The fact of global climate challenges is undeniable. Climate challenges concern past, current and future environmental pollution and emissions of Green house gases (GHG). Climate change is not only a matter for scientists studying the degree of global warming or economists calculating the most efficient mitigation policies. Environmental issues are also a major political-theoretical topic that raises several questions challenging our common-sense moral and political conceptualisations. In modern industrialised societies pollution is to some extent unavoidable. The political goal is to minimise the pollution without harming the global economy. With this in mind, non-pollution is a scarce resource triggering concerns for global distributive justice and responsibility in competition with other policy goals such as global poverty. This paper aims at critiquing the agent-relative approach to responsibility, which is generally addressed in variations of the polluter pays principle (PPP) and beneficiary pays principle (BPP). Instead, it is argued that while the agent-relative approach has considerable appeal it does not address the problems of global climate change in a sufficient way. In the paper, attention is given to the replacement of the questions who is responsible and who has benefited with the question how do we collectively respond to climate changes cumulated by past pollution and GHG emissions? The latter is not merely a question of global coordination but of what is the fairest way of dealing with past, current and future emissions, given the spatially and temporally diffuse character of the phenomenon we are dealing with. The paper argues that given the fact that climate changes are spatially and temporally disconnected, it is not reasonable to hold no-one else but the individual agent accountable. This is not an argument against the theories of individual responsibility. Rather, it is an argument for that individual responsibility is an insufficient theoretical framework for studying responsibility for climate changes over time. If we reject individual responsibility as the proper framework for climate change studies, the agent-relative theories PPP and BPP fail as well. Finally, the paper discusses a principle for collective responsibility capable of addressing the spatially and temporally diffuse climate changes. Aiming at overcoming the non-identity problems between polluters and payers, the paper’s understanding of collective responsibility is not to pick out individual or collective agents but to distribute responsibility equally between all agents after some kind of proportional tax system.
