Climate Change and Non-domination: A proposal for Future Earth Inhabitants’ rights to Representation and Planet Management

Abstract

The release of greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere due to human activities that, for example, involve the burning of fossil fuels or biomass, has led to the increase of the planet’s temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. GHGs’ long to very long atmospheric lifetimes, which can extend from decades to centuries or even millennia, imply that present emissions are equal to higher global temperatures in the distant future. Consequences of a heated planet such as the increased frequency of extreme weather events and sea-level rise have potentially devastating effects on human life. Despite international agreements aiming at holding global temperature increases to keep the planet safe for future inhabitants, global GHG emissions just continue to rise. This situation allows for the question of whether the focus of concern of intertemporal justice should shift from inequality of distribution toward inequality of relations which takes place when future lives are at the mercy of present-day powerful actors’ wills. The need for such a shift is defended in the present study through the proposal of non-domination as the ideal of intertemporal justice for the case of climate change. The proposal of non-domination is sustained in the analysis of the relation held between actors with power to drive alterations of the planet and future Earth inhabitants, and the finding of features suggesting that the former dominate the latter. On that basis, a proposal is offered for a basic institutional design to be implemented if intertemporal justice is understood as the promotion of non-domination.