[Excerpt from upcoming book — It’s Getting Hot in Here: Reflections of a climate hawk grappling with the inevitable]
It was a moment when the ground shifted beneath our collective feet. Greta Thunberg, a Swedish high school student who once stood alone on ‘climate strike’ in front of the Swedish Riksdag (Parliament) now stood in front of a large crowd of global political leaders at the UN General Assembly. The year was 2019. Similar crowds had been gathering at high profile UN-sponsored climate events for more than two decades. Many talking heads had spoken with passion over the years. Greta herself made an impassioned speech the year before, but this moment was different. Greta’s speech was electrifying. It was, in the words of philosopher Peter Singer “the most powerful four-minute speech I have ever heard”. In part, she said:
“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope? How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you! … You are failing us… But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.”
Greta’s clear articulation of the significance and certainty of what lay ahead sparked a degree of moral indignation that could no longer be brushed off. Her repeated insistence that we ‘follow the science’ was tactically brilliant, grounded in hard numbers. She dismissed the usual counter-arguments to action of political difficulty, complexity of energy systems and accusations of naivete. She was an example to young people all over the world who, when they plucked up the courage to ask adults what they/we were doing about climate risk, would get: ‘It’s complicated. Worry about this later. Don’t be naive.’ Thanks to Greta, those responses to young people’s demands for action don’t fly any more.
And those demands now came from inside our homes at a time of deep collective insecurity. Just after Greta’s speech, COVID hammered every nation and family on earth. Kids and parents were stuck at home throughout a pandemic that shook any remaining complacency about our collective security or mastery over nature. It can’t be measured, but my deep intuition is a lot of family dinner conversations got really awkward. Corporate and political leaders had long isolated themselves from criticisms of complicity, inaction or outright guilt. No longer. You can’t hide from your own kids and grandkids. I’ve met board members of pension funds who didn’t know the difference between soot and carbon dioxide. Nor did they care to. Awkward conversations hadn’t penetrated their social bubble and psychological defences. Until their grandkids fired off Greta-inspired questions over the family dinner table.
Theirs was an effective moral clarion call. I think it no co-incidence it wasn’t until shortly after the combination of COVID and Greta’s fame that capital started flowing at scale[1] to cleantech and climate and corporate targets ramped up to what seemed impossible only months earlier — net zero. This happened just when young people across the globe took the climate conversation away from adults, brought it out of boardrooms and into dining rooms and drained it of fake complexity to reveal its underlying simplicity. Kids know they’re going to be hammered by climate. What was an inarticulate but deeply felt anxiety is now focussed anger and fear. Which — thanks to Greta — was clearly expressed and confidently defended. And there was someone to blame: adults. It’s a mistake to underestimate this anger, and what it means as these kids become adults.
What makes Greta and her young activist peers so effective is not just the moral clarity of their position but against whom their accusation of wrongdoing is aimed. There’s an enemy, and it’s us. Regardless of whether you agree we deserve the blame, it’s clear to them we do. The Climate Strikes Greta inspired will grow. Movements like Extinction Rebellion in the UK will spread. Their tactics will get more aggressive, their anger more intense. While many tut-tut their antics — gluing themselves to paintings, blocking intersections — for them it’s deadly serious. The paintings are not important[2], the inconvenience of commuters is currency to use. That’s the point many adults don’t get yet: this is existential to them, it’s not for us. They know we’ll fade into the ground long before they reap the whirlwind of our complacency.
Climate disruption marks the first time in modern history a generation will not be forgiven because this the first time a generation’s struggle isn’t couched in terms of good against evil. This battle is good against lazy. Our enemy is ourselves: getting off our butts, out of our SUV’s, and on with a low-carbon economic strategy. On their view, and with justification, we just can’t be bothered.
Generation upon generation, going back through prehistory, bore some portion of the shared burden of human progress. As I speak the Ukrainians are showing the world what it means to believe in something enough to endure unimaginable deprivation and pain in leaning against hard power. Our grandparents went to war, and for that display of outright courage against tyranny became the Greatest Generation. The struggles to build responsive government after the Great Depression gave all of us better economic security. The Victorians endured long, hard labour as the industrial revolution launched. And so on, back through history and prehistory.
The struggles of previous generations — against war, injustice, famine, political repression — tend, however imperfectly or slowly, toward the betterment of ourselves and a better world for our kids. The human story is one where succeeding generations inherit and renovate political, social and economic structures. We work. We sacrifice. We make progress. Martin Luther King, Jr., reminded us “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”. So too the arc of progress bends slowly but surely away from economic turbulence and military conflict toward progress and security.
All generations make mistakes. Until now, each could be fixed, the error leveraged to raise moral ambition and refine political systems. Sexual and political revolutionaries of the Sixties rejected the strict mores and racism of their parents. Modern Germans understand tyranny better than most and became better global citizens for it. Modern South Africans know forgiveness in ways I never will. Russians too, will eventually find a way to reject Putin’s hard nationalism once they lose their war of aggression in Ukraine and confront their own history. New generations forgive those who came before because the world moves on as we learn from our mistakes. But the world can’t move on from our climate complacency. This mistake will echo for centuries. The kids can’t fix it. This coming generation feels not only anger, but despair.
We are today the penultimate beneficiaries of centuries of human progress. We sit on the shoulders of countless giants who came before. Yet on climate we show no remotely comparable collective courage or sacrifice. Indeed, we appear deeply self-absorbed and weak by comparison. The image of an American Senator pointing to a giant black SUV and speaking of ‘freedom’ or bankers funding another round of oil exploration — these make for a lousy record seen in the broad sweep of history that lands on a carbon-soaked atmosphere, collapsed ecosystems and deep social unrest. The inconvenience of limiting energy use and inability to confront the soft power of the fossil fuel industry is a colossal failure of collective character by a generation who had it all.
Make no mistake: Bad Warming can undo much of human progress. Climate pressure can make worthless those historic struggles as civic and physical infrastructure buckle. We may undo centuries of progress because … what? We couldn’t stare down an oil executive? Vote? Insulate the attic, get out of our SUVs and turn down the air-conditioning? Accept a higher discount rate in our financial models? There is no heroism here.
And so we can expect ever-increasing anger of coming generations. The intergenerational conflict will harden in tone and consequence. Future adults across the political spectrum will know full well this generation didn’t have the guts to really try. And they’ll be fully aware the consequences are effectively forever.
Today we’re experiencing a few young people’s anger at what they believe will happen later. Few risk arrest and ridicule to protest against future dangers. Many more will get angry when these events occur. A generation experiencing Bad Warming in real time will not be represented by a few activists. They will act in concert to express their outrage and fear.
Perhaps I overstate the scale and importance of future hostility aimed at us: baselines and expectations shift as people adapt to a degraded world; our kids (and theirs) share a sense of guilt; they accept mitigating climate risk was too hard; besides, who wants to hold a grudge? Perhaps. But I doubt it. Climate solutions are close to hand. It’ll be obvious in retrospect mitigation was possible, we just started too late and never make it a priority. We were lazy.
The intergenerational conflict identified by Greta and her peers will not diminish. So what now? It’s amazing what an apology can do. Many South Africans discovered that during their Truth and Reconciliation process, as do many victims and perpetrators of aggression. We’ve begun similar work in Canada. There’s a reason Courts emphasize remorse, honestly felt and clearly communicated. Rather than tut-tutting activists’ tactics, better to get on bended knee and ask forgiveness. Understand young people’s anger, don’t dismiss it out of hand because your favourite painting has to have plexiglass on it. And maybe they’ll be nice to us when we’re old and fragile.
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[1] In 2019 at the start of COVID, there were maybe a half dozen climate-tech focussed funds in North America. There are now more than a hundred, with new fund managers appearing each week.
[2] That the chattering class of adults tut-tut at soup thrown at paintings covered in plexi-glass says more about them than the activist kids.
