It’s the only serious proposal on the table for survival for our children.
A majority of Americans are concerned about Climate Change. Exactly how large the majority depends on what age group that human being tends to fall into, which makes sense, and does not make sense. If you think you will be dead before the worst effects hit then you might be less likely to be concerned than a younger person who has to live all their ‘best years’ in climate chaos. On the other hand, if you are a parent, leaving a mess for our children to clean up is the absolute opposite of being a responsible adult. How on earth would we be able to die peacefully without regret?
What would be the point of working your whole life to amass wealth, pay off a mortgage on a mansion in Miami, for example, which you plan leave to your children and then know that you are in fact leaving them an asset that could be underwater in forty years? That is not responsible.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that we must rapidly decarbonize our world. I can only imagine that some people must not have read that report or understood it’s dramatic, scary recommendations if they still believe that we can maintain a livable climate while still using fossil fuels as our main source of energy. I will give those people the benefit of the doubt and the opportunity to go read the report for themselves.
If we all presumably have the same goal of a livable climate for our children, and the experts have told us we can only achieve that livable climate with a rapid draw down of carbon dioxide, then strategies such as ‘planting more trees’ are inane, laughable, almost. We have been trying to ‘plant more trees’, for years. It is not working. By contrast, the Green New Deal is no longer ‘radical leftist propaganda’. It is one of the few serious proposals on the table for survival for our children. We can plant more trees, sure, but only if it’s a small part of a much broader plan to change everything about how we make our stuff, how we move around and how we eat.
We are, each of us, thinking adults. We need to get serious and sort through the noise and propaganda that is fed to us every day. Our children and grandchildren will either thank us or blame us for these next ten years, depending on what we choose to do.