I have two children, and knowing what I know now, I carry a certain level of guilt for bringing them into this world.
I consider myself a fairly moderate and regular person, and I would absolutely not have any more children.
Climate change is overhyped in my view. War, weapons, and disease pose a far greater threat to humanity in my view.
It's a horrific burden, it will crush a child's soul. We can make the environment cleaner with our technology, but changing the weather to prevent climate shifts that occur on a geological time scale and involve a nuclear furnace of a scale beyond our wildest imagination is not within our control.
Teaching your children that all the beauty of the planet is going to die because "people are bad and can't get their shit together" is a completely fucked parenting strategy and a horrible, awful, thing to do to children.
Even if it's true it's much kinder to let them live out this normally happy time of their life in blissful ignorance.
Kindness is what life is about.
Tell them there are always problems and we've always solved them. Tell them things are going to be ok. Let them take on the burndens of adulthood when they are psychologically mature.
The price of solar electricity has decreased 89% in the last 10 years. That's only going to continue to drop, and as long as we can figure out cost-effective ways of storing green energy I don't see how companies (and governments) can justify not entirely switching to carbon-neutral or eventually carbon-negative ways of doing business.
could you elaborate on this a bit more? what do you know now that causes you to feel guilt for perpetuating your genetic lineage—which is the most natural, low-level thing that living organisms could have an inclination to do?
and if you don't mind my asking, how old is your eldest child, so as to establish the time period in which your views were changed and your feelings of guilt began?
Look to the roots of the Syrian civil war and some of the contributing factors - you will see crop failure from climate change as one major factor (not the only one of course). Look at the huge numbers of immigrants crossing over the Mediterranean, and the tension that is rising mount some EU nations (see Italy, Greece, Turkey). Look to the southern US border getting worse, and who is using that for political capital? We are already seeing the spiral of many major ecosystems that have kept the Earth somewhat stable, from the Amazon, barrier-reefs, arctic regions...
This is just the start. We are in the very early days of something that has only begun.
Perhaps it isa failure of imagination, but I think people do not understand or appreciate the various things that are affected and intertwined with climate change.
My eldest is 15.
I can understand the perspective that anthropogenic climate change is a significant factor in various things in our complex systems, but I have trouble making the logical leap from there to what, again, seems to be abject nihilism caused by complete certainty of an imminent doomsday scenario, leaving no possibility any other outcome—which, no offense—is something usually reserved for cults. (religions usually at least proffer the possibility of salvation in such scenarios!)
it may be useful to introspect and examine what led you to such beliefs, as this specific sort of paralyzing terror is often something that one reaches through overexposure to fear-mongering mass media in a 24/7 online news cycle, and promise-making(-and-never-fulfilling) politicians looking for reelection.