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There is unprecedented momentum for a real international agreement at the Paris climate talks in December: the U.S. is on track to make significant cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions, China has announced a cap-and-trade program and many others have made commitments of their own.

The biggest obstacle? Justice — or at least two ideas about justice.

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The first involves redistribution. As part of any agreement, poor nations, such as Brazil and India, want wealthier countries to pay them a lot of money, both for scaling back their emissions and for adapting to a warming climate.

Their argument has traction. Wealthy nations have agreed, in principle, to provide $100 billion by 2020 to the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund. Last year, U.S. President Barack Obama pledged to give $3 billion. (Disclosure: my wife, Samantha Power, is the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.) Recently China announced that it would give another $3.1 billion, and Prime Minister David Cameron said that the U.K. would give $8.8 billion. But both Obama and Cameron face significant opposition from their national legislatures — and in Paris, poor nations seem poised to demand far more, perhaps even trillions.