"In the 1930s, a few people knew that nuclear weapons would be potentially cataclysmic. By the 1960s, there was a well-established anti-nuclear weapon peace movement, but the protestors were treated as fools by the media. By the 1980s, it was becoming clear that nuclear war was mass annihilation and could not be avoided by threats of mutually assured destruction. Disarmament began in earnest.
The climate emergency has a similar trajectory,3 but without that most imminent of threats. People's reaction to both is similar: ignorance, acceptance, revulsion, and rejection, but only generation by generation. People tend to stick with what they believed as teenagers. Today's teenagers know that the climate emergency is real, just as the teenagers who put flowers in the barrels of guns in the 1960s knew what their parents did not. ..."

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