For richer and for greener

There are climate deniers—those who deny the basic chemistry and physics.

Then there are the "reasonable" ones—those who start by saying, "I believe global warming is real, but… ." More often than not, that "but" is the claim that doing something now would be too expensive.

Among those who espouse that claim, the most polished argument against doing something now is that we'll all be richer in the future. With more money, we'll be much better equipped to deal with the consequences of global warming. True enough. You first need to make a certain amount of cash to be able to hide in air-conditioned lairs.

But all of that misses a fundamental point: The richer we are, the more value we tend to place on unspoiled nature.

It's precisely because future generations will have more money to spend that they'd want to spend more on making the world a greener place. It also makes them more likely to want us to spend more on preventing the worst consequences of global warming—while that's still possible to do.