Climate Denial is an Old Man’s Game

I swear I’ve talked with at least a couple of hundred people about climate change. In person.

I’ve talked with farmers, I’ve talked with a Norwegian guy who said he was part of the local fascist party but quit that because the party supported an airport expansion on a nature reserve.

I have talked about this issue with energy sector management. My uncle has worked with coal imports in Finland.

I’ve talked with young Russian guys who want to work with solar power. They also want to put an electric engine on a Lada Niva. Once I met an African guy who knew a friend who made multiple hundreds of millions of dollars in the solar power business.

That story checked out.

I’ve met people on river banks, you know, the kind of people you don’t really think of as Greenpeace. They don’t like the situation. We all fucking get the seriousness of this issue.

I have talked with an oil tanker captain and industry workers who’ve been laid off from Norwegian off shore platforms.

All of this has happened outside social media. In social media I’ve probably talked to thousands of people. But that does not matter.

We are all young people here. There is serious and wide-spread understanding that our lives will not be secure and the future is bleak.

Baby boomers put this challenge on us now. Knowingly from the early 1990’s on — you, yes, you. You knew this stuff before we did. You didn’t give two shits about it.

We have to pick up the pieces. Imagine the pressure and the stress. There is no escape from the evidence-based knowledge that this way of life will end violently if my generation fails to lead when you baby boomers retire.

I got no idea what kind of a situation I’ll be looking at when I’m 60 years old. I will most likely have to lead people since I chose to study climate change and politics.

It might be very nasty. We just don’t know.

Right now, some of the old guys have taken to social media to deny it all, all of the environmental collapse going on. All of the high-quality science which details it.

Some legacy you are leaving us with.