If 1.5°C is “crossed,” why do we still treat future lives as cheap?

Climate Strategies’ new plan is admirable in one respect: it treats climate policy as something more than decarbonisation plus slogans. It tries to align climate action with biodiversity, restoration, energy security, jobs, and inequality. That is close to what serious moral reasoning requires, because our decisions predictably affect very many people, and not just those who can vote today.

But I worry that many will read the 2024 “breach” of 1.5°C as if it were like crossing a border, after which we may relax into “adaptation planning” as a matter of domestic comfort. That is a mistake. If we have strong evidence that certain harms will occur in a century, their moral importance does not shrink merely because they are later. The familiar habit, common in cost benefit analysis, of discounting future deaths and suffering is indefensible, since temporal remoteness in itself has no moral significance. @The common practice in welfare economics of applying a positive Social Discount Rate—systematically counting future benefits and harms for less simply because they occur later—is indefensible, since temporal remoteness has no intrinsic moral significance and time discounting would render distant catastrophes morally trivial.

Equity in adaptation technologies is not an optional add-on, it is part of getting the moral arithmetic right. If some people are far more vulnerable, then benefiting them matters more, other things equal. A “Just Resilience” agenda is therefore not only politically astute, it is closer to the truth about what we have reason to do.

The plan is also right to scrutinise CDR, CCS, and SRM through governance and legitimacy. These are not only technical choices, they are choices about who may impose risks on whom, and which kinds of future get locked in. Here one deep complication appears: many climate policies change which people will later exist. That means some tempting defences, such as “this policy harms particular future people,” often fail, because those people would not have existed under the alternative. @Parfit formulates the Non‑Identity Problem as the problem of explaining what moral reason we have not to choose Depletion (and similar policies) when our choice is worse for no one, and of determining whether and how it matters morally that the lowered quality of life is not worse for any particular individuals; he insists this is a real, non‑trivial problem arising from the ease with which our choices affect the identities of future people.

This does not weaken the case for ambitious action, it forces us to adopt principles that look beyond person-affecting complaint. It is also why fragmented, context-specific action cannot mean moral myopia: what we together do can be collectively self-defeating if each actor attends only to their own narrow effects. @The fact that Common-Sense Morality ignores the effects of what we together do, and is thereby directly collectively self-defeating, is a ground for revising it to R that does not presuppose Consequentialism, since even those who reject Consequentialism and accept Common-Sense Morality must agree that in such cases it is a mistake to ignore collective effects.

Will this strategy help governments treat future lives as fully real, and present vulnerability as morally weighty, rather than as a public relations constraint?