Climate Change and Global Justice: New Problem, Old Paradigm?

In this paper, we focus on the conceptualization of climate change as an issue of global justice. While we do not deny that climate change raises fundamental and dramatic issues of justice among peoples as well as generations, our claim is that the language of global justice can obscure the fact that problems provoked by climate change lack some characteristic features of problems of global justice, while possessing others that are not characteristic of such problems. We begin by describing briefly how we got to where we are, climatically speaking; we go on to show why it is plausible to think of climate change as provoking problems of global justice; point out four respects in which this discourse does not suit the domain of the problem; highlight problems with two key conceptual elements of most global justice theorizing when applied to climate change; and finally draw some conclusions.