Does climate change legally infringe on the rights of those yet to be born?

As you can see, suits that require accusations of premeditation and hindsight, and involve actants that themselves aren’t members of the constitution due to their not yet anatomically or atomically existing, are legally sticky. The federal government attempted to get the case dismissed on the grounds that the grievances are too broad. But, for the first time, such arguments were rejected.

It seems we’ve now reached a point where plausible deniability is no longer a valid excuse for constitutional powers when it comes to climate change. Despite climate change denial still existing, the effects on future generations of greenhouse gases and the negligence of officials failing to curb fossil fuel production and deforestation is finally being acknowledged.

Whether suits like this will require changes to worldwide constitutions themselves is a fascinating question. These cases and the school strikes dramatize a crucial aspect of the divide between democracy and the citizen we’re now seeing play out. The questions of intergenerational responsibilities and ethical duties across decades and centuries is more important now that it ever was before, and the time to turn it from a philosophical inquiry into concrete legislation is now.

We are all born in a society that we did not make, subject to customs and morals left over from previous generations, then we leave our own legacy for others to inherit. The project of government inherently requires navigating the tension between our immediate circumstances and what is to come.

Climate change calling into question the very possibility of a habitable planet means that we can no longer allow parties to prioritise short term thinking. Predicting the future may, and probably should, become a necessary part of business and federal practice.

There’s one aspect that likely effect the temporal antagonism more than any other: extreme inequality. In essence, the sacrifice required by the world affluent in order to combat climate change is exponentially larger than the sacrifice required by poorer people and nations. The fact that this sacrifice is directly tied to one’s own influence in creating the conditions for climate change in the first place is, unfortunately, unlikely to help. It relies on an unquantifiable commodity: guilt. I don’t know about you, but I don’t see the worlds top 1% throwing much of that around lately.

If a solution benefits everyone equally but costs only some economically, then it’s a hard sell. And it’s these people we need to hold accountable. The plucky US youths involved in Juliana are betting that it will be more effective to appeal to them on behalf of their own progeny, given that the plight of already extant citizens has failed to move them.

Thousands of years ago, the ancient Greeks defined democracy as the act of providing for the many, not the few. To this end, our movements must be guided by a seemingly simple question that seems incredibly difficult to implement in practice: what kind of legacy do we want to leave? With every action or failure to act, we help decide the future. And it’s our responsibility to cast our vote for what this future will be, even if we won’t live to see it ourselves.

We can only hope that the law courts follow suit.