The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now by Henry Shue

Abstract

Henry Shue’s The Pivotal Generation is an ethically charged call for ambitious climate action, here and now. The prominent ethics scholar extends his seminal contribution to the international climate justice scholarship to craft a convincing reflection on the urgency of climate action against the backdrop of justice imperatives. We are the “pivotal generation.” And because developed countries have disproportionately contributed to the crisis, Shue argues, they are to shoulder this urgency and expel any delusion of possible delay. This book is directed to them and their citizens. Will we choose greed and exploitation over solidarity and justice? The book exposes us to this ultimatum. Why now, why us? Shue begins by drawing from the science three consequences of delayed climate action to support his qualification of today’s generation as “pivotal.” Flunking the urgency test would mean, first, greater costs and difficulty to tackle the crisis; second, heightened climate threats with no upper limit to their detrimental extent; and third, the passing of critical tipping points that launch irreversible and unbearable socioclimatic conditions. If scientific facts seem to insufficiently move people today, Shue contextualizes them within climate justice realities and subjects them to an ethical assessment in a pressing, affective account that serves as an impetus for action taking through moral and emotional arousal. At the heart of the book is a reflection on the distribution of costs, benefits, and risks associated with climate change and climate action. We are called to rethink our responsibility and agency in light of our embeddedness in space and time—a moral framework that translates into a vision of international and intergenerational justice. To this end, Shue proposes the concept of sovereign externalization. He argues that the system of sovereignty allows states to absolve themselves of responsibility for the socioecological impacts of their economic activities. The idea is that externalization is essentially exploitative: while the benefits of economic activity are nationalized and enjoyed principally in the present, the climate costs are imposed upon future generations and other states, who often are worse off and, crucially, can only suffer the repercussions of decision-making in which they took no part. For Shue, this is “a paradigm case of a stronger party silently exploiting the vulnerability of a weaker party in order to pursue its own advantage” (51). On those grounds, he dismisses any justification for delayed