Activists walk through lower Manhattan for the Global Climate Strike protests, Sep 23, 2022, in New York. NEW YORK: In the fictional world of the PD James novel Children of Men and its movie adaptation, humanity has lost the ability to reproduce and thus faces certain extinction.One such person is a YouTuber named Sam Mitchell, who identifies as an “Eco-Nazi”, an “unapologetic doomer” and an “unrepentant collapsitarian”.
The climate scientist took issue. “This is utterly untrue ,” Hausfather tweeted, correctly. “It assumes we fail at decarbonising our economies within our children’s lifetimes. In reality, someone in the UK today emits half the emissions in a year that their grandparents did. In the US we emit about a third less than our parents did.”
That is an extraordinary human accomplishment. And our political leaders have promised to do much more by eradicating emissions altogether in another generation. They aren’t on track to achieve that yet. But little humans are growing less polluting and wasteful by the year. As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Lara Williams has written, babies born today could see unimaginable economic and physical destruction in their lifetimes if we don’t get global heating under control.
Or 1313, when the Black Plague was around the corner. Or 513, not long before what historians agree was the worst year to be alive. Or 30,013 BCE, when just turning 30 was an accomplishment.