'Can't just sweep it under the rug,' says Broome.

Climate change is an ethical question, but a simple one at that. Reduce emissions = save the planet. The only problems is, it requires the populations as a whole to sacrifice a little to save a lot. Doing otherwise would simple be unethical because "you should no do something for your own benefit if it harms another person" (Broome 12). When put like this, no one wants to be called unethical, but it's hard to see the future that's centuries away and sacrifice what you have now for them.

If you think about it in a cost benefit standpoint, you would have to lose something now (cost) in order to help generations in the future (benefit). The Stern Review has found the benefits "gained by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases would be far greater than the cost of reducing them" (Broome 13). So why not? Why not cut back now and save later? Well, we are not those kinds of people. But that's the ethical answer. To not cut back now would be victimizing future generations and the only ethical thing to do would to 'compensate' those victims. However for the same reason that we don't think to conserve now, we won't be able to compensate them because the benefits will be "a century or two from now" (Broome 14). The fact that these benefits are "discounted" means that the benefits from now are worth more than they are in the future. When people borrow money and lend money, "they often give less weight to their own future well-being than to their current well-being" (Broome 17). Meaning, in economy, as in our culture, we value more what we get now than what will happen later. But not only is discounting unethical, so is the fact that when climate change is in full throttle, it will be our fault, we won't be around and we would have killed millions of people.