There are too many interesting issues in this thread for me to respond to so I'll just focus on intergenerational justice. Adjusting our behaviour to account for the interests of future generations raises a number of challenging problems. The endeavour assumes several things: a) that we have the organisational capacity wittingly to adjust our behaviour on a scale large enough and over a time horizon appropriate to deliver the intended benefits to future generations; b) that we can know what the interests of future generations are likely to be (beyond those minimal interests vital to life); c) that we can know how many people will be alive in each future generation so that the resources left at their disposal (even after the feared ravages of climate change) remain adequate for the good life we deem them to be entitled to enjoy; d) that the interests manifest within any particular future generation are homogeneous and not mutually in conflict; e) to the extent that these interests are not homogeneous and are to some extent mutually conflicting, that we can know whose interests we should prefer; f) that every future generation will have the same normative approach to the interests of their future generations to continue rather than undo our good work and in particular that our ideas about sustainability, which even amongst ourselves are contested, somehow coalesce into a coherent set of norms which endure through time; and g) that we can have sufficient understanding of the cause and effect chain to know the outcome over the long time scales of multiple future generations of any proposed behaviour on our part. Future generations are a somewhat amorphous category that includes my children and people living 10,000 years and more from now. Generations are not distinct but overlap and, as any parent knows, even between contiguous generations there are substantial value differences. Most importantly our children’s new values are an emergent property of their particular social milieu that almost never could have been predicted prior to their emergence. We must ask whether, however emotionally appealing might be the need to protect the interests of our descendants, it may not be something we can do in a reductive manner; we cannot know, even in the extreme, whether future generations will be less fulfilled than we feel they have the right to be if we adopt policy A rather than policy B. We cannot know from where they will get their joy. This is not to argue that we should be oblivious to the interests of future generations but rather to argue that we cannot serve those interests by proxy. Perhaps we can best serve them by delivering some basic intra- generational values in the here and now. Our debate then becomes about what that set of values might be, and how we accommodate their spatial and temporal heterogeneity in such a way as to give the future its best chance to unfold dynamically but not chaotically. We won't be here to do more than that anyway. Armed with an understanding of how our behaviour could be adjusted, not to determine the future in some dirigiste fashion, but rather to fulfil the function of beacon or role model, I suspect that the place that geoengineering might play in that future and how we should address the structure and agency issues surrounding its governance, are likely to be easier to discern.
Robert Chris On May 12, 10:51 pm, Michael Hayes <[email protected]> wrote: > Ok Will, > > I also enjoyed the the challenge of our exchange. I learned much from it. > Locking reduction with deployment would be ideal and logical; a rare > combination. You have faith in policy and I have faith in our ability to > solve technical problems. Those that come after us may look back on this > time with historic interest. Let's just hope we can show them that we did > tried our personal best. > > Michael -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en.
