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At the height of the Washington feeding frenzy about the fiscal cliff, the debt ceiling, and sequestration, austerity hawks coined a new label to denigrate lawmakers who were opposed to cutbacks brought on by the cynical manipulation of national debt: "debt deniers." It was a savvy way of turning the tables on those who had gotten traction out of depicting the GOP as hopelessly afflicted by "climate denial." This past year finally saw the climate change threat acknowledged by the worlds leading international finance institutions. Both the IMF and the World Bank have acknowledged that the brunt of the impact will be borne by some of the poorest populations in the world, further jeopardizing their prospects for sustainable development. But neither institution has encouraged, let alone pressed, rich nations to pay climate debts to developing countries that have already felt the effects of climate change. Adapted from the source document.

At the height of the Washington feeding frenzy about the fiscal cliff, the debt ceiling, and sequestration, austerity hawks coined a new label to denigrate lawmakers who were opposed to cutbacks brought on by the cynical manipulation of national debt: "debt deniers." It was a savvy way of turning the tables on those who had gotten traction out of depicting the GOP as hopelessly affl icted by "climate denial." Not that there was any real equivalence between the two charges. After all, economics, unlike climatology, is not a science, and there is nothing approaching a consensus about the fiscal wisdom of running large government debts, especially if they are U.S. debts, backed by the still almighty dollar.

The international process for tackling climate change endured several backslashes sincethe signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015. Issues around the respective responsibilitiesare not fully solved yet. The underlying question of how to share efforts in order to reacha Zero Net Emissions state remains largely unclear and the INDCs process has still todeliver a pathway for decarbonization.In the last years, the concept of global carbon budget has emerged as one of the mostdirect ways to materialize the constraint from the climate. It mainly relies on the idea thatonly a limited quantity of carbon dioxide can be released in the atmosphere if we want tostay below the 2°C temperature change threshold above pre-industrial levels and, ifpossible, below +1.5°C, as agreed at the Paris Conference in 2015. By comparing what isin our carbon budget to what is done to reduce the carbon footprint of societies, wecalculate a distance to the climate constraint. Expressed in euro this distance, called the"climate debt", measure how much we avoid paying by delaying climate change mitigation. Using different rules for sharing the burden, acknowledging there is no negotiatednor consensual way to share it, we calculate this climate debt for main EU countries.The first step of the following work is to compute a carbon budget for both the EuropeanUnion and member countries mixing population based sharing (egalitarian) for EU andrest of world budget and emission based sharing (grandfathering) for EU countries. In asecond step, we determine how many years are left before these budgets are depleted atthe regional and national levels, which requires assumptions on the future emissionstrend. Combining these trends with assumptions on the abatement cost of remainingcarbon dioxide emissions after the depletion date allows us to evaluate the "climatedebt". More precisely, the "climate debt" is the amount of money that will have to beinvested or paid by countries for them not to exceed their carbon budget.This work led us to three key policy ...

The international process for tackling climate change endured several backslashes sincethe signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015. Issues around the respective responsibilitiesare not fully solved yet. The underlying question of how to share efforts in order to reacha Zero Net Emissions state remains largely unclear and the INDCs process has still todeliver a pathway for decarbonization.In the last years, the concept of global carbon budget has emerged as one of the mostdirect ways to materialize the constraint from the climate. It mainly relies on the idea thatonly a limited quantity of carbon dioxide can be released in the atmosphere if we want tostay below the 2°C temperature change threshold above pre-industrial levels and, ifpossible, below +1.5°C, as agreed at the Paris Conference in 2015. By comparing what isin our carbon budget to what is done to reduce the carbon footprint of societies, wecalculate a distance to the climate constraint. Expressed in euro this distance, called the"climate debt", measure how much we avoid paying by delaying climate change mitigation. Using different rules for sharing the burden, acknowledging there is no negotiatednor consensual way to share it, we calculate this climate debt for main EU countries.The first step of the following work is to compute a carbon budget for both the EuropeanUnion and member countries mixing population based sharing (egalitarian) for EU andrest of world budget and emission based sharing (grandfathering) for EU countries. In asecond step, we determine how many years are left before these budgets are depleted atthe regional and national levels, which requires assumptions on the future emissionstrend. Combining these trends with assumptions on the abatement cost of remainingcarbon dioxide emissions after the depletion date allows us to evaluate the "climatedebt". More precisely, the "climate debt" is the amount of money that will have to beinvested or paid by countries for them not to exceed their carbon budget.This work led us to three key policy ...

The international process for tackling climate change endured several backslashes sincethe signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015. Issues around the respective responsibilitiesare not fully solved yet. The underlying question of how to share efforts in order to reacha Zero Net Emissions state remains largely unclear and the INDCs process has still todeliver a pathway for decarbonization.In the last years, the concept of global carbon budget has emerged as one of the mostdirect ways to materialize the constraint from the climate. It mainly relies on the idea thatonly a limited quantity of carbon dioxide can be released in the atmosphere if we want tostay below the 2°C temperature change threshold above pre-industrial levels and, ifpossible, below +1.5°C, as agreed at the Paris Conference in 2015. By comparing what isin our carbon budget to what is done to reduce the carbon footprint of societies, wecalculate a distance to the climate constraint. Expressed in euro this distance, called the"climate debt", measure how much we avoid paying by delaying climate change mitigation. Using different rules for sharing the burden, acknowledging there is no negotiatednor consensual way to share it, we calculate this climate debt for main EU countries.The first step of the following work is to compute a carbon budget for both the EuropeanUnion and member countries mixing population based sharing (egalitarian) for EU andrest of world budget and emission based sharing (grandfathering) for EU countries. In asecond step, we determine how many years are left before these budgets are depleted atthe regional and national levels, which requires assumptions on the future emissionstrend. Combining these trends with assumptions on the abatement cost of remainingcarbon dioxide emissions after the depletion date allows us to evaluate the "climatedebt". More precisely, the "climate debt" is the amount of money that will have to beinvested or paid by countries for them not to exceed their carbon budget.This work led us to three key policy insights. First, there are few years left for major European countries before exhausting their carbon budget under the +2°C target. As for the+1.5°C target, carbon budgets are exhausted for EU main countries, which are thusrunning excessive climate deficits. Secondly, the carbon debt should be considered asone of the major issues of the decades to come since in the baseline scenario it representsabout 50% of the EU GDP to stay below +2°C (120% for staying below +1.5°C). Thirdly,the results of the estimation of this carbon debt are subject to numerous moral, ethicaland technical assumptions that should motivate further and urgent investigations on thissubject, critical to climate change mitigation, from both state bodies and independentresearch institutes.

The international process for tackling climate change endured several backslashes sincethe signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015. Issues around the respective responsibilitiesare not fully solved yet. The underlying question of how to share efforts in order to reacha Zero Net Emissions state remains largely unclear and the INDCs process has still todeliver a pathway for decarbonization.In the last years, the concept of global carbon budget has emerged as one of the mostdirect ways to materialize the constraint from the climate. It mainly relies on the idea thatonly a limited quantity of carbon dioxide can be released in the atmosphere if we want tostay below the 2°C temperature change threshold above pre-industrial levels and, ifpossible, below +1.5°C, as agreed at the Paris Conference in 2015. By comparing what isin our carbon budget to what is done to reduce the carbon footprint of societies, wecalculate a distance to the climate constraint. Expressed in euro this distance, called the"climate debt", measure how much we avoid paying by delaying climate change mitigation. Using different rules for sharing the burden, acknowledging there is no negotiatednor consensual way to share it, we calculate this climate debt for main EU countries.The first step of the following work is to compute a carbon budget for both the EuropeanUnion and member countries mixing population based sharing (egalitarian) for EU andrest of world budget and emission based sharing (grandfathering) for EU countries. In asecond step, we determine how many years are left before these budgets are depleted atthe regional and national levels, which requires assumptions on the future emissionstrend. Combining these trends with assumptions on the abatement cost of remainingcarbon dioxide emissions after the depletion date allows us to evaluate the "climatedebt". More precisely, the "climate debt" is the amount of money that will have to beinvested or paid by countries for them not to exceed their carbon budget.This work led us to three key policy insights. First, there are few years left for major European countries before exhausting their carbon budget under the +2°C target. As for the+1.5°C target, carbon budgets are exhausted for EU main countries, which are thusrunning excessive climate deficits. Secondly, the carbon debt should be considered asone of the major issues of the decades to come since in the baseline scenario it representsabout 50% of the EU GDP to stay below +2°C (120% for staying below +1.5°C). Thirdly,the results of the estimation of this carbon debt are subject to numerous moral, ethicaland technical assumptions that should motivate further and urgent investigations on thissubject, critical to climate change mitigation, from both state bodies and independentresearch institutes.

A central concept raised by the climate justice movement is climate debt. Here, the claims and warrants of the movement support for climate debt is identified through an argumentation analysis of their central manifestos. It is found that the climate debt claim is understood as primarily restorative, in the sense that the environmental space of the developing countries must be returned, "decolonized." The damage caused by climate change also gives rise to a compensatory adaptation debt. The result is compared with an earlier study on ecological debt. Both concepts are framed within an unjust power relation between North and South, but there are differences. Ecological debt is mainly analyzed in terms of an unjust economic exploitation, which is congenial with its use as an argument for cancellation of Southern external debts; climate debt is rather seen as a violation of communal rights and territories, an argument for climate justice.

A range of developing countries and international advocacy organizations have argued that wealthy countries, as a result of their greater historical contribution to human-induced climate change, owe a climate debt to poor countries. Critics of this argument have claimed that it is incoherent or morally objectionable. In this essay we clarify the concept of climate debt and assess its value for conceptualizing responsibilities associated with global climate change and for guiding international climate negotiations. We conclude that the idea of a climate debt can be coherently formulated, and that while some understandings of the idea of climate debt could lead to morally objectionable conclusions, other accounts would not. However, we argue that climate debt nevertheless provides an unhelpful frame for advancing global justice through international climate negotiations-the only existing means of resolving political conflict over the collective action problems posed by human-induced climate change-due to its retrospective and potentially adversarial emphasis, and to problems of measurement.

"Climate warming and disorder are the consequence of a free trade economic growth model that has failed to anticipate its physical impact on the environment. This failure reveals a lack of interaction between economists and scientists, long separated from an academic standpoint. The separation is artificial. This book shows that the free trade concept of David Ricardo and that of the Sadi Carnot thermodynamic cycle, both developed at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, are amazingly close to each other. The analogy between the two cycles helps understand the fundamental mechanism of free trade. Irreversible processes, such as the release of CO2 by fossil fuel burning, have increased the Boltzmann entropy level. It has generated climate warming and disorder, a phenomenon accelerated by a growth model largely based on delocalization of industrial production to low wage countries. Major irreversible phenomena such as melting of all arctic ice including the Greenland ice sheets can be expected within 1000 years that can only be avoided by active removal of atmospheric CO2, whose cost can be calculated based on the entropy laws of Clausius and Boltzmann"--

A range of developing countries and international advocacy organizations have argued that wealthy countries, as a result of their greater historical contribution to human-induced climate change, owe a climate debt to poor countries. Critics of this argument have claimed that it is incoherent or morally objectionable. In this essay we clarify the concept of climate debt and assess its value for conceptualizing responsibilities associated with global climate change and for guiding international climate negotiations. We conclude that the idea of a climate debt can be coherently formulated, and that while some understandings of the idea of climate debt could lead to morally objectionable conclusions, other accounts would not. However, we argue that climate debt nevertheless provides an unhelpful frame for advancing global justice through international climate negotiations-the only existing means of resolving political conflict over the collective action problems posed by human-induced climate change-due to its retrospective and potentially adversarial emphasis, and to problems of measurement.