About

Same planet, four different bills

Everyone agrees on the science. Nobody agrees on the bill. Four Generations Talk Climate puts a Boomer, a Gen Xer, a Millennial and a Gen Zer in one room, hands them a single question, and lets the disagreement run.

There is no panel etiquette and no attempt to land on a consensus. Some episodes end with somebody changing their mind. Most end with somebody admitting they won’t.

The show is hosted by Dan Delurey, who has spent four decades in energy and climate policy and writes the Climate Time newsletter. Dan gets things going on each episode but then he is a Boomer and jumps into the fray.

Why the stripes

Four colours, taken from the record

The warming stripes are Ed Hawkins’ graph of global temperature: one coloured band for every year since 1850, and nothing else — no axes, no numbers. Cool blues on the left are the years that ran below the long-term average, deep reds on the right are the years that ran above it. Read left to right, the whole strip is the last 170-odd years of the climate record in a single picture.

1850Global temperature, year by yearToday

Each generation’s colour is lifted straight out of that strip — the band sitting over the years they were born into. Cool to hot, oldest to youngest. The order never changes, because the record doesn’t. See the full graph at showyourstripes.info.

Boomer
Born 1948–62
Grew up in a climate that was still close to the twentieth-century average. The warming happened on their watch, mostly out of sight.
Gen X
Born 1965–79
Born into the last decades that still looked normal on the chart. Heard the first warnings as teenagers and watched them get filed away.
Millennial
Born 1981–95
Every year of their lives has run warmer than the baseline. They inherited the targets and the deadlines, not the decisions.
Gen Z
Born 1998–2012
Has never lived through an average year. The stripes they were born into are the reddest on the chart, and they know it.

Stripe colours based on Ed Hawkins’ Warming Stripes (CC BY 4.0), data UK Met Office.