If you were to ask me why so many folks are attacking members of the Baby Boom Generation lately, I’d point you to the latest United Nations report on climate change.
Four years after countries struck a landmark deal in Paris to rein in greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to avert the worst effects of global warming, humanity is headed toward those very climate catastrophes, according to a United Nations report issued Tuesday, with China and the United States, the two biggest polluters, having expanded their carbon footprints last year.
“The summary findings are bleak,” the report said, because countries have failed to halt the rise of greenhouse gas emissions even after repeated warnings from scientists. The result, the authors added, is that “deeper and faster cuts are now required.”
I’m from Generation X and I just turned fifty years old. There are only a handful of U.S. Senators who are younger than me. We’re just coming into our natural time of peak power, and we have nothing but messes not of our own making to deal with. The younger generations feel even more aggrieved, since they have even less responsibility for the state of the world.
I firmly believe that we will soon wash away the gridlock and many of the idiotic political disputes that are the legacy and obsession of the Baby Boomers, but that won’t make it any less of a daunting task to fix what they let fester.
I’ve got a nine year old son and two stepsons in their twenties. Here is what they have to look forward to:
Amid that growing pressure to act, Tuesday’s U.N. report offers a grim assessment of how off-track the world remains. Global temperatures are on pace to rise as much as 3.9 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, according to the United Nations’ annual “emissions gap” report, which assesses the difference between the world’s current path and the changes needed to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris climate accord…
…Should that pace continue, scientists say, the result could be widespread, catastrophic effects: Coral reefs, already dying in some places, would probably dissolve in increasingly acidic oceans. Some coastal cities, already wrestling with flooding, would be constantly inundated by rising seas. In much of the world, severe heat, already intense, could become unbearable.
You can add stronger storms, widespread drought and famine, and an extremely inhospitable environment for peaceful coexistence.
I don’t really think the Boomers deserve all the blame for inaction on climate. It’s more that they’ve created a situation where action on anything is impossible, and an inability to be proactive on climate is just the most important consequence of that.
I know one thing for certain. As Generation X takes the reins of power over the next decade, they will be looking for help from younger people, not their older brothers and sisters or their parents. They don’t seem to be able to agree that climate change is even occurring and half of them think they can Make America Great Again by burning more fossil fuels.
Born in 1944, I completely agree that the “Boomers” have a great deal to answer for, and history will not be kind — if there are any historians in 100 years. Boomers got an undeserved reputation as liberals because of opposition to the Vietnam War. Most just objected to being drafted. I was there n the 60’s, and I know.
In addition to largely ignoring climate change, my generation has supported the destruction of the middle class dream. We enjoyed cheap public universities and chopped Public funding for them ever since. The same with other programs that made the middle class what it was until Reagan.
It is not completely too late for Boomers to redeem themselves in relation to climate change, but I fear that will not happen. God help the young. The world we are leaving them is a tragedy that could have been avoided.
I’m not big on this notion of dividing people up by arbitrarily set notions of what constitutes a generation. That said, older Americans have been selfish on many fronts. As an example, after getting nearly free education, they have been unwilling to pay the taxes necessary to help the next generation. This climate change problem is a yet more consequential result.
I’m not sure how it will end. It doesn’t help that the biggest polluters are not the ones who will suffer most. There are Pacific islands that will disappear. There are regions close to the equator that will become positively uninhabitable. The U.S. will suffer less and has resources to ameliorate many of the consequences for quite a while. So it’s not looking good.
On the other hand, the ozone issue proved that the world is capable of working collectively toward a common goal. It’s going to be a huge push because we’ve waited so long and of course the longer we wait the more that will be true. Whether the world is going to suffer mass starvation is not yet clear but things are looking grim. Even our extinction as a species is a real possibility.
Practically speaking, 2020 is an opportunity to do radical change – instead of playing it safe. It seems like a big mistake to choose a non-Bernie or non-Warren candidate just because there are a significant number of people in this country who are not yet ready to do what is needed, either due to their age, their wealth, their tribal identity with whatever isn’t associated with Democrats and city dwellers.
If the youth fail to turn out the vote for their interests, they own this damn mess too.
And it doesn’t end with 2020. It’s going to take sustained engagement by all many of people to make things happen.
I mean, we are fucked right?
Brett Kavanaugh Is Ready to Join the Supreme Court’s Conservatives to Tear Down Key Federal Regulations
So the court is going to prevent the executive from doing anything on climate change or regulating carbon emissions. Either we will burn, or the next Democratic President is going to have to ignore the court and destroy judicial review. Oh well.
Meanwhile:
Yup, the dismantling of the modern state, coming down the pike probably in 2021.
Again, without developing a rhetoric of the democratic illegitimacy of the Trumpite Court’s 5 man “conservative” majority, I do not see how the left can even begin to oppose the designs of the “conservative” movement. Yet no one will touch the subject, let alone loose the rhetorical fire needed. And it needs to begin sooner rather than later.
Someone has already suggested this but it bears repeating and for emphasis. Some parts of this earth could well become too hot to live and it will literally kill people. But who cares, certainly not those who you might expect to lead the effort to mitigate the disaster. More taxes? You are kidding right? We need more coal.It would appear Martin is absolutely right. The only way forward is to push the old farts and the elite out of the way. Let’s hope we are not too late. Trump and his minions are standing across the road.
My generation is like a roommate that uses all the toilet paper but one single square…..and then asks what your complaining about.
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I sometimes feel that we are in the capital city of a country that is badly losing a war. The enemy armies are 50 miles away, and we are starting to hear their guns. But in the meantime, everyone goes about their lives as normal, going to work, going to restaurants, still enjoying themselves. Some people are in complete denial; others are starting to get an inkling that maybe the war is not going well. Hardly anyone is really willing to face the fact that, absent a miracle victory, things are going to collapse completely sometime in the next few weeks.
It’s a nice conceit, with a grain of truth naturally, but of course many (liberal) Boomers were quite aware of the approaching climate catastrophe by 1990, led by Boomer Gore. Had the nation’s proper history line not been destroyed by the electoral college, the “conservative” movement and the 5 “conservatives” on the Supreme Court manufacturing the Stolen Election of 2000, things might have been different.
I’m delighted to start casting blame about for the coming destruction of the 11,000 year old stable climate and the ongoing 6th mass extinction of innocent species, but I have to say that a far more appropriate candidate for blame is the American “conservative” movement and those (“conservative”-created) plutocrats that funded this criminal enterprise. Had we as a nation taken the alarm bells seriously (in 1990!) when America really was the global superpower and had immense soft power to accomplish things of global reach, it is possible that effective global action to curb CO2 could have been undertaken. In those days, China had not yet been turned into the world’s low cost all-purpose manufacturer by multi-national plutocrats and we had immense leverage over their economic (and energy) future. But the American “conservative” movement instead operated immediately to turn global warming into a purely partisan matter, effectively making American leadership on the issue impossible for the critical decades, 1990-2010.
And what they began in 1990 has turned to stone by 2020–we still have the same braindead turds effectively denying the science[!] and insanely adopting policies to increase fossil fuel supplies, using ever more environmentally disastrous techniques. And still (as a minority faction) using the anti-democratic mechanisms of the failed constitution to accomplish the destruction. Unfortunately, the “success” of denialism by American “conservatives” in the 90s emboldened other denialist movements in other Western states–although (with far less braindead populations and media systems) most of those states had come around by the time of the (far too late and far too many dollars short) Paris Accords. Only America had to accept the accords without legislative consent, and of course our political minority faction (operating via the failed constitution) had to wreck even that tardy effort in 2019.
So definitely bring on the blame for the coming climate calamity, just as the (imagined?) historians of the future will have to do, since it will have been the reason for the coming collapse of human society and all the world’s natural ecosystems. But let’s be open to the idea that it’s not necessarily a generational matter (indeed, there are many, many 20-something National Trumpalist monster pick-up drivin’ denialists out there as well….and they give aid and comfort to much more prevalent Boomer “conservatives”! ) In my view, the natural climate was intentionally destroyed for purely economic reasons, largely implemented by a reactionary political movement active in the world’s largest economy at the dawn of the 21st Century.
Excellent comment.
Hear, hear!