It easy always blaming the baby boomers and Gen X. But the millenials and Gen Z are nearly just as cupable of global warming.
The amount of time we spend on the internet and the wastefull use of products contribute a lot to global warming.
Stupid blaming the individual instead of holding the corporations accountable.
and politicians
and voters
and people who don’t vote
cycle. public transport. stop eating meat. fly less.
you are somewhat responsible if you don’t boycott that which you can.
Basically my point, we are also to blame. Most of us could so a whole lot more for the environment. The acceleration of global warming (digital made a terrible situation exponationaly bad) started in the digital era and millenials/gen z are by far the biggest consumers of digital products.
We are also the biggest consumers of fast fashion although a certain subset of gen z started thrifting which is a really good development.
I may be just among the poors but I don’t know a single millennial who can afford fair-trade, cruelty free, etc. clothing. Or really anything.
Thrifting enshittified a decade ago. Walmart has more affordable clothing than any thrift shop in my area 🤷♀️
We poors are certainly killing the planet - for fun.
My parents keep saying “it’s always been like this here”
Funny. My parents say the same thing. “This is just fear mongering. We had warm Autumns in my childhood.”
Then I go look into the actual data of what their warmest years were and it’s nowhere near what we’re experiencing these days.
No it isn’t. It’s a complex issue with enough blame to spread around. Most of the fault lies with the fossil fuel companies that covered up climate change, lied for decades and bought the politicians.
Fossil fuels, petrochemical refining and usage, industrialized meat “farming,” clothing/fast fashion, cement.
Tbf they voted for them
If you can vote for politician A and politician B, and both of them are bought by the fossil fuel companies, to what extent are you to blame?
And if citizens can be held accountable for the actions and choices that their goverment has made, even if they have no real say in them, and that government has committed war crime after war crime abroad, killing literal millions, does that mean citizens are a legitimate target for retaliatory attacks? Was the Dresden firebombing justified? Was 9/11 justified? Were the atomic bombs dropped on Japan justified?
Not everyone is an American
I figured people could extrapolate, but here goes for your benefit:
If you can vote for politicians P1 through PN where N is an integer greater than or equal to 1, and all of them are bought by the fossil fuel companies, to what extent are you to blame?
Some nations are less corrupt, and even actively have more renewables than any other source of fuel and energy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable_electricity_production
Just cause USA is #115 on percentage of energy that’s renewable energy doesn’t mean those 114 other countries magically don’t exist
So with your calculation, N=0 in for example Iceland
Your options are much greater than voting for politician A or politician B
Dont let your political program be handed down to you.
I was responding to
Tbf they voted for them
hence my focus on voting, because that’s what he was talking about. But also your broader comment is not a good argument for ageism. Plenty of members of the boomer generation exercised other political options than voting. They were not successful, but many of them did try. At any rate, blaming an entire generation for policy failures is about as valid as blaming Trump’s policy failures on folks who voted for Harris.
Sure, but I dont think they as a generation did nearly enough regarding climate change specifically.
And as far as voting goes, they pretty regularly made up the core voter base of administrations which denied or ignored climate change
Democrats have a better record on climate change than Republicans do
Sure, but making it worse at a slightly slower rate is still making it worse. The most recent democratic presidential candidate was pro fracking.
Ah yes, I remember when my grandmother spent a century undermining scientific research on climate change through a massive campaign of exaggerating scientific uncertainty and overwhelming news media all while increasing consumption worldwide to 103 million barrels per day and promoting the development of the military-industrial complex to secure her interests
Did your Grandma vote for and openly support the massive campaign of exaggerating scientific uncertainty and overwhelming news media all while increasing consumption worldwide to 103 million barrels per day and promoting the development of the military-industrial complex to secure her interests?
If so, then yes she is also at fault for the reason it isn’t Cold in October anymore.
Oh another thing my grandmother is personally responsible for is fomenting working class infighting to keep people squabbling and not looking upwards at the people who are the real cause of problems. That was also her specifically.
Oh you don’t need to throw the class problem at me. I’m very well aware, but it’s cute you think this is an attack on your Me-ma’s cookies while the scary black man has a cookie too.
But your grandma, you, and everyone reading this comment has a choice when it comes to democracy. You can vote for people to represent you who support your values, support your beliefs, and allow you to hold them accountable if they don’t do as their “employers” voted them to do. Voting for someone is a show of personal value. If you vote for a candidate who is anti-climate change, you are against the idea of climate change. I am married to a trans person and if I ever voted for someone who wanted to eliminate “transgenderism”, I’d be voting to kill my partner, thus not supporting their right to exist even though I’m married to them.
Are there much larger contributors to climate pollution that we should worry about? Yes.
Are there billionaires that are the cause of the majority of the issues in the world? Yes.
Should we fucking do something about that? Yes.
But until you or I are willing to put bullets through brains and have a The Purge event for billionaires, we need to vote for people who will actually do something about the contributors to pollution, or to reign in the amount of money billionaires are able to siphon from the rest of us. And that starts by voting for people at regional and city levels, and go from there.
Sorry, I believe your vote is a representation of you as a person. But that vote could be at the ballot box, or a college campus in Orem, Utah in September of 2025.
No way, me too!
Damn, can’t believe those boomers and the way they’re abusing the means of production consciously and not as victims of propaganda like the rest of the working class!
I know, cant look grandma the same any more.
I mean, shes dead, but the point still stands.
So are boomers responsible for everything that’s wrong in the world now or just climate change?
Rich boomers are. Like actually rich.
And the poor boomers that vote conservative because they believe in hierarchies, like my parents. The ones that vote for wars and defunding education and are pro corporations.
So most of them, relative to younger people. Median boomer in the US is almost a millionaire and boomers collectively own 52% of the US. People over 55 own 73%. Majority of them benefit from whatever publicly traded corpos do because they have retirement funds.
No, its clearly the kids who are at fault… if they were born 50 years sooner they coulda fixed it
To be fair to the granny, usually not even her fault, but some corpo bastard that she didn’t have the power or will to fight against
Don’t panic yet. Give corporations and their store-bought politicians time to convince us it’s normal.
Your kids are Monday morning quarterbacking. And your grandkids will be tearing you a new butthole for all the stuff you’re not fixing right now.
It’s not about what they failed to fix, it’s about what they actively fucked up.
As a voting block, their demographic consistently did the opposite of “Plant trees under which shade you will never sit.” At every turn they sacrificed their children’s future for short term profit.
Boomers deserve their selfish reputation.
Boomers deserve their selfish reputation.
You’ll deserve it too in 2076. You’re doing something wrong. I know this because you’re a human being.
Blaming older generations instead of the powerful and wealthy is dumb and counterproductive.
The older generation ceded our power to the wealthy. They went gleefully along with tax policy designed to move money to the top, anti union legislation, increasing costs of education, stymieing environmental regulation, not pursuing and enforcing trust busting measures, offshoring industry, etc , etc. They weren’t the driving force, you could claim they were tricked, but it was their own short sighted greed and often bigotry that allowed them to go along with it. And they by and large continue to support all that same shit.
Older generations also elected FDR four times and created the only social safety nets we have, created the EPA, eliminated smog, cleaned up our rivers, created the endangered species list, etc.
I’m getting really sick of how easily some of you fall for these obvious divide and conquer tactics. Wake the fuck up and actually think critically for once. Climate change is far more of a class issue than generational one.
Conservatives blame immigrants and minorities for their problems, liberals blame old people. People are fooled so fucking easily but I bet you think you’re so much smarter than magats.
That wasn’t boomers, that was an earlier generation.
People are fooled so fucking easily but I bet you think you’re so much smarter than magats.
Dang, I sure hope I never run into one of those types who think they’re the smartest person in the room. That sound’s insufferable.
And Gen-Z helped elect Trump in 2024.
Saying that problems are because if a certain group of people is just dumb analysis. It is always about broader systems of power. Capitalism has it’s ways to bend democracy to it’s will.
The ruling class wants you to blame the elderly for the problems in the world. Because then you aren’t focused on the real issues.
If we really wanna fix problems instead of fighting each other, we need to really stop bigotry in all it’s forms and start becoming class conscious.
So the real issue here arent the thoughts and actions of Boomers and Gen X even though we are here because of those thoughts and actions?
The older generation ceded our power to the wealthy.
Did they actually? Or are you just saying that?
it was their own short sighted greed and often bigotry that allowed them to go along with it
Did we take any kind of vote on our actual energy policy? Did we collectively decide to build highways over railways or big trucks over dense housing blocks at some point?
Who decided to tear up the streetcars?
The Americans who believe their democracy is real are as bad as the ones who believe climate change is fake.
Oh, okay- so you’re just cowards who spent half a century allowing it because you didn’t want to risk your relative comfort.
Literally the same thing the next two generations are still doing?
Did I suggest they were any better?
I mean… they’re not. But fuck you for that disingenuous little sleight of hand where “they didn’t fight fascism hard enough” somehow becomes equivalent to “we voted for the fascists,” and also fuck you for making me defend their cowardly asses.
The generation wars are bullshit.
But we cant deny one generation has moved america to where it is and they still refuse to admit theyre in the driver’s seat, are too drunk to drive, and insist only they can do it
you didn’t want to risk your relative comfort
I’m still not sure who this “you” is.
Who do you think invented the Solar Panel? Who has been the most rapid adopters? Who built the wind farms? Who did the research that tells us Climate Change is even happening?
So by your nonsensical logic the current young generation is at fault for ceding more power than have been ceded in a long time to fascist oligarchs in the US.
It is plain bullshit nonsense. And you have gobbled up all of the ageism propaganda created by the oligarch propagandeers to make you completely forget the actual issue of class war.
Can’t they both be at fault?
Ya, my grandma never had a private jet or a megayacht. Not sure how her 300sq ft bungalow she lived in for 40 years and tending a community garden plot led to the environmental and socioeconomical issues we face now.
somebody voted GOP to have Trump in charge and paying companies to NOT block wind farms, somebody keeps buying giant trucks and voting to rip up bike lanes etc
So no young people voted for Trump? A lot of the no kings protestors are old people.
Generational war is a way to distract from class war, and a way to disconnect people from being inspired by the long HISTORY of class struggle.
The 8 hour day? Unions? The wellfare system (such as it is), maybe Grandma was on the picket lines for some of that too? Especially likely if she was poor.
There are labour activists and socialists in every generation.
I’m not enjoying being in the first generation to be poorer than my parents’. This is not a distraction; it’s a big fucking deal.
My parents, personally, have not really contributed to the problem. They vote sensibly, they have been climate conscious (especially my dad) for wayy longer than most people. But those are individual stories amongst the overall picture.
On the wider point, being on the picket lines fighting for workers’ rights doesn’t have much bearing on whether you then voted to take money out of the public services your parents created, which you benefited from, so that you could enrich yourself personally.
I think you might have a slight fuzziness in your history here, too. The labour movement, at least in my country, reached its peak in the first decades of the 20th century. Boomers were born around the 50s, reaching adulthood around the 70s. We already had a minimum wage, 8 hour days, weekends, paid holiday, sick leave, etcetera. We already had a welfare system. Around this time, the “post-war economic consensus” was being dismantled, and public services were being sold off to private investors. If we’re just looking at the resolution of generations, the prototypical grandma wasn’t doing the things you’re talking about - they were done by her mother or grandma or others.
Again, this is a broad brush with room for variation within generations. But there’s a section of the online left that wants to remove all responsibility for anything, especially climate change, from ordinary people. As if we can but do the bidding of billionaires. But if a population votes for climate change, or votes to dismantle public services, they deserve the blame.
The meme doesn’t say parents or boomers, it says Grandma.
wow
Environmentalists from the prior generations aren’t real. Nobody has ever done anything about climate change ever before and they’re not doing anything now and they never will.
That’s why the best way to fight climate change is to divide into generational cohorts and scream “Your Fault!” at everyone older.
It baffels me how many here seem to think that climate change is a billionaire problem. Are you really serious about this? (genuine question)
What makes you think that way? Its so obviously not true.
Look around you. Imagine you can see CO2. Coming out of the cars around you, the airplanes overhead, trucks and cargo ships delivering your consumer goods, tractors and harvesters on the nearby fields. Are the cars Ferrairs? The planes private jets? The trucks and cargo ships transporting exquisite furniture? The farmers producing kobe beef?
Must be comfortable in your world…
I’m sorry, who has the hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on buying elections, lobbying politician, and putting out propaganda to make sure that policies continue to favor consumption of fossil fuels, use of cars, lax environmental regulations for businesses, wars, and growth at any cost oriented consumption?
Is it the people driving in the cars on their way to work because they can’t afford to live close to where they work and there’s no adequate public transportation to get there? Last I checked it wasn’t.
People do have a responsibility to organize for collective action, but simply blaming them for living in the environment they were born into is missing the point on both moral culpability and practical action.
No need to be sorry, i’m here to discuss, thank you for the reply :)
So you see the billionaire problem as billionaries using their power to prevent necessary action. Ok, i agree that this is part of the problem.
But the “peope are selfish idiots” part is much larger.
The propaganda works because it is what people want to hear. And they want to hear that [climate change does not exist/wont be that bad/wont be worse than not burning fossils/but china/can not be stopped anyway] because they then dont have to change their lifestyle. And, at least in my bubble, “but the billionaires” (burning a lot more fuel with their yachts and private jets) or “but then only the rich can affort it” is another of these excuses.
I’m more charitable in my interpretation of the average human.
There’s a difference between being greedy or selfish and taking the path of least resistance out of necessity.
As far as being “idiots,” I just want people to cut people some slack. It can be easy to despair about all the things people don’t know or are misinformed on, but take a step back and look at how big and complicated the modern world is. There is a massive amount of knowledge that makes up our society, more that any individual can ever personally know. So instead we build a kind of collective knowledge through our relationships with one another. You might not have gone to the moon, but someone else did, and they shared their experiences with the rest of us. Most of the people involved in the supply chain needed to build a computer almost certainly don’t know how a computer works or how to design and build one from scratch, but that’s ok because through everyone doing their specific part of the process, it still gets made and we get to use it.
However, a critical component I think people forget about this collective knowledge is trust. You need some reason to trust that the information someone else has given you is accurate or that the product someone else made for you works. Without the tools and expertise, you have no way to personally verify every claim made, so you must decide whether or not to believe the source of the claim.
There are all sorts of reasons that you might form such an information trust relationship with another, some more valid than others. You may know the person personally and believe they wouldn’t lie to you, but they may also be wrong. You may know that the person is accredited by some reputable institution, but that just kicks the can down the road to whether or not you can trust the institution. Ultimately this isn’t about people being stupid or uneducated, it’s about how people choose to trust various sources. What makes one more valid than the other?
One way to somewhat break out of this issue is to build up a foundation of core knowledge through education that can act as a framework for evaluating how reasonable claims are, even if you don’t have specific knowledge about them. You might not know the details of how someone’s supposed perpetual motion machine works, but if you know the basic physics rules about energy, you’d know such a thing is impossible. But the problem with this is that it once again kicks the can down the road back to how you originally learned the information that goes into your framework. If you start with incorrect information, you will not be able to properly evaluate later claims. For example, if you grew up religious and were taught that god created the universe and then someone comes along and tells you that actually there was a big bang that created the universe and that evolution is responsible for the development of life, then those claims would seem absurd to you. I wouldn’t call you inherently stupid for rejecting those ideas based on your prior incorrect understanding. It’s incumbent upon us to find ways to build that trust such that we can educate you in the correct information.
When it comes to climate change, there are various sources of information that also overlap with each other. Scientists, news media, governments, NGOs, corporations, etc. They all have different expertise and motivations. They all use different methods to communicate with others and build trust. It may seem obvious that the output of the scientific community should be relatively trustworthy if you have previously learned the processes involved in generating scientific consensus, but if you aren’t familiar, you might not get why one scientist says this, but these other scientists say this. If you thought you could trust your gov or news outlets, then them telling you climate change isn’t real seems trustworthy. It may seem obvious why corporations can’t be trusted to someone who is familiar with how capitalism works, but if you don’t have a firm understanding on that and say, grew up in a country that absolutely idolizes businesses and business people, then you might look at these successful companies/CEOs and think that they must know what they’re talking about.
There’s a reason the right is constantly attacking education. There’s a reason why businesses spend tons of money on advertising, lobbying, etc. They know what they need to do to keep people from agreeing with each other on correct information. You can lament that people are led astray by them, but it clearly isn’t a trivial endeavor.
The point is, throwing your hands up in the air and saying that people are just “selfish idiots” is little more than doomer shit. If that’s true then there is genuinely no hope. But if you understand the systems and dynamics at play in producing the world we see, you can better work to change it. How do we do that? Fuck if I know, but it’s what we have to figure out and do.
Thanks for the lengthy reply. What worries me is not that people are not educated enough and use their own circle of trust to build their opinion. If it would be the case it could be solved with discussions, education and facts.
Before the internet people (including academics) were aware what they had no idea about almost everything except their own field. Can you imagine John Doe talking about virology or climate dynamics in a bar in 1990? People would have had a good laugh about him. Today people think they are competent in a field after watching a few ragebait videos. The other thing is that once they picked a team they stick to it, admitting they were wrong is out of the question. If you correct them with facts it is considered arrogant. They are unable to keep a consistent standpoint even between single questions of a discussion. For example if they start with “climate change does not exist” and you then show them a temperature chart of the last centuries they immediately switch to “yeah, but it is not human made”. After asking where the carbon in the oil goes after oxidizing its “ok its human made but a few degrees wont be a problem” and so on.
I don’t see how this can be countered anytime soon. Even the last summer here in Europe didn’t change much. People still vote the same parties. That is idiotic. At least believe your own eyes dammit…
My hope is that the younger generations will not give in to the same bullshit. Unfortunately, until they are the majority we’re already in deep shit territory.
I hope i’m wrong.
Meh. Can we have the same meme but with old rich men?
If you want to represent the generations that fucked the climate up for gain, let’s pick folks who look a bit more like those who did.
Sent from my iPhone
sips Starbucks
💯💯💯
No war but the class war.
You’re just working for the billionaires when you post divisive nonsense like this.
True, but it is hard to ignore that the a certain class seems to be centralized/condensed to one generation specifically. And that generation also consistently and energetically supports them to the day they die.
I don’t think members of Green Peace switched to supporting it.
Hello there.
Members of Green Peace protested the use of seal fur and meat, the act of “seal clubbing” and the sale of seal products. This was one of the main sustainable economies in the North. As a result, the communities living there were forced to engage in oil drilling and seismic testing in order to earn money. Still, the fact that seal products are no longer profitable have plunged these indigenous and rural populations into poverty.
The moral of this story is when you see some sort of big moral outrage about something, whether the moral outrage is coming form the left, right, or middle, whether it’s “save the animals,” “save the children,” “save religion,” whatever, you need to do some sort of basic, casual research into what type of bandwagon you’re thoughtlessly jumping on.
Yeah, the saying at the time was “A supermodel in Hollywood bats her eyelashes and a village loses their jobs.”
They also spread a lot of FUD about nuclear energy during a time when it would have made a significant difference in slowing climate change
Maybe if nuclear power plants didn’t meltdown sometimes and render dozens of square miles uninhabitable to human life by scales measured in geologic time then Greenpeace would support them.
Not sure of the relevance to my argument.
Members of Green Peace supported, and still support, global warming, even though they don’t know that’s what they’re doing.
From your story the communities were the ones supporting it. Maybe Green Peace just wanted them to die out?
Fuck you man
People over 55 own 73% of the US, heavily outweighing billionaires. Boomers alone outweigh billionaires assets by nearly 10x. Any time you see BlackRock, Vanguard, etc as major shareholders of a company, that means it’s mostly boomers’ 401ks and pension funds. Billionaires themselves are mostly old so really they’re just the top of the iceberg of a much larger problem.
Gen X might be the last generation to retire in the US, for millennials it’s starting to look unlikely. There just aren’t enough people to exploit anymore. Ideally everyone should have 3 kids, but as an interim solution you can start importing workers from 3rd world countries.
Other western countries may not have it as bad with the imbalance, but most are growing worse over time.
Yes they embraced the revolutionary technology of cars, which enabled post-WW2 suburbia to boom, which established the economic base for the rest of industry to progress to what we have now.
…so do we blame them? Because if you blame them, then expect Gen Alpha to blame you for letting AI take hold.
they embraced the revolutionary technology of cars
Well… they had it foisted on them.
It’s scary and yet many people refuse to believe in climate change. I’ve had argument with a denier on social media. I can tell that the person is not being deliberately malicious, because he did let up on some points, but he’s the type to kick the can down the road and hopelessly hoping to deal with the problem later on. I think a lot of people who handwaves the seriousness of climate change prefer to look the other way. I know far too many people who are like this even if it’s not about climate change.
I’ve been the weird environmentally conscious kid for more than 30 years. People’s attitudes haven’t changed. The arguments haven’t changed. You’ll still find people who immediately get excited about global warming, because they like warm weather.
Some people are just astonishingly stupid, and yet, they walk around and talk and have jobs and can appear to be normal. That’s because they are normal. It is normal to be stupid.
it reminds me of this quote from game of thrones, is not the same thing, but it gives the same vibe about the scope of people’s thinking and worries: “The common people pray for rain, healthy children, and a summer that never ends. It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left in peace. They never are.”
I know scientifically minded people who view it both as ‘hysteria,’ and for what remains, something that geoengineering can solve in the future.
In other words, look up the WSJ article advocating for fossil fuel production maximization as a net economic optimization in the long term, basically ‘better to maximize efficiency and minimize suffering now, to better geoengineer solutions in the future.’
…I read geoengineering papers. They are horrific. As in “our state-of-the-art-solution would… pour acid rain over the ice caps. And it’s still economically unfeasible, but less unfeasible. And maybe it will blunt things some?”
I’m offended such arguments are being presented.
But I can see right where those opinions come from, as with every twist of climate change denialism.
The environmental conspiracists are right. It really is Big Oil and such groups, from what I can see.
Here they claim it as a “natural process”. Good ol denial
My dad believes in this
Marketing gimmick so the evils can keep on eviling
It is a natural process as humans are natural.
And we are releasing natural stuff that is accelerating the change of the climate.
It’s much easier to pretend humans aren’t impacting it if people are allowed paint humans actions as outside nature. We are a huge part of nature, there’s 6 billion of us.
You mean 8 billion?
It’s grandma’s fault IF she voted for climate unfriendly folks. Else, this is just edgy genz ageism. Ageism isn’t cool.
My parents and grandparents on both sides were/are straight ticket Republican. Told me climate change was a hoax.
Now parents tell me “well we figure oh well we will be dead by the time really bad stuff happens”.
This stereotype exists for a fucking reason.
Hmmm. Not this boomer. Guess I am anecdotal. As long as we keep the attitude that it’s the boomers and not the billionaires, we are royally fucked. But hey you do you.
Go ahead and invalidate my lived experience, you do you.
I do think the boomer politicians all need to go, used to think Bernie was ok but he fell for the LLM mania. They are either evil cadavers or timid water carriers for billionaires.
Go ahead and invalidate my lived experience, you do you.
Projecting your lived experience onto an entire set of people you’ve had no personal experience with is the very definition of bigotry. Young people nowadays seem to understand this when it comes to race, sex, or gender, not so much when it comes to age.
Absolutely no argument there. The boomer politicians and the very rich boomers are very much the same. I also don’t like that boomers don’t want to learn anything new, it’s really stupid and very detrimental.
*most stereo types exist for a reason, good and bad. Regardless of whether you like it or not.
Plot twist, none of them actually do anything about climate change
Who do you think owns those companies doing all the climate unfriendly things?
If you see the likes of BlackRock or Vanguard in the list, that’s mostly retirement funds, meaning it’s mostly old people retiring off those companies. Grandma is an Exxon-Mobil shareholder and a Meta shareholder and absolutely invested in the AI industry through her nvidia holdings. She just doesn’t know any of it, but all of it is being done for her benefit as part of the ownership class.
People over 55 own 73% of all the assets in the US.
