When asking “Who screwed the millennials?” should we just apply Occam’s razor and answer “John Howard”? His government certainly shoulders a lot of blame but so do those who have done nothing to help since he was voted out.
The earliest millennials will be 70 in 2050, meaning almost all will be working when the world is forecast to reach temperatures more than 2C above pre-industry averages unless we do something.
They are the first generation who can’t really say “doesn’t matter, I’ll be dead by then”, but they of course are not the only group screwed by climate change.
When I turned 20 in 1992, I had experienced one month of global temperatures 1C above the average of the late 19th century. That was one month more than my father had experienced when he turned 20 in 1966. For their first 20 years, millennials born in January 1985, had just four months of temperatures 1C higher than the late 19th-century average.
When my daughter turned 20 last year, she had experienced 106 months of them:
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John Howard is not to blame for climate change, but inaction on climate change in this country started under his watch.
He was the one who made sure Australia was able to count land clearing when calculating our emissions, and thus be able to claim reductions when we haven’t made any at all:
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His government killed any chance of bipartisan policy for a price on........