The thing is, so often when I hear or come across someone skeptical about the science of Climate Change it is almost always a baby boomer (leave out the big L right wingers who are skeptical of anything that interferes with the collection of cash and the percentage sky rockets).
Being a baby boomer and accepting the science of climate change I wondered why this might be.
Are baby boomers inherently conservative?
"No" we scream as we stamp our right leg (that once wore flares and groovy sandals from India). We marched against The Vietnam War. We had sits in and burnt bras and demanded free education, explored the sexual revolution, and did all those other wonderful things - in our youth. Then we voted in some of the most conservative governments we've ever seen. Created a world where image is everything and a woman's image, more than ever before, is sold, abused or air brushed into an unreal fantasy for an old hippy's deluded brain.
More than that, we have demanded tax cuts after tax cuts, privatization, sold everything good off, like state owned banks, railways and bus companies, power companies and other utilities. We've closed schools, and pushed more and more funds into private schools while killing off the state system, cutting back on welfare, locking up "illegal immigrants" and so forth. If you look at our voting record, and at our effect upon the world where we baby boomers have been the single biggest voting block for a long time, the record is not very good. Not for a leftie like me anyway.
But what the baby boomers have done is acquired wealth. Not all of us, of course, but enough, enough that we seem to be a bit preoccupied with that wealth, and with our retirements. We fear anything that might touch our extended hazy days of traveling, lying on exotic beaches, buying new things, or doing whatever the hell we please as we sink into a dotage the young people under us will struggle to live through.
Hence, in my opinion, our skepticism towards climate change. We baby boomers do not want anything to get in the way of our years of spending what we have acquired.
We certainly do not want any part of a system that might ask us to pay not only for what we have, but the cost of using/buying/acquiring what we have.
As for the planet, well our lazy children will just have to get off their butts and do something about that, after all, senility brings its own climate relief.
In a sense this is an apology, to the planet, to the generations who are not baby boomers, to those baby boomers who did once march, or sit in, or imagined a world where we could give peace a chance.
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