Letter to Young Climate Change Protesters World-Wide

Dear Greta, dear children:

You are worried about mass extinction and you are right. You believe bad things are going to happen to you in the near future? Right again. We will come clean below but you have to understand that to an extent, you brought everything upon yourselves.

From when you were little, we urged you to eat some reasonable amount of vegetables even if they did not look appetizing. (But see below how you changed over a short few years!) Later, we pointed out that eating so much sugar would probably give you acne, eventually. Then, we had to redouble our effort when you insisted that a quart of cold apple juice couldn’t do any harm because it was “natural” and “organic.” Pointing out that apple juice is almost entirely water and sugar made no impression on you. When one of us would challenge you to explain the advantages of “organic” food, you teared up, ran to your room and slammed the door. We lost that one anyway.

At twelve, you disrupted your family’s shopping and cooking organization by declaring that you had become vegan. We humored you; our mistake! We should have let you go hungry for a few days and nights, or until you got back to normal. Unfortunately, we did not possess then the resolve that is now ours.

At fourteen, you announced you were going to drastically reduce your carbon footprint. Since, you only owned an old bike and some skateboards, your options were limited. (Only a few of you had access to a nice sailboat; you, Greta, are one of the lucky ones. Did you know that? ) So, cleverly, you chose to modify your clothing in the right direction.

First, you gave up any synthetic fabric because it came from oil, opting instead for the more expensive all-cotton clothing (Gap-style). But then, you said that cotton required too much water to grow. So, you simply started wearing much less clothing of any kind, much, much less. Since you were then also devoured by hormonal fires, we raised our collective eyebrows and let it go.

In the meantime, there was a constant war at home about your studying hard enough (hard?) to keep up your grades in your no-bad-grades school environment. Little was asked of you and you did not do it, on the whole.

The main problem was not that you were dull – though some of you were, without knowing it; who would have told you? The main problem was that you spent ten to fifteen hours a day with your faces glued to some screen or other. That way, you gained most of your understanding of the world from advertisers, propagandists, other sources un-vetted, and other children, almost all of whom were as uninformed as you are.

Let me say before it’s too late that yes, you are a little bit right, Fifty years ago, we could have made do without 20 foot-long cars empty at both ends  and getting only eleven miles to the gallon. And then, there was the incessant jetting to nowheres with sun and sand.

This being admitted, the many of us who have read history recognize well the new world for which you are clamoring. We know it because your new world is really yesterday’s world, the world in which the grandparents of the oldest among us lived. I mean the world before western societies had fully reaped the benefits of relying on fossil fuels. It was defined by short life expectancy, high infant mortality, mediocre public health, unsafe food, social isolation (really what Karl Marx had earlier called “the idiocy of village life”), and, above all tyranny. I mean by tyranny the intrusion of government in every aspect of life. (You want more regulations don’t you?).

Moreover, in spite of your thousands of tiresome repetitions, we are not running out of anything, anything (except possible wild tigers; got to do something about that; I have my checkbook in hand for that one). If our practices were really “unsustainable,” one of your favorite meaningless words, prices would go up. In fact almost nothing is more expensive than it used to be (and especially, not crude oil!)

What you wish for is just not worth it. We don’t want to help you go there. It’s better to stop soon.

So, making a long story short, we , your parents, and other seniors, joining yet older generations, have had it. We despair of you ever gaining the maturity, and especially, the knowledge to steer the world even as badly as we did. We are sure that if we let it happened, it’s going to become disastrously ugly.

So, rather than take this chance, with such poor probability of being proven wrong, we have decided to end the world, close it down, so to speak, in 2031. (Yes, twelve years from now). We will make it as quick as possible to avoid unnecessary suffering.

First, the ocean will rise, drowning most big cities; then a period of extreme droughts everywhere will cause crops to whither. There will be little to eat, organic, or genetically modified, or anything. Latter, fresh water will be in severe shortage. All the while mass extinctions will take place around you, beginning with panda bears, dwarf Nubian goats, and sea horses, and ending with flies and mosquitoes.

Did I say “ending”? Not so, the last mass extinction will be yours (ours). Which is pretty much what you have been clamoring for.

Sorry it had to end this way but you have convinced us through the robust logic of your arguments and your dexterous use of incontrovertible facts that there is no other issue to the current and growing horrid climate change crisis.

PS  We are glad so many of you have decided not to reproduce to alleviate the Earth’s burden. If you had not, we would have missed our grandchildren by anticipation.