Eric Beinhocker writes:

Human-induced climate change is a moral wrong. It involves one group of humans harming others. People of this generation harming those in future generations. People in the developed world harming those in the developing world. Each of us is emitting carbon that is harming those caught in climate-driven superstorms, floods, droughts and conflicts. And there’s the greatest moral wrong of all – the mass extinction event we have triggered that harms all life on Earth.

Yet until recently, climate change has not been argued as a moral issue. Rather, it has been presented as a technocratic problem, a cost-benefit problem, where the costs of action must be weighed against the benefits of avoiding disaster. The debates have been around taxes, jobs, growth and technologies. While such debates are important – there are better and worse ways to tackle the climate crisis – the effect has been decades of inaction, denial and delay. When something is a moral wrong, particularly a deep, systemic moral wrong, we don’t wait around debating the optimal path or policy; we stop it.

Looking back in history, the climate movement can draw inspiration from another effort to right a deep moral wrong: the slavery abolition movement. There are clearly important differences between slavery and climate change, and I’m not drawing a moral equivalence between the two; slavery was a unique moral horror and climate change is immoral in its own terrible way. But the climate community can find inspiration in the 19th-century abolitionist movement’s courageous efforts to make slavery illegal around the world.

Those who fought against slavery did not agonise over the costs and benefits. Their goal was morally righteous and powerfully clear: abolish slavery, make it illegal. It is time to do this for climate change: to make human carbon pollution illegal in every country in the world. It is time for a “carbon abolition” movement, to put an end to emissions. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports:

In one of the largest youth-led demonstrations in history, millions of people from Manhattan to Mumbai took to the streets around the globe on Friday, their chants, speeches and homemade signs delivering the same stern message to world leaders: Do more to combat climate change. And do it faster.

From small island nations such as Kiribati to war-torn countries such as Afghanistan, from small towns in Africa to major European capitals, and across the United States, young people worried about the future that awaits them left behind their classrooms to collectively demand that governments act with more urgency to wean the world off fossil fuels and rapidly cut carbon dioxide emissions.

“Oceans are rising and so are we,” read the sign that 13-year-old Martha Lickman carried through London.

“Whose future? Our future!” shouted students from Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, as they made their way to protest outside the U.S. Capitol.

“I hope the politicians hear us. They don’t really seem to be doing anything,” said Albe Gils, 18, who skipped high school to join the crowds of protesters in front of Copenhagen’s copper-towered city hall.

Despite a monumental turnout that stretched across every continent, it remains unclear whether the high-profile demonstrations can fundamentally alter the global forces contributing to climate change and compel elected leaders to make the difficult choices necessary to halt the world’s warming. But transformative change is precisely what those behind Friday’s marches have demanded — including a swift shift away from fossil fuels toward clean energy, halting deforestation, protecting the world’s oceans and embracing more sustainable agriculture. [Continue reading…]