NOVEMBER 20, 2021 – Posting a zinger-critique of America’s baggage seems no more useful than a fugitive analyzing tire pressure of an escape vehicle. Yet, ostrich antics won’t work either. Reality persists, watched or not.
What do we do? What our species has always done: bequeath to youth. They will inherit the earth. They will set things right and remedy the wrongs we leave behind.
Knowing many highly capable and motivated youth, I’m confident that Boomer heirs are better equipped for the future. Today’s youth are more enlightened, more interconnected than any preceding generation. (A blubbering, out-of-town, punk-vigilante strutting the streets and brandishing an assault rifle in self-defense being the exception that proves the rule.)
I worry, though, that we’ve piled our problems too high and wide. In many arenas we’ve created a classic Hobson choice: pay now with money we don’t have or force today’s youth to pay lots more later when they have even less. We’ve blazed an unsustainable path into a network of swamps. We can’t say, “Here’s your wrench, here’s your hammer. Good luck building bridges over troubled wetlands.” We’re handing off a world in geophysical trouble, and one in which one solution (electric engines, for example) creates another problem (destroying lives and earth for Congo cobalt, a rare-earth metal used in electric engines).
For Americans, there’s another reality. On a per capita basis, we generate double the CO2 emissions produced by the Chinese—who, in aggregate, pump out double the total CO2 that we do and the most of any country. But close to 10% of China’s manufacturing output is consumed by Americans, and thus, a significant percentage of Chine-based CO2 emissions is attributable to us.
China isn’t some obsequious ally of the U.S. Good luck, kids, negotiating trade pacts and climate treaties with the biggest rival—nay, bigger, given China’s economic power—we’ve faced since the salad days of the U.S.S.R.
Independent of the root cause of climate change, our heirs will face spiraling “feedback loops” and forced adaptation. A leading Dutch climatologist predicted recently that the effects of climate change within this century alone could force as many as two billion people to scramble. Trans-national and domestic migrations will result in game-changing economic, political, and cultural disruptions. Kids: buckle your seatbelts as you seek higher ground ahead of cresting waves of change.
Long gone are the days when “Don’t Tread on Me!” expressed a grand American ideal. Such independence now guarantees grand disorder. As the window closes on our ability—and more specifically, on our political capacity—to change the course of climate change, we need to expand our organizational frameworks to facilitate adaptation. This imperative connects all the dots in our current maelstrom of crises—from income disparity to gun violence to racial inequality to China policy to the Quixotic rebellion against public health.
The only way around a dismal fate is an integrated highway onto which awareness and innovation, enlightenment and technology, human and financial capital, merge and flow toward a better world.
(Remember to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.)
© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
