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The Right to Life

For several decades Richard Posner, a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, has been a prolific and often brilliant writer on law, literature, and politics. He is perhaps best known as an advocate for the use of economic standards as both a legal tool and a yardstick by which to measure judicial decisions. In clear prose and well-reasoned analysis, Judge Posner has advocated wealth creation as a reliable standard for legal reasoning along with a pragmatic view of political realities that defers substantially to prevailing practices and behaviors. Applied to politics, Posner’s pragmatism comes close to views once proposed by the economist Joseph Schumpeter, not otherwise known as a reformer. Posner’s position has been so forcefully and consistently stated for so long that it is surprising to read his book Catastrophe (Posner 2004) in which he concludes that the odds of the occurrence of one or more catastrophes are growing quickly. Among these, he includes the prospect of rapid climate change and admits that it “is to a significant degree a byproduct of the success of capitalism in enormously increasing the amount of world economic activity. . .and is a great and growing threat to anyone’s idea of human welfare” (2004). On this subject conservatives, he believes, are “in a state of denial.” The problem has come about, in part, because of the “scientific illiteracy of most nonscientists . . . [particularly] the people who count in making and implementing policy.” Posner believes that the dangers of one or more catastrophes are growing because of “the breakneck pace of scientific and technological advance.” As for a framework to understand our situation and to reduce the potential for disaster the “natural candidate . . . is economics,” but alas, the subject of catastrophe “turns out to be an unruly subject for economic analysis.” This is so, in some measure, because of the global scope of the problems and because of the long-time horizons involved that bring into question standard economic tools such as discounting. The use of discounting raises the potential for disasters that occur sufficiently far into the future that the benefits of procrastination and the costs of disaster fall onto different generations without the possibility of some offsetting benefit by the accrual of more wealth. If economics is an unsatisfactory tool, the law is little better. Posner believes that “the legal profession may even be increasing the probability of catastrophe.” Improvement in this situation, in his view, will require “that a non-trivial number of lawyers” become scientifically literate, an interesting challenge. Posner further proposes other remedies such as the establishment of a science court, a center for catastrophic-risk assessment, the use of fiscal tools such as taxation and subsidies, increased regulation including the establishment of an international EPA, increased scrutiny of research projects in highrisk areas, and greater police powers to detect and control growing risks of terrorism. Of the risks noted by Posner, only the threat of nuclear annihilation is more worrisome or immediate than that posed by rapid climate change. Americans are the largest contributors to atmospheric carbon dioxide, and we have no good policy and still little inclination to reverse that fact. Worse, there remains a robust denial industry led by an administration that considers the fantasies of sciencefiction-writer Michael Crichton superior to the decades of patient, peerreviewed, and increasingly consensus science of the U.S. Academy of Science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the many scientists who study climate for a living and must live by the rigors of evidence, fact, logic, data, and peer review. For this dereliction that willfully puts posterity in jeopardy we have, as yet, no suitable words. But they will come. The evidence is coming clearer and clearer that if we fail to control CO2 levels in the atmosphere very soon, we could pass the point at which climate change tips over into some uncontrollable state. This will not be global warming, a nice sounding thing on cold days above 40◦ latitude, but planetary destabilization with rising sea levels, spreading diseases, rapid ecological changes, severe heat waves and droughts, moresevere storms, economic disruption, political turmoil, and resource wars. Serious scientists now talk about “tipping points” and the end of civilization (Flannery 2006). One can quarrel with a few of the details in the large and growing body of scientific evidence about the reality of climate destabilization, but no longer with the overall conclusion that the combustion of fossil fuels is the major cause forcing climate destabilization and that at some point we will tip climate into a new