Have baby boomers wrecked the planet?
Yes, we have. But we’re still not satisfied. 
I tried to find the most important part of this post to quote, but every part of it is spot on.
If Cecil had approached this question from the perspective that it’s bad to blame generations because there are good people and bad people in every generation and the generation splits are completely arbitrary, then it could have been a valid discussion. Pretty boring, but valid.
But to take the approach that everything is better today while ignoring the impact this “prosperity” has on future generations (including ones already alive) is embarrassing. It feeds into the narrative that Boomers are selfish - a somewhat unfair narrative, but it sure doesn’t help when this column (written by a Boomer) is a poster child for selfishness.
Cecil, please, I beg you not to do that annoying online journalist thing of plunking links into your writing stream, which tells me “I have a point to make here but I’m not going to bother making it, but if you really must know here’s someone else’s take on the thing, I’ll just graze by and allude to it thank you”.
I think if you can’t bother to include at least a reader’s digest version of the point you alluded to, it wasn’t worth making. I know you’re probably rusty at this column thing, so I’ll let it pass this one time. But pretend you’re still writing for a printed medium. No links, or if you must, keep it to a minimum and wrap it in some kind of “for more information” disclaimer. Thanks.
I’m not one to argue that we should go back to primitive ways, but it’s plainly wrong to suggest that the planet is in any way healthier than it was before the industrial revolution. At best, we can say that a few parameters are relatively unscathed. But if we’re talking about health of the ecosystems, it’s worse in every way, and in some ways catastrophically so. Deforestation, de-speciation, coral reefs, ocean warming, ocean acidification, I could go on. If you’re going to keep saying the planet is “healthier than ever” then you need to start providing some cites to support this fantasy.
You said we were “doomed to climate change.” Your words, not mine. Doomed is a strong word. If you mean the climate is headed in a catastrophic direction, I strongly agree. If you mean anti-nuclear sentiment is an important obstacle to fixing it, then I moderately agree. But this is wholly inconsistent with any suggestion that the planet is in the best shape it’s ever been. “Doomed” is not “great shape” and I think you know this.
It isn’t. You should read the IPCC reports.
The horror! Imagine the audacity of wanting to move to all of our power coming from renewable sources. The desire to move towards renewable power isn’t ruining the lives of humanity. This is Boomer talk and is exactly why Boomers continue to be predominantly blamed for wrecking the planet. Instead of realizing their mistakes, too many of them are double/tripling/etc. down on the notion that greed via infinite growth is more important than the planet. We need to move our ideology towards sustainability and equity, and not greed, greed, greed, we need to have more.
Right. Sorry Charlie_Tan but at least by the USA understanding you and I are “Boomers” even though we were at best children when many of the Real Big Boomer Thing cultural benchmarks went down. Which is kind of appropriate anyway considering that many of the people the first wave boomers were following at the time were themselves NOT technically “Boomers”.
*ahem “You’re”, BTW
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Now, as to the column… dang, Uncle is a bit rusty ain’t he, first reaction. Then got to thinking hoo, boy he’s really rilin’ them up ain’t he.
Though I get it that he may be in a “dang kids git off mah lawn” mood about the whole proposition of “Boomers wrecked the planet”. The people who wrecked the planet included folk from all the still-living putative generations with the probable exception of those born in this century. And before you build up hope, I’ve seen the Young Republicans… they are not going to just let the progressive Whatever-enials or Gen-Whatevers take over, no siree. There are young boys, gals and enbies out there in colleges right now ready to sign up with rapacious extractive-industries corporations and truth-challenged political movements to make bank… and pwn the libs as a sweet bonus.
We get credit for the Industrial Revolution too? Far out!
If we’re gonna blame “boomers” for things that long ago, how about stuff far in the future too?
I said ‘at any point in my lifetime’. Just how old do you think I am?
As a reminder, in the past the ozone layer issue was an ‘existential threat’ to the planet. It no longer is, if it ever was. Acid rain was going to destroy the ecosystem. That problem is no longer there to the extent it was. The coral reefs were dying and were predicted to be gone by now, but they are recovering. Overpopulation was going to cause us all to starve by now. Instead, we are worried about obesity and population collapse in industrialized countries.
The environment is cleaner and healthier save for the issue of global warming, and to me that doesn’t look any scarier than the other existential threats we’ve gone a long way towards mitigating, despite what hysterical idiots like Al Gore and John Kerry are saying. It’s a problem, but it’s not an existential threat. A bigger threat is coming from the policy mistakes made in fighting it, and that’s not on the boomers.
It’s audacity if we don’t know how to do that, and yet we shut down fossil fuels anyway in hope that the pressure will cause us to just ‘figure it out’. Because that’s how you get to be Germany, leveling villages to open a coal mine after shutting down their nuclear power.
Desires and perfect solutions do not overcome reality, as we are discovering to our great discomfort.
Let’s stop this particular hijack. I will open a new thread for that discussion.
Ugh. Cecil answered a completely different question than one that was in the title of the article.
Yes, the whole world is much more prosperous than it was 50 years ago. Yes, there are less of pretty much every negative outcome. But that’s not the point. That prosperity, combined with a relative disregard for the reality of climate change, has led to things having gotten much worse in the climate change front compared to what might have happened.
There are definitely strides being made, but there is opposition to what needs to be done from both sides. As mentioned, anti-nuclear activism is a major hurdle when it comes to the generation of power that doesn’t emit carbon dioxide. I’ve heard some people say, “Well, nuclear isn’t economical”, but that’s not the point. I’m sure coal is even more economical. Nuclear power is a great way to get baseline power that’s not dependent on the weather.
It would help even more though if the entrenched fossil fuel interests weren’t as strong as they are. We ended up not running out of oil, as we seem to always have 40 more years of oil as new deposits are discovered. We’ll most likely never run out of oil until we’ve caused a huge shift in the global climate zones, and the stocks of coal are in even a better situation.
Another huge issue is that a large part of the world is finally getting industrialized, and it’s hard to tell them “wait, you can’t do it that way, the carbon footprint is too big” when the majority of the problem is that the originally industrialized world could have cut back decades ago and instead didn’t in order to promote economic growth. And when original industrialized countries have sections in them that want to pass laws banning electric vehicle sales because their economy is dependent on fossil fuels, that doesn’t make the argument any easier to make. Wyoming lawmakers's bill seeks to ban all electric vehicles by 2035 | Financial Post
Of course, I wouldn’t blame it on baby boomers anyway. Blaming a whole generation is stupid and counterproductive. It’s mainly the fault of entrenched elements in the fossil fuel industry, who have been burying or diverting attention from the problem for as long as its existed, and you can’t blame the Boomers for what their bosses decided in the 70s and 80s even if you wanted to blame one particular generation. Their lack of care about the problem has just filtered down, such that the vast majority of people continue living their lives as if there’s no coming crisis.
I would like to mention though that Michigan is having some lovely April weather this January. I definitely look forward to milder winters, if nothing else.
I legitimately laughed out loud at this.
Do you know why? Because we acted. Scientists for decades have been saying that we need to act on climate change, and we’ve ignored the issue (in large part because of Boomers). For quite some time, scientists have been saying that if we continue to ignore the problem, then the cost and pain of acting will only become compoundingly greater. And now here we are, we’re at the critical point and it is conservatives (in particular Boomer conservatives) saying, we cannot act. The price is too high.
It may surprise you to hear this but food security is a major global problem. In large part brought about by, you guessed it, climate change.
And do you suppose, the fact that those hazards were pointed out, seen as serious, studied and when needed action taken to address them, may have had something to do with their being prevented or mitigated?
What amuses me about this column is Ehrlich is painted as being wrongheaded about population growth and positive prospects. You were, of course, aware this is the dude that cured syphilis? For the Baby Boomers and Love Generation, he might have done more than anyone to cause population growth and positive prospects. 
As a reminder, many powerful interests tried to stop the changes to prevent the worsening of those issues, those interests were wisely ignored on the way to set regulations that inconvenienced those interests, it made the recovery of those issues possible.
Actually, it is on the mostly conservative boomer voters, specially when they ignore how the Republicans in congress are dismissing the worries that many conservatives are having too.
Uh, this really grossly ignores that Russia has been playing with nuclear fire by taking hostage the Ukrainian nuclear plants. Anyone in Europe seeing that is not amused or willing to rush to ramp up nuclear power in light of the increased danger of using nuclear power in Europe that is also caused by the Russian invasion. In any case, as I posted before, the use of coal is only a temporary move to deal with the current crisis.
That might be one of the most stupid sentences I’ve read this week. Any burning of hydrocarbons will contribute to climate change. The canard of labeling Fossil Gas as Natural Gas needs to stop now.
The label - and more importantly the connotation - of the Gen X concept was made by Douglas Coupland, born 1961, He wasn’t writing about later generations.
And Gen X sounds so friggin cool. I’ve heard people born in every decade since the 60’s label themselves Gen X.
None of my '90s or early 2000s-baby coworkers have ever referred to themselves as “Gen X” within my earshot.
Hey Cecil,
You could have written a column that pointed out that no generation exists in isolation or is a monolith and thus deserves the blame for the current state of affairs. Instead you showed yourself as one of the elite, regardless of generation, who fail to recognize the threat of global warming, the utter inadequacy of our current measures and the extreme unlikelihood of new technology arising to save us from it* and hand wave it all away, helping yourself and others feel about about decades of dragging our feet on real action.
I didn’t really care one way or another about your column coming back. Now I’m deeply sad that it has.
*it would have to be extremely efficient and cost next to nothing in labor and resources to produce and maintain
I believe the point is that someone who is as careless as to not bother fact checking arguments about global cooling probably are pushing other agenda that is also less than carefully vetted.
Personally, I found the entire article just a tired rehashing of neoliberal propaganda in line with the above mentioned Steven Pinker book without any awareness that this is what it was doing as well as the substantive critiques of the mainstream neoliberal line of thought.
My two main critiques with the “the numbers show everything is fine” argument are
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It’s fundamentally a materialist view of the world that views humans as primarily economic units where you input material prosperity like big macs and iPhones in one end and you get contented, productive workers out the other. It doesn’t attempt to quantify things like mental health or social cohesion or the effects of inequality. What’s more, it cherry picks the commodities that capitalism is efficient at making cheaper like food and electronics and conveniently ignores the long standing structural factors that have made education, healthcare and housing more consistently rise rather than lower in price even accounting for inflation.
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Material wealth is pretty profoundly a lagging indicator and pointing to a rise today as an indication that everything is fine is like pointing to the increase in logging profits as proof of how wise it was to save money on tree replanting just as the last tree is being cut down.
I find many of the critiques of the neoliberal position to be pretty flawed in their own ways but to write an article presenting the standard neoliberal position as if it hasn’t been debated to death and that there aren’t pretty powerful arguments against it seems very out of touch.
Excellent video. I remember seeing this hearing when it first aired and it struck a sobering chord with me, and hopefully others.
Ever the great communicator, Sagan articulated the dire global warming facts and predictions clearly and concisely. That congressional hearing should have been broadcast globally, and often, though I doubt it would have made a great deal more difference, because people don’t want to endure hardships that can be passed onto future generations, and politicians don’t want to piss off their constituencies. It’s not a failure of any particular generation, it’s a failure of all generations. It’s a failure of human behavior.
In an ideal world, there would be a global board of top scientists in all fields who have authority to override politics and institute necessary and immediate changes, when dire global catastrophes are predicted and imminent. Global warming should currently be at the top of the list, but the list should also include such catastrophic events as extinctions of important species, destruction of coral reefs, effective pandemic protocols, nuclear war aversion, bolide impact scenarios, and so on and so forth.
Top economists should also be included on the board, to suggest counterbalance to avert economic collapse that could potentially occur with board decisions.
And, as much as I am in awe of AI and its potential to benefit mankind (in fact, AI should be included on the board of scientists as well), AI also has the potential to harm mankind, if it’s not controlled properly. We now live in a world where science and technology can do great global good, but also great global bad. Could this be the answer to the Fermi Paradox? Do all advanced civilizations destroy themselves before they go interstellar? It’s a sobering thought.
Sure, it will mean enduring hardships and the science board policies won’t be popular with many or most people. That’s why it must be in the hands of unbiased scientists, not the domain of politicians, because politicians modus operandi is to institute popular policy, not unpopular policy.
Sometimes it’s necessary to suck it up and endure hardships for the betterment and survival of our planet. Or, we can just live well and screw the future. The choice is ours.
Claim: The Baby Boomers caused tremendous long-term damage by focusing on short-term material things.
Refutation: We got lots of short-term material things, and that’s all that matters.
This doesn’t actually refute the claim nearly as well as you seem to think.