This letter is addressed to you because you are influential, you have children, and you are not taking sufficient action on climate change.

Climate change has presented all of us with an enormous moral challenge, but the level of our personal responsibility is commensurate with the sphere of our influence. You have the resources to make a huge impact, and nothing less than a huge impact will be able to change the course we’re on. The rest of us can only hope to use our meager influence to influence you.

This letter is not going to make the case for the reality of climate change. Whatever you might say in public, you clearly accept its reality; your governments, organizations, and companies are already strategizing around how to cope with it. The purpose of this letter is to express moral outrage.

Generations before you faced challenges similar in scale and moral weight: fascism, genocide, epidemics, inequality. They are rightly remembered for bravely confronting the quandaries history presented to them. Unlike them, you dally in the face of this challenge and so, unlike them, you will be remembered as the generation who knew better but did nothing out of selfish shortsightedness.

Whether or not your place in history matters to you, you have children. Some of you even have grandchildren. They are the ones you love most dearly in this life and they stand to suffer terribly from the effects of climate change; yet you are effectively doing nothing to avert it.

The only reasonable explanation for your inaction is that you assume you’ll be able to protect your children and grandchildren because you are wealthy or powerful (or both). Unfortunately for all of us, you are wrong.

Money and influence will not save them because you will have ensured the destruction of the very systems giving money and influence any meaning. You have failed to prioritize your children’s most basic needs over your own profit and comfort by knowingly purchasing your prosperity with their future. Continuing on this path guarantees them a worse life than the one you have enjoyed.