ABSTRACT
This chapter aims is to establish that three commonsense principles of fairness, none of them dependent upon controversial philosophical theories of justice, give rise to the same conclusion about the allocation of the costs of protecting the environment. In the area of development and the environment, the clearest cases that fall under this first principle of equity are the partial destruction of the ozone layer and the initiation of global warming by the process of industrialization that has enriched the North but not the South. Meanwhile, the environmental damage caused by the process has been incurred by everyone. Whatever environmental damage has been done, it is said, was unintentional. Now we know all sorts of things about CFCs and the ozone layer, and about carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect, that no one dreamed of when CFCs were created or when industrialization fed with fossil fuels began.
