208 Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, Vol. 8 No. 2 4 RISK TRANSFER This brings us to the second level of unacceptable moral costs. The first level of unjustifiable costs discussed above is that we might in fact undermine food security or sustainable development by causing absolute shortages or mal-distributions of food as a result of appropriating land or water for BECCS. But someone might respond that this is all quite speculative. Who knows how much the global population will grow? Who knows what changes in diet or food production methods or water purification methods might occur so that even the extensive withdrawal of water or land from food production would do no harm? I acknowledge that the case for this danger is somewhat conjectural – we certainly do not have firm knowledge about all dimensions of the human situation decades hence. On the other hand, most of the key conjectures seem quite plausible, and I think it is reasonable to rely on them until specific reasons not to rely on one of them arise. A deeper point, however – and the second level of unacceptable moral costs – is that, as Anderson and Peters claim, it is unjust to create a gamble in which, if it goes badly, the losers are people who are totally vulnerable to us, the poorer people of the future whose food supply we are gambling with, and, if it goes well, the winners are ourselves, the well-off of the present who might otherwise invest more heavily in ambitious mitigation now to try to guarantee that excessively extensive BECCS is not necessary later to stabilize future climate. It would not only be wrong in fact to create food deprivation – it is also wrong to gamble on producing a situation in which creating food deprivation is one of only two extremely bad alternatives, the other being severe climate change, both of which might occur. The BECCS gamble shares four crucial structural features with the following analogy. Suppose I propose that you take a six-shot revolver with a bullet in one chamber, spin the chambers, and pull the trigger with the barrel against the head of a sleeping person. If the revolver does not fire – most likely, of course – I will pay you £750 (I find watching this gamble exciting!); if it fires, you receive nothing (and the sleeper will probably be killed). First, this is not a gamble in which the same person will either win or lose; instead, one person may win and a different person may lose. Second, the person who runs the risk does not receive the reward. The reward goes to someone who ran no risk but imposed the risk on the other – a situation of all risk, no possible reward. Third, the winnings of the potential winner, while not utterly inconsequential, are relatively minor, while the loss of the potential loser is grave. Fourth, the potential loser has not consented to the gamble, and the winner could not possibly compensate the loser. To take (or offer) this gamble is outrageous, bordering on psychotic. Compare the climate gamble, which consists of some people of the present saving themselves the extra effort and expense that would be required by more ambitious mitigation now at the risk that some people of the future, who have no say in the gamble and are entirely at the mercy of what people in the present decide to do, may be forced to endure either extremes of climate that their current BECCS is not adequate to prevent or extremes of deprivation of their food security because of the water and land required to raise BECCS to an adequate scale. In this gamble too the people of the present may gain something inconsequential, the people of the future may suffer grave losses, and the people of the future are completely vulnerable to decisions by people now. This too would have been an unjustly outrageous gamble to have taken, even if in fact everything turned out well. ‘Turning out well’ in this case could mean at best that people now avoid some extra effort and expense, and people in future suffer no grave damage because, in © 2017 The Author Journal compilation © 2017 Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd