Is climate action unfair?

Visit a climate protest, and you are likely to hear about future generations. They’ll be there on signs, in speeches. References to children and grandchildren. Failure to act is a betrayal of the future. It leaves the world in a worse state, and leaves our children to clean up our mess. Inaction on climate change is profoundly unfair.

In his book What is Intergenerational Justice?, Axel Gosseries asks a question that troubles the water. Climate inaction may be unfair on the future. But is climate action unfair on the present?

To stop runaway climate change, we have to act now. That requires some difficult choices. It’s not the defining ethic of environmentalism that some seem to think it is, but we will need a degree of self-denial. Some things don’t have a low carbon alternative just yet – flying being the most important. There are things we use too much of, like plastic. However allergic industrial capitalism may be to the word, ‘less’ is the only responsible course of action right now.

Other options may open up in the longer term, such as zero carbon aviation or more versatile biodegradeable plastics. Right now, there will be a degree of ‘giving up’.

The most significant thing we have to give up is fossil fuels, on an vast scale. This is a transition from one form of energy to cleaner ones, and at its best it might not be perceptible – the lights come on the same whether it’s wind power or coal generating the electricity. Behind the scenes however, we are all paying for this transition. A huge amount of work is being done, with more to come. There are homes to refit, infrastructure to built, and a lot of damage to repair.

People alive and working in the years from 2000 to 2030 will presumably pay the most towards a clean energy revolution that will hopefully be the basis for future society. Future generations will still be paying for it too, but many of the up-front cost falls on us now, with the long term savings accruing to others. Is that fair?

Gosseries raises this question and then, in my opinion, immediately bungles it. “The problem is not that a given generation will not reap the full benefits of its own efforts,” he writes. “The problem is rather that we may be asking the poorest generations to put in the most effort, the benefits of which will moreover fall primarily on future and richer generations.”

The ‘poorest generations’ is us, now, in case you missed that. This is a very sweeping statement, given that today’s generation includes the richest people in the history of humanity – and I’m talking about anyone getting by in a high income country, not just billionaires. Poor us! Being asked to stump up for renewable energy and land restoration, when our great-grandchildren will all be so much richer than we are! This is of course a spectacularly rash assumption, to think that the future will inevitably be richer. History doesn’t endorse that kind of blind faith in economic progress.

Putting aside Gosseries specific concern, what do we do about the fact that we are being asked to do things that may only benefit the future? I think there are a few things to say.

First, so what? This is how life works in an ongoing society. I live in a house I didn’t build, in a town that goes back a thousand years. I am surrounded by things that my ancestors built and paid for, from the sewer system to the postal service to the institutions of democracy. Would the Victorians who built the water tower opposite my house declare it to be unfair that others would be benefiting from it in 150 years? Of course not. We are handed the world from our parents and pass it on. We steward what we receive, we improve what we can, and we hand it on.

Yes, there are things we have to do. There are also a great number of things we don’t need to do because our ancestors did them for us. We shouldn’t fixate on the burden and forget the inheritance.

Secondly, we don’t have the luxury of deciding whether or not to act. In a crisis, we have to move. We don’t get to opt out of the generational challenges that come our way, whether it’s a pandemic, or a conflict, or a natural disaster. Sometimes we can see that bad decisions in the past have set up to fail, but we still have to respond, just as previous generations had to respond to their own challenges.

We don’t get to opt out of the climate crisis, any more than my grandad got to politely decline Hitler’s invasion of Europe.

Third, we have lots of choices about how we respond to climate change, and it has to be fair. That’s why campaigners talk about a ‘just transition’. We’re not all equally responsible for climate change, nor equally vulnerable, and our response should take that into consideration. Some people have benefitted from fossil fuels, and continue to do so, and those people should contribute more towards climate action. This is why we can’t put off conversations on things like loss and damage, or climate reparations.

It’s also why we should work intersectionally, prioritising climate policies that will benefit marginalised communities. That will look very different, depending on where you are in the world. In some places it will divide along racial lines, or tribal lines, or simply geography. Marginalisation has many forms. In the UK we should be talking a lot more about climate policies that benefit working class communities, coastal towns, and post-industrial regions in the Midlands and the North.

So, is climate action unfair? With those sorts of things in mind, I don’t think it’s a question that gets us anywhere. It’s like asking if history is fair. What matters now is that our own actions are fair, both to those who are disadvantaged now, and to those who come after us.