Under 'fair' climate equity rules, most wealthy nations have a carbon budget that is already a massive negative number.
April 1, 2026
Original Paper
Climate Fairness and Growth: Allocating the Remaining Carbon Budget
SSRN · 6391718
The Takeaway
If the remaining 'safe' carbon budget is divided equally by population while accounting for history, developed countries have already 'overspent' so much that they would effectively need to reach zero and then go negative immediately. This reveals a mathematical impossibility in reconciling historical fairness with any standard model of continued economic growth.
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