Whenever I encounter someone who makes political arguments claiming that they are based on moral arguments I know that I've entered the twilight zone where reason has no force.

The cover article in the current Scientific American claims to be a guide to the perplexed in thinking through a difficult question: how do we weigh the costs of ameliorating climate change today versus the potential benefits that this will create for future generations? Unfortunately, it is rhetoric from front to back. . .

Note that the author, Oxford Professor John Broome, makes the huge assumption that the only way for us to assist these future generations is to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. He assumes away any possible efforts to recycle atmospheric carbon or execute other geo-engineering approaches, or invest in adaptive engineering solutions or simply to grow wealth fast enough to offset the negative impacts of climate change.

Broome goes on to cite “the elementary moral principle that … whenever you cause harm, you should normally compensate the victim.” He then applies this to global warming, saying of developed world carbon emissions that “…the elementary moral principle I mentioned tells us we should try to stop doing it and compensate the people we harm.”

It's not a moral issue or a political issue, it's a technological issue. It is only by disregarding reality and focusing on hair-shirt sacrifice and the wheezy old politics of limits that this important technological issue can be reduced to a dim witted moral argument. The objective isn't to grapple with the issue, it is merely to advance a neurotic quasi-religious agenda.

This is a Rawlsian wilderness of mirrors. The search for this sort of cosmic justice has never formed the political foundation of a workable village, never mind global village. At the level of practical international politics, it is the kind of argument that sounds good at a faculty colloquium, but won’t, and shouldn’t, ever be the basis for real policy.

That's too kind. Making moral arguments about this issue is merely childish. It can't result in either good political policies or effective technological response. It makes things worse rather than better and so should not be excused by an assumption that the perp meant well. Even the most casual analysis shows that he did not in fact mean well since all of the information that demonstrates the negative consequences of such views is readily available to all. That reality is ignored in the pursuit of a neurotic need to cause harm to some hated group.

To make progress on this and many other issues requires us to stop indulging these wackos, pretending that their thinly veiled venomous characters are somehow elevated by their specious moral arguments. Those who are sincerely concerned about harms and the the plight of those not yet advanced beyond the historically common condition of poverty and pain look for continued improvement in technologies that will provide the energy needed to raise them up. Those technologies will necessarily be less inefficient, which includes having fewer emissions. The additional need is to clean up past emissions and those that are emitted before full deployment of the better systems.