It’s really hard to address climate change because the bad effects take a generation to appear, but people value the here-and-now. I’m writing an essay about this for “Gardeners of the Galaxies“.

As much as I don’t like the idea of a discount rate when people are planning for the future, I’ve always had to admit that contradicting it makes matters worse. People who contradict it are the “longtermists” and “effective altruists” who somehow always turn out to be swindling people or smashing things without producing anything of value.

The language is full of exhortations about this, like “the beam in thine own eye” or “clean up your own backyard”. But I hope the editors appreciate my restraint in not citing Yoda:

All his life has he looked away to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph.

It amuses me that so many of the sites on line that offer quotations from Yoda also include his grunts. It reminds me of the Usenet FAQ that asserted when the Swedish Chef spoke, the words meant nothing. All the semantic content was in the “bork, bork, bork!” at the end.

Update

That feeling when you cite an article with a fairly harsh tone, and then two weeks later discover that the author was just getting started. Emile Torres, who wrote the article about longtermism, has two new articles out in the last couple of days. One in Salon, and another in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.