Overview: Think you’ve waited too long to do something about climate change? Think again. Am I Too Old to Save the Planet? A Boomer’s Guide to Climate Action explains how America’s most promising generation allowed climate change to become a planetary emergency―and what to do about it now.

Verdict: Who’s to blame for climate change? Ask the more militant members of Generation Z – i.e., those born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s – and you’ll be left in little doubt. It’s the old!

That’s right: those selfish, entitled, ignorant, gas-guzzling Baby Boomers. It’s all their fault. Or so Gen Z has long believed. In January 2020, for example, Greta Thunberg and a group of other leading “youth climate activists” co-wrote a scathing public statement in which they declared that, when it comes to the climate, “Young people are being let down by older generations and those in power.” (“Those in power”, of course, are almost invariably members of “older generations” themselves. So in effect the old were being blamed twice over).

A former foreign correspondent and vice president of the World Resources Institute, Lawrence MacDonald shares his journey to becoming a passionate climate activist. Packed with practical advice, his book invites fellow boomers to join the growing global movement to save the planet.

Explaining it as such, Baby boomers in developed countries have a bigger climate footprint than other age groups, according to a new study that says people over 60 accounted for nearly a third of the greenhouse gas emissions in 2015.

While this age group’s contribution to the national total consumption-based emissions was about 25 per cent in 2005, it jumped to 32.7 per cent in 2015, said scientists, including those from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, said the trend is mainly due to changes in the expenditure patterns of senior citizens. “Older people used to be thrifty. The generation that experienced World War II was careful about how they used resources. The ‘new elderly’ are different,” Edgar Hertwich, an NTNU professor in the industrial ecology programme, said in a statement.

“The post-war ‘baby boomer’ generation are the new elderly. They have different consumption patterns than the ‘quiet generation’ that was born in the period 1928-1945. Today’s seniors spend more money on houses, energy consumption and food,” Dr Hertwich added.

Making a powerful case for generational action, a call to human arms even, Am I Too Old to Save the Planet?: A Boomer’s Guide to Climate Action provides us all the knowledge to enable us to come together to create a systemic change.

Chock full of the overall feasibility of such a suggestion, coupled with the impact that such an undertaking would bring about, the book is, at its heart, a survival guide for those people of a certain age that want nothing more than to leave a livable, sustainable planet for our future generations to enjoy.

A book that sounds an alarm bell much louder within its prose than I have heard in many a long time, Laurence MacDonald’s Am I Too Old to Save the Planet?: A Boomer’s Guide to Climate Action is an inspiring read that if it doesn’t trouble the senses of those who read it to go out and do something, no matter how small it is, to help re-correct the direction our world is currently traveling, well, I honestly don’t know what else possibly could.

About the Author - Lawrence MacDonald is a writer, policy communications expert, and Boomer climate activist. Born in the middle of the Baby Boom generation, he believes that American Baby Boomers are the generation most responsible for the climate emergency and that he and fellow U.S. Boomers have the power to avert the worst impacts of climate change if they reconnect with their youthful ideals. He lives in Arlington, VA.

Official Book Purchase Link