The moral right to resource extraction

Reading a post by Chris Dillow on the Paternalist Conspiracy about how we should have a form of pre-life insurance got me thinking about environmentalism. Given the historical evidence that almost everything is better now than it was in the past thanks to technological progress it is fairly safe to extrapolate that things will be even better in the future than they are now (unless the greenies get there way that is).

Now given the fact that life is getting better if we had the kind of rational pre-life insurance market that Chris Dillow argues for then the better off people, in the future, should pay a compensation to the less well off, those living now. Not having access to a temporal cash machine they cannot compensate us that way, but we can gain compensation by using resources instead of leaving them for the future. We do not owe it to the future to leave the earth pristine, they owe it to us to compensate us for not having their flying cars, robot housemaids, extraterrestrial blue skinned babes, or all the other things that we cannot even think of now.