ABSTRACT
The 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) declared anthropogenic climate change to be a "common concern of mankind" and resolved to take all necessary steps in order to prevent "dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system." The right to develop cannot trump the right to survival emissions, nor can it trump the equally basic right to an adequate environment. These two kinds of rights claims together inform the design of a fair and effective global climate regime, because they provide a normative framework for distributing emission shares along the two dimensions noted above. Insofar as developing countries like India and China have historically produced only survival emissions and not luxury emissions, they bear no responsibility for causing climate change, and hence can be attributed no liability for its remedy. Global climate may be only part of the complex causal chain that produces unjust inequality, but resource exploitation patterns that contribute to climate change also lead to global inequality.
