Mitigation efforts made now have their greatest environmental impact over the long-term, producing weak incentives to mitigate. In response to this challenge, there has been increasing attention to the idea that the current generation can finance emissions reductions by shifting costs to the future. 'Borrowing from the future' produces better outcomes for the future while the present incurs no net costs. Part I of the paper questions this no-cost thesis on the grounds that the strategy involves large changes in behaviour. Reductions in the consumption of carbon intensive goods and activities are compensated with increases in the consumption of low-carbon goods and activities. Less overall consumption is compensated with more free time. Investments in mitigation are compensated with less investment in and more ‘using up’ of the conventional capital stock. This reasoning posits the suggested replaceabilities, assuming away the possibility that there are limits to what the future 'has' to offer us to change our current consumption preferences. Moreover, to an important extent the savings effect of investments in the conventional capital stock appears to be a bi-product rather than the aim of these investments. Finally, it is questionable if large changes in our lifestyles can be strategically effective given that reforms need to be made over the near term. Part II develops a strategy that shifts mitigation costs to the future but does not involve large changes in behaviour. Those in political power now commit the young and the adjacent generation to significant investments in mitigation. These commitments are then securitised creating a financial liability for failures to satisfy them. Enforcement of future mitigation commitments made today is achieved by exploiting future decision makers’ commitments to property rights regimes and the global financial system. Part III defends this type of cost shifting to the future as normatively justifiable.
