry almost no weight at all. As far as the second sort of reason is concerned, however, not. all future people will be wealthier than all contemporaries. Perhaps if "we" collectively will be richer, "we" can worry about redistribution later. Yet we cannot assume that future people can solve distribution problems more easily than we can. Nor can we 124 Global Political Philosophy know that particular discount rates track increases in wealth, | j,e rationale for discounting in individual behavior does not appi- (0; climate change. We are then talking about people who live across1 different generations. Unlike in cases of public expenditure; tor' the immediate future, one set of people participate in the decision process, but others bear the costs. Or consider the value of iive^ (or anything else that is not straightforwardly priced, e.g., wildlih- or: ecosystems). We often adopt policies that implicitly put a price osv human life (e.g., by deciding how much money to invest in safety). We make such decisions in a context where probabilities of di-ath or other harms are of a certain magnitude, as are the benefits ofl the relevant policies. We do not know if future people will rindi scenarios acceptable where probabilities of death or disease as well as gains from certain policies, are much higher, generating the same expected value for which we find the mix of probabilities and benefits acceptable. But we may well bequeath such polu ies to the future. In a nutshell, we should have considerable resena tions about applying CBA to climate change. The joint presence of these storms also generates a problem oi moral corruption: we are only all too inclined to accept arguments; whose conclusions benefit us. The harms and injustices that m ight ■ occur are potentially catastrophic, but the future victims cannot make themselves heard. Our own vigilance must protect them An example Gardiner uses to illustrate the phenomenon of moral; corruption is gee-engineering, an area of research that investigates possibilities of intentional interventions in the earth's climate system on a global scale to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The thought of the possible future availability oil geo-engineering offers reassurance that we may go on as we have, assuming there will be a solution in the future. Perhaps there will be, but the joint presence of the three storms makes us unduly| willing to believe that it will be so. Climate change as a problem of justice As far as climate change is concerned, there are three options: to let the changes happen and suffer the consequences; to mitigate 1 Environmental Justice 12S climate change (reduce its pace and magnitude); or to adapt (reduce its impact). The first option - to conduct "business-as-usual" - is motivated by the view that the future is likely to be 3 richer than the present. We will be better equipped to deal with 'i problems then. But the damage might not only be irreversible, but also trigger increasingly problematic consequences. Alternatively, t' one may favor the "business as usual" option if one thinks there is ,| nothing we can do about climate change anyway, or if one believes climate change simply is not "our" problem and that therefore * there is nothing we ought to do about it. However, it is decidedly not true that there is nothing we can do about climate change. And indeed, climate change is "our" problem at least in the sense that we are contributing to it and are thereby causing hardship for others (both now and in the future). For these reasons, I do > not further consider the "business-as-usual" option. Possibilities for mitigation include a reduction of greenhouse gases (through } changing energy use, reforming agricultural practices, or limif- 1 ing deforestation), as well as geo-engineering to remove gases ......) from the atmosphere or create cooling effects to offset heating. | Possibilities for adaptation include developing crops resistant to .....4 climate change; public-health defenses; flood control and drought I management; building barriers against sea-level rises; or avoiding | development in at-risk areas. | One contribution philosophy can make to an attempt to keep ,=r.i humanity from suffering the same fate as the earlier civilizations ! in Diamond's Collapse is to present arguments for the claim that I many matters of global concern are indeed matters of justice, and I must receive the kind of urgency appropriate for matters of jus-_ I .rice. Both mitigation and adaptation (being deviations from the | economic business-as-usual trajectory countries would otherwise | choose) create burdens. Enlightened self-interest goes a long way f towards explaining why these burdens should be shared among | all human beings. After all, we are dealing with a problem with 5 unpredictable and potentially cataclysmic effects. But why would | this be aproblem of distributive justice, and thus why would there | be a moral obligation to share these burdens fairly? Why not say | the distribution of burdens should result from rational bargaining | in which every country maximizes its national interests? 126 Global Political Philosophy Environmental Justice 127 There are several answers to this question. First of ail, thou humanitarian duties in virtue of the moral, significance of the dk tinctively human life. After all, climate change has the potem^^, threatening the living conditions of many people especially in,u regions around the equator, which are already rather problem, i ridden. Second., climate change is occurring as a result of rim Vl activities and in that regard differs from a disaster caused b\ &n< asteroid. Emitters are presumably responsible for the harm the\ inflict. A third reason appeals to the utilitarian side of moral r hi ing. Utilitarians seek to bring amaximal amount of well-be in gints j the world compared to other available courses of action. Given tis^ potentially disastrous consequences of climate change, measure' to adapt to and mitigate climate change in the long run com i ibm?| much to this endeavor. Finally, the distribution of burden-, horn climate change is a moral problem also because humanity i i>liec-| tively owns the earth, which gives everybody some kind of e mule S ments to the atmosphere. We have already encountered 1 hat idea in Chapters 1 and 3. Let me say a bit more about it now. We u ill use this idea later in this chapter, and again in Chapter 6. Collective ownership of the earth In Europe the 17th century was a troubled period marred b\ it>li-gious wars. But the Old Testament provided as secure guidance as these difficult times permitted. This was also the time when \ European expansionism started to peak. Questions of global s.^ope ! arose when the colonizers thought about the conditiotis under j which they could occupy territories, or whether they couid also > occupy seaways to the exclusion of others. The idea that humamtv s collectively owned the earth helped with those questions. CuiiMde! of a religious context, one might think, this approach makes lit-, tie sense. After all, we inhabit a planet that was already in «.'MSl-ence for longer than four billion years when our species emugt'd, and the physical and biospheric conditions that enabled its ast ent have resulted from a series of cataclysmic developments. Would it not be preposterous to think humans own this planet? ffte idea that humanity owns the earth has contributed its re to the history of human chauvinism. The American poet l"%alt Whitman once praised animals by emphasizing that, as (imposed to humans, "not one is demented with the mania of owning things" (section 32 of "Song of Myself"). But my secularized 'jjjjjcistanding of collective ownership does not presuppose the arrogance associated with a reading of the Bible that subjects the • creation to the human will, an attitude that emerges, for instance, t- '0 the protestant theologian Jean Calvin's view that God took six i ■ ' garded), such as resources, plants, ecosystems, or species; mt.n- " made capital includes infrastructure such as roads or machine and human capital includes knowledge and skills. Adopime I either form of sustainability means insisting that the future he integrated into decision-making. Being committed to weak sus-." tainability means insisting on a non-declining stock of total capital: being committed to strong sustainability means insisting on a non-declining stock of (some forms of) natural capital. It is by insisting on a non-declining stock that we obtain a commitments to intergenerational equality as a lower boundary. According to weak sustainability, all forms of capital are sub-stitutable for each other and the preservation of anything in particular is not required. Future people cannot complain as long as they are no poorer in total capital. In contrast, the most commons-version of strong sustainability identifies some forms of naturalff capital as significant, or "critical" (to make clear that, say, obscure -' species of beetles do not deserve preservation, a point that presupposes, controversially, that we have a sufficiently good understanding of ecosystems to consider the extinction of such species.;-;-"non-critical"). So even if future people are richer in terms of over- . all capital, they can complain if their wealth comes at the expense of such capital One reason for supporting strong over weak sustainability turns ■ on the instrumental value of naturalresources, insisting that weak sustainability does not optimally secure the future of hum.mily. What is of concern are biodiversity losses, loss of ecosystems c*|| life-support systems such as the global climate and the ozone iayer, and soil erosion. We must ask to what extent protecting fliese assets requires non-substitutability of natural resources, ^nd how to assess opportunity costs from giving a special status jpsiich resources. Neumayer (2003) insists that "the combination if the distinctive features of natural capital with risk, uncertainty and ignorance suggests the conclusion that there are good reasons for the non-substitutability of specific forms of natural capital" (p 124). These "features" are that those forms of capital (global life-support systems, biodiversity) provide for elementary life functions better than any replacements ever could; that we have no practical way of replacing them; and that it is hard to know ivhich elements of our environment will matter. For instance, the eminent biologist E. O. Wilson refers to biodiversity as "our most ■ aiuable but least appreciated resource" (1993, p 281). So there is a strong rationale for caution about depleting natural capital. But in addition to such instrumental arguments enlightened anthropocentrism too supports strong sustainability. Enlightened anthropocentrism, again, finds room for a range of attitudes towards nature, for instance, that nature should be val-■ued intrinsically, as sublime or awesome, or as providing a context where human life obtains meaning. Those ways of valuing nature in turn support the preservation of the natural environment itself. Singer's argument for equal entitlements to pollution In One World Peter Singer (whose work we already encountered in Chapter 4) asserts that humanity collectively owns the absorptive capacity of the earth, its capacity to absorb greenhouse gases in • away that preserves basic climate conditions, which is one good provided by that part of the earth. Singer advocates a per-capita view as the principle of distribution for this good: each person -may consume (or "access") the absorptive capacity to the same degree (i.e., bring about the same volume of emissions). One may implement this approach via a "cap-and-trade" system. We :: would choose a global limit, each country obtaining an amount 134 Global Political Philosophy of permissible emissions (its "cap") based on population > , Countries that wish to pollute more must purchase addiiif.... rights. One way of assigning caps is that each person since, the industrial revolution has the same entitlement. We must tbj^ determine how much pollution that involves in light of bearable greenhouse gas concentrations. Or one may think of thedisir 0ll. tion in terms of current populations. Variations are conceivable one could index population sizes to a year before which ac could be expected to combat pollution. Or one could UuU-< . , future year, to avoid perverse incentives for population po . . or accommodate countries with young populations. But in 1)ty event, as political scientist Steve Vanderheiden states, "the airr . phere presents a rare example of a pure public good, where no one has a valid claim to larger shares of the good than anyone else" I (2008, p 225). Note some implausible implications of the equal per->\iotti» approach. Countries would obtain allocations regardless of how this affects their economy, how they use them, what importance they have for people's lives, and whether they reduce emission"; At least some of these concerns could be resolved by clever. illoca-tion and trading mechanisms. However, there is a more fundamental worry about Singer's approach that draws on the idea of collective ownership of the earth. We can develop this objcciion ' in two steps. Note first that Singer's standpoint assumes that t here is an entitlement to the atmosphere that all of humanity shares. This is plausible only if humanity owns the earth as a whole. After all, one would think the atmosphere (or its absorptive capacity) is i collectively owned because everybody needs it for survival, and because it is nobody's accomplishment that it exists to begin with, 1 But the domain for which these claims hold is the earth as surh, not the atmosphere or the absorptive capacity in particular. 'Che " second step then is this. We noted that collective ownership of '! the earth does not. imply that any particular object on or part ot if must be divided up. But if not every nugget of gold found on the ocean floor must be shared out, then this inference does not hold for the absorptive capacity either. In light of the initial difficulties and of this fundamental problem I think the idea is unl enable that we should think of the distribution of burdens from climate I Environmental Justice 135 change in terms of everybody having the same right to pollute the atmosphere. How to regulate access to the absorptive capacity? Humanity's collective ownership of the earth does bear on the question of how to distribute the burdens from climate change. If we ask that question, among others things we are asking how to regulate access to the absorptive capacity (i.e., how much pollution is permissible). Collective ownership offers one way of explaining why we must find a fair way of distributing access to the absorptive capacity, rather than leaving this matter to self-serving bargaining. However, what collective ownership implies is not as straightforward as suggested by Singer. Instead, we must be open-minded as to what criteria best capture ideas of fairness when it comes to the regulation of access to the absorptive capacity. Generally, one addresses fair-division problems by exploring the strength of various initially plausible criteria and by then making a proposal that brings the criteria that pass initial scrutiny into "reflective equilibrium:" one that integrates the criteria and explains precisely how they bear on the distribution. So the process that leads to such reflective equilibrium enumerates and compares the relative strength of different criteria. The following criteria are the initially more promising ones in this debate about how to divide up the burdens from climate change (including Singer's criterion that we already discussed): (1) Equal entitlements to the absorptive capacity of the earth (2) Polluters pay, including past polluters (3) Polluters pay, but not past polluters (4) Those pay who are willing to do so, which presumably is a reflection of how much they worry about climate change (5) Consumers pay for emissions required to produce goods they consume (6) We respect the status quo: countries are asked to reduce emissions by a fixed percentage of current emissions (7) Those pay who have the ability to do so 136 Global Political Philosophy Environmental Justice 13? Some criteria can be dismissed quickly. "Willingness-to-pay" 141 disregards causal involvement and capacity to deal with the problem. It should therefore enter any overall proposal at best in a verv limited way. My proposal below integrates it in just such a way, in the sense that not all burdens from climate change count as burdens that should be distributed globally. The approach that takw ; the status quo as starting point (6) merely offers political expedi*: ency. The consumer-pays principle (5) is implausible if producer | sell voluntarily Producers control emissions, buyers do not. One ' might say that if buyers act voluntarily, they control emissions 1-j creating demand. But they only do so mediated through actions of; producers. Perhaps it is implausible to say about very poor court- :■ tries that they "control" emissions since they often have very limited choices in what they can put on world markets. However, ,ts ■ long as those countries need not contribute to a solution to climate change (as they do not on my proposal below), the consumer-pays ■ principle is unacceptable. J So we can readily reduce the longer list to a shorter one: j (2) Polluters pay, including past polluters (3) Polluters pay, but not past polluters ;| (7) Those pay who have the ability to do so These are the serious contenders. To narrow this shorter list down f further, let us discuss the importance of historical emissions. Historical emissions To begin with, we must assess what should count as historical emissions. What is the relevant time t such that, before t, we should ; not blame emitters for emissions? Axel Gosseries (2004) mentions; various sensible dates, among them 1896 (publication of an article by the chemist Svante Arrhenius on the greenhouse effect, "the first warning of global warming" (Neumayer 2000, p 188)); 1967 '. (publication of first serious modeling exercise on climate change);:-; 1990, and 1995 (publication of first two IPCC reports). An advo-: cafe of historical accountability, Neumayer (2000) thinks it was 1 not before the mid-1980s that the public and decision makers became aware of the greenhouse effect. The 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change too sets a plausible date. The years of the publication of the third and fourth IPCC reports, 2001 and 2007, are also possible since both added much clarity on climate change. The crucial question is at what time decision makers could be expected to know, specifically, the dangers of climate change. By this standard, 1990 is the latest sensible date: the 1990 IPCC report ■already absorbed a body of insights gathered over years. Any choice of date will trigger the objection that, if countries cannot be blamed for emissions prior to Year X, they cannot be blamed for having committed themselves, over generations, to lifestyles that : essentially involve massive emissions. Come Year X, they were locked into certain patterns. However, if Year X is fixed as the latest possible year this objection loses its force. In light of the relevance and visibility of the 1990 IPCC report, : and of persistent doubts a choice of date other than the latest sensible one would inevitably create about what decision makers may have been expected to consider, 1990 is also a sensible choice, ■provided the proposal for the distribution of burdens acknowl- : edges reasons other than rectification of wrongful past emissions : as reasons for which disadvantaged countries can demand aid. ■ The importance of 1990 can then make us neglect the fact that it is the latest sensible date. Put differently: if the only aid avail- ; able to poor countries on the correct proposal depended on the amount of blameworthy past emissions, then the later we move the date, the less aid poor countries will get. We will then have to worry about choosing the latest sensible date, rather than, say, < the earliest. However, we saw in Chapter 1 that there is a duty : to help states realize human rights, and thus help them create the conditions under which the realization of these rights is possible. (There is in fact a duty of assistance in building institu- . tions, a topic we discuss in Chapter 7.) One sensible way of making good on these duties is the sharing of technology and other support to mitigate or adjust to climate change. It is because of these independently existing duties that also affect the distribution of burdens from climate change that the choice of the latest 138 Giobal Political Philosophy sensible date before which emissions are not blameworthy is net too worrisome. Let me discuss five problems about holding countries account, able for historical emissions and thus about imposing higher \nn-dens because countries have emitted in. the past. Let me b< with three minor problems. First of all, delineating and ascribing damage might be problematic. For instance, soil erosion mighj have done damage to shorelines if rising sea levels due to climate, change had not done so. Second, it is unclear what the unit of anal- '. ysis should be: should it just be individuals, or also corporations' ■ and states? If it should be states, then what about new states (such as those that emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union atuj, Yugoslavia)? And who should be accountable for damage done bj agents who are no longer alive? A third issue is that if we count past -polluters they would be counted disproportionately, After all, contemporary industrializers have better technology that draws