As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reaffirmed last week, global warming and climate change will devastate the lives of millions of people in the poorest parts of the world. Emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from Hong Kong are contributing to this devastation.
According to the Kyoto Protocol, as a region of China, Hong Kong is classified as a developing country and therefore not required to limit its greenhouse gas emissions. We are free, according to existing international law, to pollute to our hearts' content, regardless of the impact on the future's most vulnerable people.
From an international perspective, comparing, say, China with the United States, this makes sense because rich countries have been the largest polluters.
However, even though Hong Kong's pollution of the global atmosphere does not violate treaties, it is arguably immoral - and downright callous of us - to continue anything resembling business as usual. Any reasonable conception of social justice requires that a person stop the harm he or she is doing to others.
Justice demands not only that the most affluent polluting states do more to combat climate change, but also that the most affluent people do likewise.
Some might say that all of this is academic. After all, Hong Kong's greenhouse gas emissions are only 0.2 per cent of the global total. We could argue that climate change is not our fault because our individual pollution is very small.
This is true, but if everyone in the world who is as affluent as we are thought this way and behaved accordingly, the result could be quite large - especially as the number of affluent people here and in other parts of China grows into many millions.