Climate change is rightfully perceived as today’s leading global policy challenge. The obligation to prevent transboundary environmental harm has taken center stage in the legal fight to curb climate change. In this Article, I argue that the traditional understanding of prevention premised in a tort-based idea of wrongfulness faces an insurmountable impasse in addressing climate change. States do not have a tort-based duty to prevent climate change because it is not wrongful to emit greenhouse gases. A tort-based duty to the contrary would fly in the face of settled climate law. Such a tort-based duty also cannot otherwise be created out of general environmental law principles. If prevention is to be relevant to climate change at all, we must switch perspectives.

I argue that it is possible to re-theorize climate prevention on the basis of neighborliness, or holding correlative rights in a shared climate community. I argue that such a correlative rights approach to climate prevention is both more ambitious and more pragmatic than the traditional tort-based understanding of prevention. This conception of climate prevention is more ambitious because it requires the affirmative joint conservation of climate systems as opposed to imposing a negative duty to only prevent doing harm individually. At the same time, this conception of climate prevention is more pragmatic by eschewing a categorical ban on fossil fuels and allowing states to rely on a hybrid approach to energy transition that combines all available means to decarbonize energy systems in light of national circumstances (for example, increasing non-fossil fuel penetration and supporting carbon capture). I submit that climate prevention so conceived can guide decision-making around four reasonable-use factors (substantive, procedural, functional, and financial). These reasonable-use factors give pride of place to the concept of sustainable development as it is applied to the global climate and energy community.