Who’s to blame for climate change? Ask the more militant members of Generation Z – i.e., those born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s – and you’ll be left in little doubt.
It’s the old.
That’s right: those selfish, entitled, ignorant, gas-guzzling Baby Boomers. It’s all their fault. Or so Gen Z has long believed. [emphasis, links added]
In January 2020, for example, Greta Thunberg and a group of other leading “youth climate activists” co-wrote a scathing public statement in which they declared that, when it comes to the climate, “Young people are being let down by older generations and those in power.”
(“Those in power”, of course, are almost invariably members of “older generations” themselves. So in effect, the old were being blamed twice over.)
Greta and her friends were far from alone in this view. Around the same time, Billie Eilish, one of the world’s most successful young pop stars, told the NME that “old people” must “start listening to us so that we don’t all die”.
The old, she fumed, “don’t really care if we die, but we don’t wanna die yet.”
Of course, both Greta and Billie were mere teenagers when they made these comments. Now that they’re older and wiser – Greta is 20, Billie 21 – perhaps they’ll be mature enough to admit they got it wrong.
Because, according to a fascinating new poll by YouGov, the old seem to be doing more to tackle climate change than the young.
In the poll, those aged 18-24 claimed to be the most worried about climate change. When it came to doing something other than moaning, however, it was a different story.
Almost 90 percent of the over-65s said they recycled “as much as possible,” compared with only half of the young.
The old were also more likely to save water, turn down the heating, wash their clothes at low temperatures, buy locally produced food, avoid excessive packaging, buy energy-efficient appliances, switch off the lights when leaving a room, and repair things rather than throw them away.
On top of that, more of them had cut down on the number of flights they took.
Greta’s generation was more likely to have given up meat. But otherwise, it seemed to be the old doing most of the work.
What are we to make of this mysterious discrepancy? Perhaps Greta’s generation is in such deep despair about the future of the planet that some of them have given up trying to save it.
There is, however, an alternative possibility – which is that they care more about being seen to have the “right” opinion on climate change than they do about tackling it. A type of behavior that older people like to call “virtue-signaling”.
Which could it be? We can only speculate. Either way, the poll results shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Anyone who has been held up by a Just Stop Oil protest will have noted that an extraordinary number of the protesters are pensioners.
This, I suspect, is the real reason why the Government is so anxious to get older people back into work. It’s got nothing to do with boosting the economy. It’s purely to stop them gluing their bottoms to roads.
Read rest at Telegraph
Greta and her Generation are the examples of the Brainwashing hat is carried out in all those Government Run Schools and Big Brother is happy about it all
I would not believe a government-sponssored poll about so-called ‘climate change’. There is no way 74% of the population, or even that poll, are concerned about it, and certainly not 70% of people over 65. The older people get, the more easily they can spot a scam.
I wish this was true, but from my experience (not a poll) I found the older folks get more of their information from the main stream media, where they are effectively brain washed into believing that Global Warming is will destroy the planet.
I’m sure that is true of some, perhaps even many, but my own experience in talking to people is that most adults are skeptics.
Well any thinking adult who doesn’t just swallow the climate scam nonsense but actually does real research. Then they become skeptics.
Very true, that was how I became a skeptic.
Even though done in the UK I find the results of the polls hard to believe. In the US polls have consistently shown that climate change was the issue that people are least concerned about. The polls are consistent with election results where when people can vote directly on the issue, climate change initiatives almost always lose.
I rather suspect that poll is completely fabricated to push the alarmist narrative.