Climate Change and Discounting the Future: A Guide for the Perplexed

What should be done about climate change? The debate is notoriously complex, involving a mix of difficult and uncertain science, the potential restructuring of the energy, agricultural, and forestry sectors across the globe, as well as issues of national sovereignty, distributive justice, corrective justice, and development. Specialists intensely disagree about the central issues-the types of policies that are best, the level of resources to be devoted to the problem, and which nations should pay. Many of these disagreements are beginning to play a role in domestic law, and they may well arise in the context of judicial interpretation of many environmental statutes.