We are betraying our children with fossil fuel pollution 

The national conversation about global climate change has gone through ups and downs over the last 75 years. Climate science entered politics in the 1950s and led to bipartisan support for action in the 1970s. But the issue became intensely partisan in the 1990s, when big oil companies aligned with Republicans. 

Congress did virtually nothing about global warming until 2022, when it passed the country’s largest-ever investments in clean energy. But over the last 18 months, President Trump has blocked the investments, suppressed clean energy, and accelerated America’s fossil fuel production.

Democrats’ response has been so muted that a new term — “climate shushing” — has emerged to describe it. They apparently consider the issue a nonstarter in a Congress controlled by Republicans and a country preoccupied by the rising cost of living, so they want people to stop discussing it.

Meantime, fossil-fuel pollution keeps accumulating in the atmosphere like a metastasizing cancer, causing a slow-growing fever that’s changing the planet’s metabolism. But over the decades, whether we paid attention or not, one thing has remained constant: Our failure to get global warming under control is the greatest betrayal that any generation has ever imposed on its children. We are letting oil oligarchs get rich by robbing our children’s future.

This is not the American way. With the industrial revolution, Western societies in general adopted the ethic that each generation should make life better for its children. We are not keeping that promise now.

After all these years, fossil fuels still provide more than 80 percent of........

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