Against Future Generations

Future generations are invoked in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and increasingly often in climate debate, as a locus of responsibility for present generations. In this article, I argue against this framing. I look at the historical context and rhet-orical effects of a generational frame for both present and future generations, dwelling in particular on guiding conceptions of sacrifice and legacy as well as on the construction of future scenarios and the practice of future discounting. I conclude that the appeal to future generations obfuscates, rendering a series of critical boundaries diffuse, and, in doing so, ab-jures concrete urgent existing responsibilities towards those alive today in the same gesture that nominally assumes them for an abstract unformed future.


Introduction
Responsibility is commonly conceived of in two distinct ways: as something one has (or owes) or as something one takes on (or bears). Political and legal debate often centres on the task of aligning these two: assuming the responsibility that is, in fact, already one's due. One way to approach the climate problem is in terms of the profound misalignment between these two kinds of responsibility. Three cleavages are immediately evident: between states, classes and generations. Numerous low-carbon-emitting states find themselves on the front line as the planet warms: a responsibility -an imperative to respond -lands upon them that is not their due. Similarly, despite an immense carbon footprint (since emissions correlate with prosperity), wealthier individuals are far better placed to weather the storm than their poorer In legal and political discourse, then, 'present' and 'future' generations are called forth in a certain manner to a certain effect: we owe a responsibility to them. But it is this very 'we' -and so, also, 'them' -that I aim to problematize in the following article. Whom do we mean when we speak of 'future generations'? Whom do we set aside? Who gets to speak on behalf of either the future or the present? Future generations rhetoric calls up a pair of unfeasible trans-historical subjects -a concrete populace in its global entirety facing an abstract multitude across eternity -and posits a relationship between them that is neither feasible nor even plausibly imaginable. Why adopt this impossible subjectivity? Ethically rousing as these capacious signifiers are, I argue, they cannot sustain analytical precision or normative clarity. In the translation to policy, they rather obfuscate. By contrast, deeply compelling reasons to act precipitously on climate change are already clear-cut and extensive in regard to concrete persons alive today -without recourse to these nebulous, if attractive, categories.
To expand on the latter point, a turn to 'future generations' risks obscuring much that is already well understood in terms of ('equitable') climate responses. The register's evocative call to solidarity risks papering over deep and substantive differences of interest and perspective, both today and in the future. If a responsibility towards future generations invokes sacrifice, it is coy as to whom, precisely, this sacrifice falls upon. Rather, I will argue, this register performs a reverse double move, abjuring responsibility in the same gesture that nominally assumes it. A generational frame also sweeps in those to whom a responsibility is owed today -those who, for historical and geographical reasons, already bear the brunt of climate inaction -and, in a perverse twist, makes them responsible too, demanding further sacrifice of them. Such a move deflects the urgency and scale of action required to meet the suffering of concrete persons alive now and seems likely to carry forward today's structural inequities into the future. My title -'against future generations' -thus has a second sense: the adoption of a 'future generations' register may, paradoxically, work against generations to come.
Some further short caveats are in order before I enter the argument. I am not arguing against imaginative engagement with the future: quite the reverse. Such is the accelerating pace of climate change that it is increasingly impossible to conceive of a present that is not already infused with the near and distant future. But this requires, it seems to me, a more profound reappraisal of futurity (which I do not undertake here) than the easy formulae deployed in most 'future generations' discourse. I am also not claiming that those alive today are not responsible for, and impelled to address, the profound destruction wrought by anthropogenic climate change. Again, quite the reverse. 'We' -but really a (sizeable) minority of us -are, in effect, shaping, even colonizing, future lives and lifestyles, just as past generations colonized the lives of (many) of us alive today. My concern is that 'our' mode of interpolating 'them', as the nominal beneficiaries of an imagined munificence repeatedly postponed, merely repeats this ancient gesture again. A better answer lies closer to home.

Rhetorical Ambiguity
Appealing though it is (who, after all, is not 'for' future generations!?), I will argue that the rhetorical turn to 'future generations' stands to obscure both the agency and vulnerability attributable to climate change, while forgetting or bracketing existing and well-known climate imperatives. It creates a kind of appealing epistemological fog, tending to obscure and diminish the true scale and immediacy of necessary climate action. This is because the language entails, or resorts to, a series of ambiguities that are, I believe, essentially undecidable. I lay these out in the remainder of this section, turning then to the structure of the article as a whole. A first ambiguity within 'future generations' discourse lies in the disconnect between local and global. Moral philosophers generally intend the register to apply universally to all future generations everywhere (though there are exceptions). 3 Indeed, it seems plausible that, for some commentators at least, the register intends to pick up the mantle of a kind of global constitutionalism that has largely foundered in other domains. So, for example, Stephen Gardiner -a key and consistently clear climate ethicist -recently made the case for a 'global constitutional convention focused on future generations … charged with representing humanity [and] establish [ing] institutions with a broad remit and ongoing responsibility to act on intergenerational threats'. 4 Henry Shue too has raised the suggestion of the need for new global institutions focused on both 'international justice' and 'intergenerational justice', and others have made similar suggestions. 5 A new global constitutional, or even institutional, order seems a worthy goal. It is also one that has long exercised the discipline of international law, wherein, however, it has not fared well. 6 The 'fragmented' field that has long prevailed in place of a global constitutionalism -according to international law scholars -is also implicitly recognized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the problem 3 Such as Rawls. See text at note 43 below; Heyd, supra note 2, is also doubtful. 4 Gardiner, 'On the Scope of Institutions for Future Generations: Defending an Expansive Global Constitutional Convention That Protects against Squandering Generations', 36 Ethics and International Affairs (2022) 157. 5 Shue, 'Human Rights, Climate Change, and the Trillionth Ton', in Shue, Climate Justice, supra note 2, 297, at 302-303; see also section 7.B. Simon Caney recently put forward 10 proposals of a generally modest nature, ranging from representation within various United Nations (UN) bodies to a 'global citizens' assembly. Caney, 'Global Climate Governance, Short-Termism, and the Vulnerability of Future Generations', 36 Ethics and International Affairs (2022) 137. 6 The literature is large and the debate beyond the scope of this article. An excellent account remains M. Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia (2005Utopia ( [1989), especially ch. 7 (noting -albeit with greater nuance than I can supply here -that 'the formal character' that allows international law to function in practice 'makes the law fail as a normative project'; at 475). To wit, a recent collection of essays proposing various institutions for future generations clarifies that they rest 'on explicit normative grounds belonging to theories of justice and legitimacy'. González-Ricoy and Gosseries, 'Designing Institutions for Future Generations: An Introduction', in I. González-Ricoy and A. Gosseries (eds), Institutions for Future Generations (2016) 3. of 'climate governance'. 7 More to the point, it is far from clear that states (in the guise of policy-makers and negotiators), where they adopt the language of 'future generations', intend it to underpin a new global constitutionalism -especially given the urgency of climate action -and almost certain that, even if they do, they will, for practical as well as legal reasons, tend to retreat to 'their own' institutional levers rather than prioritizing any new trans-global and/or trans-historical project -at least 'at present' (that is, within a time frame that would shield today's 'future generations' from climate change). This regression to the national is illustrated, in different ways, in the existence of actual (national) future generations commissions, on the one hand, 8 and in contemporary climate litigation, on the other. 9 Indeed, anything else would be not merely surprising but close to revolutionary.
To this, one might respond that the sum of 'future generations' locally amounts to their aggregate globally -if 'we' act for 'our' future generations, all future generations everywhere will benefit. But a moment's consideration will show this to be incorrect, if not dangerously misleading. With their 'own' future generations in view, many rich countries will (hopefully) pursue rapid mitigation, but some may decide instead to prioritize adaptation; others again might choose not to force the pace of mitigation since (in a cruel irony) some may actually expect to benefit from a global average temperature rise of two to three degrees Celsius. 10 Whereas for many developing countries (notably, small island states), immediate global mitigation is an existential matter right now, for others, especially those rich in fossil fuels, the trade-offs point towards rapid

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Article fossil fuel-based expansion now paired with costly adaptation later. 11 The stakes are high and contentious: the point is that many contradictory policies are compatible with prioritizing future generations. Second, future generations discourse is ambiguous as to where 'present' stops and 'future' starts. There is, of course, no clear-cut answer to this question -indeed, the very notion of temporal generations resists clarification: our living children or grandchildren are not 'future' persons at all, whereas actual future persons transit into the present in a constant stream (or flood). 12 But there are nevertheless two clearly distinct approaches that often appear fudged in a 'future generations' register (with some exceptions), particularly when something called 'intergenerational equity' (or 'justice') is counterposed to its 'intra-generational' partner. 13 The term 'intergenerational' is inherently ambiguous, referring both to relations between different current generational cohorts ('boomers', 'millennials', generations x, y and z and so forth) as well as between those alive now and in the (potentially far distant) future. Understandably perhaps, given the lack of a clear boundary, the literature slides easily between these two, 14 but I think it helpful to maintain a distinction between what we might call a diachronic analysis -one concerned with variation across time -and a synchronic one -viewing variance globally at a certain moment in time. 15 In most formulations, the language of 'future generations' intends a diachronic analysis. So Simon Caney, for example, who has made enormous contributions in this domain, suggests that the 'duties' of present generations extend 'as far into the future as the effects of [our] actions (and inactions)': he asks us to consider the 'rights' of those alive as long as carbon emitted today remains airborne, at least 1,000 years hence. 16 Henry Shue also asks us to consider the sixth, seventh and even thirteenth generations beyond the present. 17 Any consideration of cohorts (if that is the correct term) such as these raises well-known problems of abstraction, non-reciprocity 11 For example, the Financial Times quotes Macky Sall, president of Senegal and chair of the African Union, as follows: 'We will not accept that polluting countries, responsible for the situation of the planet, tell us that we are no longer going to finance fossil fuels.' D. Pilling, 'Calls for a Just Energy Transition in Africa Carry Echoes of Elite Panic', Financial Times (10 July 2022). 12 Caney, 'Justice and Posterity', in R. Kanbur and H. Shue (eds), Climate Justice: Integrating Economics and Philosophy (2018) 157, at 160-161 ('a "generation," however, defined, is a somewhat arbitrary and artificial unit that does not have any intrinsic value. Ontologically it is also odd to divide the future of humanity into separate and discrete chunks -a generation 1, generation 2, and so on -rather than see a flow of future people'). Caney nevertheless does speak, in this article and others, in terms of generations broadly conceived. 13 The term 'intergenerational equity' appears in the preamble to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, UN Doc. FCCC/CP/2015/L.9/Rev.1, 12 December 2015, whereas Article 3(1) of the UNFCCC, supra note 1, refers to 'future generations'. 14 But see Heyd, supra note 2; Nolt, 'Long-term Climate Justice', in Kanbur and Shue, supra note 12, 230. 15 On the distinction between 'diachronic' and 'synchronic', the locus classicus is F. de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, edited by C. Bally and A. Sechehaye (1916). 16 See Caney, supra note 12, at 163. He notes the criterion might create climate-related duties over 100,000 years, the duration of about 10 per cent of emitted carbon dioxide. 17 Shue, Responsibility to Future Generations and the Technological Transition (2005), reprinted in Shue, Climate Justice, supra note 2, 225, at 232. and 'non-identity' within a context of profound agnosis about future conditions. 18 'Present generations', by contrast, even in their intergenerational guise, do not raise these difficult questions. I will here reserve the term 'intergenerational' for the future ('properly so-called', so to speak) and 'present generations' for a generational present. 19 (The term 'intra-generational' is less problematic, helpfully capturing a temporal radius buffering the present beyond the forever vanishing 'urgency of now'.) 20 A third ambiguity has to do with climate policy. Future generations discourse foregrounds mitigation: adaptation is not entirely absent, but its role is, at best, marginal. 21 This is unsurprising: the essential motive of this register is rapid ramping down of carbon emissions. What future generations deserve, it is said, is a world as little altered as possible (by climate change at least) from the one present generations have known: this entails mitigation at a very rapid clip, ideally fast enough to render adaptation secondary if not outright unnecessary. For the same reason, presumably, we hear little about 'loss and damage' or climate migration in this register: key climate policy concerns, certainly, but of less relevance in a climate-unchanged world.
Given how much is at stake today in these areas (adaptation, migration, 'loss and damage') and that these matters exist in symbiotic tension with actual mitigation policy, 22 this relative silence is profoundly problematic. Rather more glaringly absent, however, is the policy domain that goes by the clunky term 'technology transfer', which is climate law's name for the idea that, given their historical responsibility and greater wherewithal, wealthier countries should contribute materially -through intellectual property waivers, for example -to the transition of poorer countries to low-carbon and climate-adaptive economies. 23 Even though the international law regarding technology transfer is itself ambiguous, it is difficult to imagine from a political or practical (not to say 'just' or 'equitable') perspective how rapid mitigation can be global without significant transfers of some sort, but these have not been forthcoming. 24 On current trends, global mitigation will either be achieved at the cost of entrenched local poverty and immiseration or (more likely, since affected states will not agree) not at 18 The 'non-identity' thesis, introduced by Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1987), points out that the identity of any actual future persons will be contingent upon whatever actions are undertaken in the present: their existential indebtedness to previous generations obviates any potential harms they might be thought to have experienced due to the latter's actions. See  That is, conceived within a temporal radius comprising a generational buffer of 20-odd years. This aligns with Henry Shue's 'pivotal generation', although my sense is that each succeeding present generation will also be 'pivotal' in his sense. Shue, Pivotal Generation, supra note 2, at 10. 20 David Heyd writes: '[W]e usually feel solidarity with the next two generations (of our society). And maybe that is the limit we can expect in the scope of our duties to future people.' Heyd supra note 2, at 187. 21 For example, the 24 contributions to González-Ricoy and Gosseries, supra note 6, barely mention climate adaptation. An exception -with which I engage below -is Shue's Pivotal Generation, supra note 2. See text at note 134 below. 22 See, e.g., text at note 143 below. all. 25 Indeed, the relative silence on this matter in future generations literature risks repeating the heedless West-centrism that prefigured the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment: prioritizing the status quo for 'developed' countries by 'kicking the ladder' from beneath the (then newly postcolonial) rest. 26 The appeal to 'future generations' risks, in this gesture, clothing a parochial interest in universal garb. 27 Fourth, 'future generations' discourse invokes sacrifice, but, as noted above, it is unclear upon whom it falls. A driving motif is that 'our' sacrifice today avoids 'their' sacrifice later. 28 But framing the climate problem in this way obscures the stakes of a responsibility-sacrifice nexus as it plays out in fact in both present and future alike. This is because both the progress of climate impacts and the exigencies of climate policy distribute real-world sacrifice in radically unequal ways. For some, rapid mitigation -a 'green deal', for example -is relatively costless and even beneficial. For others, it risks entrenching endemic poverty. For some, climate impacts are a death sentence even now; for others, they are an adaptation challenge or even an economic opportunity. An apparently expansive concern for homogenous 'future generations' -for their supposed autonomy and non-colonization -belies the degree to which the distribution of sacrifice in the present prefigures that in the future. A future generations register has the quality of easy virtue -rapid mitigation is, after all, imperative -but even successful global mitigation that cannot answer the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change's (UNFCCC) oldest question -the one labelled 'equity' -will consign actual future generations to conflict and 'resilience'. 29 To premise action on a responsibility towards future generations implicitly suggests that the extraordinary climate impacts now experienced around the world are not in themselves a sufficient motive for immediate action. However, this begs the question as to what threshold of sacrifice would be adequate. Do we need to fear a coming apocalypse in order to act now (as a surprising amount of the literature suggests)? The problem here is not so much the signalling of an implicit threshold; it is more the creeping relativity that it entails. For while rapid global mitigation serves (and so, in principle, 'saves') present and future persons alike, the discourse appears to bracket or forget both the hugely inequitable costs of rapid mitigation for many people in much 25 For an early statement of this truism, see Agarwal and Narain, 'Global Warming in an  27 See, e.g., Heyd, supra note 2, at 178. 28 See, e.g., Page, supra note 2, at 53 ('[the] principles which are integral to Article 3 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change often converge in requiring large sacrifices of present persons to protect the environment bequeathed to future generations, but are motivated by very different ethical positions'). 29 See Article 3(1) of the UNFCCC, supra note 1. This point is clearly made in the future scenarios literature. See section 5 below.
of the world as well as the actual sacrifice entailed by climate change already. The insidious effect is to prioritize one group's sacrifice (ours, of our lifestyles, here in the planet's wealthier corners) over another's (theirs, of their aspirations, there in 'emerging markets'), both now and in the future. This has the further paradoxical effect of making a future generations literature 'all about us', subject to our changing whims and priorities as to the kind of 'good life' we can imagine for our grandchildren.
Ultimately, the language of future generations repositions the climate imaginary away from the vital, already urgent, stakes that constitute it as a problem here and now, projecting them instead into an amorphous fictional arena in which a notional motley 'we' is produced as agent and assigned a full plenary power, so to speak, to act for an equally notional 'them'. In doing so, this discourse tends to redirect the notion of responsibility away from well-established themes in the known and knowable present -adaptation, 'loss and damage', technology transfer, 'climate migrants' -towards vague abstract entities in a notional unbounded and ultimately unknowable future.
The article proceeds as follows. The next section tracks the background to the rise of a 'future generations' register in the early 1970s. Following this, I ask first 'who are we?' in a fourth section and 'who are they' in a fifth section, focusing in the latter on climate scenarios. A sixth section explores the nexus of responsibility and sacrifice drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida. A seventh section sets out the specific question of 'legacy' -what do 'we' owe 'them' -looking at the seminal work of Henry Shue in light of a 2021 ruling of the German Constitutional Court. A penultimate section examines the practice of discounting before I then conclude.

Summoning the Future
The invocation of 'future generations' in climate literature marks the continued indebtedness of climate debate to its early environmentalist framing. The writers and activists -John Muir, Julian Huxley, Rachel Carson -whose work foreshadowed the rise of institutional environmentalism in the 1970s drew on long-standing theological and (later) Romantic imagery casting humankind as stewards of the natural world 'for posterity' or, in later colonial-tinged language, as 'trustees' on behalf of others. 30 However, the pivotal events punctuating the emergence of contemporary environmentalism -the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment and the so-called Club of Rome's canonical The Limits to Growth report published that same year -framed environmental concern in terms of future shock, population explosion, natural resource exhaustion and irreversible pollution. From the outset, it was clear that these global concerns, now framed as 'environmental', also constituted long-term threats to what was already, by then, a global economy. This itself was not new -the possibility of resource depletion was regularly confronted in the late colonial period and became a subject of international treaty making by 1900 at the latest. 32 But Limits to Growth, written by a self-styled 'invisible college' of largely private sector analysts, was specifically concerned with the future writ large, projecting catastrophe in order to avoid it, drawing on the then new science of computer modelling, with a view to reorienting investment to facilitate what the authors called 'the great transition' from 'growth to global equilibrium'. 33 This requires, according to the report, 'weigh[ing] the trade-offs engendered by a finite earth not only with consideration of present human values but also with consideration of future generations'. 34 (The repetitive prose gives a flavour of the report's imaginative constraints.) Limits to Growth also considered the identity -or, at least, the number -of these 'future generations', devoting considerable space to the theme of 'population explosion'. 35 An ominous graph purports to show that 'urban population is expected to increase exponentially in the less developed regions of the world, but almost linearly in the more developed regions', with absolute numbers in poor countries set to overtake richer nations in the mid-1970s and then take off. 36 The graph seeds the sort of arching linear bloom that is now a commonplace of climate literature.
The 'world problématique' animating the report is the expected fact (predicted by the authors' new digital 'world model') that, with future economic growth, 'the birth rate declines gradually, [while] the death rate falls more quickly', leading to a global population increase that will ultimately breach the planet's 'limits to growth', causing sudden resource and population collapse -almost certainly by 2072. 37 To ward off this trajectory, according to the report, '[e]ither the birth rate must be brought down to equal the new, lower death rate, or the death rate must rise again'. 38 The latter is our Malthusian fate, the report makes clear, unless something is done. To avoid it requires 'deliberate action to control the … birth rate' and achieve what it calls 'the desired birth rate', ideally one that precisely matches the death rate, achieving the golden mean: equilibrium. 39 In the same year that The Limits to Growth appeared, a nascent post-colonial 'international community' struggled towards its first significant environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972. The run up to Stockholm was marked -in a story masterfully  Meadows et al., supra note 31, at 24. 34 Ibid., at 182. 35 Ibid., at 25. 36 Ibid., at 27. 37 Ibid., at 125; see also P. Edwards, A Vast Machine (2010), at 361-372. 38 Meadows et al., supra note 31, at 157-158. 39 Ibid., at 112-113 ('[t]he desired birth rate is the rate that would result if the population practiced "perfect" birth control and had only planned and wanted children'); 159-161. told by Aaron Wu -by extensive behind-the-scenes machinations to persuade developing governments, many of which had just achieved independence, that the global North's sudden concern about 'the environment' was not aimed merely 'to stabilise the "economic gap between developed and developing countries"' (in the words of the Brazilian UN ambassador) by kicking the ladder of economic development out from beneath the new states. 40 The compromise, brokered by Canadian Secretary-General Maurice Strong, allowed the conference to proceed by knitting 'development' and 'conservation' uneasily together in the resulting Declaration on the Human Environment. 41 The declaration provided a prototype of the notion of 'sustainable development' and asserted, in its opening breath, that 'Man … bears a solemn responsibility to protect and improve the environment for present and future generations'. 42 In addition, in 1971, John Rawls published A Theory of Justice, containing a passage on 'intergenerational justice', comprising an early philosophical treatment of this theme. 43 The passage proposes that each generation owes it to 'future generations' not only to 'preserve the gains of culture and civilization, and maintain intact those just institutions that have been established, but it must also put aside in each period of time a suitable amount of real capital accumulation'. 44 Rawls refers to this as a 'just savings' principle. 45 Rawls takes an explicitly teleological view of historical progress, in which each generation represents a 'phase of civilization' tending towards a 'last stage of society' in which 'just institutions' will finally have been achieved, at which point the onus on each generation is to preserve them for the next. 46 This is not the place for a fuller critique of this thesis -which is influential if clearly problematic -but a few points need remarking. 47 First, Rawls' 'just institutions' exist within a political community; although he is not clear on the matter, the larger context of his work would tend to presume against significant extraterritorial duties. 48 Second, Rawls prioritizes 'just savings' over his 'difference principle', which is Rawls' term for a limited duty to assist the disadvantaged -that is, to sharpen the point, future 'liberty' takes precedence over present 'equality'. 49 Third, even so, Rawls rejects the 'utilitarian' view 40 Wu, supra note 26, at 123 (citing José Augusto de Araújo Castro); see generally 118-131. 41 Stockholm Declaration, supra note 31. 42 Ibid., Principle 1. 43 J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971), at 284-292; see, e.g., Heyd, supra note 2, at 169. 44 Rawls, supra note 43, at 285. 45 Ibid., at 289. 46 Ibid., at 287 ('[e]ventually once just institutions are firmly established, the net accumulation required falls to zero. At this point a society meets its duty of justice by maintaining just institutions and preserving their material base'); 289. 47 Critiques are put forward in Shue, Pivotal Generation, supra note 2, at 13-14, 105-111; Lawrence, supra note 2, at 40-41 (citing Vanderheiden); Heyd, supra note 2; see also Caney, supra

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Article that present generations should make great 'sacrifices' today to support larger (and/ or wealthier) populations tomorrow. 50 As a policy matter, the explicit desirability of global population control moved to the margins of international development thinking after Limits to Growth, though never quite disappearing (as we shall see). 51 But it hovers unspoken in the spate of references to future generations that appeared subsequently, such as in the canonical textbook definition of 'sustainable development' in the 1987 Brundtland report, as that 'which meets the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs' -the implicit assumption being that future 'needs' can be anticipated as long as they are bounded. 52 Two years after the Brundtland report, Edith Brown Weiss' In Fairness to Future Generations, published by the UN University, developed a sustained polemic arguing that 'each generation is entitled to inherit a planet and cultural resource base at least as good as that of previous generations'. 53 Brown Weiss' work is synthetic and intuitive, explicitly connecting Rawls to the Stockholm Declaration and the new notion of 'sustainable development'. 54 The heart of the argument extends to future generations what some have called the 'Lockean proviso' on resource use. 55 This refers to John Locke's recommendation that the private acquisition of natural resources from 'the commons' be limited to cases 'where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others'. 56 Views differ on how to interpret this nostrum, but Locke himself clearly intended the proviso to apply in a supposed 'state of nature' (regarding, for example, his personal investments in 1680s Virginia), 57 being subsequently subordinated to, and subsumed within, the contractual, legal, political and financial institutions of a superseding state or 'civil society'. 58 That is, the 'proviso' does not govern the actual resource management of a state-based order: rather, as Edward Page underlines, it justifies existing resource allocations on a notional historical basis. 59 Brown Weiss proposes an intergenerational 'partnership' (or contract) that would lock in the Lockean proviso under international law as though the international realm were itself a kind of 'state of nature'. In 1992, shortly after the Brundtland report and Brown Weiss' book, the world's states signed the Rio Declaration and the UNFCCC, agreeing to 'protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind'. 60 So we have present generations and future generations. But who are these people?

Who Are We?
The default subject in writing about future generations is an expansive first-person plural: 'we'. 61 This is in part, of course, a simple effect of grammar: the very invocation of a 'future generation' reflexively collectivizes the present, casting the global population as a whole in the role of subject. This is not the courteous, if vacuous, 'we' that habitually signposts academic papers, as we shall see(!). Rather, this 'we' envisages an agent, a subject of specific rights and duties, a collective -even corporate -entity that makes decisions, represents interests, enjoys discretion and holds obligations. It is easy to see the appeal of this adopted persona. Affectively, 'we' invokes home -a planetary home in this case -but it also signals house rules. At the outset, it seems correct to assume that this constructed agent involves -consciously or not -an invitation to solidarity -one that is irresistible in its inclusivity: to join a universal association, a community of fate, a communion of souls. One does not have to agree with Carl Schmitt to marvel at the sheer scale of this gesture, uniting all of humanity across the globe, now and forever.
Politically, a universal 'we' stands to slice through the seemingly intractable obstacles that have dogged climate action for decades: the ethically irreproachable, but politically thorny, appeals to 'equity' and 'common but differentiated responsibilities' upon which half the world insists; the refusal to cede, or recognize liability or compensation, that characterizes the other half. 62 An appeal to 'intergenerational equity' promises to override this standoff -or to bracket it at least -with perhaps the background hope that the current paralysis will dissolve in the miraculous solvent of the longue durée. Finally, something we can all agree on: a better life for all of our children and our grandchildren, even if that is clearly not what is in store.
If this is correct, the stakes are high indeed. To clarify, I will briefly recount in this paragraph the story of who 'we' have been over the 30-year history of climate talks so far. A group of 'developing' countries (in UN speak), comprising a majority of the global population, have little historical responsibility for climate change but stand to lose enormously if they abandon fossil fuels without alternative means to 'develop' (at the time of writing, almost half the world still lives on less than US $165 per month in real terms). 63 These countries, therefore, have made their participation in global mitigation efforts conditional on support from the wealthier and historically responsible countries: funding towards adaptation, the transfer of technologies, and compensation for actual losses and damages -all contentious elements of the UNFCCC regime. 64 The 1992 UNFCCC aimed to incorporate these concerns through the principles of reciprocal solidarity ('common but differentiated responsibilities') and 'equity', the latter term notably carried into the 2015 Paris Agreement. 65 But in the three decades since the UNFCCC's entry into force, the wealthier countries have been slow to do their bit: they have not met even their own (grudging and inadequate) promises to fund adaptation in poorer countries, largely blocked technology transfer, and explicitly refused to provide 'compensation' for 'loss and damage'. 66 For their part, developing countries have begun to accept mitigation targets, while still making their ambition conditional on transfers to meet growing adaptation and technology needs. 67 The register of future generations also invokes solidarity but on a different basis. The gesture is apparently premised on altruism, though now modelled, it seems, on the parent/child or guardian/ward relation rather than on reciprocity and/or historical responsibility. 68 This register de-emphasizes past responsibility in favour of future responsibility. It is, then, a language not only of non-reciprocity but also of redemption. As foreshadowed in my introduction, it counterposes the sacrifice of taking action now against the sacrifice later for action not taken now. To speak of 'future generations' sets up these two in opposition: 'we' (all of us -developed and developing nations alike -in this new solidarity) sacrifice something in order that 'they' need not 63 The case was put early and well in Agarwal and Narain, supra note 25. For a recent synthetic account, see Grubb and Okereke, 'Introduction and Framing', in IPCC, Working Group III Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report (2022)  Developing countries have set out their needs in a series of 'National Adaptation Programmes of Action', 'Technology Needs Assessments' and, most recently, 'Nationally Determined Contributions' under the Paris Agreement. All these are provided on the UNFCCC's website, available at unfccc.int. 68 ' As the Brundtland Report puts it: "We act as we do because we can get away with it: future generations do not vote; they have no political or financial power; they cannot challenge our decisions".' Zwarthoed, supra note 61, at 81. incur a greater sacrifice. In a different sense now, we are 'all in it together' -not just across space but also across time. The question of responsibility, then, is a question of what or whom to sacrifice. In what will sacrifice consist? Is it voluntary? Is it even articulated? I will return to this set of questions in a moment after having looked a little more closely at who 'they' are, or might be, in the next section.

Who Are They?
The rhetorical invocation of 'future generations' is consistently vague, presumably requiring an indistinct cypher to be filled subjectively. They have probably been most thoroughly imagined in future climate scenarios, to which I now turn, though the notional persons that inhabit these proliferating worlds remain essentially bland: featureless, colourless, mostly genderless and characterless. Their key characteristic is their abstract universality: they exist in cohorts and demographics, aggregated in institutions, representing lifestyles, economies, waves of political, economic and social (but not, interestingly, cultural) 'preferences'. In these areas, 'they' are both more and less defined than 'we' are: more so in that the contours of their global political and social proclivities acquire greater precision than 'ours' can; less so insofar as they are suspended simultaneously in multiple abstract renditions or possibilities.
Scenario building has evolved since Limits to Growth into a core branch of climate science, today playing a central role in the IPCC's assessments. Scenarios supply a narrative supplement to climate modelling, which today has two principal pillars: general circulation models (GCMs) and integrated assessment models (IAMs). GCMs are the familiar data-crunching sources of hard climate prediction: they apply vast computing power to calculate and project the physical consequences of emission concentrations on the climate system over decades and even centuries. 69 They represent 'future generations' -if at all -incidentally, as the hapless faceless victims of climate impacts. IAMs input socio-economic drivers (technology, policy, economic and political variables) of greenhouse gas emissions into simplified GCMs; their imagined future populations are, though anodyne, in the driver's seat. 70 Climate scenarios have been through several generations, in each case providing narrative structure to guide climate model inputs. Recent models have centred on five narratives -known as 'shared socio-economic pathways' (SSPs) -each of which guides one of six IAMs towards the endpoints foreseen in any of one of seven 69 See Edwards, supra note 37, ch. 14. 70 The IPCC describes integrated assessment models (IAMs) as 'simplified, stylized, numerical approaches to represent enormously complex physical and social systems'. Clark 'representative concentration pathways' (RCPs). 71 (Bear with me!) The RCPs each imagine a final concentration of greenhouse gases by 2100 in terms of its 'radiative forcing' capacity on the planet (measured in watts per metre squared), ranging from RCP 1.9 (that is 1.9 watts per metre squared) -a 1.5 degree Celsius scenario at the bottom end -to RCP 8.5 at the top, more likely to produce four degrees Celsius or more of global warming above pre-industrial temperatures by 2100 or earlier. 72 RCP 2.6 is a two degree Celsius scenario, and four others (3.4, 4.5, 6.0 and 7.0) fall in between. The IAMs 'back-cast' from these 2100 endpoints, using the SSPs to put some shape on global energy use, land-use change, economic and population growth and so on. 73 Current scenarios thus have crude acronymic titles such as 'IMAGE SSP1-19' (where 'IMAGE' is the relevant IAM, '1' the first SSP and '19' indicates RCP 1.9). 74 A kind of world construction is undertaken in the five SSP narratives. They are chosen to illustrate future policy environments absent specific climate policies and centred on differing combinations of possible future 'challenges' to mitigation and adaptation -so SSP1 ('sustainability' -each SSP has a synoptic moniker) represents low 'challenges' for both mitigation and adaptation, while SSP3 ('regional rivalry') assumes high challenges for both; in SSP4 ('inequality'), mitigation costs are low and adaptation costs are high, while in SSP5 ('fossil-fuelled development') the reverse is true. To these is added a 'middle road' (SSP2), which assumes a continuation of contemporary trends and in which the challenges to both mitigation and adaptation are fair to middling (not necessarily a 'likely' scenario, as the authors emphasize). 75 Much about the scenario-building process merits inspection. The knowledge cohort that produces it comprises a small close-knit self-described 'modelling community' from a handful of well-established global institutions that have worked within welldefined and somewhat arcane parameters over several decades by now. 76  tended to become less, rather than more, detailed over time. 77 Also intriguing is the fact that SSPs are unable (as yet) to dynamically factor in expected climate impacts over time in terms of possible policy responses to those impacts: an extraordinary limitation (and the 'next frontier' for the modelling community). 78 And there is the unique position that the scenarios have within the IPCC process, placing them at the heart of global climate orientation. While each of these attributes opens up fruitful lines of inquiry, this article can merely touch on their broader parameters and assumptions.
Unsurprisingly, the scenarios advance a utopic/dystopic spectrum. 79 The obvious best case scenario -'sustainability' (SSP1) -is supplemented by another more surprising utopian (at least potentially) narrative: SSP5 ('fossil-fuelled development'). In SSP1, the 'world shifts gradually, but pervasively, towards a more sustainable path, emphasizing more inclusive development that respects perceived environmental boundaries'. 80 This keeps mitigation manageable. But adaptation is also manageable because, we are told, 'inequality is reduced both across and within countries' (we are not told how this happens). 81 By contrast, SSP5 might be described as 'staying with the trouble', 82 flowing with, rather than against, the market and climate alike: the world 'places increasing faith in competitive markets, innovation and participatory societies to produce rapid technological progress and development of human capital as the path to sustainable development'. 83 This wealth-generating powerhouse is combined with what is referred to as a 'higher level of equity' -which, as in SSP1, keeps the 'challenges' to climate adaptation low -though, again, we are not told how. 84 Although (steep) mitigation remains possible in SSP5 (two IAMs even achieve RCP 1.9), 85 a query arises as to whether somewhat higher temperatures may be bearable in a world with a manageable population, high growth and broad-based adaptation.
These two apparently contrasting utopias share a number of assumptions in common: they have the lowest global populations of the five (achieved, we are told, through higher education levels for women) and the highest global income growth (both per capita and absolutely). 86 Both narratives also feature continuing globalization and steady or increased trade liberalization. 87 By contrast, the dystopiasnotably, the worst-case SSP3 ('regional rivalry') -expect lower economic growth, heightened barriers to international trade and larger populations. 88 As at the Club of Rome a half-century earlier, a principal feature of thriving future generations is that there are fewer of them. But, unlike Limits to Growth, there is no scope in the SSPs for what we have since come to refer to as 'degrowth'. 89 Future generations thrive by thriving.
The faith in globalization, growth and trade -the very engines of climate change -in creating conditions for its overcoming may seem surprising at first glance. Noticing this obliquely in its Fifth Assessment Report, the IPCC pointed out that IAMs were initially constructed within the field of mainstream economics -the first social science to enter the climate field -and embed basic assumptions from that discipline: '[T]he scenarios tend towards normative, economics-focused descriptions of the future' since 'the models … typically assume fully functioning markets and competitive market behavior'. 90 The same logic informs the IAMs' approach to trade: 'In general', the IPCC observes of the models' assumptions, 'greater [openness] to trade will result in lower-aggregate mitigation costs because the global economy is more flexible to undertake mitigation where it is least expensive'.
These observations remain intuitive rather than analytic -in fact, it is not easy to locate anywhere in the SSP literature an argued justification for the economic premises that appear fundamental to their world building. Whereas considerable space is devoted to the assumptions upon which the SSPs sit (for example, 'globalization continues …'), less is given over to what we might call the 'underlying assumptions' (for example, '… thus reducing emissions') that explain the 'pathways' set in train by them. 91 This appears to be because the latter assumptions are found not in the SSPs themselves but, rather, in the less transparent IAMs. 92 The notion that more trade, globalization and growth is environmentally beneficial may seem an extravagant assertion to smuggle in without debate or explanation, but it is worth recalling that the UNFCCC contains precisely the same assumption in its section on 'principles'. 93 In these respects, the future worlds of SSP1 and SSP5 may look quite familiar. To observe the obvious, SSP5 shows the world continuing much as it is but with the injection of something unexplained and magical called 'equity'. SSP1, in which the Sustainable Development Goals are met, shows the world not as it is but, rather, as it has been imagined in a reiterated environmentalist vision extending back at least to the Stockholm Declaration's compromise: growth continues but more 'sustainably' and (again) equitably. Both visions are redemptive fantasies, it seems, not only saving us from ourselves but also fulfilling our better natures, while polishing away, in the future, the apparent contradictions of our present. What 'equity' is or how it is achieved remains mysterious.
It is, however, SSP3 and SSP4 -the dystopias -that will look most familiar to contemporary eyes. In SSP4 ('inequality'), 'unequal investments in human capital' and 'increasing disparities in economic opportunity and political power, lead to increasing inequalities and stratification both across and within countries', creating an abyss between 'an internationally connected society' and 'a fragmented collection of lower-income, poorly educated societies'. SSP4's authors refer to it as representative of 'barbarization' scenarios: 'The core theme of barbarization is that extreme poverty, income inequality, and lack of opportunity lead to social and environmental ills, especially for the poor.' 94 In SSP4, mitigation challenges are low due to technological advance, but warming is still high enough to cause real pain for the majority who cannot adapt -presumably, a higher level of warming is bearable for the well-heeled, tech-savvy, geographically mobile, and 'internationally connected' minority. 95 Worse still, however, and most vulnerable to climate extremes, is SSP3 ('regional rivalry'), in which 'resurgent nationalism … and regional conflicts push countries to increasingly focus on domestic or, at most, regional issues', resulting in the lowest economic growth and highest population growth. 96 Nationalism -including, in any form, protectionism, mercantilism and going forth and multiplying -here appears as the crucible of worst-case scenarios. The scenario narratives do not explain why a political vehicle that has historically been somewhat successful is now so catastrophic: again, it seems almost a matter of faith in global market integration.
So, to pose my earlier question, where does sacrifice lie in these visions? In mirroring the present in so many ways, the scenarios, at first glance, do not obviously require much at all in the way of sacrifice -not least in terms of 'our' lives and lifestyles as they are usually conceived. And yet two clear loci of sacrifice are evident: first, the 93 UNFCCC, supra note 1, Art. 3(5) ('[t]he Parties should cooperate to promote a supportive and open international economic system that would lead to sustainable economic growth and development in all Parties, particularly developing country Parties, thus enabling them better to address the problems of climate change'). This scenario, it is reported, appeared highly unlikely when adopted in 2014, but much less so by 2016. birth rate. To exercise a responsibility towards future generations today apparently implies, in effect, taking steps now to prevent their existence altogether -at least for some -particularly in today's 'developing' countries. 97 We face again the Club of Rome's neo-Malthusian dilemma but with the stakes ever heightening. The second locus of sacrifice resides in the magic wand of 'equity', which, whatever else it means, presumably expects to cut something from somewhere and deliver it somewhere else. But here the stakes are not obviously different in the future than they are now. Their particular stamp in climate talk is still, as it has always been, found in familiar terms: loss and damage, adaptation, technology transfer, migration -those long-standing areas of blockage or fast-falling expectations. But the scenarios reach far beyond these climatespecific technicalities, apparently seeking a wholesale global levelling up and wealth redistribution. 98 Indeed, this second locus of sacrifice seems to assume that the salient attribute of a better future is that by then 'we' will have overcome precisely the hurdle that the invocation of a 'future generations' register itself aimed to bracket. It is surely disappointing to travel so far into the future and find there, staring back at us, as blank and pitiless as the sun, the very conflicts that we had hoped to escape by going there.
For the purposes of this article, it is less the reflexive mirroring of the present in future climate scenarios (idealized in the utopias; realist in the rest) that concerns me than the inevitable recursivity of present intra-generational conflict in the future. It is not just that the present-future boundary is blurry (if not outright inconceivable) nor even that intractable present concerns cannot simply dissolve in a fantasy future: rather, it is that to neglect current 'inequity' in a motivated projection of imaginary future solidarity surely stands to set in train an actual future trajectory in which those inequities become constitutive rather than merely intractable -what the scenarios refer to as 'barbarization'.

Sacrifice
I have raised several times a connection or even identity between responsibility and sacrifice -a nexus that Jacques Derrida draws out in his 1992 text The Gift of Death. 99 Derrida refers in this text to responsibility as 'the injunction to respond … the call to explain oneself [répondre de soi], one's actions or one's thoughts'. 100 He then relates this very personal matter of accounting for oneself to the 'most ancient' experience -the uniquely subjective endpoint that is, for each of us, death: 'My first and last responsibility … is that responsibility … that relates me to what no one else can do in my place. … Everyone must assume his own death, that is to say the one thing in the world that no one else can either give or take: therein resides freedom and responsibility.' 101 The 'most fundamental' -or prototypical -mode of accepting responsibility, he then says, 97 KC and Lutz, supra note 88.  (1995 [1992]). 100 Ibid., at 3 (in this passage, 'responsibility' is defined negatively). 101 Ibid., at 44, 48. would be a readiness to die for another, and it is this 'most ancient' vocation that 'institutes responsibility … in the ethical dimension of sacrifice'. 102 The point for Derrida is, in part, to distinguish what he calls an 'economy of sacrifice' from the everyday exchange economy: the former is indifferent to rational calculus and non-reciprocal -it does not expect a reward, being grounded in an ethic of love. 103 This is not to say that an act of sacrifice entails no reward but, rather, that any reward is both incalculable and incidental. Moreover, in this economy of sacrifice, to enact my responsibility in sacrifice does not bind, but liberates, the person to whom I am responsible. 104 It is presumably here that the register of responsibility towards future generations implicitly situates itself. Not that 'present generations' are expected to give their lives for the formless abstractions of the future but, rather, that this background relation of responsibility/sacrifice provides the non-reciprocal ground for taking actions today to benefit others tomorrow. We would not need, as we move beyond self-interest, to know anything at all about these others to whom we are responsible, other than that they will someday exist. 105 They are self-constituted and autonomous beings beyond our understanding. Derrida's anchoring of responsibility in the fact of death matters not only because the stakes in climate action and awareness entail actual death -for many already and in the future and for others if this or that decision is taken or not. It also matters because, in approaching future generations, however conceived, we are at the same time approaching our own mortality and, with it, the question of répondre de soi: how to account for our lives; what will we have lived for; to what will we have given our lives in the end?
However, there is a difficulty with responsibility in this register for Derrida -which resides in contending with competing loci of responsibility and in the difficulty or impossibility of choosing between them. 106 Derrida worries that the ultimate determination of where sacrifice lands -and, thus, the final locus of responsibilitymay remain inexplicable or inarticulate, grounded not in reason or love but, rather, in fear or secrecy. 107 Here, Derrida turns to the much-rehearsed biblical story of Abraham's readiness to sacrifice his son Isaac at God's behest, perhaps best known from Søren Kierkegaard's extended meditation Fear and Trembling, with which Derrida dialogues. 108 In this story, although God had previously promised Abraham that he would be the progenitor of multitudes -and although he and his wife Sarah were old and Isaac was their only child -Abraham agreed to God's command. Derrida points out that Abraham's 'absolute' responsibility to God entailed a betrayal of his (responsibility towards his) own son as well as towards his wife and, indeed, towards an entire ethical order. Abraham's sacrifice is a test of faith, but it is equally grounded in 'fear and trembling' before God's power. 109 The paradox for Derrida is that the imperative to respond in faith (or fear) is inexplicable: 'There is no language, no reason, no generality or mediation to justify this ultimate responsibility which leads me to absolute sacrifice.' 110 Abraham's readiness to sacrifice Isaac is, he says, abominable, unspeakable, criminal. And, yet, the imperative that impels sacrifice in response to one rather than another, or to find one locus of responsibility 'higher' than another, remains inexplicable, unjustifiable or irrational (faith, fear, love). If there is an explanation, it remains, at some level, mysterious. 111 Not only that, Derrida adds, but this imperative to sacrifice in service of a more imposing, absolute or ultimate responsibility is 'ubiquitous', much more prevalent than the rare extravagance of Abraham's horrific dilemma might imply. At this juncture, Derrida provides a list of the atrocities of the world in which he was writing in 1991-1992 -the moment, as it happens, in which the UNFCCC was agreed, with its exhortation to act for the benefit of future generations, as well as the time of the first Iraq (Gulf) War, with its 100,000 civilian deaths. 112 Although there is no mention of climate change in Derrida's text, it feels close by in his description of a world in which so many are dying of preventable hunger and disease, an 'incalculable sacrifice', as he puts it, made 'to avoid being sacrificed oneself ', a sacrifice that 'we' not only participate in but 'actually organise'. 113 Those who are dying now due to climate inaction are, of course, on this reading, being sacrificed due to our ongoing responsibility to something else, something higher. But to what? The choice of what to sacrifice -at an individual or societal level -itself indicates, so Derrida hints, where responsibility truly lies. But whereas Abraham chose his sacrifice, Isaac did not: voluntary self-sacrifice is counterposed to the involuntarya sacrifice that falls on a victim. This crime, and the keenly paradoxical affront to God's promise to Abraham to father multitudes, is averted only when God stays Abraham's hand at the last minute. In this foundational story, then, the coming into being or not of future generations is a matter of sheer chance -a wager -subject to the irrational mechanics of a jealous God. The impossible choice facing Abraham is not between present generations (his son and wife) and future generations (his progeny): rather, it is between one kind of annihilation (in obedience to God) and another (in God's foreseeable wrath). 114 Their fates are bound together. The fact that Abraham chose obedience to God against both present and future generations and that -in the event -both nevertheless survive (his son and their progeny) is, for Derrida, aleatory: there is no rationale to justify it. Abraham acts on the imperative of a responsibility he is unable to choose against, and the sacrifice falls where it will. For Derrida, Abraham is no model -to choose faith or fear over love, and to be rescued by the vagaries of chance, is execrable. Yet Derrida asks us to notice the ubiquity of the dilemma Abraham faces and the choice he makes.
What Derrida aims to recall, I suggest, is that the choice is rarely between responsibility and none, between sacrifice or no sacrifice. Rather, everywhere we turn, there are others to whom we are potentially responsible, there are sacrifices to be made and they are non-reconcilable. But we must choose. An imperative locus of responsibility may be known or named -it may be God or ego, 115 or the nation, or 'the markets', or 'the economy' (Derrida's apparent reading), or the nostrums of globalization and trade, 116 or science, or it may even be fidelity to the rule of law itself. It may be obscure or inarticulate. But, even if known, the choice of what to sacrifice, or where it is to fall, often remains at some level unexplained and unjustified, and its logic, if that is what it is, undisclosed. 117 What presents as altruistic may turn out to be sacrificial. Meanwhile the choice, or fall, of sacrifice now orients the future.
Viewed from this perspective, the fact and possibility of sacrifice runs throughout the climate problem. There is the sacrifice already made: the physical loss, the deaths, the species extinction -the daily due of the onward march of climate change -and of so much more in the past, as this problem has surged forward across two centuries. Then there is the sacrifice implicit in ongoing inaction: the foreseeable loss, or giving up, of lives, lands, livelihoods, cultures, relationships, homes -expectable now and escalating with time, as we know. But there is also sacrifice for many in taking action now: we all depend on fossil fuels still, but for much of the world, its removal -unless some affordable alternative is quickly made available -will ensure that poverty and inequality calcify and extend. There is sacrifice in the building of a new energy infrastructure: where it will arise; where it will not; its cost and the means of payment.

EJIL (2022) Article
There is sacrifice in the burden of adaptation in countries facing an unbearably hot future, its cost, and whether to fund it from an emissions-based economy or instead to blindly mitigate and trust to fate or law. There is the irreparable sacrifice reframed euphemistically as 'loss and damage'. Indeed, for many there is sacrifice in both action and inaction: an invidious choice between the damage wrought by a changing climate and the loss of a viable pathway to a more prosperous life hitherto presumed by many, even most alive today, and for their children and beyond, as a hope if not a destiny.

Legacy
A further pivot upon which 'future generations' discussion frequently turns is the idea of legacy: what to bequeath. The very notion of a legacy is intergenerational, though that need not entail that 'generations' leave legacies (if they do, on what scale: familial, national, global?). As I noted in section 3, much of the future generations literatureincluding the very idea of sustainable development -holds it as self-evident that 'we', in the present, have an obligation to pass something -characterized by Brown Weiss and others in terms of 'resources' -on to future generations. 118 It is a compelling intuition that, in this penultimate section, I will not so much argue against as supplement.
In the climate context, the question of legacy takes on urgency and distinctiveness across two dimensions. First, the resource most evidently at risk of depletion is what Larry Lohmann has helpfully called 'the global carbon dump' -that is, the planet's capacity to absorb greenhouse gas emissions. 119 Second, there is the much broader question of the 'planet or cultural resource base' (using Brown Weiss' language) that future generations will 'inherit'. The list of loss here is already extensive: species, ecosystems, land, livelihoods, cultural traditions -all these and many other phenomena are in the course of disappearance as I write, with climate change a principal cause among several. These two dimensions are conceptually distinct, if interrelated -I must restrict myself here to the first (though I believe the second follows a similar structural logic). My aim here is not to challenge the ethical case for swift action (with which I fully agree) but to investigate how a 'future generations' rhetoric translates into the existing legal and institutional context within which climate policy is situated.

A Allocating the Global Carbon Dump
One might argue that, even were we to accept as a general matter a 'modified Lockean proviso' (that 'we' should 'leave enough and as good' to future generations), this is inapplicable to the 'global carbon dump' given that it is already essentially depleted. After all, the 'carbon budget', beyond which the planet will warm by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, and even two degrees, will be exhausted within the lifetimes of present generations. 120 The 'equitable use' (or technological replacement) of this scant resource is therefore an essentially 'intra-generational' matter. There is nothing left for future generations.
Henry Shue, however, in an influential intervention, reaches the reverse conclusion: ' A single budget for carbon emissions, whatever its total size, is shared by us and every foreseeable generation to come. Consequently … what is fair is a pervasively intergenerational issue.' 121 Shue is, of course, correct, in the sense that the 'carbon dump' -unlike say the blue whale -is not something that disappears through overexploitation. Rather, it can continue to be 'overused' after its notional depletion, albeit with devastating consequences. Indeed, in the case of the carbon dump, we might say that something like the Lockean proviso is the problem: new ownership claims continue to be staked wherever new reserves appear (hence, new oil investments in, for example, Mozambique). 122 Continuing private acquisition of the carbon dump is, from this perspective, the climate crisis. Responsibility in this case would appear not to mean, as a loose reading of Brown Weiss might have suggested, conserving the resource for use by future generations but, rather, placing it off bounds for them altogether: binding future generations too into giving it up. For there is little point in 'us' (to adopt the register) taking the difficult step of constraining carbon rapidly if some future generation was simply to undo that step. 123 If, then, this really is about something we are doing 'for' future generations, it quickly also becomes something 'they' must do for their successors and also, arguably, for us: they presumably owe us the self-restraint we have shown them -something like intergenerational reciprocity then.
In his article, Shue implicitly recognizes this idea in proposing an institutional mechanism that would not only be global in its mandate (of a kind still lacking) but also intergenerational (of a kind unknown): groping, indeed, towards some institutional binding between generations. 124 The proposal is intuitively appealing if theoretically extravagant, but it also feels oddly inadequate. For one, it might be argued that any agreement reached now already extends into the future -after all, this is what international law does by default: it binds the future. The attempted binding of the future through law, then, requires neither an 'intergenerational' extra nor any concrete notion of reciprocity. At the same time, it is surely hubristic to imagine that we can bind future generations forever: those born after us remain free. 120 Riahi and Schaeffer, 'Mitigation Pathways Compatible with Long-Term Goals', in IPCC, Working Group III Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report (2022) 3-1, at 3-5 ('[m]itigation pathways limiting warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot reach 50% reductions of CO 2 in the 2030s, relative to 2019, then reduce emissions further to reach net zero CO 2 emissions in the 2050s. Pathways likely limiting warming to 2°C reach 50% reductions in the 2040s and net zero CO 2 by 2070s'). 121 Shue, supra note 5. 122 Pilling, supra note 11; see also K. Bryan and T. Wilson, 'Congo Expands Oil Auction Round after West's Crude Production Push', Financial Times (19 July 2022). As I write, in the autumn of 2022, these sorts of investments are multiplying globally, including in Europe. 123 See the thoughtful discussion in Page, supra note 2, at 99-131. 124 Shue, supra note 5, at 300-303, 304-305.
Beyond these notions, though, lies a more profound inadequacy, to which I have drawn attention already. Important as rapid mitigation is, it is unlikely in itself to be sufficient to meet today's climate-driven needs: absent significant international transfers, steep global mitigation is a formula for entrenched inequity. 125 To be sure, this is an 'ethical' shortcoming -a failure of responsibility -but it is also a deeply practical obstacle: global mitigation is simply unlikely to be embraced if it depends on keeping half the world poor. 126 In essence, this is the story of the dystopian scenarios SSP3 and SSP4 in different ways, recounted in section 5. By contrast, if 'we' (to retain the register) were to foreground our responsibility to present generations in administering the fast-vanishing global carbon budget -by meeting long-flagged cross-border adaptation and replacement technology needs -the effects would flow into future lives globally too, which, in short, is the thrust of SSP1.
The distinction between these positions is illustrated in a March 2021 ruling of the German Constitutional Court, widely hailed as a 'historic victory' in the protection of future generations. 127 In this ruling, the court follows a Shue-vian 'pivotal generation' type of examination of the burden distribution of a tight carbon budget, 128 ultimately ordering more stringent climate mitigation policies in Germany in order to 'afford protection against the greenhouse gas reduction burdens … being unilaterally offloaded onto the future' (that is, the plaintiffs aged between 15 and 32). 129 The ruling focused on those alive today since -the court is crystal clear -actual 'future' generations 'either as a whole or as the sum of individuals not yet born -do not yet carry any fundamental rights in the present'. 130 This synchronism matters: of interest for my present purposes, though, is the court's treatment of a conjoined complaint from Bangladeshi petitioners. While the possible positive knock-on effect for Bangladeshis of future German mitigation policy was flagged, the court did not recognize any German responsibility for current impacts in Bangladesh nor any concrete obligation to assist present (much less future) generations there through adaptation, technology or otherwise: It is true that by reducing the greenhouse gas emissions produced in Germany, the German state could protect people living abroad … just as it could protect those living in Germany. … However, with regard to people living abroad, the German state would not have the same options at its disposal for taking any additional protective action. Given the limits of German sovereignty under international law, it is practically impossible for the German state to afford The latter point is again illustrated in the German Constitutional Court's ruling of March 2021, wherein the Court explicitly balanced mitigation costs today against adaptation costs in the future, finding that a target of two degrees Celsius, rather than 1.5 degrees, may be 'sufficient' if 'alleviated by supplementary adaptation measures'. 143 Moreover, current mitigation policy itself is subject to balancing between different (local) interests: '[T]he legislature has considerable leeway in deciding how to strike an appropriate balance between the interests of property owners exposed to risks from climate change and the interests opposing more stringent climate action.' 144 In this analysis, a climate assessment involves (i) balancing the costs of (local) mitigation today against (local) adaptation in the future and (ii) balancing the costs of (local) climate impacts in future against the (local) costs of mitigation today. The consequences of a possibly looser German mitigation policy for future generations outside Germany (outlined in the same IPCC report upon which the Court relies) are, in this analysis, essentially removed from view. 145

Discounting the Future
In this final section, I sketch and critique a common existing register for the incorporation of future generations into current policy: the notion, unremarkable in welfare economics and central to policy-making far beyond climate matters, of discounting. A discount rate attempts to factor the preferences and circumstances of future persons into the cost-benefit analysis of policy choices, assuming future generations will necessarily be wealthier than present generations and more technologically sophisticated. Recourse to a discount rate already presupposes a relation between generations: a high discount rate signifies that future generations are better placed to absorb costs; a low discount rate that 'we' are. Thus, for example, sanguine expectations about future redemption through carbon dioxide removal -a key element of RCPs 1.9 and 2.6 and, indeed, almost all SSPs limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius -embed a significant discount rate. 146 We can, in short, only meet this target if future generations have some clever technology up their sleeve.
Discount rates have long been controversial in climate change. The influential 2006 Stern Review drew fire for settling on a low discount rate on the basis that the scale of future costs was potentially enormous and irreversible. 147 Stern explained his choice EJIL (2022) Article by reference to the notion of 'equity'. 148 The question of an appropriate discount rate in climate change remains alive today. In the United Kingdom (UK), for example, where the government applies a standard discount rate of 3.5 per cent per annum to 'future benefits and costs', the Treasury, in a 2020 review, 'recognised the standard discounting technique may not be appropriate for projects with long time effects, such as those addressing climate change [which] raise "fundamental ethical issues concerning the responsibility of the current generation to future generations".' 149 However, a further review, in the run-up to the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP-26) in late 2021, decided against reducing the discount rate, choosing instead to find ways to better calculate future 'environmental' costs and benefits. Discounting is, like scenario building, a form of fictionalizing the future for the purposes of the present. It operates by extrapolating current trends and making informed guesses about future directions: the process is inherently subjective, as the UK Treasury's recommendations implicitly acknowledge. Rather obviously, the whole notion of a discount rate plays out Derrida's Abrahamic drama, with the national offspring potentially sacrificed in a mysterious act of faith-based responsiveness to some greater imperative (such as the 'pure time preference': the assumption that 'people' value consumption in the present over that in the future). 150 The UK Treasury, in its initial review, had argued that environmental damage due to climate change might lead to 'irreversible wealth transfers from the future to the present' (though, of course, the true costs are not well captured by the term 'wealth transfers'). 151 To argue for 'our' responsibility towards future generations might, as the UK Treasury's aside hints, take aim at this whole corrupt edifice. But the difficulty I have attempted to clarify here is that the bald current work of responsibilizing the future cannot simply be overturned by the rhetorical reversal of the arrow of responsibility, so to speak, between present and future generations, while maintaining the arbitrary ruse of the distinction itself. This is because the other cleavages I identified at the outset of this article -between states and classes -do not simply dissolve in the soup of time. As I have endeavoured to show, they play out as the terms of sacrifice. 152 So, on the one hand, for example, when the European Union (EU) delegate at COP-26 in November 2021 exhorted those present to 'keep 1.5°C alive', he may have claimed to be acting for future generations. 153 But future generations in the EU can afford steep mitigation costs and stand ultimately to benefit from economic transition: the EU's donation of €24 billion in 2020 towards mitigation and adaptation in the rest of the world offers relatively little in terms of achieving the vertiginous 1.5 degree Celsius goal or meeting their historical responsibility. 154 On the other hand, the Indian delegate at COP-26 who stood for phasing coal 'down' rather than 'out' might also have claimed to be acting out of a responsibility to future generations -those in India -balancing the risk of entrenched poverty against the promise of autonomous adaptation. 155 For if those with past and present responsibility refuse to own it or submit to the sacrifice entailed thereby -which can still be found in terms such as technology transfer, adaptation, loss and damage, climate refugees -their counterparts elsewhere, faced with inordinately greater sacrifices, will presumably be right to conclude that they have not in fact received an invitation to a future (or any other) solidarity to which they might respond.
Examples such as these reveal, I suggest, that lines of responsibility and corresponding sacrifice run from deep in the past through our fraught present and continue indefinitely before us. The question, then, is not whether 'we' are responsible -some, but, crucially, not all, of 'us' clearly are -but, rather, to what or to whom there is responsibility. It is not a question of present generations tout court having a responsibility to the future, but of distinct collectivities that exist synchronically and between whom responsibility subtends, even as we/they -and our/their responsibility inter se -extend diachronically. It is a question of whether or how they or we can imagine our responsibilities to one another in the present and future alike. And it is not a question of future generations tout court, but of which, or perhaps whose, future generations. It is not whether there is sacrifice -there must be -but of what form sacrifice takes: whom to sacrifice, and who will choose sacrifice.

Conclusion
Numerous responsibilities attach to climate change. An appeal to the responsibility towards future generations is attractively simple: an exhortation to act, drawing on a powerful imagery of obligation, an altruistic duty towards our children and grandchildren, an invitation to global solidarity. I have argued here, however, that the appeal to future generations instead stands to elide numerous existing loci of responsibility in climate matters that are more concrete, more coherent, more demanding, more easily understood and more effectively articulated in law. It tends to fold those to whom responsibility is owed in the present into those owing responsibility and so annihilates the former's claim to a present and a future alike. Responsibilities towards those alive today surround us; they swell, if we choose to see them. And, if acted upon, the consequences will flow into the future, just as future generations themselves flow into our present. As things stand, however, the colonizing metabolism of climate consumption is already underway. The future, as Shue writes, is not inaccessible or unborn: 'it is not even future.' 156 156 Shue, Pivotal Generation, supra note 2, at 4: 'The future is not inaccessible-we hold its fundamental parameters in our hands, and we are shaping them now. In this respect the future is not unborn-it is not even future.' Shue is deliberately inverting a line of William Faulkner's ('the past is never dead. It's not even past'). Compare Kierkegaard, supra note 108 ('if one generation arose after another like the leafage in the forest, if the one generation replaced the other like the song of birds in the forest, if the human race passed through the world as the ship goes through the sea, like the wind through the desert, a thoughtless and fruitless activity … how empty then and comfortless life would be!').