It comes down to this: when we see a malnourished child or a town hit by a hurricane and seriously suggest that we should make lives better by cutting a ton of carbon dioxide, we are not actually trying to do good, but rather imposing our own priorities on people who have little power to assert their own. It has become too easy to believe that policies aimed at cutting carbon are the answer to everything. They’re not, and we need to stop campaigning for and enacting policies that will have the world’s poorest paying for our mistakes.
