UNCORRECTED PROOFS Opinion A gentle critique of the Greenhouse Development Rights framework Kenneth E. Shockley * The Greenhouse• Development Rights (GDR) framework provides a promising AQ1 attempt at fairly distributing the burdens of climate change. This brief review critically examines the framework, with a particular focus on the individualism that the authors take to provide much of the moral justification for their account. The review concludes that the particular role played by individualism in GDR both blinds the framework to certain crucial features of development and leads to difficulties in attributing historical emissions more properly tied to states and collective entities than to individuals.  2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. How to cite this article: WIREs Clim Change 2013. doi: 10.1002/wcc.215 INTRODUCTION A s we face the consequences of climate change, some means of allocating the associated burdens is needed. The Greenhouse Development Rights (GDR) framework is certainly one of the most interesting and promising efforts at assigning this allocation. 1 However, while there is much to applaud in GDR, the framework is structured in such a way that it is systematically blinded to a range of morally relevant considerations. Unfortunately, these considerations will only become more significant as the effects of climate change become more pronounced. In the following, •we will consider several AQ2 themes advocated by GDR and show that while each of those themes captures something of substantial importance, the way the framework addresses each of those themes systematically forces any policy that relies on the framework to overlook considerations AQ3 vital to development, to environmental justice, or to both. We will conclude that while GDR has clear virtues, it must be modified if it is to retain the moral legitimacy that is taken to provide its primary motivation. * Correspondence to: kes25@buffalo.edu Department of Philosophy, University at Buffalo—SUNY, Buffalo, NY, USA Conflict of interest: The author declares that he has no conflicts of interest in relation to this article. The motivation behind GDR is to provide a fair method for sharing the substantial burdens associated with the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. Spelling out what constitutes a fair distribution is a substantial task, requiring that several divergent moral considerations be simultaneously addressed. We can see the difficulty, conceptually, by considering the competing moral principles in play. The first is grounded in a basic requirement of justice that we should address harms done. We will call this the contribution principle; here we take this principle to be a version of the polluter pays principle. The second, the ability to pay principle, is grounded in the moral requirement to help those that one can. 2 The justification of the ability to pay principle involves a basic appeal to benevolence. 3 While the history of a state’s emissions motivates an appeal to the contribution principle, the current level of a state’s finances motivates an appeal to the ability to pay principle. Taking responsibility for the harms resulting from one’s actions is morally distinct from providing the help that one can. Paying back one’s debts is quite different from helping those in dire need. The duties associated with those acts, and the justification available for those duties, take distinctive forms. The difficulty in finding the right balance between the demands of these two principles constitutes the primary moral problem attached to any fair distribution of the burdens of climate change. Taking seriously the needs for development, while 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 Volume 1, 2013  2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 1