Young people have a very special place amongst the people of the world when it comes to climate change. Clearly, the bulk of historical carbon emissions have been caused by generations past, and in particular our parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

In addition, people who are not yet born can have no say in decisions that affect them. Where are the voices of those born in 2040 in today’s negotiations? Intergenerational equity is the idea that there should be equity between generations, so that past generations can be equal to present and future generations. Present generations should leave a world comparable to the one we grew up in, to afford future generations the same rights and privileges their parents had.

But our parents’ generation has failed us when it comes to acting on climate change. We have been aware of the situation since at least the 70′s, and the UNFCCC has been working now for 20 years. They have been negotiating for, literally, our whole lives. But we have consistently failed to see adequate climate action.

So the youth of today are affected in a unique way by climate change. A quote from American activist Tim DeChristopher sums this up nicely:

“It means that we’re never going to have the opportunities that our parents’ and our grandparents’ generations had, and that we’ve got this massive burden weighing on our future. We constantly hear baby boomers saying to young people: “Stopping climate change is going to be the challenge of your generation.” Well, that’s not really true. We’ve known about climate change for 20 years, during the time when baby boomers were holding power in this country. Stopping climate change was the challenge of the baby boomer generation, and they failed because it would’ve meant making sacrifices and putting their children’s and grandchildren’s generations ahead of their own. They chose not to do that.”

As such, I think that climate change is one factor contributing to the kind of youth disengagement and disempowerment in political processes we see in the extremely low level of voter turnout amongst youth.

How should youth feel about this? Firstly, for us, climate change is deeply personal. From Tim:

“For a young person looking at climate change, it is personal. It is an older generation trading our lives for their own short-term interests, whether that’s fossil fuel executives trading our lives for profit or whether that’s baby boomer liberals trading our lives for their own comfort and convenience because they don’t want to take the risk of fighting back.”

How should we respond? There’s a quote from Tim which I find really interesting, about anger:

“I’ve never seen a place in this movement or in the discourse around climate change where it’s considered appropriate for young people to express their anger at old people. But it’s just under the surface. I don’t think we can have a healthy dialogue around climate change until young people are able to express that anger in an honest way, just like I don’t think we ever could have had really honest and productive dialogues around race without the expression of black rage. Certainly we need more than just rage, and on its own, it’s not productive. But if it’s not ever addressed, I think it’s hard to move forward in a trusting way.”

We have a right to be angry. But it’s not all about anger. Tim speaks about how once he got beyond the sheer terror he felt when he thought about the reality of climate change, he found it liberating:

“Once I realised that there was no hope in any sort of normal future, there’s no hope for me to have anything my parents or grandparents would have considered a normal future - of a career and a retirement and all that stuff - I realised that I have nothing to lose by fighting back. Because it was all going to be lost anyway.”

Further, he says, “[i]t’s somewhat comforting knowing that things are going to fall apart, because it does give us that opportunity to change things.”

I find this fascinating. This takes all that is bad about climate change and flips it on its head. It marks a paradigm shift in the way that young people think. Because we are not going to have the same kind of lives as our parents - as much as some of us may want that life. And if we choose to accept it, this can liberate us. We don’t have to follow predetermined pathways. We can live the kind of lives that we want to lead.