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A recent poll highlights what everybody should intuitively already know, millennials overwhelmingly support a Green New Deal. After a week of heavy Green New Deal bashing amidst Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s rollout, it also proved incredibly popular with young people. With over 50% of millennials strongly or somewhat supporting the policy, and another 20% or so with no strong opinion on the matter. The vast majority of millennials support the Green New Deal, and the popularity is essentially flipped with Boomers, with almost 70% opposing the policy in one way or another. This might not be a shocking result, because it pretty much tracks with who will actually suffer the consequences of rampant climate change.

For millennials climate change isn’t an issue for people in the future, it’s not a great grandkids or great great grandkids issue, best case scenario it’s a grandkids issue, but it seems increasingly obvious that the catastrophic impacts of climate change are already making themselves known.

Year after year, month after month, American cities set new record high temperatures, hot enough in some cities to ground planes in the summer months. Snowpack and rainfall are well below average almost everywhere in the United States, leading to record droughts both statewide and regionally. Droughts which fuel record breaking wild fires, which cost billions to fight and enable other natural disasters like mudslides. All of which is exacerbated by increasingly common catastrophic weather events, like Hurricane Maria or the seemingly annual record breaking polar vortexes which engulf the Midwest and East Coast.

This is the new reality, but it’s the only reality millennials have ever known. We’ve come to age with the warnings of these changings looming over our heads, seemingly never materializing. Until year after year we break records in the worst way and older people remark how winters used to be more harsh, or summers less so. All with the prospect that this force which has seemingly fundamentally reshaped the climate in the last twenty or thirty years has the rest of our lives to wreak havoc. And to make matters worse, there is a time limit on reversing this trend in any meaningful way.

The IPCC estimates there is roughly 12 years to reverse climate change and avoid catastrophic outcomes. The 700 page report details dozens of disastrous consequences inaction will bring. From rising sea levels, to increased drought, more disastrous once-in-a-lifetime weather events, refugee crises, food and water shortages, and much more. It also lays out what must be done to avoid these outcomes, and there is no way around it, there needs to be a massive expenditure on the international level, like nothing we’ve seen since the Marshall plan, if reversing climate change is at all possible.

The Green New Deal is the Only Game in Town if We’re Actually Going to Save the Planet

So if these changes are already making themselves known, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the people who have to live with them the longest are the most earnest when it comes to solving these problems. Supporting the Green New Deal and politicians who back it is one of the few actions a voter can take to tangibly move towards any meaningful climate solution. Boomers have the luxury of all being dead long before we see just how bad another 40 years can make things. They probably care about their kids, grandkids, and whoever comes next, but it’s not a looming reality. Living through climate induced food shortages, political instability, or the increasing inhabitability of swaths of the planet isn’t ever going to be a reality for boomers. Yet that is the reality millennials and young Americans live with every single day.

The Green New Deal might be broad, it might not be fully sketched out and it will engender a significant amount of criticism, some legitimate, a lot less so. However, it’s the only game in town. There is no other national politician treating climate change as a priority, let alone pushing policy that aims to transform the American economy in the ways we will need to in order to avoid the worst outcomes. Young people’s support for the Green New Deal is simple, if we’re going to stop climate change it’s going to take a massive effort, and the Green New Deal is the only policy making any effort at all.