More (#1) from Worst-Case Scenarios:

For advocates of cost-benefit analysis, a particularly thorny question is how to handle future generations when they are threatened by worst-case scenarios. According to standard practice, money that will come in the future must be "discounted"; a dollar twenty years hence is worth a fraction of a dollar today. (You would almost certainly prefer $1,000 now to $1,000 in twenty years.) Should we discount future lives as well? Is a life twenty years hence worth a fraction of a life today? I will argue in favor of a Principle of Intergenerational Neutrality - one that requires the citizens of every generation to be treated equally. This principle has important implications for many problems, most obviously climate change. Present generations are obliged to take the interests of their threatened descendents as seriously as they take their own.

But the Principle of Intergenerational Neutrality does not mean that the present generation should refuse to discount the future, or should impose great sacrifices on itself for the sake of those who will come later. If human history is any guide, the future will be much richer than the present; and it makes no sense to say that the relatively impoverished present should transfer its resources to the far wealthier future. And if the present generation sacrifices itself by forgoing economic growth, it is likely to hurt the future too, because long-term economic growth is likely to produce citizens who live healthier, longer, and better lives. I shall have something to say about what intergenerational neutrality actually requires, and about the complex relationship between that important ideal and the disputed practice of "discounting" the future.

But at least so far in the book, Sunstein doesn't mention the obvious rejoinder about investing now to prevent existential catastrophe.

Anyway, another quote:

Why was the Montreal Protocol so much more successful than the Kyoto Protocol? I shall suggest here that both the success in Montreal and the mixed picture in Kyoto were driven largely by decisions of the United States, based on a domestic cost-benefit analysis. To the United States, the monetized benefits of the Montreal Protocol dwarfed the monetized costs, and hence the circumstances were extremely promising for American support and even enthusiasm for the agreement. As we will see, the United States had so much to lose from depletion of the ozone layer that it would have been worthwhile for the nation unilaterally to take the steps required by the Montreal Protocol. For the world as a whole, the argument for the Montreal Protocol was overwhelming.

But careful analysis and economic rationality were not the whole story: The nation's attention was also riveted by a vivid image, the ominous and growing "ozone hole" over Antarctica. Ordinary people could easily understand the idea that the earth was losing a kind of "protective shield," one that operated as a safeguard against skin cancer, a dreaded condition.