Climate change is a hard problem. I mean really hard. You know in your heart how hard it is, and then you start thinking about it and you remember all over again that it’s even harder than *that*. For all sorts of reasons, like: the warming we are experiencing right now is the product of greenhouse gas emissions pumped into the air in the century or so prior to this moment, which will continue to exert a warming effect for years to come, which means that the effect of any changes we make to our behavior right now will be essentially imperceptible for years to come and will overwhelmingly benefit people who are either very young or not yet born. What’s more, many of those beneficiaries—honestly the overwhelming majority of them—will live in other countries, where people speak other languages and worship other gods. And even they will not see much benefit from our actions, no matter how dramatic¹, unless all the world’s other major emitters of greenhouse gases also take dramatic action, even though many of them are much poorer than us and haven’t contributed nearly as much to warming as we have and also don’t like the idea of sacrificing heavily today to benefit the foreign-born youngsters of tomorrow.
The ethical emitter
The ethical emitter
The ethical emitter
Climate change is a hard problem. I mean really hard. You know in your heart how hard it is, and then you start thinking about it and you remember all over again that it’s even harder than *that*. For all sorts of reasons, like: the warming we are experiencing right now is the product of greenhouse gas emissions pumped into the air in the century or so prior to this moment, which will continue to exert a warming effect for years to come, which means that the effect of any changes we make to our behavior right now will be essentially imperceptible for years to come and will overwhelmingly benefit people who are either very young or not yet born. What’s more, many of those beneficiaries—honestly the overwhelming majority of them—will live in other countries, where people speak other languages and worship other gods. And even they will not see much benefit from our actions, no matter how dramatic¹, unless all the world’s other major emitters of greenhouse gases also take dramatic action, even though many of them are much poorer than us and haven’t contributed nearly as much to warming as we have and also don’t like the idea of sacrificing heavily today to benefit the foreign-born youngsters of tomorrow.