Postericide

Over lunch, the conversation turned to the end of humanity as Catriona McKinnon presented her forthcoming book with MIT Press, introducing the concept of postericide and arguing that deliberately causing human extinction should be recognized as a new international crime.

As with many in the field, McKinnon seems fixated on “fossil capital” without recognizing the globally shared benefits of fossil fuels, from plastics to the natural gas used to produce the synthetic fertilizers that help feed billions of people. More importantly, however, she seems to miss the bigger picture of technological evolution. To return to one of my favourite examples, climate ethicists might condemn a nineteenth-century steam locomotive without recognizing that today's electric trains are themselves downstream of the same technological lineage. The problem is that we cannot know where technological evolution will take us, making precaution a deeply problematic guiding principle. After all, there is no safe baseline to which we can simply retreat. We cannot know what dangers technological development may unleash, but neither can we know what possibilities for human flourishing, or even survival, might be lost by holding it back. In a world of so many unmet needs, I would rather embrace a proactionary principle through which we democratically pursue the futures we want, recognizing that every technology comes with its downsides and that we must choose among different bundles of risks and benefits in ways that expand our capacity to collective shape the future.

As for the legal framing, I find it just as socially destructive as the use of climate attribution science to pursue litigation over losses of wealth and infrastructure that might never have existed without fossil-fuelled economic development in the first place. Rather than turning climate change into an endless source of legal conflict, it seems far more fruitful to accelerate technological innovation until fossil fuels become not only environmentally undesirable but economically obsolete.

And finally, if we are to play McKinnon's game of pointing fingers at ExxonMobil, Darren Woods, or Mohammed bin Salman, I would argue that Greenpeace deserves an equal share of scrutiny. After decades of spreading non-scientific anti-nuclear propaganda, surely the organization must also bear some responsibility for delaying the transition away from fossil fuels. If we are to assign moral blame for putting humanity's future at risk, why should that blame extend only to those who promoted fossil fuels, and not to those who opposed the most promising alternative?