It's Too Late For Us To Fight Climate Change. Instead, Here's How We'll Spend Our Lives.

2/16/2020 08:00 am ET

“My wife and I will leave it to someone else to try and avoid disaster ... we’ve decided that as long as they can postpone the collapse until we’re dead, we’ll be OK.”
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By Barry Rueger

...at 64 and 74 years of age, my wife and I believe there’s a good chance that we’ll be gone before coastal cities are flooded, the ice caps have melted, and the planet descends into a “Mad Max” dystopia. We would like to think that this isn’t what the future has in store, but the intransigence of almost all governments to actually slow carbon emissions leaves little doubt that things are unlikely to turn around.

One of the things that age gives you is a sense of history, a feeling that you’ve seen patterns repeat and that you can see where things are heading in the near future. Over and over again, we’ve seen corporations and governments ignore the people they should protect in order to line their own pockets. What has changed now is that they’re sacrificing an entire planet instead of a town or a country. I would like to believe that the younger people marching with Greta Thunberg could change that, but honestly I can’t see it happening.

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We’ll choose a home in a place that will stay reasonably cool and that should avoid tsunamis and tornados. We’re exercising and eating carefully so that we can stay healthy to avoid a collapsing health care system. We’ll invest in things like solar energy because it will protect us from failures of the infrastructure that powers our home, not because we hope to reduce emissions. And, to some degree, we’ll welcome friends who are forced to leave their homes when they are underwater, or who are burned out of their properties. It is now part of our plan for climate disaster to accept that our home will become a place of refuge for some of these people.

What frustrates us is that we’re part of the generation that saw all of this coming...Whether we are leading by example or just running away from the inevitable can be debated, but this is how we’ll be taking back control of our lives. Meanwhile, as I watch the sea levels rise and Australia burn, I can’t help but remember the words of the old American spiritual “Mary Don’t You Weep”: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/climate-change-strategy_n_5e4308c0c5b6b9d1a7570b47