Dear Greta:

I struggled with writing this to you.  I’ll explain later, but that needs to be said.

I want you to know that I admire you deeply.  Your passion is astounding.  Your grasp of the pertinent information is impressive.  Your urgency is palpable, and your cause is noble.  Your English is better than mine, and certainly better than my Swedish.  I raised my own daughter to be like you, without even knowing who you were.  The world needs you, and the world needs a generation of young people who will take up the mantle of many noble causes with your commitment and desire to change the world.  

I saw the footage of your speech at the United Nations Climate Summit today.  You know, the one my own President really didn’t want to attend, even though it’s a short train ride from his seat of power.  I choked up as I saw you hold back tears, clearly overcome by emotions I understand – anger, frustration, fear – when it comes to our impending climate catastrophe.  We are approaching an event horizon, a tipping point from which there is no going back, and I’m scared for you, and for my daughter, and for your entire generation, who, as you said so perfectly, have to live with the decisions of those who have the power to change our course, and the consequences of those decisions.  I’m proud of you for that death stare you laid on Donald Trump today.  Not that he cares, or even noticed – I’m sure he was plotting what to tell Sean Hannity tonight about how America is Great Again because he ignored you on behalf of the American people.

You see, I’m a little different than the average white male American who has so much privilege he doesn’t know what to do with it.  I’ve traveled.  I’ve walked the streets of nations where I didn’t speak the language, didn’t understand the culture, where I was as vulnerable as a woman or a person of color in America.  I understand what it is for respect for others to be a matter of survival, and I’ve experienced the contrast between cultures where people work together, and where people fight each other.  You and I, we realize that when people work together, when people stop fighting and start pulling in the same direction, that humanity has only begun to scratch the surface of our potential.  So many people don’t understand respect or cooperation at all, have no idea of our responsibility to each other.  They’ve never needed anything, and never had to ask.

Yes, we can fix climate change.   I have a deep faith that, given the will as a global society – whether that comes from desire or desperation – we will engineer our way out of this crisis.  You spoke of depending on technologies that barely exist.  When I was your age, they didn’t exist at all.  In my lifetime, I’ve seen technology invented to clean up oil spills, to produce clean drinking water in places where there is none, and to depollute rivers and streams we depend on to anchor our societies.  I’ve seen people invent machines to clean plastic out of the ocean, and to generate power without fossil fuel combustion.  Human beings have learned how to power our society by harnessing the natural, inexhaustible forces of our world. 

I talk about having been your age, and seeing these things, because the reason I’ve seen the progress of mankind in ecology is largely due to us having known for a very long time that environmental disaster is on the way.  I remember talking about things like peak oil production, rising temperatures, melting polar ice, and the effects of carbon dioxide on our environmental situation as early as the third grade, which for me was 1984.  It’s a little strange for me to realize that 1984 was 35 years ago.  We talked about other things in 1984 too, things that have been largely overcome by technology, engineering, and social change – in those days, we had acidic rain in the northeast United States, waterways so polluted that they could be set on fire, and we had no idea how to deal with the danger posed by our growing landfills that were reaching capacity.  

Our governments in the 1990s created things like the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and rules about mass emissions from huge factories and energy production plants to curb the obviously harmful effects of unchecked corporate greed.  The free market demanded technologies that made recycling more cost-effective and waste management techniques that extended the usefulness of existing landfills and disposal techniques.  We developed new facilities to deal with wastewater and chemical waste, and we focused on efficiency – where past generations would simply build a new power plant to increase capacity, we empowered energy providers to reduce energy waste in our homes and businesses that were often equivalent to the capacity of a new generation plant.  We invented low-energy lighting, televisions and refrigerators and air conditioning that used a fraction of the energy of the old equipment.  We, as a global society, understood the stakes because we were taught the consequences.

We were asked as individuals to bear the weight of an environmental movement that would save the human race, and we largely accepted that challenge.  But one segment of our society wasn’t asked to sacrifice like the rest of us, and we quickly learned that the bulk of our problem comes from that source.

See, as I’m sure you know, the harmful emissions and pollution coming from huge corporations absolutely dwarf any positive effort that can be made by individuals to curb humankind’s impact on our environment.  Human beings could stop driving cars, using single-use plastics, and throw away our smartphones tomorrow and it wouldn’t even make a dent in climate change.  Our power plants will still be spewing combustion gases into the air on an apocalyptic scale.  We’ll still be stripping mountaintops to burn the coal and leaching the heavy metals into nearby streams.  Our pesticides and fertilizers will still collect in the aquifer and flood into the ocean in such quantities that they can be detected in fish.  We will still be pumping poisonous chemicals into the ground to force out the polluting oil we burn, and to leak into our groundwater and poison the water we drink.  

All while we have the technology to stop.  Today.  

It already exists, and we have had it for decades.  We have the resources to continue to improve these technologies, and the economy of scale resulting from adoption of green technologies would almost certainly cause an explosion in the rate of improvement of things like wind, solar and hydro power.  That’s what we did with fossil fuels, too – all the arguments about inefficiency and inconvenience and immature technology were also true at the dawn of the Oil Age, all overcome by the scale of mass adoption and the investment of profits into product development, same as would happen with green energy.  The difference is that oil wasn’t replacing anything, really, where green energy is replacing an industry on the basis of ethics and safety while it’s still a wildly profitable, widely-available and mature technology.  It’s a tall order to convince people to abandon easy and cheap to avoid consequences they can’t see and may not live to experience, even under the best of circumstances.

We haven’t even talked about the lack of use of nuclear power – I know there are difficult questions about nuclear, but none so pressing or with such horrific consequences as we face from fossil fuels.  The world should have abandoned fossil fuels forty years ago, when nuclear became practical, and then committed to solving the problems with wind and solar and hydro power even before nuclear would need to be replaced.

The question is why, or really why not.

Greta, you got a lot of things right in your speech.  I’ve seen a ton of memes today with a particular quote – the one about how politicians keep telling you how you give them hope, but continue to spin fairy-tales about eternal economic growth.  You’re right.  They have no shame.  They are lying to you and me and everybody else, and the idea that you give them hope that we’ll solve these problems in the future while they hold the power in their hands to solve them today is condescending and ridiculous and entirely shameful.  They are cowards and they are liars and the blood will be on their hands, though that doesn’t matter when the blood belongs to every one of us.  

But there was another quote from your speech that stuck with me, the one that inspired me to write to you:

“You say you hear us, and that you understand the urgency, but no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that, because if you really understood the situation, and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil, and that I refuse to believe.”

Honey, they are, and you have to believe it to win this fight.  This is the part I struggled with writing.  I wrote a thousand words above because I didn’t want to say this to you – I was putting it off because it hurts me to say it, because I admire your passion and your heart and even though we’ve never met I want to treat you with the love and respect of my own daughter.  And I don’t want to discourage you or put a damper on your fire.  But I have to tell you the truth.  I didn’t want to be the one to ruin your innocent belief that deep down, humans are good at heart, but you deserve to be told the truth, even if it’s a horrible truth.

Dear, sweet, lovely Greta, they are evil.  I’m so, so sorry.

Every one of them.

They are complicit in the greatest crime against humanity of all time, one that will cost us our very existence, and they’ve done it for filthy lucre.

And they don’t care.  They don’t feel the shame of your words or your scorn.  They don’t care about your fear or anger.  They don’t even pretend.  

They’ve undone the measures we’ve already taken, the progress we’ve made in the last 30 years.  The Clean Air Act.  The Clean Water Act.  Endangered Species Acts.  Environmental review statutes for construction of heavy industry.  Fracking rules.  They’ve defunded research into renewable energy, halted the construction of new renewable energy sources, refused to allow solar fields and windmills to be built.  They’ve been blocking the use of safe nuclear product storage for 25 years, then claimed nuclear energy is too dangerous to use.  They send our military to war to protect the oil pipeline, kill thousands of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of civilians, plunge entire societies into chaos and deadly disorder, and for what?  Fossil fuel profit.

They’ve convinced almost half of America that their investment accounts are more important than the future of their very habitat, as if we’re somehow different in our biological needs from the Peregrine falcon or the Galapagos turtle, somehow not subject to the laws of science and physics.  I was once told by one of them, “You know what I’m going to do about global warming?  Go inside and turn up my air conditioning.”  Their answer to “our planet is dying” is “Fixing it will harm the economy,” as if there will be an economy when we’re all gasping for air – I suppose we’ll be able to buy fresh oxygen from the same companies that already sell us clean water and decent food.  Profit is their higher calling, after all.

Remember a few paragraphs ago when I talked about how hard it is to convince people to leave behind cheap and easy to do the right thing?  Well, it’s really easy to talk people into ignoring the Right Thing to be lazy and make money.  They did it to nuclear energy, and now they’re doing it to renewables, ‘it’ being the exploitation of the greed and innate intellectual laziness of modern human beings.  Emphasis on ‘exploitation.’  In particular, the American government has been owned by oil barons since the discovery of the Texas oil fields in the early 20th century.  They know no responsibility beyond wealth, and they will destroy this planet and kill everyone aboard in the desperate rush to squeeze the last few petrobillions out of the very ground we live upon.

They do not feel the burning shame your words should inflict, for they are without a single soul amongst them.  

Greta, they are not misguided people to be swayed with a reasonable argument.  They are evil.  They are adversaries, people who will destroy you, me and anybody else who speaks against them, all for money, even though they already have enough money to simply buy our lives.  And that’s the problem – they have enough money to buy all of us, and as long as resources can help them escape consequences, they don’t care if people without their resources suffer. 

They think we deserve to die of starvation or lack of medical care or in wars to fight for their right to profit.  If we deserved to live, we’d have earned it like they did.  They believe it’s right to have to earn life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the form of wealth, and that if you haven’t earned enough wealth, you don’t deserve the rest.  

I’m writing to you in the hope that you will reach the understanding that appealing to the deep inner morality of oil barons and their thoroughly debased government toadies is futile.  Proselytizing to the soulless isn’t the solution.  They must be overthrown, and destroyed so that they never return.  I hate to see your energy and effort wasted, and that’s why I say this to you: this isn’t a discussion, it’s not a debate: it’s a fight.  They’re not going to come around, and either we will destroy them, or they will destroy all of us, with no remorse, not even a hesitation to consider the wages of greed.  It’s us or them, and it’s like that.

We’re with you.  Seven billion people who care about our shared future are behind you.  A few hundred people shouldn’t be hard to overcome, but they have all the resources in the world, and all we have is hope, numbers, and love for each other.  Sometimes for love to win, it has to fight.  Keep throwing punches, love.  I’m incredibly proud of you.