How the right to pursue happiness through unlimited consumption harms the planet, and our kids. Our liberty-loving way of life has landed us in an encircling moral maze otherwise known as the climate crisis. That means certain of our cherished rights face a new test. While many are misled into imagining we can escape with minor tweaks to our “normal” lives, the science begs to differ: We have a very narrow window to collectively cut emissions, or face a destabilized climate that will make life on Earth for most beings much more perilous. Fortunately, there is much we can do to quickly improve matters, but first we need moral clarity. Consider this simple question: Since we are all created equal, what would equal carbon rights look like? We now have part of an answer. The latest United Nations Emissions Gap Report includes the following chart, which shows that to stay on track for an average global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius, the average biosphere-baking emissions for each human on Earth under the most likely conditions needs to be 2.1 tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (tCO2e) per year, by 2030. (The report also notes we’re currently on track for a 3°C temperature rise this century.) For any given target temperature stabilization there is a “carbon budget,” a fixed total amount of carbon dioxide (and equivalents) that can be emitted by everyone, and everything, on Earth. To arrive at an “equitable low-carbon lifestyle allocation” of 2.1 tCO2e each per year by 2030, simply divide that total by the number of humans. The UN doesn’t quite call this the carbon “fair share,” but that’s what that horizontal line in the chart above means. The moral of the chart’s story is that the world’s wealthy will need deep cuts as follows: Let that sink in. The world’s wealthy need cuts of over 90 percent of their carbon emissions, to get to their carbon fair share. The top-skew is so huge that the world’s richest 1 percent cause... |