actually elaborate on and quantify the notion of historic responsibility was the proposal made by Brazil to the UNFCCC meetings in 1997 (hereafter Brazil, 1997).

But the notion of historic responsibility has been disputed and the exact manner of giving expression to this notion has also been controversial. An extreme position on historic responsibility is Cooper (2008) who argues that: “... optimal decisions generally require bygones to be ignored. To focus on equity, and thus the alleged retrospective wrongs of the remote past, is to assure inaction.” Posner and Weisbach (2010) argue that a retributive justice perspective on historic responsibility normally requires establishing an injurer who behaved in a “morally culpable” way and establishing the identity of the injured or the victim. In the climate change context, this argument leads to the question whether the perpetrator has to be an individual or a country. If only individuals can be responsible, then according to calculations from the Climate Analysis Indicator Tool (CAIT), only 8 percent of the stock of emissions in 2000 can be traced to the flow of emissions from individuals who are still alive and might be responsible for those emissions (Table 5.1 from Posner and Weisbach (2010)).

Joshi (2010) argues that the notion of historic responsibility is: “...a persuasive claim but it runs up against some powerful moral intuitions. The ACs (advanced countries) did not expropriate knowingly. They acted in the belief, universally held until quite recently, that the atmosphere was an infinite resource. Moreover, the expropriators are mostly dead and gone. Their descendants, even if they could be identified, cannot be held responsible for actions they did not themselves commit.” Bhagwati (2009b) argues that reparations for past harm can be imposed on countries and invokes precedents in US law. He distinguishes between stocks and flows of emissions, arguing that countries should pay for past damage (the stock of emissions). Although he does not argue that past responsibility should determine future emissions allocations per se (which in his view should be determined separately), he nevertheless argues that rich nations should pay compensation for the damage they have caused on account of historic emissions. There is a precedent of such a fund in the US system – the CERCLA (1980), commonly known as the “Superfund”, under which a tax is levied on polluting industries and liability established for release of hazardous waste at closed and abandoned waste sites.

Whether corrective justice requires establishment of culpability on the part of the perpetrator is still debated by philosophers. Dietz et al. (2007) note that: “One might also seek to justify emission reductions based on the weaker notion that emitters of greenhouse gases (past, present and future) have obligations – not arising from rights – to consider the climate damage caused, just like a passer-by might be morally obliged to aid someone who has taken ill, even though the ill person is unlikely to have a right to that assistance as such. Barry (1999) constructs a theory of intergenerational justice that he argues does not depend on equal rights across generations. Instead, it depends only on the twin notions of ‘responsibility’ – that “bad outcomes for which somebody is not responsible provide a prima facie case for compensation” (p97) – and ‘vital 8