Abstract

[Comment] We believe that climate winners have a part to play in redressing the inequalities brought about by climate change—indeed, we think some of their winnings are not legitimate because they were unearned, lucky windfalls. But the matter must be considered carefully. First, we do not claim that all climate gains are illegitimate, meaning that climate justice does not warrant confiscating all climate gains wholesale. Next, and perhaps somewhat unintuitively (at first), we argue that some of the illegitimate gains should be transferred to polluters—that is the unintuitive part—while the rest should be used to compensate those harmed by climate change. [Open access]