ABSTRACT
One concern with our previous argument is that perhaps the most straightforward answer to the third key question of climate ethics has not yet even been brought into play: Should we not simply divide up the remaining emissions budget equally among all human beings living at present? Everyone would receive an equally large piece of the “emissions cake,” as it were-a small child from Calcutta, as well as the manager from New York. Would this equal division not be the easiest and fairest solution? This proposal does, in fact, have a range of supporters among experts in ethics and in international climate policy. The so-called contraction and convergence approach, for example, pursues the aim of aligning the currently glaring diff erences in per capita emissions between the diff erent states over a certain period of time (see Meyer 2000). In addition, a range of policy advisory institutes-for example the German Advisory Council on Global Change (Wissenschaftlicher Beirat der Bundesregierung Globale Umweltveränderungen, or WBGU) with its so-called budget approach (WBGU 2009)—are proponents of this kind of “emissions egalitarianism.”
