When my daughter was three in 2010, she started saying “Blah, blah, blah” to me.
But I was OK with her repeating things she heard—if she used them correctly. So I asked her if she knew what “blah, blah, blah” meant. She paused and said, “It’s when Daddy says something that doesn’t matter.”
Dang. She did know what it meant.
Until I had a daughter, I never realized just how often I said things that didn’t matter. But with her help, I learned much about what matters and what doesn’t.
And if you are a parent with a Gen Z teen, then you know climate change matters a lot to them. As it should, since they are the ones who will have to live with the ever-worsening consequences of our inaction decade after decade. And given advances in medicine and artificial intelligence, many are likely to live beyond the age of 100.
So, all the most devastating impacts we don’t like to think about because we believe we are going to miss them—from sea-level rise to extreme drought to big wildfires and superstorms—will simply be what they are forced to suffer through on an ever-increasing basis.
Tell Congress: Commit to Climate Investments and Clean Air Progress
Climate change has become like one of those body-switching role reversal stories popularized in movies from Freaky Friday (and its three remakes!) to Netflix’s November 2023 movie Family Switch.
But this time, it’s not a comedy. We adults are trashing the house and refusing to clean up after ourselves as if we were the children. And then we say things like, “Your generation is our last hope!”
Greta Thunberg, who emerged as a global voice of Gen Z with her school strikes, has repeatedly addressed this ridiculous notion. In her 2019 UN address at the age of 16, she blasted the adults for all our dawdling: “This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!”
What we are doing to our children and future generations is uniquely immoral because of one crucial word that differentiates climate change from most other environmental problems people are used to dealing with—“irreversible.”
Many previous environmental problems turned out to be reversible, like the deadly air pollution over Denver or Los Angeles, or once-toxic rivers, like the Hudson River in New York or the Cuyahoga River that runs through Cleveland, which caught fire 14 times decades ago. Even the hole in the ozone layer proved reversible over a period of many decades.
Be we have known for a long time that the destruction we bring to our livable climate will be irreversible for countless future generations. A 2009 study led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that “the climate change that is taking place because of increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop.” What kind of changes? Well, besides destroying the oceans, the study warns of “irreversible dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions comparable to those of the ‘dust bowl’ era and inexorable sea level rise.”
Sea-level rise could hit four to six feet by century’s end and then continue rising a foot or more a decade. How will our children’s children and their descendants adapt to that?
If we force our children and grandchildren to live through this, they will remember nothing else we ever did for them and never forgive us—and by “we” I don’t just mean Boomer dads like me. I mean everyone who can vote or help elect candidates who embrace strong action. I mean every corporate or tech leader who is in a position to reduce the emissions of their operations and, more importantly, their products. I mean anyone who makes ads promoting the greenwashing of fossil fuel companies—and anyone who runs such ads.
By 2014, the world’s top scientists of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made irreversibility a centerpiece of their assessment of the scientific literature. They warned that absent very sharp emissions reductions we risk “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.”
The governments of the world signed off, line-by-line, on a final summary that mentioned “irreversible” 14 times and had extended discussions of exactly what it means and why it matters.
Avoiding all the irreversible impacts is a major reason why the world’s nations agreed a year later in Paris—the 21st annual global meeting to address climate change—to keep ratcheting down greenhouse gas emissions to zero by midcentury. And yet emissions have kept rising and rising year after year.
Clearly, the Biden administration has taken stronger action on climate change than any other in history—passing legislation that could direct a trillion or more dollars toward clean energy and putting forth regulations that would further reduce emissions.
But we have a Supreme Court that routinely kills most regulations aimed at preserving a livable climate, and we have a House of Representatives run by climate deniers. So we have an election in November with a stark choice between candidates who want even stronger action and those who desire to roll back what we’ve already done domestically and stop global action.
We also have this love affair with carbon offsets—where rich countries and rich companies pay poor countries to reduce their emissions, so we can keep polluting, but claim we’ve hit “net zero” whatever that means. But the United States and its companies need to reduce direct emissions at least 90%, and then only at that point in, say, the 2040s, perhaps make big bets on high-quality carbon removal, as I’ve argued in major reports on both offsets and carbon dioxide removal.
As Greta said before the 26th global climate meeting in Glasgow, “Net zero by 2050. Blah, blah, blah.”
The climate change we have now is irreversible, but the far worse climate change to come can be stopped through rapid reductions for the next quarter century and beyond. The choices we make in the coming months and years—but most especially in November—will be the most consequential choices we make for our children.
Think about all we do in our obsessive effort to protect our kids in their daily comings and goings, how hard we work to set them on the right path for economic security, heck, how unrelenting some of us are about getting our kids into the best colleges we can. Shouldn’t we spend at least a fraction of that time, effort, and money ensuring the life they have after college—after their first job, after they tuck their own children safely in bed at night—isn’t in a world of ever-worsening climate disasters?
The question for dads this Father’s Day is, What will you tell your children about what you are doing right now to stop this slow-motion train wreck that isn’t just more “blah, blah, blah”?
Tell Congress: Commit to Climate Investments and Clean Air Progress