Debating the Climate Corporate Tax

Although the creation of a new fund dedicated to climatic loss and damage has been agreed at COP 27 in 2022, it remains unclear how it will be financed. Given the current insufficiency of climate finance, new policy instruments may have to be found. Recently, economist Esther Duflo has proposed the introduction of a global corporate climate tax in order to fund direct transfers to the victims of extreme weather events like heat waves, floods and droughts. It has been presented as a way to discharge the climatic “moral debt” that rich people in the global North have towards vulnerable people in the global South and as a “progressive” and thus “just” tax. In this paper, I want to assess the fairness of such an instrument. This raises both normative and empirical questions. On the normative side, there may be a tension between a corrective approach to corporate responsibility and a distributive approach to interpersonal justice. On the factual side, the fairness of a climate corporate tax may also depend on its economic incidence and on the carbon intensity of corporate profits.

Pierre André is a researcher and teacher specialized in environmental ethics and environmental political philosophy, with a strong focus on climate change and climate justice. His most recent work focuses on the ethics of climate taxation. He is also the co-author, with Axel Gosseries, of a book soon-to-be-published (November 6, 2024) by Presses Universitaires de France: La justice climatique (collection: "Que sais-je ?").
He holds a PhD in Philosophy from Sorbonne Université (France), but he also has an interdisciplinary background with an MSc in Management from HEC Paris (France) and an MA in Public Policy from the Freie Universität Berlin (Germany), as well as work experience in renewable energy and finance. After having completed his PhD, he was awarded an FNRS Postdoctoral Fellowship to continue his research at the Hoover chair of economic and social ethics. Currently teaching at UCLouvain, he is also a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Graz (Austria) within the Field of Excellence Climate Change Graz.