Generation Hot: If you’re under 25, you should be pissed about climate change

So you effed up our planet, huh?"Generation Hot" is the 2 billion or so young people who will be stuck dealing with global warming and weirding for their entire lives -- and who have to figure out how to do it sanely and humanely. In his new book Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, journalist (and Grist contributor) Mark Hertsgaard puts the official start of Generation Hot at June 23, 1988, when climate scientist James Hansen first testified to Congress about climate change and The New York Times put the story on its front page.

"My daughter and the rest of Generation Hot have been given a life sentence for a crime they didn't commit," Hertsgaard writes in a piece in The Nation adapted from his book. Even if we manage to ditch fossil fuels over the next 25 years, "the reality is that we're locked in to at least 50 more years of rising temperatures and the harsher climate impacts they bring. Thus the young people of Generation Hot are condemned to spend the rest of their lives coping with a climate that will be hotter and more volatile than ever before in our civilization's history."

Hertsgaard has been reporting about climate change for 20 years, but it wasn't until 2005, when his daughter was born and he began to realize what kind of world she would be growing up in, that he became, as he puts it, "deeply angry."

He plans to channel some of that anger into guerilla-style protests against the "climate cranks" in Congress, corporations, and the media who have denied the problem and blocked the solutions. The week of Jan. 31, Hertsgaard and some members of the members of Generation Hot will confront climate cranks on camera in Washington, D.C.

Source: Grist