Browsing by Subject "yhdenvertaisuus"

At the Paris climate conference (COP21), a new, comprehensive, legally binding agreement was reached, and it came force by November, 2016. The main goal of the Agreement is to keep the global temperature rise well below 2 degrees and strive for efforts to restrict the temperature increase to 1.5 degree Celsius. Carbon budget denotes the aggregate maximum of carbon dioxide ended up in the atmosphere which mankind can afford to emit now and the future. Keeping the more stringent goal of the Paris Agreement with a probability of 66 % results in the global carbon budget of 350 Gt between 2011 and 2100 and in my thesis, I choose the global carbon budget of 183 Gt for the years 2016-2050. In addition to considering the global carbon budget, the matter of distribution of global carbon budget among the nations is important because both huge practical questions of the international climate politics and general philosophical questions of fairness are directly linked to it. The fairness principles expressed in formulas provide functional tools for studying potential answers for these questions. In my thesis, I choose an equity principle and a historical responsibility principle out of the various fairness principles and I examine 1) what kind of carbon budgets they produce 2) what kind of differences there are in results they produce and 3) how two fairness principles are fulfilled in the current climate politics. Results brought by using the equity principle demonstrate that carbon dioxide emissions of the most African countries, Asian countries akin to Bangladesh and Nepal and a group of other developing countries are very small compared to their carbon budgets based on their population shares, and annual carbon budgets. Simultaneously, the carbon dioxide emissions of Western countries, Japan, Russia, South Africa, Iran, China, Turkey, Argentina, Mexico, Egypt, Indonesia, Brazil and India are going to exceed their carbon budgets in 2-15 years, that is only after some years. It is observed in results brought by the historical responsibility that the cumulative, historical emissions (per capita) of the United States and the other Western countries involved in a sample are tenfold, even hundredfold compared to those of developing countries. Furthermore, almost all Western countries, Russia, Japan and South Africa have negative carbon budgets and the others have positive ones. In the calculation of historical emissions, the choice of starting year matters and the earlier the starting year is, the bigger are carbon debts of Western countries, Russia and Japan and carbon credits of India, China and many other countries. In the results given by the historical responsibility principle, only Western countries, Russia, Japan, South Africa have exceeded their carbon budgets whereas in the results given the equity principle, there are also a remarkable amount of other developed countries which will exceed their carbon budgets in 2-15 years. Another difference is that in the case of the equity principle, countries that have exceeded their carbon budgets should only decrease their emissions to the level of their annual emissions. In other words, their carbon budget would remain positive while in the case of the historical responsibility, countries that have exceeded their carbon budgets receive directly negative carbon budgets. After all, the results brought by chosen the equity and historical principles indicate that neither principle is fulfilled in the present international climate politics.