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Klein is not the first to demonstrate that unless our priorities are urgently altered, our fossil-fuelled economy-culture will push us to a level of warming that will be impossible to mitigate. Our current path will lead to an average of between three and five degrees of warming by the end of the century and threaten the vast majority of humanity and most non-human life as well.

Our predicament, if unprecedented, is constructed on familiar ground. As with all the major crimes against humanity of the past century, we know what is going on at the same time as we deny the evidence that piles up around us. ……..

I have read hundreds of articles and books on climate change, and unlike my prime minister and his corporate backers, I have been convinced by the scientists that we are heading for catastrophe…..I feel a profound need to lie to my children — the ones in my house and the ones in my classroom. I haven’t the guts to contradict the central premise of my culture, and tell all my children that the world is not their oyster, that they must not do as I have done. That in fact, not only is the oyster’s shell disintegrating because of the acidification of our oceans, but my children cannot have the lifestyle I have had. How do I admit that I and a handful of generations before me have exposed our unique, perfect pearl of a living planet to gradual, then probable rapid extermination of life?…

I am no role model. For my children must not live like me, eat like me, shop like me, travel like me, dream like me, because our planet cannot cope with another generation of middle-class North Americans treating the planet like its private sewer……..

Our kids earnestly recycle and reuse, but they are not really given much guidance in how to reduce. To reduce, consume less, do less, buy less, in our value system is ideologically associated with being less.

Nor are they given much guidance by their overworked parents about how to  engage in our admittedly flawed political landscape.  The fundamental changes required to slow down global warming demand that young people speak out as citizens, not just as consumers,  for policies that defend their right to clean air, water, soil and survival. Without such engagement, Klein argues, our democracy is a façade spinning PR for corporate interests.

Klein insists that the only thing that will save us is a collective standing up and telling the truth to power, both political and corporate, and that we must demand that our  leaders  guide  us and if needs be, regulate and yes, tax the bejeesus out of carbon at the source. It is the only path for urgently protecting this planet and the future of humanity.

But we must do the hardest job first: We must start by telling the truth to our children. http://montrealgazette.com/business/energy/opinion-do-we-have-the-courage-to-tell-our-children-the-truth-about-climate-change