There’s a particularly irritating conversation underway in the climate change activist community. An increasing number of voices are lauding millennials for their energy, enthusiasm, and thinking outside the box about climate change. Some folks have gone so far as to say that millennials will “save us.”
Other, more sober voices, say that the jury is still out on whether or not the millennial generation will be the one to solve the climate crisis – and just in the nick of time, it must be said.
But the conversation is happening, and the fact that this is even a discussion is more than a little troubling.
Climate change isn’t a one generation problem. There won’t – and can’t – be a single generation solution. We can’t fool ourselves into thinking that a single, small, generation of people will lead the way. Yes, the 15 year old activist at the Paris climate talks last December was inspiring. Here’s hoping his lawsuit bears fruit! But this sort of chatter about the children being our future seems to imply that some older progressives are ready to throw in the towel, write off the current Congress, and take a personal pass on implementing climate change solutions on either the micro or macro level, when in fact all Americans need to pitch in and work together.
First: Millennials didn’t build this – older people did. The remaining members of the Greatest and Silent Generations, the Boomers and the Gen X-ers – those are the Americans who principally participated in and benefitted from the high-carbon, fossil-fuel-intensive way of life that is causing anthropogenic climate change. If you helped create and sustain it, and if you enjoyed its fruits, oughtn’t you be responsible for doing more than mouthing platitudes about the children being the future? Shouldn’t you be the first to step up to the plate and declare that since you were a part of the problem, you should be an aggressive, active part of the solution? And if you enjoyed the carbon-generated lifestyle for decades, how can you justify asking younger people to make sacrifices you yourself won’t make? How can you expect that they will do the heavy lifting while you sit back and let them?
Second: To millennials, the current climate and weather are normal. They have never experienced a world like the one older Americans grew up in, with its lower temperatures, lower sea levels, and more clement weather. This is an important point. People over 50 – or even 40 – can remember what the world used to be like, bear witness, and act with a passion driven by having lived through the first years of climate change becoming in-your-face obvious. Yes, millennials will experience the effects of worsening climate change as it proceeds, but those of us who have inhabited that liminal space between “before” and the beginnings of “after” have a story to tell, and should feel an urgency that younger people – people more used to throngs of climate refugees, hellish wildfires and Biblical flooding – might not.
Third: Like it or not, the folks still in power aren’t millennials. The youngest candidate for president is 44 years old, born 13 months after the very first Earth Day.
Yes, Marco Rubio is an oleaginous, simpering, Christianist climate change denier, and if he managed to win the White House we could write off any action on climate for his entire term(s) – not to mention all the damage his (or any Republican) administration would do by rolling back the progress made by President Obama. That’s not the point. The point is that the corridors of power are still stuffed to the gills with older people, and will be for the next few election cycles.
While some, like Mitch McConnell and Jim Inhofe, are too marinated in fossil fuel money and ignorant evangelical bullpucky (respectively) to ever be convinced that they are on the wrong side of history, there are many others whose feet must be held to the fire until they get the message that climate is a number one priority.
It’s safe to say that there are no millennials among the thirty-one House Democrats who voted for the Keystone pipeline. John Barrow of Georgia is 60. Al Green of Texas is 68. Pennsylvania’s Mike Doyle is 62. Carolyn McCarthy of NY is 72, and so it goes.
Those weasly votes – from Democrats! some with decent environmental records! – were driven by political assumptions about what their constituents wanted. To pick on Mike Doyle again, it is of note that his 2014 League of Conservation Voters score was 89% – and yet he still caved on Keystone.
When constituents who want action on climate change are clamoring louder than other groups, we’ll get consistent action on the issue, and not before. Now is not the time to sit back, trust the Paris accords to work, and stop pushing. To implement change, we need government regulations. To get government regulations, we need to push – harder now than ever – on the folks already in Congress. Even those who are over 40.
And all Americans, personally, need to start walking the walk. Yes, we have to take the required political action (on all legislators – without giving senior members of the House and Senate a pass because of their age) and get out and vote our conscience on climate. But we also have to scale back our personal carbon footprints.
Shall I drone on through the nagging yadda yadda yadda of what that means? Surely we all know the litany by now. Drive less, scale back meat consumption, plant trees, turn off the air conditioning, live in a smaller and greener space, don’t buy fast fashion, blah blah blah. And we can’t expect that asking only younger people to make those sacrifices will be enough, because it won’t be. The American population is aging, and we’re living longer.
The recent Paris accord on climate was a first step – but it was just that. A first step.
Says Sarah Perkins from Australia’s Climate Change Research Centre, "current pledges in greenhouse gas reductions will only limit warming to 2.7 to 3°C by 2100".
That means that even if 100% of the countries who agreed to the accord actually accomplish 100% of what they pledged to do (where it is quantifiable), we’re still on track to blow through the 2 degrees of warming limit that scientists have decreed is the “magic number.”
Oh – and don’t forget – we don’t have 2.0 degrees to go to hit that limit. We’re already half way there!
We seem to be “locked into” 3 feet of sea level rise already.
"Given what we know now about how the ocean expands as it warms and how ice sheets and glaciers are adding water to the seas, it's pretty certain we are locked into at least 3 feet [0.9 meter] of sea level rise," said Steve Nerem of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and lead of the Sea Level Change Team. "But we don't know whether it will happen in 100 years or 200 years."
We don’t know a lot of other things, either, such as the exact temperature at which the entire Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets will melt, and what, precisely, would happen, and how soon.
And we don’t know if there are unknown feedback loops already in progress, and we’re looking at much more rapid sea level rise, much more quickly. To read more about that, see here and here.
In short, we don’t have time to wait for millennials to grow up, take the reins, and do the hard work that will be needed to combat climate change. It’s all hands on deck time.
Older people – the ones who got us into this scrape, whether wittingly or not (looking at you, Exxon Mobile) – need to put their shoulders to the wheel immediately. Even to have a conversation about who needs to do the innovation and hard work, and whether some folks are exempt, implies that it might somehow be okay to let a huge swath of Americans give up on action, throw up their hands, and talk in soaring tones about millennials and the future while turning up the A/C and going about their merry carbon-intensive business.
It’s hard to teach old dogs new tricks, and it will be a historically heavy lift to make the political and personal changes required to pull off the Big Dodge of halting and/or reversing climate change… and yet we must. All of us, even those with creaky knees and reading glasses, must participate. No one gets a free pass. The time is now. The task is daunting. But what other choice do we have?