Pointing fingers in a burning house

Are Millennials and Gen Z failing to live up to our climate change expectations?

Our planet is burning! There is no planet B! What will be left for my children? School strike for climate! Fridays for climate change!

We chanted these slogans in the fall of 2019 when we - Millennials and Gen Zs - showed up in droves to march and protest against climate change, inspired by the actions of a Swedish 16-year-old. We were right of course, and as we prepare for another winter so unlike those that I remember from my childhood, I am reminded every day that our failure to take drastic action will leave a world for my future children that looks very different from the one I grew up in. 

We - my generation and those of the following one - are not the ones who got us here. By the time I was born, we were already well aware of the dangers of fossil fuels, the hole in the ozone layer, and the realities of climate change. The famous documentary An Inconvenient Truth, was released while I was still in elementary school. The generation after me, the one Greta Thunberg was born into, have lived their entire lives in an era when we are painfully aware - and feeling the effects - of climate change. The damage that has been done to present, is by and large, not our fault, we weren’t alive yet. While this isn’t our mess, we are the ones who are going to have to clean it up. We are past the point of being able to kick the can further down the line. No amount of bringing our own bag to the grocery store or using a metal straw is going to save us if we don’t do something bigger. 

So just for today, let’s take a break from pointing the finger at our parents and grandparents for getting us into this mess, and point the finger at ourselves. Are our actions living up to our chants? 

When we talk about our carbon footprint, we tend to focus heavily on things like disposable water bottles and plastic shopping bags. But I think that these are things that a lot of us, have gotten really good at largely eliminating from our daily routines. What we don’t talk about are the ways that our generation’s culture contributes to excessive carbon emissions.

Let’s begin with Netflix and chill. One hour of streaming Netflix produces approximately 55 grams of carbon dioxide. Binging Netflix for 3 hours, something we have all had far too much time to do during the pandemic, is roughly equivalent to driving your car for 1km. While this is a relatively small impact, it is important to understand that our favourite way to kill a rainy Sunday afternoon, or months of being stuck at home, is not without environmental impact. To date, web services remain a predominately fossil fuel-powered industry. 

Another feature of the pandemic, and a growing trend for many years, is athleisure. Leggings are one of the most popular clothing choices for women heading out for the day, particularly on university campuses. Living in Canada, fleece is a frequent staple of our winter wardrobes. Leggings and fleece sweaters share one very important commonality in the context of sustainability: they are synthetic. Every time we wash these fabrics, microplastics break off and enter our water supply. While they may be too small for us to see, aquatic species consume these microplastics, which block their digestive tract, resulting in repercussions on feeding and mating behaviour and contributing to starvation and biodiversity loss. 

These are only two examples of things that we do in our daily lives that contribute negatively to our carbon footprint without realizing. The list of things we are aware of but do anyways is far longer. 

One of the best things that we can do to reduce our carbon footprint is consume less. Every time we refrain from immediately upgrading to the newest smartphone, adding more to our wardrobe, or purchasing more than we can consume at the grocery store, we are doing something positive for our environment. This includes the continuous accumulation of products we perceive as environmentally friendly. Yes, we should all have reusable grocery bags, but it takes 10,000-20,000 litres of water to produce one kilogram of cotton, so it might be worthwhile to ask yourself how many cotton bags you actually need and make the ones you already own last as long as possible. 

For Millennials, many of the things that were affordable for our parents, such as buying a house, are well out of reach for us. But one thing that isn’t, is clothing. There is an apparently endless supply of fast fashion brands from H&M and Primark, to websites like Shein, Zaful, and Fashionova, to name a few of the more well-known. All of these companies offer an endless supply of new clothing options for the cost of your regular Starbucks order. The clothing we get from these brands, while they may be some of our favourite pieces at the moment, are more often than not poorly made, with low-quality materials, and quickly out of style. And because it’s so cheap, we don’t feel bad about getting rid of it and consuming even more. Case in point: North America sends 10 million tonnes of clothing to landfills each year. 

Millennials and Gen Zs own more clothing than previous generations. In 2018, Americans acquired, on average 68 clothing items. This is five times the amount of clothing purchased by the average American in the 1970s. We surround ourselves with photos and icons who promote this consumer lifestyle. In addition to all the usual forms of advertising, social media influencers are constantly promoting new products to us, or posting photos in new outfits. We see the size of Kylie Jenner’s closet, tell ourselves that’s what success looks like. 

And it’s not just clothing. Between the internet and smartphones, our generation never has to wait for anything, and when we do, we have a constant distraction. Prior to the pandemic, Amazon was already outselling Walmart, in America, four times over. Over half of Amazon purchases in America are made by men, and 82% of 20-29-year-olds have Amazon Prime subscriptions. We are constantly consuming, and it’s not harmless. In 2020, Amazon emitted 60.64 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide. While some of these items were things we likely needed, speaking for myself, lots of them were not. 

Amazon isn’t the worst thing that Millenials and Gen Z are uniquely enamoured with that harms our environment. All of our streaming, Googling, and Amazon ordering pail in comparison to cryptocurrency. This imaginary thing that most of us don’t understand, and none of us can spend is also throwing matches into a house that is catching fire. Today, mining one bitcoin requires, on average, the equivalent amount of energy one household consumes in nine years. In 2019, Bitcoin had the same carbon footprint as the country of New Zealand. It’s not just Bitcoin anymore, there is Ethereum, Tether, Dogecoin, and countless others, all of which require massive amounts of energy to mine and emit massive amounts of carbon in the process. It takes 15 times more energy to mine Bitcoin than it does to mine the equivalent value in gold. 

The list of ways that we, as the great young hope for the world, are failing to meet the climate change expectations we set for older generations could go on for another 10 pages. I haven’t cracked the surface on our insistence on using Uber over public transit or the environmental impacts of continued reliance on meat products as our primary protein source. We talk a big game, but that’s about it. 

For our entire lives, we have been told that actions speak louder than words. So if we care so much, why isn’t that reflected in our actions? 

I by no means live a zero-waste, carbon-neutral lifestyle, but more days than not, I’m trying my best. I gave up meat 12 years ago, and I’ve never looked back. Prior to the pandemic, I went nearly a year without using a disposable coffee cup even though I regularly bought coffee on my way to school. Over the summer, I gave up my car because it makes more sense to take the subway in my circumstance. I do my best to look for the clothing items I want used, before I purchase them new. But, I still order from Amazon, especially now that I live in a more remote location. I love YouTube videos of people sitting in massive closets, demonstrating products I could never afford. I spend way too much time streaming video, own too much clothing, and have groceries go bad in the fridge. 

The standard is not one of perfection. Everyone doing environmentalism imperfectly is better than a small number of people doing it perfectly. But we actually have to do it. I am doing my best to live by the values I project into the world. I have lots of times when I fail at that, especially when it comes to behaving sustainably. What I can say, from my effort though is that it requires making real personal change, even when it’s a hassle or denies us something we want. 

If we are going to be the generation that ends climate change, then we have to be more than words. We have to wake up tomorrow morning, with behaviour and consumption patterns that are different from the ones we have today. We need to set an example for our parents and grandparents, who we love to point the finger at, by living the messages we preach. We cannot put this off until next week or month or year. 

Make Friday morning different.