Discounting the future
I'd like to further explore the interesting phenomenon of discounting the future. It's well known that people have a strong tendency to discount the future, and in a non-linear fashion. Two years out is discounted more than twice as much as one year, IME. No doubt there are very sound reasons why humans do this, immediate survival reasons.
Marshall's link in the most recent GW thread points out how this is the key dynamic in the failure to slow carbon emissions. Most people discount the future so strongly that they would not save for old age. Hence social security programs - forced old age pensions. So of course very few indeed will plan for future generations in a time when they themselves will be gone.
Social security programs work when there is lots of wealth in a society. Some of the excess wealth is distributed to those who failed to plan, to save, to curtail present consumptions. Could something similar be done to prepare for climate change effects?
A deep future tax, taken in the form of reserved fossil fuels, unburnt. The governments gather the tax now, and buy portions of reserves to be left in the ground for future generations to decide what to do with. The tax would of course have be calibrated by income or assets. Politically possible?