The Pivotal Generation by Henry Shue;

Author:Henry Shue;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-09-23T00:00:00+00:00

Bequeathing Risks

We now turn to a normative analysis of the relation between the level of the present-day ambition to stop contributing to climate change and the risk of danger for future generations—between present inaction and future danger. We explore the structure of the risks created by every decision about how ambitiously to mitigate the primary factor forcing climate change, CO2, and thereby reveal the deepest objection to the current half-hearted and half-baked mitigation. The two main theses in this section of the chapter are (1) that, in general, all decisions in the present about the degree of ambition for emissions mitigation are unavoidably also decisions about how to distribute risk across generations; and (2) that, more specifically, the less ambitious the mitigation is, the more inherently objectionable the resulting intergenerational risk distribution is.41 One of the most tempting ways by which a country’s policy-makers can persuade themselves that less than a reasonable amount of mitigation now is permissible is by assuming that remedial CDR later would be just as good as more mitigation now—by gambling that remedial CDR will be fully equivalent to ambitious mitigation (including any enhancement CDR) now. This is not a reasonable gamble, as I will now try to show. The following normative structural analysis of risk thus has strong implications for the standards of assessment by which to judge national implementation of the 2015 Paris Agreement, especially the extent of the ratcheting up of each nation’s NDCs as mandated by the Agreement.

Every risk, as Hermansson and Hansson note, involves “three roles, namely the risk exposed, the decision-maker and the beneficiary.”42 The three roles may be occupied respectively by one, two, or three parties. How the three roles are allocated among the parties involved gives the risk what I am calling its “structure.” In the simplest case, all three roles are occupied by the same person who chooses to gamble and receives the benefits or suffers the losses of the gamble. If, instead, for example, the decision-maker is one party and a single other person is both the intended beneficiary and the risk-exposed, the structure of the choice may be paternalistic.43 For instance, the legislature requires motorcycle helmets, and cyclists benefit from greater safety and suffer the loss of the thrill of greater danger.

Or, to see a different structure, take the typical choice by a firm to externalize the environmental costs of its operations. The firm is the decision-maker about how much to pollute, and it is itself the beneficiary of the reduced costs relative to controlling the pollution, while third parties bear the costs and suffer the harms created by the pollution. Other people are stuck with the costs of dealing with the pollution in order to reduce production costs for the firm. This structure constitutes corporate exploitation of the public. We saw in chapter 2 that externalization at the national level—sovereign externalization—uses the remainder of the planet for waste disposal.

John Rawls focused attention on a simple situation for choice between two alternatives, which I have modified in the following in important respects, partly following Stephen Gardiner.

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