Seniors and climate change

Droughts, heat waves, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, wildfires: climate change isn’t in the future any more, it’s already here. How will it affect seniors, and how should we respond?

We older adults feel the effects of extreme weather more than younger adults. Our aging bodies, limited mobility and sometimes our medications make us especially vulnerable to high temperatures, polluted air and vector-borne diseases. If the power goes out, we can’t use our electric medical devices or refrigerate our medications. If we live alone, we might not get the help we need to get through an extreme weather event. Remember the heat wave in France in 2003? Of the almost 15,000 people who died, 80% were seniors.

There are plenty of younger people who won’t be sorry to see us suffering from climate change, since our generation has caused it. Many of us now feel guilt over our inaction. But guilt is paralyzing. Somehow we have to turn that guilt into responsibility and action. What can we do?

We can certainly take action in our personal lives. We can recycle, go vegan, give up the car, use energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs, fix things instead of throwing them away and so on. These gestures may help to quiet our conscience or deflect our grandchildren’s anger, and they’ll reduce our carbon footprint. But they won’t go far enough. Avoiding the worst impacts of climate disruption means changing the way the power sector operates, and implementing mitigation and adaptation policies both nationally and globally. The science is clear and can’t be denied any more. The ball is in the politicians’ court now. But the politics are complex and daunting. How many politicians are willing to pay up front for an uncertain result in the future, coordinate their policies with whose of other nations, and regulate and downsize a sector with the power of the fossil fuel industry? Not many, as we learned from the climate conference in Madrid a few weeks ago.

But the stakes are high, time is short, and we have to keep trying. At the very least, we need to vote out all the politicians who deny climate change, and those who talk a good game but don’t act. We have to let politicians know that climate change is a top priority now and we will or won’t vote for them depending on their climate policy. We also have to tell them that we accept what these policies may mean for us, in terms of higher prices, the disappearance of some jobs and creation of others, and maybe a shift in the economy away from growth. We have to keep learning and talking about climate change. We seniors need to leave a better legacy than climate disruption and chaos. The young people, marching in the streets in the thousands, are watching us.