 The preservation of opportunities to live well, or at least to have a minimally acceptable level of well being, is at the heart of  population ethics  and many contemporary conceptions of sustainability. Many people believe such opportunities for the existing younger generations, and also for the yet to arrive future generations, to be under threat from continuing environmental destruction, including loss of fresh water resources, continued clearing of wild areas, decreasing biodiversity and a changing climate thus raising questions not only about sustainability but also about environmental justice (see Gonzalez, Atapattu, and Seck 2021). Of these, climate change has come to prominence as an area of intense policy and political debate, to which applied philosophers and ethicists were slow to contribute (Heath 2021). An early exploration of the topic by John Broome shows how the economics of climate change could not be divorced from considerations of intergenerational justice and ethics (Broome 1992), and this has set the scene for subsequent discussions and analyses (see the entry on  climate justice).  More than a decade later, when Stephen Gardiner analyses the state of affairs surrounding climate change in an article entitled “A Perfect Moral Storm” (Gardiner 2006), his starting point is also that ethics plays a fundamental role in all discussions of climate policy. But he argues that even if difficult ethical and conceptual questions facing climate change (such as the so-called  “non-identity problem”  along with the notion of  historic injustices)  could be answered, it would still be close to politically and socially impossible to formulate, let alone to enforce, policies and action plans to deal effectively with climate change. This is due to the multi-faceted nature of a problem that involves vast numbers of agents and players. At a global level, there is first of all the practical problem of motivating shared responsibilities (see the entry on  moral motivation)  in part due to the dispersed nature of greenhouse gas emissions which makes the effects of increasing levels of atmospheric carbon and methane not always felt most strongly in the regions where they originate. Add to this the fact that there is an un-coordinated and also dispersed network of agents—both individual and corporate—responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, and that there are no effective institutions that can control and limit them. But this tangle of issues constitutes, Gardiner argues, only one strand in the skein of quandaries that confronts us. There is also the fact that by and large only the future (and perhaps the current younger) generations will carry the brunt of the impacts of climate change, explaining why so many people in the current generations seem not to have strong enough incentive to act. Finally, he argues it is evident that mainstream political, economic, and ethical models are not up to the task of reaching global consensus, and in many cases not even national consensus, on how best to design and implement fair climate policies. Some consequentialist theorists, however, have argued that a form of  rule consequentialism  can take account of the interests of future generations who may be inhabiting a "broken world" (Mulgan 2011, 2017). Mulgan argues that by imagining a broken world of limited resources and precarious human survival, it may be possible to devise an ideal moral ooutlook that differs from the ideal code of many rule consequentialists who usually presuppose that the future will be just like the present.