One of the core arguments for doing something about Climate Change is that it is unfair on future generations to behave badly now (pumping out carbon into the air) and lumber them with the far-reaching results of our selfishness/negligence.

Which assumes various things.

That, for example, the results of Climate Change will be mainly negative. That it is possible now to identify what we might do so as to benefit those future generations by preventing/reducing at least some serious negative outcomes. And that having identified what we might do, the costs of doing it look to be worthwhile.

Lurking in all these assumptions are some highly technical but vital calculations on the way we value the future beneficial outcome of spending now.

This in turn is based on assumptions about economic growth. 

Take the past 100 years. Despite two astonishingly awful World Wars, the Great Depression and so on, the mass of human beings are far better off now than was the case a century ago.

So it seems reasonable to assume that in a hundred years’ time people will be at least somewhat wealthier than they are now.

Hence the dilemma. How much should ‘poor’ people now spend to benefit probably much ‘richer’ people far down the line?

The Stern Report took a hammering in part on this issue, the argument being made that its assumptions were untransparent or erroneous or both.

All sorts of complex exchanges ensued. See eg this:

Leonhardt says that Stern is "right for the wrong reasons", and says that "technically, Sir Nicholas’s opponents win the debate." The problem is that this is a very high-level and complex debate, which is not at all easy to follow. Leonhardt, with his talk of inflation, has shown that he is not up to following it.

This is no great failing, since I’m not up to following it either, and most economists I know also can’t follow it. But if you can’t follow the argument, you certainly shouldn’t be declaring winners.  

So what are we lesser mortals meant to believe if even economists find it all too difficult?

The New York Review of Books had a more or less comprehensible clash of swords, with one of the contributors making this point:

The Stern Review, for example, assumes that global per capita real income will rise from $10,000 today to around $130,000 in two centuries. At the same time, it argues that we should take urgent steps today to reduce damages in the distant future based on its argument for near-zero discounting.

While there are plausible reasons to act quickly on climate change, the need to redistribute income to a wealthy future does not seem to be one of them.

And so on.

My point for now is a more modest one.

Namely to point out that those who seem to clamour the loudest for acting now to make life easier for future generations on Climate seem to be hell-bent on bankrupting those future generations by lumbering them with insane quantities of officially-driven debt.

Thus Perry de Havilland at Samizdata:

But to the entire political looter class, and I mean not just the elite elements but also including the millions and millions of people who took loans they could not repay and voted for the people whose regulations provided the perverse incentives for banks to loan money to them, the important things was to… keep lending.

And this, boys and girls, is what we call a Credit Bubble. And why do we call it a bubble? Because when loans are given out at a rate greater than actual economic growth can support, the amount of loans (assets) that go bad increases because the increased lending was not supported by an increased ability to pay the loans back… and when that fact becomes clear, people with money suddenly stop lending… the ‘bubble’ bursts…

… And how are the political looter class trying to remedy this situation? Well they are trying to re-inflate the bubble with the extra added spice of making the secured assets (property) even harder to repossess (in effect un-securing questionable loans either by fiat or with money plucked from the government’s magic money tree). Pure genius.

Or am I missing something?