Climate change – our real bequest to future generations

Dean Baker is a reliable source of insight about economics, finance and fairness, and now he's turned his attention to climate change in the Guardian (UK): It is remarkable how efforts to reduce the government deficit/debt are often portrayed as a generational issue, while efforts to reduce global warming are almost never framed in this way. This contrast is striking because the issues involved in reducing the deficit or debt have little direct relevance to distribution between generations, whereas global warming is almost entirely a question of distribution between generations.

....If the deficit has little to with the wellbeing of our children and grandchildren, global warming has everything to do with it. We run the risk of handing them a planet without many of the fascinating features that we had the opportunity to enjoy (for example, coral reefs that are dying, plant and animal species that are becoming extinct, landscapes that are being transformed). Far more seriously, we face the likelihood of handing them a planet in which hundreds of millions of people risk death by starvation due to drought in central Africa, or through flooding in Bangladesh and other densely populated low-lying areas in Asia, as a result of human caused global warming.

The guiding philosophy on this issue in the United States is pretty much that we can inflict whatever harm we want on people elsewhere in the world because we are powerful and they are not. This is certainly true today, but will it still be true 60 or 70 years from now? Do we expect that the United States will still be able to act unilaterally without regard to the consequences that our actions have on the rest of the world?

...Those who want to worry about questions of generational equity might start to wrap their heads around combating global warming. Global warming threatens to do far more damage to the wellbeing of future generations than the social security and Medicare benefits going to baby-boomers, no matter how much the deficit hawks try to twist the numbers to claim otherwise.

A 1647 pen and ink drawing of a family, by Adriaen von Ostade (1610-1685)