The Argument from Jurisdiction Against Consumption-Based Emissions Accounting of Greenhouse Gases

A key question of international climate policy is how emissions should be counted. The system currently in place counts emissions at their geographical source. This is known as territorial accounting. Owing to an increasing mismatch between emissions embodied in countries’ production and consumption, in recent years the competing idea of consumption-based accounting has gained in popularity. The idea behind such accounting method is to count emissions at the point of final consumption. Many scholars have argued that switching to this method would be desirable as it would enhance the global climate mitigation effort and allocate the costs of climate policy in a fairer way. In this paper, I advance a new kind of argument against consumption-based accounting: the argument from jurisdictional control. The normative discussion surrounding consumption-based accounting so far has been preoccupied with a retrospective understanding of responsibility, that is, it has asked whether this accounting method makes the polluters pay. Yet, we can also assess the method through the lens of prospective responsibility and ask whether it is an appropriate way to distribute remedial tasks. The argument from jurisdictional control maintains that the current system of territorial accounting is appropriate because it ensures that emissions are attributed to the government that has the legal power to regulate emissions moving forward. I distinguish between two versions of this argument. In the fairness version, the argument is that territorial accounting is appropriate because it ensures that countries are not attributed with emissions it could not control. In the effectiveness version, the argument is that territorial accounting is appropriate because it places the incentive to reduce a set of emissions on the entity that has the most control over that set. Individually or taken together, these arguments provide reasons to doubt consumption-based accounting that so far have been neglected in the literature. Yet, as I also argue, they are also potentially vulnerable to an objection. Even though it is plausible that every country, owing to their jurisdiction, has more control over its territorial emissions than over other emissions, this does not show that every country has more control over its territorial emissions than any other country does. When other countries can better control the emissions taking place in a country than the domestic government can, the argument from jurisdiction does not provide grounds for preferring territorial accounting. Thus, whether territorial accounting is more appropriate from the perspective of prospective responsibility ultimately depends on empirical facts about the nature of international relations.