Bad ancestors: are we violating the rights of our grandchildren?
There is evidence that greenhouse gas emissions persist in the atmosphere for a long time, contributing to negative climate impacts for centuries, or even millennia. The fundamental human rights of children and youth are disproportionately threatened by climate destabilization. Although our generation is accountable for only part of the problem, are we doing enough to protect future generations’ fundamental rights?
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We are almost certainly going to pass on more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than we have inherited. This has some implications with regard to intergenerational climate justice – the idea of respecting and protecting human rights of future generations by holding those contributing to climate change accountable today. The thinking is simple: while we are benefitting from not paying for the pollution we are causing, our grandchildren will have to pay the bill.
Greta & CO have repeatedly drawn attention to the issue of intergenerational climate justice. She often speaks on behalf of those who do not exist yet and even brought a legal complaint about the climate crisis to the UN.
But there is another side of the coin and some people believe we should not care at all about future generations. I highlight three main arguments used to support this theory and try to explain why they are not convincing enough.
Present generations have no information on future generation’s preferences.
This is called temporal myopia: current generations’ lack of information about future people’s interests does not imply that they have no responsibilities towards them. Instead, current generations should do everything in their power to offer the best possible conditions to future generations for realizing their preferences.
There is no reciprocity among current and future generations, as the latter have no power to impose sanctions on the former for non-fulfilling their obligations (the will theory). Instead, by applying the interest theory, we realize that to be able to exercise a right is neither necessary nor sufficient to be the bearer of that right. It quite changes the perspective, doesn’t it?
There is no reason to be concerned with future generations’ wellbeing.
Humans are part of an “intergenerational community” that, based on common principles, makes present generations accountable and responsible for the wellbeing of future ones. Think about new direct air capture and storage technologies that safely store carbon dioxide underground for centuries to millennia: why even bothering if we are not interested in future generations’ wellbeing? (Last week, Climeworks has officially launched Orca, the largest commercial direct air capture and storage plant in the world!).
By now, it should be clear that intergenerational climate justice is a serious issue that requires bold actions. But how?
I support the idea of creating an intergenerational balance sheet that clearly shows the liabilities we are transferring to future generations (e.g. carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere). This implies that we need to develop enough extra environmental assets to compensate these damages, so that natural capital overall does not diminish. In other words, we need to ensure future generations get a compensation for the mess we are creating today. This could be in the form of a sovereign wealth fund, where we build up the financial resources that our grandchildren need to deal with the result of our mistakes.
Eventually, an increasing number of politicians is including intergenerational climate justice in their narratives, although approached very differently from left to right. Still, the bottom-line message is somewhat hard to sell: ultimately you and me are causing this mess, we need to face up with the consequences of our actions and pay for them. The truth is that politicians do not want to confront voters with the costs of their pollution and an international balance sheet does this very much “in your face”. As Oxford Professor Dieter Helm wrote in his last book, “we simply cannot have our cake (net zero) and eat it too (carrying on the current consumption levels)”.
