Distribution costs of global climate change

The problem of global climate change links the issues of energy utilization, economic development, environmental degradation, and equity on a planetary scale. Questions concerning the scale and timing of the impact of continuously increasing emissions of greenhouse gases remain. A set of approaches has emerged which claim to objectively demonstrate that nothing or very little should be done to address this problem. These approaches rely on standard economic theory and analytical methods to reach their conclusion that significant worldwide action is unnecessary. In the authors' view, however, these approaches contain biases which place an exceptionally high value on maintaining the status quo of global patterns of resource consumption and distribution of wealth. When utilized to analyze various policy options, this bias results in a determination that equity considerations are too costly and may impede technological and economic progress. As an alternative, the authors propose an approach based on a principle of equity in atmospheric resource utilization.>