Climate Descendants

One of my friends who gets my newsletter saw the one I sent about Arbor Day, and asked me to appear at a small, local ceremony on April 26^th, the actual date for that Holiday.

The weather was sunny and beautiful as about 50 kids from Grades k-4 gathered on the lawn at a local park to plant two maple trees (with help from a local landscaping company).

I was asked to make remarks about trees and climate change, and in thinking about what I would say I reminded myself that I really shouldn’t get too detailed. For example, I decided I should probably not use the term carbon dioxide, and instead talk about carbon pollution.

The head of the school introduced me and said I was there to talk about climate change, and so my first comment was in the form of a question; I asked how many of them had heard about climate change. Almost every hand shot up. I then asked what it was. At least a dozen hands went up. The child that I called on proceeded to talk to me about how carbon dioxide is building up in the atmosphere and creating a blanket around the earth and making it warmer.

So much for dumbing down climate change for this group. I said to the girl who had spoken, “maybe I should sit down, and you can do the rest of the presentation!”

We then had a 20 minute-plus Q&A that featured no stupid questions or comments from the kids. They asked about deforestation. They asked why electric cars are good. They asked about the coral reefs. They asked about carbon dioxide from factories and cars.

What they didn’t ask me about was the future, and I have to say that I was expecting one of them to do that given the way that the conversation was going. We came close when they talked about what the “change” in climate change meant for animals. I admit that I was not looking forward to a future-oriented question.

The reason they probably didn’t ask about their future was that as sophisticated as they seemed to be in understanding global warming and climate change, they were too young to connect the dots that lead to visualization of the bad- and worst-case climate scenarios. They were also too young to have participated in any of the young person polls that show the high levels of climate anxiety in young people today.

This is 2024 and let’s say the average age of the kids I spoke to was 7. That means that these kids will be in their early 30’s when 2050 comes around, which is the target date upon which so many emission reduction pledges and plans are built. Yet those pledges and plans are falling by the wayside as countries and companies pull them back because of their cost and/or their favorability with the public and other stakeholders.

The pledges where follow-up action is faltering is also on the personal, individual front. Recent work at Yale shows that even Americans who say they will definitely/probably do some things on climate change didn’t do them. Sign a petition, even online, about global warming? 51% percent say they would; 16% actually do it. Contact a government official about global warming? 28% to 8%. 

So, what are these kids supposed to do when 2050 comes around?

Climate change is not the only thing in their future. They will be faced with a need to solidify Social Security and the social safety net. They will be the ones that have to deal with the national debt. They will need to pay the cost of upgrading our crumbling infrastructure.

They will have to pay the costs of dealing with the impacts of climate change and the costs to adapt to it. They will have to live in a climate-changed world because those of us today did not sacrifice anything to prevent climate change from happening.

Are we really going to do that? Is there any sign that we are changing or will change? Is there any sign that we will sacrifice anything today to make it easier on those kids who sat with me that day and then helped shovel dirt into a hole where a tree was planted?

The people in the future are not strangers – they are our descendants. And the future will be here sooner than you think