Climate justice demands polluters to take responsibility for both present and future harm caused by past GHG emissions and for future harm caused by future GHG emissions. One problem with this is double climate taxation: people living in historical polluting countries must both shoulder the burden of an effective and inclusive climate transition and repay the climate debt incurred by their predecessors. Although double climate taxation might be defensible on normative grounds, it risks making climate justice politically infeasible. I therefore (...) maintain that global climate justice should focus on future, rather than past, climate harms. The forward-looking polluter pays principle (FL-PPP) can ensure both a cost-effective climate transition and a fair distribution of the climate burden, provided it is applied as follows: i) each country must introduce a carbon price calibrated to the global social cost of carbon; ii) each country must transfer part of carbon revenues collected at the country level to an international fund; iii) global carbon revenues must be redistributed on the basis of the country-level social cost of carbon. The FL-PPP burden can be made more progressive, moreover, if the formula for allocating global carbon revenues is adjusted through two coefficients, one consumption-based and one priority-sensitive. (shrink)

EU co-legislators recently approved the EU carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), which establishes a uniform carbon price on both EU and imported products, in ETS covered sectors. This violates the CBDR-RC principle. Yet, CBAM advocates claim that the resulting unfair mitigation can be offset by scaling up climate finance, to the benefit of poorer countries. I argue that the CBAM’s unfairness is compounded by previous climate injustice, as avoidable emissions by developed countries pushed the climate crisis to the point where (...) fair mitigation is no longer viable. This implies that a disadvantage within the distributive sphere of emissions abatement cannot be counterbalanced by additional advantages within the distributive sphere of climate finance. (shrink)