Infinite Responsibility - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 118

As I suggested in an earlier chapter, the harsh resistance to a carbon tax
or untax expresses the wish to protect individual liberty even from the
overriding demand to transmit a living biosphere to posterity. The fierce
defense of liberty defined in this way—a liberty free of obligations to
others or responsibility to the future—ultimately protects ir responsibil-
ity and a refusal of obligation, much as the tolerance of state power in the
abstract authorizes a potential abuse of power. The international inability
to respond to genocide is echoed in our general endorsement of the right
to drive SUVs, build excessively large homes, apply nitrogen-based fer-
tilizers to crops, or engage in mountaintop removal coal-mining. Taken
seriously, the perpetual complaint about environmental regulation voices
a demand that one have the right to use or abuse the Earth's resources as one
pleases , or more directly, the right to destroy . Such an insistence, I would
suggest, applies in one domain what the murderous abuse of state power
enacts in another.
This insistence on the rights of states or individuals makes clear what
is at stake in the habits of indifference and self-estrangement. We refuse
to mourn the violence of modern history primarily because we are its
beneficiaries—because it exemplifies, on a much broader scale, the
right to destroy that we claim for ourselves. We ultimately do not wish
to take responsibility for the violence that sustains us because our belief
in a certain liberty requires us to value that liberty more than responsi-
bility itself. Although we may deplore the exploitation that pervades the
world economy, we do not finally lament it, for we do not allow it to crack
open the notion of individual liberty or the reality of our relative eco-
nomic privilege.
The most direct way to overcome this flawed legacy is to renounce
the notion of an abstract, purely formal liberty—a right in the end to
destroy—and affirm instead our place in a web of relationships with fam-
ily, friends, neighbors, and partners at the workplace, with fellow citizens
in our locality, state, region, and nation, with the living beings who share
our habitats, with those who make the goods we use or who consume
what we produce, with those who share our humanity, with the dead and
the unborn, and with the Earth's dynamic, living systems. An abstract lib-
erty is as nothing compared to our power to respond and be responded