Under 'fair' rules, most rich countries have already blown through their carbon allowance and should technically be at negative emissions right now.
March 25, 2026
Original Paper
Climate Fairness and Growth: Allocating the Remaining Carbon Budget
SSRN · 6456964
The Takeaway
The paper uses the principle of equal-per-capita emissions to show that the math of 'climate fairness' is fundamentally broken for the West. Even if advanced economies gave all their best green technology to the rest of the world for free, it would still only cover about a third of the 'carbon debt' they already owe based on historical emissions.
From the abstract
Limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees requires that cumulative carbon dioxide emissions remain within a finite remaining carbon budget. How this budget is allocated across countries raises questions of fairness and development. This paper evaluates whether equity-based carbon allocations are compatible with sustained economic growth in emerging and developing economies. We compute country-level fair shares of the remaining carbon budget under the equal-cumulative-per-capita (ECPC) principle. Us