Don't despair

Watch and enjoy. Global warming is happening, but that does not mean that we are obliged to do anything to prevent it.

The corpus of climate science is clear: global warming, partly of anthropogenic making, is gradually choking the planet. Using this evidence, the beard-and-sandals brigade infer that we must intervene now to conserve the environment, principally so that future generations may enjoy the same benefits that we do today.

After all, the class of 2014 will be dead long before the up-tick in the earth's bunsen burners and sea levels immerse the UL. So if it were just about us, we could do as we liked. We might even start using crude oil as a sexual lubricant.

In other words, there is a lot riding on presumed obligations to future generations. But let's unpick this argument.

Clearly we cannot owe obligations to everyone or everything. It would be absurd if trees had a right to social housing, or shoes had a right not to be tortured. Instead, we allocate rights and privileges to the things that matter most to us, allowing them to flourish at the expense of the not-so-lucky ones. Typically, the golden gaggle are human beings, something then rationalised and justified under the guise of 'objective' criteria. (This normally consists of using scarily complex words or phrases, like 'sentience' or 'capacity for rational thought'.) Sometimes, these same criteria persuade us to broaden our moral caring to incorporate animals and other cuddly organisms.

So far, so fair. But where do unborns feature in this rights equation? The truthful answer is that they don't. And we should stop treating them as if they do, since, whatever the metric used to assign rights, they wouldn't qualify. Prospective humans aren't alive. Hence they don't feel or suffer. And they can't construct essays.

Naturally people always will care about their kids. Yet this debate isn’t about them. Ultimately, it’s about the great, great grandkids; the ones you never meet and who will never remember you, where the only attachment is a sentimental and species-ist one.

So let’s rejoice that we’ve managed to avoid the future, and enjoy the present while it lasts.