Talkin' 'Bout my Generation

Why don't we all . . .fade away

_{(I sometimes use Substack to work out what I think. This is one of those posts)}

For starters, I don’t believe we’re all selfish swine with fully engaged smug mode. Okay, most of us are, but not all of us.

And when I say we, I’m talking about people born in Europe and the North America way back in the 1950’s. People who are now in their late 60’s up to their late 70’s. I’m talking ‘bout my g - g - generation.

An example of what people who are now in their 70’s used to look like 50 years ago.

The legendary Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee (born 27 December 1946) recently posted a video about how our generation have cheated the young. She makes a very convincing argument and I have to agree with much of what she says. It’s on the Guardian’s Instagram account if you want to watch it.

As she explains in the video, in 1970 the average house price was four times the average income. Now it’s nine times. And due to a massive house building program in the late 1940’s, there used to be houses to buy. But more importantly there were thousands of council houses, with very reasonable rents, which the Conservative party sold off under the wonderful Mrs M Thatcher.

There were jobs, unemployment was low, my generation could go to university and not pay for the privilege. In fact students received grants from local authorities, yes, they got paid to go to University.

I was never a student, so I, along with the vast majority of my generation, didn’t benefit from such largess. When I was 18 (1974) the student population was very much smaller than today.

Every politician who benefited directly from this system has made sure it was discontinued. ALL those politicians were Conservatives. Everyone who once worked in manufacturing industry in the UK now doesn’t, and that is entirely because of the Conservatives.

Everything that was introduced by the post war Labour government has been fought against and rolled back . . . by the Conservative party.

In the immediate post war period, there was dramatic and systemic change in British society. Change for the better. The post war labour government could have done more, sure. They could have closed all private schools which would have made an enormous difference to our vile dated class system.

But that aside, I grew up in the aftermath of that incredible post war administration, they introduced the National Health Service, always fought against by the Conservatives, they invested in schools, child health, (I received free school milk until I was 11, that was removed by margaret Thatcher, a Conservative).

The only part that was a bit dodgy was dentistry. Oh my life, I had early years dental treatment on the NHS and it was rough and damaging. But that was in the most part due to technology and materials.

We boomers have undoubtedly been a very blessed generation. My brother worked out a few years ago that he and I were the first generation of men in our family who hadn’t had to fight in a war, for 5 generations going back to before the Boer war.

But I have to disagree with Polly Toynbee about us literally cheating the younger generations. Things developed and changed in the wider world outside the UK at incredible speed and with enormous impact that goes far beyond a boomers mortgage or pension plan.

Thanks to the Thatcher administration and their hysterical hatred of trade unions, we shifted the vast majority of our manufacturing base offshore in the 1980’s.

I’m not going to try and claim that the UK was a powerhouse of technological innovation, but we made stuff, some of it tragic, some of it amazing. Austin Allegro and Concorde, two machines at opposite ends of the British innovation spectrum.

But thanks to a load of drippy loon pants nonsense and a jumble of cultural notions from around the world, there were enough new age tech fantasies among proponents of an alternative society to start the ball rolling on coming up with ideas that didn’t require burning fossil fuel.

Those old hippies, freaks and weirdos are now old people, and some of them have not followed the clichéd route of being radical left when young, and angry reactionaries when old.

The number of people over 65 who drive electric cars, have solar panels, a house battery, heat pumps and good insulation in their homes is substantial. I don’t have any statistics to back up this claim, it simply comes from meeting many 100’s of people around my age who acknowledge their lifetime impact on the environment we all live in, and have made some attempt to change that in their latter years.

John Walsh from Ireland, learned to drive in a Model T Ford. He is standing next to his first electric car, a Nissan Leaf. Mr Walsh is 100 years old

Of course another big reason behind this uptake is some people over 65 have more disposable income and can afford to make these changes.

Of course there are plenty of really sound reasons to be resentful and critical of my generation, but I will argue this;

Due to the sheer bulk of the post war baby boom, it means large number of people have invested in these technologies which, in turn, means the technology and workforce that supports the energy transition has grown and the cost of individual systems has reduced.

The more solar is installed on roofs, the more heat pumps and batteries in homes, the more electric cars, the more we invest in offshore wind, massive solar farms, updated grid infrastructure, the cheaper all those things become and the less we all pay for electricity.

To counter that delightful rosy view, as we are now repeatedly reminded, it’s already too late. The damage has been done and we can only try and mitigate the calamitous disaster we have created. And when I say we, I meran pretty much everyone over 55 is directly, personally responsible for the damaging changes we’re seeing around the planet.

Although when I say that, I am excluding the vast majority of people my age from around the world. Why should baby boomers be forgiven for anything I hear you cry?

Well, not everyone around my age is a baby boomer, that is a very blinkered, western view of the world. I’m talking about people who are around my age in India, Africa, the middle east, Asia and south America. There’s a lot of them and they have done very little or nothing to contribute to the changes in our climate, they don’t own all the property, they aren’t sitting on mountains of wealth and, as seems always to be the case, they are the ones now suffering the most.

As with all aspects of human history, behaviour, opinions and actions, it’s not either or, it’s a mish mash. Some people in my age group have done incredible things in their lifetimes, they’ve made very positive contributions to the general well being of the global population.

Others have spent their lives amassing great wealth in the armaments industry, the fossil fuel industry, in banking and financial services which directly support those industries.

They may well be deserving of younger people’s criticism, but here’s another twist, even they might now be buying a luxury electric car and some of them will be putting solar PV and batteries on their houses because it makes economic sense to do so, something they understand.

After all that waffle, I think the members of my generation who deserve zero sympathy and our collective denigration are the people, politically and financially motivated people, who still say, in Europe in 2026,

‘The climate has always changed, it’s not because of human activity, we can carry on burning fossil fuel. Stop making a fuss, we had a hot summer back in 1976, it’s no big deal.’

Aaahhh yes. 1976. I’ve posted about it earlier this year on this substack account. Here’s a little addendum to that particular myth.

The highest temperature reached in the UK in 1976 was 35.9C (96.6F) which was recorded at Cheltenham in Gloucestershire on July 3, 1976. That’s about 20 miles from where I live.

The highest temperature ever recorded in the UK was 40.3 °C (104.5 °f) on the 19th July 2022, in Coningsby, Lincolnshire. This was first time the temperature went over 40 °c in the UK according to records that go back over 400 years.

I say yes, of course, to the fossil funded tossers who happily spout their increasingly weak denials, the climate has always changed. But not this fast, and certainly the single cell organisms, the dinosaurs and people living in the neolithic age were not in a position to do anything about it.

We are, all of us can make changes that at least minimise the damage we’ve already done. I’m not saying for a moment that electric cars will solve the problem, of course they won’t. Neither will solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, smart grid innovation.

But a picture is now becoming clear, a combination of all those things will start to make a really big difference. According to numerous sources including Ember Energy, the current global EV fleet has reduced oil consumption by 1.8 million barrels a day.

Now, I’m not claiming for a moment this is a big percentage. The human race burns through 102,809,918 barrels of oil a day! So we have a long long way to go.

The only positive thing I can say about that 1.8 million barrels a day is it will grow, and it will grow fast.

A recently opened charging hub in China.