A Canadian graduate student in sustainable energy frets for her infant son.
Rose Murphy writes in the Globe and Mail:
I gave birth to my first child last year. According to the latest data from Statistics Canada, his life expectancy is 79; if he reaches that age, he will live until the year 2090. The normal anxiety I feel as a parent about my child’s future is heightened by what I know from a career spent considering the implications of climate change and analyzing the economic impacts of climate change policy. And for me, it couldn’t be more personal. The best information available today tells me this issue touches anyone who has a child in their life who they love. Action we take, or fail to take, right now to address climate change will profoundly affect their lives…
Indeed..!!!!… makes me more pesimistic about the future of our world based on this demonstrated “product” of our higher eduction systems. That’s where the real peril lies, in my view.
The level of stupidity of large numbers of today’s college graduates is appalling.
My advice as a parent with 3 grown children: take care of the present and the future will attend to itself. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t plan for foreseeable events, but you also shouldn’t obsess over future possibilities that you can’t see clearly.
“PhD candidate in sustainable energy at Simon Fraser University.”
I can’t digest this. Is “sustainable energy” in the political science dept?
Is she trained to agitate the government to give subsidies to companies
to develop “sustainable energy?” 40 years of subsidies have produced
little, so let’s try for another 40 years?
Or is it in the engineering dept? Is she trained in windmill design? How
to make solar panels? The formula for pixie dust to power tomorrow’s
cars?
Art history might have been a better choice for Ms. Rose. At least she
wouldn’t be paranoid about her kid’s future.
Then there is SFU:
“As a founding member of the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS),
SFU researchers are well positioned to contribute to the development of
innovative climate change solutions, seek new opportunities for positive
adaptation to climate change solutions, and lead the way to a vibrant
lowcarbon economy in BC and globally.”
Vibrant.
I can’t help but think about how I had no future when I was born in 1972. The food shortages predicted by Erlich, the looming cancer explosion, still under the thumb of nuclear armegeddon and the predicted coming ice age. This means that if we didn’t address the problems right away, my life would be one of cold and starvation, if we lived at all……….oh wait everything has got better and not worse. Guess my parents were just smarter than this twat.
But isn’t it touching that she is worries about her 80 year old little boy…….but I thought we needed to stop keeping people alive longer for GIA’s sake? This really translates to: “I love my kid so much that I want to make sure he has hard life with none of the advantages I had, so he can spend his last year or two of old age in a slightly cooler world, but still without any of the advantages I enjoy now”.
I think her new little baby is filling his diapers with better thought out ideas.
My parents raised their children to be adaptable.