How best to love your kids in a world we set on fire? Many parents say that they would do “anything” for their kids, but can such heartfelt declarations of devotion square with our collective inaction on the climate and ecological crises? When we know that our current path will harm the life prospects of our precious youngsters? Our times bring new kinds of true love tests.
Consider the ecologically unprecedented Canadian wildfires of 2023 which burned 45 million acres (about 5 billion trees). People as far away as Spain “choked on Canadian ash,” wrote influential climate journalist David Wallace-Wells and “more than half of the world’s countries could fit” in that burn zone. In his view “we don’t have the capacity to meaningfully reduce the risk of these kinds of fires,” since we lack the “resources or the strategy or the technical know-how” needed. That’s just one of the relevant world-worsening woes. Wallace-Wells, who rose to prominence by writing a smash hit 2017 article and related best-selling 2019 book both called The Uninhabitable Earth, said in January 2024 that “the world is still not nearly alarmed enough about climate change.”
Fortunately, advice for what certain kids themselves can do about this colossal contradiction is available from former US secretary of energy and Nobel-winning physicist Steven Chu. When asked “What’s your message to the kids?” Chu replied, “Press your parents and your grandparents, especially those who have influence: ‘Dad, don’t you care about me? It’s your responsibility. You’re handing us a much worse world. Stop it'” (watch here). This kind of direct “personal pressure,” says Chu, can really “start to move things.”
Chu also shared a potent anecdote about certain elite elders failing in familial duties of care: “When I was secretary of energy … I told a bunch of senators this story: Imagine you’re on your deathbed, and you’re surrounded by kids and grandkids. One of your grandkids says, ‘Grandpa, you could have done something about it. You were in a position of [power] … Didn’t you love us?’” He was quickly told not to “say that again to any senator,” it makes them “too uncomfortable.” But Chu explains, “You should feel uncomfortable if you’re sacrificing someone’s future for a little bit more personal greed, especially in rich countries and rich people. . . It’s very different if you’re struggling.” Chu is correct to focus on the rich and to note that those harmed by climate-worsening elite greed will include their own kids.
We don’t only inherit our biosphere from our ancestors, Chu observes, we “borrow it from our children.” The blessed era in which we could safely feel we were handing on a better world or even one that’s basically stable, with no explicit effort, is truly over. Without vigorous action, our legacy will be a dangerously degraded biosphere. We urgently need a politics capable of facing the fact that how we live now harms the interests of those that we say we hold dear. We must rapidly reorganize how we live around new norms that cherish and respect rather than erode and burden the future.
Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has analyzed prior such seismic norm shifts in The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. He finds that ethical arguments against practices like dueling, footbinding, and slavery, were in play long before their demise. Their ultimate rapid collapse occurred only when they came to be deemed dishonorable. In this Appiah confirms Chu’s point that aversive emotions at work in elites can trigger large rapid changes. For instance, a Chinese intellectual in 1898 decried footbinding for making China “a laughingstock in the eyes of foreigners.” Appiah reports that in one region the rate of bindings fell from 94 percent in 1899 to zero in 1919. Fear of ridicule and shame quickly killed a thousand-year tradition.
However uncool or old hat they may seem, Appiah finds that honor, shame, and esteem, and social pressures and moral sentiments generally, are vital engines of ethical and political progress. Like it or not, those social emotions are plumbed into our physiology and they’re active in our social and moral and political psychology. They still shape our lives (we can’t just wish them away). It is true that moral pressure has been used in corrosive ways, but that’s not the whole story. Conversely, hasn’t the recent lack of shame in public life enabled the tsunami of shamelessness of Donald Trump’s presidency? Or the spectacle of slicker public servants (of either party) shamelessly enriching themselves.
Much present-day thinking paints shaming in a negative light but it has well-argued defenses. For instance, in Is Shame Necessary? Jennifer Jacquet writes that it “is one of our most powerful means of nonviolent resistance.” Adding that “shaming, like any tool… can be used to any end, good or evil.” Her examples of “norm entrepreneurs” who used shame (or fear of its reputational risks) to accomplish large scale progress includes Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Rachel Carson. Jacquet notes that “shame can scale… and can work quickly.” She offers vital clarifying nuances: it matters who is shaming whom and how. Shaming works best when a respected in-group-er exposes a reparable departure from a shared value (between groups it typically makes things worse). The salient shared value here is love of offspring and the duties that brings. The desire to protect kids has a decent shot at motivating action across political tribes.
There’s abundant evidence that good parents routinely work hard for better lives for their kids. They sacrifice endless hours schlepping kids to sports, set aside money for college, and countless similar acts of love. So why is the idea of incurring inconveniences or costs to conserve biosphere resources to benefit beloved offspring so often presented as impossible to imagine? Pundits who deem changes in consumption habits for the sake of climate stability to be politically unrealistic are choosing to impose extra costs, constraints, and burdens onto the later lives of their beloved youngsters. Those who frame such lifestyle changes as an unacceptable ‘sacrifice’ act shamefully in another way. They disrespect the truer sacrifices of blood and treasure made by prior generations to bequeath them the freedoms and comforts to now proclaim that they are unwilling to incur even trifling costs to protect their own descendants. Is that a legacy to be proud of?
War mobilization metaphors have been used to frame climate-crisis response, but they typically ignore the often-crucial role of consumer constraints in military victory. In “the greatest generation” of World War II one million Americans were killed or wounded and the entire population faced rationing (including of cars, tires, sugar, gasoline, coffee, butter, canned goods, shoes, etc.). Meat was rationed to 60% below today’s level. Rigorous analysis of the moral tests we face in the climate emergency has led philosopher of ethics Henry Shue to call us The Pivotal Generation. What we do this decade is critical. Our choice is to work to be a blessing to our descendants by curbing our known-to-be-harmful activities or we risk failing our loved ones and being remembered as a shameful generation.
More evidence of shame’s powerful role on the world stage is offered by critic and novelist Amitav Ghosh. In his new book Smoke and Ashes, he describes the key role social and moral pressures played in ending the colonial opium trade. Despite its vast profits it came to be seen as a shameful business. A “transnational, multiethnic, multi racial coalition of civil society groups” many of which “did not see eye to eye on any other matter” together forced powerful elites to change by ensuring “that the reputational damage … would outweigh the profits.” Ghosh explicitly presents this as a model for eco-activism today (noting that the British Empire’s opium business was “more powerful than today’s giant energy corporations”).
In weighing the burdens of our legacy of atmospheric pollution, note that NASA says the harmful heating effects of carbon last for 300 to 1,000 years. Once emitted, that’s how long natural processes take to remove carbon from the atmosphere. And despite the hopeful hoopla, the technology to do carbon removal at massive enough scales remains a very risky bet. Professor of engineering Julian Allwood says it should have no place in “serious current policy.” Industrialist Andrew Forrest recently called it a “complete fiction.” And it’s an open secret among climate modelers that the level of carbon removal typically used in policy-shaping models just isn’t “feasible.” To make the bet more concrete, would you put your kids on a flight with a 60-90 percent chance of worsening or shortening their lives? No one has a reliable guesstimate for the odds of this nascent tech working at sufficient scale and in time. To my mind that only makes the precious cargo gamble worse. Again, not leaving behind a benign biosphere harms the chances of your lineage having thriving lives.
Our descendants will inherit a kind of scientific karma that outdoes its biblical kin by a diabolical factor. The Old Testament warns that the sins of the fathers will be visited unto the 3rd or 4th generations. But atmospheric physics and biosphere processes mean the harms of our carbon sins will be visited upon our descendants for 12 to 40 or more generations. They will have cause to curse that we knew but chose not to act. Surely a shameful dereliction of parental and ancestral duties.
Ghosh in an earlier book about our collective climate irrationalities, The Great Derangement, dubbed our encircling dangers a crisis of culture and of desire. It seems our elite’s desire for resource-intensive lifestyles clashes with whatever wishes they might have to act on the duties that love of their offspring requires. Asked if he was optimistic at his 2024 Tanner Lecture (Intimations of Apocalypse) Ghosh said: “we shouldn’t think of this in terms of optimism and pessimism… we should think of it as a duty.” It is simply our duty to act no matter how we feel. Again, our current lives owe incalculable debts to those who dutifully fought difficult and daunting odds in prior generations. It must be made salient and reputationally damaging that ecologically profligate elite lifestyles shirk on duties to their own young.
Philosopher John Gray has noted related flaws in the logic of motivations and emotions in our political discourse. He detects a widespread “politics of narcissism” where elites have no political purpose other than that they “just want to feel good.” But this narcissistic politics is immensely immature and enormously irresponsible. Indeed, expecting nonstop nice feelings asserts a monstrous privilege while willfully ignoring gigantic flashing-neon-sign truths. If we adults don’t face harsh facts and act on duties to the young, we simply ensure that fear and unpalatable feelings will play larger roles in their risk-laden lives, which will contain constraints and hardships we could have spared them. Again, is that a loving legacy? However unpopular aversive emotions might seem in our solipsistic politics, and as all who’ve truly felt it know, fear is a potent motivator (only blinkered elite can be oblivious that so many fellow citizens live in such constant fear, for instance of financial ruin or medical bankruptcy, that US life expectancy has fallen amid “deaths of despair”). Shouldn’t we be afraid of the shame of burdening our loved ones with a worsened world?
The narcissistic sense of entitlement to unlimited resources of many in our elite must end. And Chu’s advice to kids of influential parents can bring home that unattractive truth. Too many climate experts and journalists yield to strong incentives to avoid upsetting elites (there seems precious little desire to act on the once-honored media motto: to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable). Rather than “speaking truth to power” and courageously conveying troubling truths, courtier experts are handsomely rewarded for flattering elites and keeping them feeling good (like the handlers who told Chu not to upset senators, or media that hasn’t reported scientific findings that curbs in elite consumption are unavoidable, as for instance the U.N.E.P. Emissions Gap Report stated in 2020).
Much of our leadership class seems catastrophically cut off from realities by utterly unhealthy epistemic conditions. They seem surrounded by subordinates who obstruct the facts that would surely spur rational action. But as Chu advised, their loved ones can evade the cordon sanitaire and rosy information filters of happy-talking courtiers (Shakespeare ponders this precise problem, where the powerful can be shielded from troubling truths, hence he has kings conferring with troops on the eve of battle in disguise, so they can hear unfiltered views, and he notes risks of courtiers offering “sweet, sweet poison for the age’s tooth”). Certain kids can sneak truth to power, by applying intimate dinner-table pressure. Piercing the good-vibes citadel of coddled elites, to prod them to dutiful loving action.
Any discussion of climate activism by the young must of course mention the worldwide impact of Greta Thunberg who has always centered “moral duty.” In her 2019 Davos speech she said: “The bigger your carbon footprint, the bigger your moral duty”. To many youngsters it’s plainly true that parents and leaders are failing at kid-protection duties (despite common claims about willingness to do anything for their kids). With wisdom beyond most of her elders she notes: “hope comes from action not words.”
Let’s not forget just how much elites are to blame here. The global top 1 percent by income produce twice the carbon of the whole poorest half of humanity combined. Top-decilers emit about half of all carbon, each typically responsible for 2,400 percent more emissions than a bottom deciler (most readers are very likely in or near this polluter elite, the threshold for the global top decile in 2020 was an income of $59,000). Since the poor bulk of humans emit so little (84 percent of humanity lives below our poverty level), the term Anthropocene is at least lax if not wildly inaccurate (eliteocene or greedocene would be apter). Most humans bear little to no blame. Carbon isn’t the only ecological factor that has an effectively finite budget which therefore requires sound stewardship. We can’t safely ignore that what we consume now impacts what our own descendants can do in the future. Facing up to, or denying, the science of biosphere limits is an easy litmus test of sanity (which sadly far too many courtier climate pundits constantly fail). What kind of deviant devotion lets parents consume resources for their own lifestyle frills that their kids will need for safer or more flourishing lives? Isn’t a world less roiled by climate chaos and less ravaged by resource wars rightly in the “rational interests” of most elite parents? Or at least any who aren’t dedicated sociopaths? Even today’s level of climate impacts are a factor in conflicts (like Syria, Yemen, Sudan) and upheavals like the Arab Spring. There were 55 state-based conflicts and 80 non-state ones in 2022 listed by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program and the Armed Conflict Location & Event Project global dashboard counted 10,932 battles, and 5,021 riots in Q4 2023. This will only escalate.
To quickly end this intergenerational insanity, profligate use of finite ecological resources must become reputationally damaging. On the production side as climate activist Jamie Henn recently tweeted: “Big Oil CEOs deserve all the public shame we can give them.” Similarly, climate activist Jane Fonda, in a clip circulated by Yellow Dot Studios (makers of the movie Don’t Look Up), calls for fossil fuels executives, and all their enablers, to become “persona non grata.” On the consumption side it should become a reputational risk to be seen to be in the global polluter elite. Ironically the severe top-skew in resource impacts actually brings a silver lining. Shifts in elite lifestyles can yield very large gains quickly by evading the delays and veto points that plague systemic changes: each 1 percent cut by Americans in the global 1 percent is akin to retiring 8 million cars (or nixing 17 coal plants).
For those daunted by the need to fight to change powerful elites consider this quote from Ursula K. Le Guin. When accepting her award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters: the power of capitalism “seems inescapable …so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed.”
Slavery offers a useful moral model for the task of “carbon abolition,” in two senses. Firstly, as historian Jill Lepore notes slaveholders were powerful but only about “1% of the population.” And as political scientist Neta Crawford finds in Argument and Change in World Politics moral suasion and social pressure beat elite profits in abolition and decolonization (as Ghosh notes it did with opium). Secondly, members of the polluter elite are easily tempted to use the excuse that their personal emissions, though large compared to others, are still only a tiny fraction of the total, so reducing them doesn’t matter. That’s like a slaveholder arguing that since freeing their hundred or so slaves wouldn’t end the suffering of millions, there’s no point (Washington freed his, but Jefferson and 7 other presidents didn’t). But we are each morally responsible for the harm we cause (history will judge carbon criminals accordingly). Moral guides like the Golden Rule or Kant’s “categorical imperative” indicate we must act in ways that are rational or good (or survivable) if others do the same. Plus, carbon pollution imposes colossal century-spanning spillover damages that vastly violate the limits of liberalism’s “no harm principle.” Shockingly our excess carbon will impact more people than slavery did (the UN puts transatlantic victims at 15 million people). But everyone’s kids will suffer costs for the carbon pollution we permit elites to emit. It will burden billions of people for dozens of generations. Allwood (the engineering realist quote above) projects up to a billion people won’t be able to grow enough food or earn enough to buy it. That means hundreds of millions of climate refugees for your youngsters to deal with.
To protect your kids, and to avoid the reputational damage of failing to act on what is known, you will not only have to curb your own enthusiasm for excessive pollution, you’ll also have to stop the harmful behavior of others. Again, elites especially.
Let’s end with some radiant wisdom from that stellar shame-deploying norm entrepreneur Dr. Martin Luther King: “All of us are on trial in this troubled hour, but time still permits us to meet the future with a clear conscience.” We must write a new “luminous moral chapter in” our history. Where personal and systemic greed yields to justice within biosphere limits. Isn’t that what acting in accord with love for the young demands? Doesn’t our love create a duty to leave the best world we can for the young?