It is New Year’s Eve 2054, twenty degrees below zero. In the background, Marvin Gaye is softly singing: “Live life for the children. Let’s save the children.” I, Q, am ninety and talking to my great-granddaughter P. We have just heard that the Elfstedentocht will go ahead: “it giet oan!”

P: “Why is it so cold?”

Q: “Because of global warming.”

P: “Huh?”

Q: “Due to global warming, the land ice melted and the water in the North Atlantic Ocean became lighter and less salty. As a result, the warm Gulf Stream, which used to ensure a mild climate in Northwestern Europe, came to a halt.”

P: “Could that have been prevented?”

Q: “Yes, because we knew. In 2025, scientists from Utrecht calculated that this could happen.”

P: “So why wasn’t anything done?”

Q: “Many people dismissed climate change as nonsense. Despite wildfires and floods, most concerns focused on how immigration was changing national culture and the local living environment.”

P: “Weren’t people concerned about their children’s future?”

Q: “There were many reasons for doing nothing: from ‘you only live once’ to ‘what I do, doesn’t make any difference anyway’ and ‘technology will solve everything.’ Misinformation was also deliberately spread and doubt was sown. Fossil fuel billionaires funded climate denial and wielded great influence over the media. In the United States, they even seized political power through Trump. He first dismantled climate science and environmental policy, and then democracy itself.”

P: “But powerful business leaders and politicians have children too, right?”

Q: “They thought their children could remain immune to the consequences of the climate crisis. They opted for the ‘ethics of the armed lifeboat,’ as Christian Parenti put it in 2012*. They secured their own interests through military force at the expense of the suffering of millions of people, particularly in the Global South.”

P: “What should economic and political leaders have done instead?”

Q: “Save all children, not just their own. Cooperate internationally and uphold universal human rights for every citizen of the world. Show moral leadership by acknowledging global warming and the suffering associated with it, granting rights to nature, grounding private jets, and sharing benefits and burdens fairly. Strengthen democracy by respecting science and uncertainty, promoting independent investigative journalism, and enabling well-informed citizen participation in decision-making. Make social media social again, so people can reengage in dialogue with one another. Require companies and engineers to develop clean products so that the world would have enough for everyone’s needs. That is how they could have become heroes for eternity.”

*Van Est refers here to the book Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence by American investigative journalist Christian Parenti.

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This article was translated using AI-assisted tools and reviewed by an editor.