Personal Carbon Allowances: Implementing National Climate Equity and Responsibility

Steve Vanderheiden

Abstract
This project examines schemes by which climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions could be attributed to individual persons rather than states or firms, and where persons on carbon budgets could meet these obligations (legal or otherwise) through trading or other offsetting mechanisms. In addition to exploring several personal carbon trading proposals, along with carbon accounting rules and technologies that make possible personal carbon budgeting, the project focuses on the normative potential of such schemes, which some tout as instantiating individual responsibility for climate change (a social norm that motivates cooperative action) while fostering social cooperation around decarbonization imperatives. It will also consider several objections surrounding such schemes, including those against carbon trading and emissions offsetting more generally as well as in this particular application. The upshot of the analysis concerns a proposal for the policy means by which burdens associated with national carbon budgets could be passed along to sub-state actors, while also increasing carbon visibility in a way that promotes greater awareness of climate impacts of individual actions and support for national mitigation efforts.