5917

She’s correct that we should shame that generation forever.

5918

While I’m not a believer in stereotypical hell, I keep wondering what kind of place D’Souza would wind up in if it existed. Maybe he’d be forced to listen to hard leftist morons (idiots are on all sides of politics, even mine) espouse the stupidest rationales and explanations for eternity. eg - “universal health care is vitally important because stubbing toes connects all mankind,” and then meandering off into some non-sequitur about soccer, preferably in a Trump-like especially nonsensical fashion.

5919

An interesting idea for an afterlife is that you experience your own actions through the eyes of everyone you ever interacted with.

So, if you’re a good person, this is a pleasant experience, since you get to experience tons of people having you do nice things for them.

For D’Souza, he’s going to have to listen to himself saying objectively idiotic things, for eternity. Sounds like hell to me.

5920

I like the cut of your jib, Timex.

5921

Clearly, if you want to enjoy heaven, you should be having as much sex as possible, and you should make sure you’re GOOD at it.

5922

For the record: I’d be willing to bet the generation(s) you’re talking about include every single person on this forum. Which of us has given up flying, like Greta has? Which of us has stopped shopping, instead using second-hand things or simply reusing and repairing things? Who of us thinks the situation is so dire that we’re making drastic changes to what we do? Skipping work once a week to protest inaction?

She’s talking to us. We’re the ones who should be shamed forever.

5923

She’s talking more about the Boomers, as they’re the ones who knew there was a problem, and intentionally did nothing, and even today continue to fight AGAINST doing anything. And they absolutely refuse to die and give up control.

5924

My generation (Gen-X) did nothing and allowed it to happen. We’ve known for at least 20 years this was a problem, and our reactions ranged from doing nothing to making it worse. Sure, the boomers have outnumbered us all that time, but that’s hardly an excuse – Greta can’t even vote and she’s already done more to bring awareness to the problem than my entire generation.

5925

It helps that she’s not employed, you know. And that people are standing in line to help her travel by sailboat. Try that for your next management summit.

5926

She is literally saying this is an existential crisis that, in order to address in such a way that her generation doesn’t face decades of disease, dislocation, weather, heat, energy shortages, migrations, fires, wars, famine, drought and misery, requires drastic action. Which will require sacrifice. It will require changing the way we live. We (most definitely including myself) have not been and still are not willing to do that. We’ve known and we’ve done very little. We are to blame.

5927

I think she’s right, but what would she be saying / doing if she had to feed a family? Shelter them tomorrow? Pay for their health care? She’s a child, someone else is taking care of those needs for her, so she’s free to walk the talk. Most people are not. What they need is government action to change the way work works, to make her choices available to them. All they can do is agitate for that, vote for that, but until that produces a result , they’ll also go on doing what they have to do. They don’t really have any other choice.

5928

We are to blame, but I’d have been fine with government action since the late 80s. I’d have been fine with paying extra taxes, with adapting to whatever rules I had to in order to save the planet by changing the way I lived in the 90s, because we’d all be doing it together and there would be structure around that change. Me changing my behavior over the last 30 years, me alone, would not have made a difference no matter what I did. But government implementing rules on me that I had follow, which I would then happily follow, could have made a huge difference.

5929

Thats the rub. On a personal level I have made what changes I can, do what I can, and push for others to do the same.

But there is a finite limit to what I as an individual can, and should, do. But changing my diet and bike commuting to work only go so far. And since the majority of pollution comes from the industrial scale that is a more fruitful line of effort.

5930

To be fair, there is nothing Gen-X could’ve done at any point.

They never had the votes to change things. Try to change it? The Boomers overpower you easily. By the time enough Boomers start dying off so you can maybe do something, Millenials now outnumber you just like the Boomers did.

5931

More than that; I did my best to vote for the team on the side of this sort of action.

5932

Greta is awesome - not least because she is able and willing to say the obvious. And her words hurt, because there’s a lot of truth in them.

In terms of what my (our?) generation could have done, I agree that the effects of personal action may have been limited. I’m not in favor of “shaming” people for flying or driving cars, etc. - at least not as long as they’re not being unreasonable in their consumption.

Where I think she is very right - and where we (the collective we, not necessarily you as an individual) - have failed, is in how we’ve used our vote.

At the end of the day, the only thing that matters to 95% of politicians is how their constituents vote. The recent elections in Scandinavia have been very instructive in that respect, IMO (galvanized in large part by the awareness created by Greta): voters went to the polls concerned about climate change. The smart politicians responded by taking climate change seriously - and those parties with a track record of doing so got rewarded.

I chose to become a “single-issue” voter after my second kid was born, in the sense that if the candidate/party does not have a serious climate change agenda, then I will give my vote to someone that has (even if they’re farther away from me on other issues than I’d perhaps like). And honestly, I’m ashamed it’s taken this long, because we “knew” very well what was happening 20 years ago, and that’s 15+ (or more) years of voting where I should have sent a stronger signal to the politicians that this was an overriding concern for me. And there are too many who - like me - have been a bit complacent in thinking that politicians would actually act, even though my vote isn’t compelling them to act - and still too many who haven’t yet realized that acting is imperative and that their vote needs to reflect that.

5933

I wish we even had this choice in the U.S. Like if the Republicans were the party who are the party they are now, but they were the ones demanding action on Climate Change? That would be a tough choice, but I’d vote for them despite disagreeing with them on everything else. But it’s not that way here.

5934

Not me. Their other policies kill people today, not tomorrow. Killing people today to avoid killing them tomorrow is not an attractive bargain.

5935

I disagree.

We resurrected electric cars, bought hybrid cars, bought solar for our houses, improved the ease of recycling, passed more clean air and water legislation, slowed/stopped the ozone hole creep, eliminated Acid Rain, etc.

Has it been enough? No, and our addiction to gadgets has made it worse as well, but progress has been made on many fronts. Nowhere near enough, but still, there are a number of areas where things are better because of Gen X than they would have been.

5936

mostly