Another kind of charge is made in Juliana v. the United States, also known as “Kids vs. Climate,” an ingenious equal-protection lawsuit alleging that in failing to take action against global warming, the federal government effectively shifted many decades’ worth of environmental costs onto today’s young—an inspiring claim, in its way, made by a group of minors on behalf of their entire generation and those that will follow, against the governments their parents and grandparents voted into office. This is the second vector of climate liability: against the generations that have profited.
But there is also a third vector, yet to be litigated in any more formal setting than the conference rooms in which the Paris accords were negotiated: against the nations that have profited from burning fossil fuels, in some cases to the tune of whole empires. This is an especially electric vector because it is the descendants of the subjects of those empires who will bear the bluntest climate trauma—which is what has already inspired the political outrage organized under the banner of “climate justice.”
How will those claims play out? A range of scenarios is possible, having to do mostly with what human choices and commitments are made over the next decades. Exploitative empires have collapsed before into relatively peaceful rapprochements, retributive energies muffled by the cushions of reparations, repatriation, truth, and reconciliation. And that could emerge as the dominant approach to climate suffering—a cooperative support network erected in the spirit of mea culpa. But there has been little acknowledgment yet that the wealthy nations of the West owe any climate debt to the poor nations who will suffer most from warming. And that suffering, and the exploitation it expresses, may also prove too gruesome a prompt for high-minded cooperation between nations, many of which could instead look away or retreat into denial.
We do not yet know, of course, just how much suffering global warming will inflict, but the scale of devastation could make that debt enormous, by any measure—larger, conceivably, than any historical debt owed one country or one people by another, almost none of which are ever properly repaid.
If that seems like excessive hyperbole, consider that the British Empire was conjured out of the smoke of fossil fuels and that, today, thanks to that smoke, the marshland of Bangladesh is poised to drown and the cities of India to cook within just the span of a single lifetime. In the twentieth century, the United States did not establish such explicit political dominion, but the global empire it presided over nevertheless transformed many of the nations of the Middle East into oil-pipeline client states—nations now scorched every summer by heat approaching uninhabitable levels in places, and where temperatures are expected to become so hot in the region’s holiest mecca that pilgrimages, once the annual rite of millions of Muslims, will be as lethal as genocide. It would take an exceedingly idealistic worldview to believe that the matter of responsibility for that suffering will not fashion our geopolitics in a time of climate crisis, and the cascading flow of that crisis, should we not dam it first, does not offer much foothold for idealism.
Of course, present political arrangements, not to mention bankruptcy law, will conspire to limit climate liability—for oil companies, for governments, for nations. These arrangements may buckle and fall—under force of political pressure and even insurrection—which would have the perhaps unintended effect of clearing from the stage all of the most obvious villains and their guardians, leaving no easy marks to which we might apportion blame and expect commensurate payback. At that point, the matter of blame could become an especially potent and indiscriminate political munition—residual climate rage.
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If we do succeed, and pull up short of two or even three degrees, the bigger bill will come due not in the name of liability but in the form of adaptation and mitigation—that is, the cost of building and then administering whatever systems we improvise to undo the damage a century of imperious industrial capitalism has wrought across the only planet on which we all can live.
The cost is large: a decarbonized economy, a perfectly renewable energy system, a reimagined system of agriculture, and perhaps even a meatless planet. In 2018, the IPCC compared the necessary transformation to the mobilization of World War II, but global. It took New York City forty-five years to build three new stops on a single subway line; the threat of catastrophic climate change means we need to entirely rebuild the world’s infrastructure in considerably less time.
This is one reason a single-shot cure-all offers an undeniable appeal—which brings us back to that magic phrase, “negative emissions.” Neither negative-emissions method—“natural” approaches involving revitalized forests and new agricultural practices, technological ones that would deploy machines to remove carbon from the atmosphere—requires wholesale transformation of the global economy as it is presently constituted. Which is perhaps why negative emissions, once a last-ditch, if-all-else-fails strategy, have recently been built into all conventional climate-action goals. Of 400 IPCC emissions models that land us below two degrees Celsius, 344 feature negative emissions, most of them significantly. Unfortunately, negative emissions are also, at this point, almost entirely theoretical. Neither method has yet been demonstrated to actually work at anything like the necessary scale, but the natural approach, though adored by environmentalists, faces much stiffer obstacles: one researcher suggested that, to succeed, it would require a third of the world’s farmable land; another suggested that, depending on exactly how the system was designed and deployed, it might have the opposite of its intended effect, not subtracting carbon from the atmosphere but adding it.
The carbon capture path, which would blanket the planet in anti-industrial plants out of a cyberpunk dream, seems, by contrast, more inviting. To begin with, we already have the technology, though it is expensive. The devices, Wallace Smith Broecker is fond of saying, have about the same mechanical complexity as a car, and cost about as much—roughly $30,000 each. To merely match the amount of carbon we are presently emitting into the atmosphere, Broecker calculates, would require 100 million of them. This would merely buy us some time—at a cost of $30 trillion, or about 40 percent of global GDP. To reduce the level of carbon in the atmosphere just by a few parts per million—which would buy us a little more time, matching not just our present emissions but our likely level a few years down the road—would take 500 million of these devices. To reduce the level of carbon by 20 parts per million per year, he calculates, would require 1 billion of them. This would immediately pull us back from the threshold, even buy us some more time of carbon growth—which is an argument you hear against it from some corners of the environmental Left. But it would cost, you may already have calculated, $300 trillion—or nearly four times total global GDP.
These prices will likely fall, but only as emissions and atmospheric carbon continue to rise. In 2018, a paper by David Keith demonstrated a method for removing carbon at a cost perhaps as low as $94 per ton—which would make the cost of neutralizing our 32 gigatons of annual global emissions about $3 trillion. If that sounds intimidating, keep in mind, estimates for the total global fossil fuel subsidies paid out each year run as high as $5 trillion. In 2017, the same year the United States pulled out of the Paris Agreement, the country also approved a $2.3 trillion tax cut—primarily for the country’s richest, who demanded relief.
The Church of Technology