Global Warming: Why Act Now in Behalf of Future Generations?

This piece was written in mid-2009 and, as best as I recall, was never published. It’s on a good topic, but remains a quite superficial piece. Read it and find a couple of current comments appended.

            The negative effects of global warming we feel now are not horrendous.  If we knew for sure that what has been happening during the last few decades was just a passing, if cosmic, phase, we would essentially ignore such temporary sizzling in the expectation that things will return to normal before long.

            But that ain’t so.  Everyone but a minority of ostriches believes that if we carry on as usual, ever increasing calamities will befall our globe.  By now most people have become acquainted with predictions about sea levels rising so as to swallow up settlements of huge populations and more.              But when?  Not next year, not during the next decade, perhaps not even during the lifetimes of many of us who are around now.  That raises a question that has not much been discussed: what does the present generation owe to future generations, many quite distant from our own?

            Economists have formulæ for calculating what I should pay now for an anticipated future gain, with the first sum smaller than the second because the formula considers inflation and the uncertain slips betwixt cup and lip.  But such calculations become tenuous when we are not speaking of events in a single lifetime and it becomes inapplicable, except for pathological rationalists, when we are speaking of the cost of preventing the future loss of untold numbers of lives.

            In short, even though large sums of money are involved, the discipline of economics will not teach us what we ought to do.  But thinking of this question as a moral issue also raises difficulties.  Most people hold that they have responsibilities vis-à-vis their children and many also believe that they have obligations toward their grandchildren.  If that is so, we are not doing what we ought to do (not doing our duty) if we don’t contribute to the flourishing of our children and grandchildren—assuming that we are able to do so.  But I can’t see stretching that obligation to my grandchildren’s grandchildren and then to theirs.  As the generations roll on they soon become complete strangers, no more my family than the folks that now live on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia.  And I don’t owe them anything at all.

            This tack, then, isn’t getting us anywhere, even assuming that the people affected in a fairly distant future are descendents of ours.  Nevertheless, quasi-relatives or not, I believe in my gut that we ought to act, if we are able, so that the lives of future generations are not harmed or lost. So I’ll  try another way to justify this conviction.

            A huge number of decisions were made in the past and huge amounts of money have been spent from which I have benefited.  To be sure, when those schools and roads were built (to take two examples of thousands), those who built them did not have me in mind—a fact that is no bar at all to my profiting from their existence.  If all of that is true, do I now have an obligation to act in such a way that unknown future generations are better off because of what I did?

            That’s what people—usually affluent ones--call “giving back.”  Past generations gave to me and now I give to future generations.  Assuming I have what it takes in money and/or ability, that comes close to an obligation.  We tend to hold that people are (reprehensibly) selfish if they are rich and hold on to every penny they own.  (We don’t think that scrooge is a good guy.)  Children, we say, ought to be helpful to their old parents—in return, so to speak, for having been brought up by them.  Society has nurtured me, goes a similar argument, so now I owe society something in return.  And in this context I see no moral difference between “giving back” to the present generation or to future ones (though thanks are to be had only from those who are here now).  We also don’t approve of Louis XV’s “Après mois le déluge,” that is, not giving a hoot about what comes after us.

            If this talk of morality is getting you down, let me conclude with some quite mundane local analogies.  Not very long ago it was decided to spend quite a bit of money to widen the parkway that goes from downtown Pittsburgh to the airport and beyond.  The beneficiaries of this expenditure, however, are certainly not limited to those whose taxes were used; rather, all the  future people who use that road are included.  There may be arguments about how traffic situations are best improved, but it is taken for granted that easing up on clogged roadways is desirable, with no one fretting that most of the beneficiaries live in a distant future. 

            There is nothing wrong, moreover, in wishing that the authorities many years ago had anticipated ever-increasing traffic and had then widened the road.  We would have been grateful to them and thought them meritorious.  Well, the need for effective transportation has been around for a long time, while the need for saving  low-lying land from being overtaken by the ocean is newly discovered; but the structure of the argument for acting now is the same.

The analogy to road building is too facile for at least two reasons. First, the issue is not to produce for future generations the sort of “facilities” that are expected to be desired because they are similar to features that are at present desired, where the future is expected to resemble the present. The future in the climate change case, on the other hand, is expected to be quite different—with many of its features unknown—and the reason for acting now is to eliminate or at least to mitigate future disasters. These are important differences. Second, before too long I want to do a piece in which I try to understand why so many simply deny that significant climate change is in progress or , if there is, that human activity is a cause.