Can Elderly World Leaders Implement Climate Change Requirements?

 

Can Elderly World Leaders Implement Climate Change Requirements?

Without Including Members of the Younger Generations Most Affected

Americans are notoriously callous to eliminating risks to their children, if there is inconvenience to the older generations. Noting that 2018 was a banner year for student shootings causing death or injury (the year of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School [Parkland, FL] mass killing), as of May 19th (according to tracking by NBC News): “Since 2013, 73 people have been killed and 132 injured in 50 school shootings, according to a school shooting tracker NBC News is making public. As of May 19, 2022, it has been 27 days since the last school shooting.” Gun laws in red states continue to be relaxed. But between “active shooter” drills and available Kevlar school backpacks, too many voters think that society has already done enough to save our kids from being shot in their schools. More would be inconvenient to gun advocates.

Swedish teenaged climate change activist, Greta Thunberg, has also taken up the mantle against an even bigger threat to the youngest and most vulnerable people on earth, many too young to vote in societies that allow voting. Children who are going to face the biggest impact of climate change. The searing heat in South Asia, devastating superstorms multiplying in both frequency and intensity, flooding all over the world, rising oceans about to swallow island nations, desertification destroying food-producing land and wildfires decimating forests everywhere… well, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Greta reminds us: “‘People are more generally aware now. The climate and the environment is a hot topic. But - and it's a big but: From another perspective, pretty much nothing has been done,’ she said… Citing parts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that came out in 2018, she said that if we are to have a 67 per cent chance of limiting the global average temperature rise to below 1.5 degrees Celsius [2.7 degrees Fahrenheit], we had on January 1st, 2018, about 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit in that budget. ‘... of course, that number is much lower today, as we emit, about 42 gigatons of CO2 every year, including in land use. With today's emissions levels, that remaining budget is gone within less than eight years’” as of 2022. BusinessToday, India. May 19th.

Again, older incumbent industries – particularly in the fossil fuel energy sector – and the politicians who rely on their campaign contributions, the workers in those industries, and the governments who rely on tax revenues from fossil fuel production… along with the consumers used to living well with fossil fuels… would be inconvenienced if we transition to alternative energy sources as quickly as natural science conclusively tells us we must. That there are millions of jobs waiting to be filled in the new side of industrial “non-fossil-fuel” growth, well, that transition would still be inconvenient.

That billions of people will suffer (with many deaths) in the immediate future, perhaps hitting irreversible tipping points, is such a shame, but stopping greenhouse emissions quickly is just too inconvenient. Picture the vast tundra (permafrost) that melts every year, eliminating sun-reflecting ice along the way, releasing methane (23 times heavier than carbon dioxide) which has begun to create a vicious circle of melting, releasing methane, thus melting more, and so on.

Indeed, the rising demand for electric cars this year is less motivated by environmental concerns than it is from the inconvenience of skyrocketing prices at the pump. Younger generations, accurately assessing that the major political parties around the world aren’t about to inconvenience older generations (a demographic that includes most of the politicians capable of implementing the necessary change) with an accelerated transition to alternative energy, don’t vote anymore, even when they can. Frustration at the do-nothing process. See my May 4th Is Politics a Solution or Disease? - Ask the Rising Generation blog. We stupidly use terms like “by the end of the century” for climate change statistics, which pushes change off the table for voters over 40. Kick that can down the road! The problems we face today often address an immediate disaster separately without linking it as an obvious result of climate change.

Since it would be inconvenient for politicians around the world to force the existential changes to our approach to energy, the band aids just keep flowing. And things just get worse. Superstar academics, Giovanni Maggi, Yale University, Howard H. Leach Professor of Economics & International Affairs and co-author of a climate study, Robert W. Staiger of Dartmouth, put it simply, writing about the inadequacy of global climate treaties for a report from the Yale Economic Growth Center (May 19th summary): “One of the main points of the paper is to call attention to a limitation of international agreements that have not been highlighted by previous academic research: the simple fact that they are contracts between countries within a generation. By necessity, future generations are excluded from these contracts.”

The authors believe that serious action will take place only in one of two scenarios: “One we call the ‘Common Brink’ scenario. Here, the whole world faces a common brink of catastrophe. All countries stand or fall together. The other one is a scenario where there are more and less vulnerable countries. They differ in their risk and vulnerability, so some would collapse before others if the climate keeps warming.”

The problem, of course, is that what older people implement now will irretrievably impact all future generations, who are not part of the decision-making process. While Maggi and Staiger may disagree, the presumed intergenerational “altruism” of parents caring for their children and grandchildren does not seem to be motivating meaningful climate change policies that are needed now… because it is inconvenient to those older generations and industrial incumbents.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I worry about the amount of climate-related devastation it will take for the world to save its children and their children… if it still can.