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TOPLINE
Climate crisis a prime “intergenerational justice” challenge b/c young people pay for old’s decisions
World’s average billionaire is 65; they’ve amassed wealth while deferring environmental costs
“OK boomer” meme expresses Gen Z’s explicitly climate-related frustrations
That deer .gif is Important™️
The Ol’ Climate Dine-And-Dash
You know that thing where you’re planning to meet someone out at the bar, but they’re finishing dinner at a nearby fancy restaurant first with a bunch of rich coworkers and they’re all like “come meet us”, so you do even though you already ate some leftovers at home, but then when the bill comes they try to split it evenly despite the fact that you only had a water with lemon and everyone else gorged themselves on I don’t know something fancy like pheasant or some shit, and besides they’re all bankers or whatever, so you’re all like “uh what the fuck, my pals” and they’re all like “businessbusiness you don’t understand how the world works economysnowflake” which is when you remember they’re not your friends at all and are 30-50 years older than you and leave without paying at all and you have to cover the entire bill?
Do you know that thing? That thing sucks. The climate crisis is sort of like that thing. There’s a group of mostly old people gorging themselves on profits, racking up a bill they will not be around to pay. This is why experts consider global warming an intergenerational issue: previous generations created it and benefited by it, and future generations must solve it—or else be undone by it.
I searched for “dine and dash” gifs on Google Images and felt compelled to include this one for what I hope are pretty obvious reasons. [via]
Being old and having money aren’t inherently evil. I know old people who are rich that aren’t villains. They care about the climate crisis and don’t light rainforests on fire to clear land for industrial cattle ranches, or whatever. But there are a small number of people who amass shitloads of wealth by indirectly or directly fucking up the environment.
Attaining Scrooge McDuck levels of cash basically requires you to defer the environmental costs of your industrial-grade grifts to people who will be born after they die. Oil, factory farms, lumber, soda, fast fashion, same-day shipping… the people cashing in on carbon-emitting industries aren’t going to be around to clean up the mess. Some of them are even kind enough to admit this!
Most mega-rich people are old. The average age of the world’s billionaires is 65. (Also, 88% of them are dudes, because duh.) 65, as it so happens, is smack in the middle of the so-called Baby Boomer generation, loosely defined as people born between 1946 and 1964.
Which brings us, more or less, to this moment of cathartic climate delight. Watch this 25 year-old (!) New Zealand lawmaker absolutely dunk on a climate-denying heckler with a with a simple, lethal dismissal:
Put that video in saline solution and inject it into my veins again and again until I am dead. This is my wish.
For those of you who don’t sit on Twitter all day, there’s actually a bit more to the story on “OK boomer.” Over the past few weeks, this new meme has emerged as a catch-all way for today’s kids to dismiss the dipshit harrumphing of yesteryear’s Reaganites.
Frustration over the older generation’s climate profiteering is explicitly baked into the retort, as one teen who helped popularize the phrase explained:
A lot of them don’t believe in climate change or don’t believe people can get jobs with dyed hair, and a lot of them are stubborn in that view. Teenagers just respond, ‘Ok, boomer.’ It’s like, we’ll prove you wrong, we’re still going to be successful because the world is changing.
I honestly don’t know how dyed hair plays into this, but I also don’t have much hair, so maybe that explains my confusion. In any case, the New Zealander didn’t come up with “OK boomer”; she just used it in possibly the most satisfying context imaginable.
Or at least, the second-most satisfying context imaginable.
I regret to inform you that no one has dropped a hot “OK boomer” on President Donald Trump. But you’d have to imagine it’s coming, my dear Heat Beaters. He’s a climate-denying 73 year-old maybe-billionaire who cares about no one but himself and won’t be around when the shit hits the fan. If there’s a more deserving boomer to be “OK’d”, I don’t know one.
There’s been a lot of hemming and hawing about whether “OK boomer” is ageist, or hilarious, or both. I’m not going to get into that here, because who cares. The important point here is that people in power—political, economic, or otherwise—are actively fight against meaningful, immediate climate action. If they won’t stop braying falsehoods while the world burns, and lining their pockets with the principal of loans they have no intention of repaying, then there’s no reason to listen to them, no matter how old they are.
These people are pulling a dine-and-dash. They’re ordering more pheasant and eyeing the exit. You’ve been summoned to a meal you didn’t want to eat, with people who don’t care about you, and they’re asking you to kick in for a bill you didn’t rack up. Soon they’re going to leave, and you’re going to be stuck with their tab.
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Want to send me a tip, comment, or other feedback? Email me: dave@dinfontay.com. I love hearing from you! (Most of you, at least.)