214 Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, Vol. 8 No. 2 short-term, negative emissions in the intermediate term buy no time. With or without the later negative emissions, the methane emissions in the next decades do their damage – both the resulting thermal expansion and the basal melting of ice sheets will, each by its own mechanism, produce higher sea-levels and contract the land area safe for humans. ‘Buying time’ on mitigation is a scientifically naive fantasy. Peters is correct that no NET is a ‘get-out-of-jail-free card’. 6 MORAL CORRUPTION In sum, we have seen two serious objections to any reliance on BECCS that underwrites a compromise of the ambitiousness and urgency of the mitigation of carbon emissions in the near and intermediate terms: (I) BECCS may either simply not work at a sufficiently large scale to make enough difference globally or work at scale only at unacceptable costs to food security or sustainable development caused by diversion of land, water, or both; and (II) in any case reliance on future BECCS unjustly transfers risk to vulnerable people of the future who are at our mercy. Moreover, (III) even if some NETs worked at scale with acceptable costs, none of them could ‘buy time’ that would make current inaction cost-free, but all would instead simply permit long-term climate changes to proceed apace in the interim. In so far as the purpose for counting now on deploying NETs in the future is to avoid causing expense or inconvenience to those of us who can easily afford far more ambitious mitigation now, our self-regarding plan blocks the future provision of necessities to the less well-off in order to preserve the existing conveniences of us better-off. Sacrificing the poorer to benefit the richer is the clearest possible case of injustice. As I put it in 1992, ‘even in an emergency one pawns the jewellery before selling the blankets’.29 To keep our own jewellery now we risk forcing others to sell their blankets later. In so far as it is future poorer people who are sacrificed for present richer people, this constitutes specifically one kind of blatant intergenerational injustice. Scientists are not to be faulted for exploring all options, including plans B, C, etc. But how can policy-makers lazily indulge in patently unfair policies that de facto substitute dreamed-of future NETs for actual current mitigation? This may be an especially clear example of what Stephen M Gardiner calls ‘moral corruption’. Moral corruption is actually corrupt reasoning, but the reasoning is corrupted by a moral failing constituted by assigning inordinate weight to one’s own well-being at the price of the well-being of others that justice would require one to respect. The ‘core case of corruption’ is ‘illegitimate taking advantage of a position of superior power for the sake of personal gain’.30 Living people have superior power over future people, rich people have superior power over poor people, and humans have superior power over non-human lives. Moral corruption takes the form of buck-passing: the living passing sacrifices on to future people, the rich passing burdens on to the poor, and humans advancing their interests at great costs, including extinction, for non-humans. Risk transfer may be one form of buck-passing. The buck-passing is licensed by corrupt reasoning such as self-deception or rationalization that ‘prevents us from even seeing the problem in the right way’,31 which Gardiner beautifully illustrates with a detailed reading of the reasoning by which the characters John and Fanny 29. Shue (n 24) 46. 30. Gardiner (n 14) at 304. 31. Ibid at 301. © 2017 The Author Journal compilation © 2017 Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd