Conference Agenda

The decarbonization of residential heating and transport requires widespread adoption of climate-friendly technologies such as heat pumps and electric vehicles. As efforts to price emissions from these sectors ramp up, differences in the propensity and speed with which households switch to green substitutes will have immense distributional consequences. In this article, I argue that inequality in the `capacity to switch’ is central to the fairness of climate policy in consumer-focussed sectors. Importantly, households' `capacity to switch' is often constrained by factors outside their control, including market failures such as under-provision of transport infrastructure or split incentives in rented housing. I argue that fairness principles should be sensitive to these non-responsible factors. This would require abandoning fairness conceptions predicated on `equality of outcome', such as vertical and horizontal equity, in favour of `equality of opportunity' in reacting to carbon pricing. Building on luck-egalitarian theories of justice, I outline how such an approach can be operationalised and tested empirically. The article concludes by showing how this perspective can inform the design of equitable climate policies.