Will Climate Change Be Boomers’ Legacy To Millennials?
Climate change is the deadliest legacy we will leave the young; Property prices, pensions and austerity will pale into insignificance compared with the effects of global warming on the next generation
John Lanchester, 6 February 2019 (UK Guardian)
“…[The version of generational inequality] that existed in the developed world for much of the 20th century was based on the idea that life should be gradually more secure, more prosperous, healthier, and longer] from one generation to another…This model for a relationship between the generations has broken down…[A huge body of social science shows] the baby boomers ate all the pies…[And reports from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the projections of what a warmer world is going to look like, and how quickly it could arrive, show] we are facing the prospect of the most radical form of intergenerational inequality the world has ever seen.
…[It is not about different versions of the social and economic contract, but] fundamentally different maps of the world. A world four degrees warmer – the world for which we are heading, in some of the worst-case scenarios – is a world of floods, droughts, drowned cities and coastlines, crop failures, unprecedented levels of mass migration, and all of it arriving in the gap between three or even two generations. Of course, it’s possible we will get lucky…[and warming will create a world that is] hotter, but not uninhabitably, unimaginably so. But I don’t think we can just cross our fingers and hope for that. The need for intergenerational justice on the issue of the climate could not be stronger. The prospect of leaving a broken world for our descendants is the clearest call to action on climate change we will ever get.” click here for more
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