How Climate Inaction Betrays Our Children And Future Generations

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/02/10/1373841/global-ponzi-scheme-revisited-how-climate-inaction-betrays-our-children-and-future-generations/

By Joe Romm on Feb 10, 2013

Obama has now framed climate action and inaction in moral terms, as a betrayal of future generations. So it seemed like a good time to run this (slightly) updated repost, which explains why our inaction is indeed such a betrayal. That — and it’s my own daughter’s six birthday.

Fundamentally, homo “sapiens” has constructed the grandest of Ponzi schemes, whereby current generations have figured out how to live off the wealth of future generations. We are all in essence Bernie Madoffs (many wittingly, most not) or at least his most credulous clients.

NYT columnist Tom Friedman interviewed me for his column “The Inflection Is Near?” back in 2009:

“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children,” said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows.

“You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior,” added Romm. “But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate …’ Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy.”

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See also a new study “The Monetary Cost of the Non-Use of Renewable Energies,” which finds that “every day we delay substituting renewables for fossil fuels,” every day “fossil raw materials are consumed as one-time energy creates a future usage loss of between 8.8 and 9.3 billion US Dollars.” Oil and coal are essentially too valuable to burn even ignoring the cost of their climate-destroying emissions.

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Knowingly entering a Ponzi scheme, even at the last round of the scheme, can be rational in the economic sense if a government will likely bail out those participating in the Ponzi scheme.

But Friedman quotes Glenn Prickett, senior vice president at Conservation International, explaining, “Mother Nature doesn’t do bailouts.”