When policies and activities within one country and generation cause deleterious consequences for those of other nations and later generations, they constitute serious injustices. Recognizing this, the international climate policy development process has expressly aimed to mitigate the pressing contemporary environmental threat in a manner that promotes justice and avoids injustice as they attempt to deal with anthropogenic climate change. Yet, while making justice a primary objective of global climate policy has been its noblest aspiration, it remains an onerous challenge for policymakers. Atmospheric Justice is the first single-authored work of political theory that addresses this pressing challenge via the conceptual frameworks of justice, equality, and responsibility. Throughout Vanderheiden carefully sets out ways to achieve environmental justice, as he explores how climate change raises issues of international and intergenerational justice in addition to considering how the design of a global climate regime might take these aims into account. Engaging with and expanding on the principles of renowned political philosopher John Rawls to account for future generations, Vanderheiden address the pressing issue of global climate change via the conceptual frameworks of justice, equality, and responsibility. Demonstrating how political theory can usefully contribute toward a better understanding of the proper human response to climate change, as well as how the climate case offers insights into resolving contemporary controversies within political theory, the book offers a case study in which the application of normative theory to policy allows readers to betterunderstand both. Thoroughly researched and persuasively argued, Atmospheric Justice makes an important step toward providing us with a set of carefully elaborated first principles for achieving environmental justice.

This book brings together leading scholars on the politics of energy, examining the natural resources and developing technologies that are essential to its production and the various public and private factors affecting its use, along with the ecological consequences of both. Section One examines the looming challenges posed by continuing dependence upon oil as a primary energy source, including "peak oil" scenarios and the social and political consequences of resource extraction upon the developing world. Section Two considers proposals to dramatically increase nuclear power production as a means to reduce carbon emissions, with both the risks and potential of this "nuclear option" carefully weighed. Although many tout renewable energy sources for their environmental benefits, Section Three calls attention to several potential problems with large-scale renewable energy development and the dilemmas that they have caused for would-be supporters of such efforts. Finally, Section Four weighs the prospects for developing sustainable energy systems on the ground, including conservation measures that reduce energy demand and system-wide energy policy efforts. Together, these essays demonstrate the importance of sound energy policy along with the numerous obstacles to developing and implementing it.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Environmental Politics.

This book brings together leading scholars on the politics of energy, examining the natural resources and developing technologies that are essential to its production and the various public and private factors affecting its use, along with the ecological consequences of both. Section One examines the looming challenges posed by continuing dependence upon oil as a primary energy source, including "peak oil" scenarios and the social and political consequences of resource extraction upon the developing world. Section Two considers proposals to dramatically increase nuclear power production as a means to reduce carbon emissions, with both the risks and potential of this "nuclear option" carefully weighed. Although many tout renewable energy sources for their environmental benefits, Section Three calls attention to several potential problems with large-scale renewable energy development and the dilemmas that they have caused for would-be supporters of such efforts. Finally, Section Four weighs the prospects for developing sustainable energy systems on the ground, including conservation measures that reduce energy demand and system-wide energy policy efforts. Together, these essays demonstrate the importance of sound energy policy along with the numerous obstacles to developing and implementing it.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Environmental Politics.

When the policies and activities of one country or generation harm both other nations and later generations, they constitute serious injustices. Recognizing the broad threat posed by anthropogenic climate change, advocates for an international climate policy development process have expressly aimed to mitigate this pressing contemporary environmental threat in a manner that promotes justice. Yet, while making justice a primary objective of global climate policy has been the movement's noblest aspiration, it remains an onerous challenge for policymakers.
Atmospheric Justice is the first single-authored work of political theory that addresses this pressing challenge via the conceptual frameworks of justice, equality, and responsibility. Throughout this incisive study, Steve Vanderheiden points toward ways to achieve environmental justice by exploring how climate change raises issues of both international and intergenerational justice. In addition, he considers how the design of a global climate regime might take these aims into account. Engaging with the principles of renowned political philosopher John Rawls, he expands on them by factoring in the needs of future generations. Vanderheiden also demonstrates how political theory can contribute to reaching a better understanding of the proper human response to climate change. By showing how climate policy offers insights into resolving contemporary controversies within political theory, he illustrates the ways in which applying normative theory to policy allows us to better understand both.
Thoroughly researched and persuasively argued, Atmospheric Justice makes an important step toward providing us with a set of carefully elaborated first principles for achieving environmental justice.

The essays selected for this volume present critical viewpoints from the debate about the need to establish rights on behalf of greater environmental protection. Three main areas for developing environmental rights are surveyed, including: extensionist theories that link existing rights (for example to subsistence or territory) to threats of harm from exacerbated resource scarcity, pollution or rapid environmental change; proposals for rights to specified environmental goods or services, such as rights to a safe environment and the capacity to assimilate greenhouse gas emissions; and rights that protect the interests of parties not currently recognized as having rights, including nonhuman subjects, natural objects and future generations. This volume captures the potential for and primary challenges to the development of rights as instruments for safeguarding the planet's life-support capacities and features proposals and analyses which argue the need to create an avenue of recourse against ecological degradation, whether on behalf of human or nonhuman right holders.

This collection of scholarly articles takes as its subject matter discourses on environmental justice. The concept emerged in recent decades as an important framing concept for a wide variety of environmental movements and objectives, and has gained considerable currency due to the scope and normative force that its principles contain, whether in legal, political, or philosophical applications. This collection is an invaluable resource for researchers and scholars in this field given that the multiple theories and analyses of environmental justice are likely to remain central to the ongoing development of normative theorizing about the human role in the environment in the foreseeable future.