As this volume demonstrates, the prospect of global climate change raises profound questions of international corrective and distributive justice. At the same time, individual nations must grapple with the ramifications of domestic policies for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This chapter concentrates on the distributive and participatory justice challenges posed by one prominent US climate mitigation strategy: a GHG cap-and-trade program. While carbon dioxide emissions themselves are not harmful and do not create direct distributional concerns, they are invariably accompanied by hazardous co-pollutants. Policies that affect GHG emissions, therefore, indirectly impact co-pollutant emissions, raising distributive justice concerns for impacted communities. GHG mitigation policies also raise issues of participatory justice: Who participates in regulatory decisions about how and when industrial sectors should reduce emissions? At the facility-specific level, who controls and participates in decisions about facility emissions?

The cap-and-trade programs that are emerging as a core strategy for addressing climate change at the state and federal levels have long been considered antithetical to the environmental justice movement's distributional and participatory goals. Rather than concluding that the conflict is unbridgeable, however, I propose a reconciliation. I argue that a cap-and-trade program that is one component of a much larger climate change strategy, and that includes limitations to improve the distribution of co-pollutants, could balance efficiency and distributive justice.

The first section of this chapter describes the environmental justice movement's central claims for distributive and participatory justice and the relevance of those claims to climate policy.