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> The people who are the most affected by climate change are the poorest and least able to relocate. The people who will be the most affected by climate change

> The people who are the most affected by climate change are the poorest and least able to relocate. The people who will be the most affected by climate change will be the folks living decades if not centuries from now. And those people will be, on average, orders of magnitude more wealthy than the people of Earth today. This is even more striking when you consider that the major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions over the 21st century will not be from the wealthy folks living in the current G8 countries but from what are now developing countries (China, Indonesia, India, Nigeria, Brazil, etc.) The moral calculus becomes a hell of a lot more complex when you take this into account. In 50 years the people of Bangladesh are likely to have developed world levels of per capita GDP, and by 2100 they are likely to be richer than Americans living today. Does it make sense to hold back the current development of not just the US but also places such as Bangladesh and China in order to benefit the incredibly wealthy citizens of the future Earth? Moreover, the case for severity of damages to the future Earth due to man made climate change are rather weak. The current best estimate of sea level rise by the year 2100 is rather moderate, much less than a meter and at present being revised downward due to more accurate estimates. Does it make sense to spend even billions of dollars today to save a future world that will have a global world product of literally quadrillions of dollars (adjusted for inflation)? And will have vastly more advanced technology than we do today? As to what will happen next, I think the people of the future who will have the benefit of: vastly greater wealth, vastly more advanced technology, and hopefully much more accurate climate models borne out by being able to compare models against nearly two centuries of data. And for those reasons they will be unimaginably more capable of both figuring out what changes would be warranted as well as having the ability and wealth to make such changes without incurring a huge amount of personal misery.

ajb 13y ago
This assumes that the cost of fixing the climate doesn't grow faster than economic growth, and that brute work (enormous masses of chemicals, etc) is not essential for fixing the climate. The amount of brute work we can does not necessarily grow with GDP. Suppose we detect an asteroid which will very likely hit the earth. You might make the same argument. But in the case of an asteroid, the amount of force required to divert it from its path is trivial when it is a long way away, as it becomes closer, grows until it is impossible. Fortunately, in the case of an asteroid, this fact is calculable today. It would be a pity if when we have 'much more accurate climate models' it turns out to be too late.
- smsm42 13y ago
  It would be much more pity if it turns out we spent trillions of dollars (meaning those trillions of dollars weren't spent on healing people, feeding people, inventing technologies that make people live longer and suffer less from diseases) on something that turned out to be not much more than a blob of hot air expelled by attention-seeking politicians and didn't really require that much resources to be spent on it. Take the example of rich people buying "carbon credits" that go towards paying poor people in poor countries for not developing their economies (and thus not becoming rich too). I think it is economically inefficient (since it in the long run decreases the overall value produced) but it is also morally reprehensible to bribe someone into suppressing their economic development so you could enjoy yours without guilt. It would be especially bad if it turns out the guilt was over nothing.
  - drharris 13y ago
    I agree with this in theory, but in practice there's no way a government/economy will take those dollars and magically spend them on causes that actually benefit humanity. More likely they go to the war machine, welfare state, and other bureaucratic money pits. Given that, it's probably not a bad thing to spend that money on things that benefit our ecosystem.
    - smsm42 13y ago
      I personally find the position of "you're going to waste the money anyway, so at least make me feel good" very cynical.

ajb 13y ago

This assumes that the cost of fixing the climate doesn't grow faster than economic growth, and that brute work (enormous masses of chemicals, etc) is not essential for fixing the climate. The amount of brute work we can does not necessarily grow with GDP. Suppose we detect an asteroid which will very likely hit the earth. You might make the same argument. But in the case of an asteroid, the amount of force required to divert it from its path is trivial when it is a long way away, as it becomes closer, grows until it is impossible. Fortunately, in the case of an asteroid, this fact is calculable today. It would be a pity if when we have 'much more accurate climate models' it turns out to be too late.

smsm42 13y ago
It would be much more pity if it turns out we spent trillions of dollars (meaning those trillions of dollars weren't spent on healing people, feeding people, inventing technologies that make people live longer and suffer less from diseases) on something that turned out to be not much more than a blob of hot air expelled by attention-seeking politicians and didn't really require that much resources to be spent on it. Take the example of rich people buying "carbon credits" that go towards paying poor people in poor countries for not developing their economies (and thus not becoming rich too). I think it is economically inefficient (since it in the long run decreases the overall value produced) but it is also morally reprehensible to bribe someone into suppressing their economic development so you could enjoy yours without guilt. It would be especially bad if it turns out the guilt was over nothing.
- drharris 13y ago
  I agree with this in theory, but in practice there's no way a government/economy will take those dollars and magically spend them on causes that actually benefit humanity. More likely they go to the war machine, welfare state, and other bureaucratic money pits. Given that, it's probably not a bad thing to spend that money on things that benefit our ecosystem.
  - smsm42 13y ago
    I personally find the position of "you're going to waste the money anyway, so at least make me feel good" very cynical.