"An Unforgiving Generation" Of Young Voters Faces Entrenched Climate Delay Across A Generation Abyss

[hatrack]

EDIT

Climate change is a uniquely generational issue. There's a clear age divide — particularly among Republicans — when it comes to addressing it. Millennials and Gen Zers across the political spectrum are more likely than their parents and grandparents to support climate action. They're better educated on the issues, and they're more open to structural change. They also have much more at stake — older people will likely be dead before planet Earth experiences the most severe impacts.

Lawmakers are increasingly aware that younger constituents will hold them accountable on climate. "I hear Republican senators say, 'If we don't clean up our act on climate, we are going to lose the next generation of voters for our party,'" Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat and champion of climate policy, said. "Anybody who has political sense understands that there is an unforgiving generation of voters coming along that is gonna be very pissed that we allowed this to drift for 20 years when we knew better."

EDIT

But most policy debates aren't genuinely existential in the way climate change is. From heat waves to droughts to floods, people born in 2020 will experience between two and seven times more extreme-weather events in their lifetimes than people born in 1960, according to a 2020 study published in the journal Science. Millennials and Gen Zers, in particular, have benefited from more education and better information about the crisis. For years, older Republicans were shaped by partisan, fossil-fuel-backed claims that climate science was bunk, that climate policy could only be achieved with overwhelming economic costs, and even that climate change was a hoax devised by China to strangle American manufacturing, as Trump falsely claimed in 2012.

EDIT

Rep. Bob Good, a Virginia Republican, declared, "There is no climate crisis. It is a hoax," while railing against the Inflation Reduction Act on the House floor in August. Matt Schlapp, the head of the Conservative Political Action Coalition, put it simply in a May tweet: "I don't give a crap about climate change." Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia argued in June that climate change and carbon emissions are actually "healthy for us" and good for the planet. Thirty Republican senators and 109 Republican representatives in the 117th Congress have openly questioned or denied the science of human-caused climate change, according to a 2021 report from the left-leaning Center for American Progress. Those members have taken a total of $61 million in donations from the oil, gas, and coal industries during their careers, the report found.

"It's impossible to deny the power of the fossil-fuel industry carrot-and-stick in the behavior of the Republican Party. I've seen it in my time in the Senate," Whitehouse said. "We went from having multiple bipartisan, good, strong climate bills to having none. And it happened instantly upon the Citizens United decision."

EDIT

https://www.businessinsider.com/climate-crisis-environmental-policy-congress-legislation-2022-9

[2naSalit]

1. Perhaps they'll vote this time.

[hatrack]

2. A guy can dream . . . .

Whatever the wake-up call (Katrina, Harvey, Lightning Complex Fire or a 20-year drought), our collective capacity for hitting the snooze button seems unlimited.

[ThoughtCriminal]

3. I have voted in every election since 1976

when I turned 18. I sure wish that this generation turns that anger and frustration into participation.

No excuses - you want a future? Make it!