The Washington Post ran a column last week that blamed the baby boom generation for global warming. Even for the Post this was extraordinarily low. This is not an issue of defending my generation; it is a question of how bad policy persists. And the answer puts the blame far more on media outlets like theWashington Post than people born in the two decades after World War II.
Most people don’t spend their days enmeshed in policy issues; they have jobs and lives. They rely on the media to let them know what is important. Unfortunately, this has generally not meant much coverage of global warming. The media have largely treated global warming as sort of a sidebar of interest to a narrow clientele, kind of like sailboat races.
Contrast the coverage of global warming with the near wall-to-wall coverage of Ebola back in the fall of 2014, a disease that infected a total of three people in the United States. Or, take the current coverage of ISIS. If we envision a worst case scenario for ISIS, there are probably several thousand times as many lives being put at risk by global warming than will ever be threatened by ISIS.