IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/lsg/lsgwps/wp49.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Carbon trading: unethical, unjust and ineffective?

Author

Listed:
  • Simon Caney
  • Cameron Hepburn

Abstract

Cap-and-trade systems for greenhouse gas emissions are an important part of the climate change policies of the EU, Japan, New Zealand, among others, as well as China (soon) and Australia (potentially). However, concerns have been raised on a variety of ethical grounds about the use of markets to reduce emissions. For example, some people worry that emissions trading allows the wealthy to evade their responsibilities. Others are concerned that it puts a price on the natural environment. Concerns have also been raised about the distributional justice of emissions trading. Finally, some commentators have questioned the actual effectiveness of emissions trading in reducing emissions. This paper considers these three categories of objections � ethics, justice and effectiveness � through the lens of moral philosophy and economics. It is concluded that only the objections based on distributional justice can be sustained. This points to reform of the carbon market system, rather than its elimination.

Suggested Citation

  • Simon Caney & Cameron Hepburn, 2011. "Carbon trading: unethical, unjust and ineffective?," GRI Working Papers 49, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
    • Handle: RePEc:lsg:lsgwps:wp49
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/WP49_carbon-trading-caney-hepburn.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Diniz Oliveira, Thais & Costa Gurgel, Angelo & Tonry, Steve, 2021. "Potential trading partners of a brazilian emissions trading scheme: The effects of linking with a developed region (Europe) and two developing regions (Latin America and China)," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 171(C).
    2. Dominic Roser & Christian Huggel & Markus Ohndorf & Ivo Wallimann-Helmer, 2015. "Advancing the interdisciplinary dialogue on climate justice," Climatic Change, Springer, vol. 133(3), pages 349-359, December.
    3. Spash, Clive L. & Theine, Hendrik, 2016. "Voluntary Individual Carbon Trading," SRE-Discussion Papers 2016/04, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business.
      • Clive L. Spash & Hendrik Theine, 2016. "Voluntary Individual Carbon Trading," SRE-Disc sre-disc-2016_04, Institute for Multilevel Governance and Development, Department of Socioeconomics, Vienna University of Economics and Business.
    4. Lu & Pollitt, M. G. & Wang, K. & Wei, Y-M., 2023. "The Incremental Impact of China's Carbon," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 2349, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    5. Stiglitz, Joseph E., 2019. "Addressing climate change through price and non-price interventions," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 119(C), pages 594-612.
    6. David Brown & Marion MacLellan, 2020. "A Multiscalar and Justice-Led Analysis of REDD+: A Case Study of theNorwegian–Ethiopian Partnership," Global Environmental Politics, MIT Press, vol. 20(1), pages 11-37, February.
    7. Hennlock, Magnus & Löfgren, Åsa & Sterner, Thomas & Martinsson, Peter, 2018. "Emissions Trading Subject to Kantian Preferences," Working Papers in Economics 718, University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics.
    8. Khaqqi, Khamila Nurul & Sikorski, Janusz J. & Hadinoto, Kunn & Kraft, Markus, 2018. "Incorporating seller/buyer reputation-based system in blockchain-enabled emission trading application," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 209(C), pages 8-19.
    9. Mattauch, Linus & Hepburn, Cameron, 2016. "Climate policy when preferences are endogenous – and sometimes they are," INET Oxford Working Papers 2016-04, Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:lsg:lsgwps:wp49. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: The GRI Administration (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/grlseuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.