What's our duty to future generations? Greta Thunberg demands an answer

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The uncomfortable truth about the teen activist's message on climate change is that we can no longer claim innocence - we have known too much for too long, and we have done nothing about it, writes Anna Hartford.

Does someone who will be born in 2119 count any less than someone who is alive right now?We know the planet is warming. We know we're causing it. We know it will result in drought, plague, famine, disease, drowned coastlines, mass extinctions.

Philosophers have long pondered these questions, but for the first time - faced with our complicity in an increasingly uninhabitable earth, and our narrowing window in which to evade it - they are coming to have urgent public resonance. Her accusations have been variously received. In the laughing and clapping at the UN address you sense both condescension and relish: that she's providing some a yearned-for rebuke.

Thunberg will be 17 in a few months, but an important part of her power is in coming across as much younger than she is. No small part of Thunberg's message, and the discomfort of receiving it, is this accusation that our innocence with regard to climate change has now passed: we have known too much for too long, and we have done nothing about it.

 

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