Is This the Last Generation That Gets to Ask “What If” About the Future?

by Thom Hartmann | Jul 8, 2025 | Politics, Corruption & Criminality, Money Over People

Image: The Hartmann Report

Is This the Last Generation That Gets to Ask “What If” About the Future?

by Thom Hartmann | Jul 8, 2025 | Politics, Corruption & Criminality, Money Over People

Image: The Hartmann Report

The Iroquois planned for seven generations. Our leaders can’t plan past the next corporate quarterly report—and we’re paying the ultimate price.

Republished with permission from Thom Hartmann

We are the generation that broke the Earth, and now we’re out of time to pretend otherwise. I know you don’t want to hear this. Nobody does.

Just like nobody wanted to hear that 9-year-old girl’s screams echoing through the Texas Hill Country last week as floodwaters ripped through her summer camp. She was washed away before rescuers could reach her. Her story is heartbreaking, and emblematic.

Trump cynically dismissed it as “a hundred year flood” and added, “Nobody saw it; nobody expected it.”

He lied.

It wasn’t just a freak accident and Republicans know it, even though they won’t acknowledge it. It was the new climate reality. The one we’ve been warned about for decades. It’s here, now. And if we don’t act now, it’s going to get irreversibly worse.

Because here’s the part nobody in power wants to admit out loud: it’s too late to prevent more of the “minor” disasters like we just witnessed. (For the “major disasters,” see the 11-minute YouTube video that Leonardo DiCaprio and I wrote and narrated)

“I’ve never said this before to the media, but it’s too late,” said David Suzuki, scientist, broadcaster, and lifelong environmental champion, in a July 2nd interview. “We’ve passed seven of the nine planetary boundaries… If we pass one, we should be shitting our pants. We’ve passed seven!”

Let that sink in.

Suzuki is talking about the nine thresholds scientists have identified: the very limits of a livable planet. Once breached, the systems that support life on Earth begin to collapse. And now we’ve broken through seven of them.

Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute, and his colleagues have mapped out the nine limits. They are:

Climate change: The most obvious. We’ve gone well beyond safe CO₂ levels.
Biosphere integrity: Species are vanishing at a mass-extinction pace.
Biogeochemical flows: Runoff of nitrogen and phosphorus from agriculture is killing ecosystems.
Land-system change: Forests and wetlands are being razed for short-term profits.
Freshwater use: Droughts are getting deadlier; aquifers are being depleted.
Ocean acidification: CO₂ absorption is turning oceans into acid baths, killing coral reefs and other marine life.
Novel entities: Plastics, forever chemicals, synthetic toxins that are mostly unregulated and now everywhere.

Only two boundaries remain “unbroken”: the stratospheric ozone layer (partially healed through heroic efforts in the 1990s when politicians in both parties listened to scientists), and atmospheric aerosols (ditto), at least for now.

We are way past “concern” or “urgent.” We’re now in what Rockström calls the “danger zone.”

And what is the Republican Party’s official response? Essentially, “To hell with future generations. Let our grandchildren die, so fossil fuel billionaires can buy another yacht.”

The Trump administration—back in office through sheer disinformation, gerrymandering, billionaire money, and massive voter suppression—has made their strategy painfully clear: if the ship is going down, they’re going to loot the cabins before it sinks.

In just the first six months of 2025, the new Republican Congress and Trump White House have already:

Slashed clean energy subsidies in what they call the “Big Beautiful Bill,” redirecting billions to oil and gas exploration.
Revoked tax credits for EVs, solar panels, heat pumps, and green home upgrades.
Lifted regulations on methane emissions and offshore drilling.
Cut funding to NOAA and weather satellites, even rolling back the “weather watchers” who otherwise would have warned that Texas camp about the deadly July 4th flood.
Gutted FEMA’s climate preparedness, leaving communities vulnerable and unassisted.

All as a gift to the fossil fuel industry and to pay for tax breaks for billionaires.

They’re not even pretending anymore. This is extraction capitalism on steroids: “Burn it all, bank the profits, and let the next generation deal with the ashes.”

The new survival strategy being pushed by the GOP is, essentially, “Hunker down, average people, while the billionaires who own us secure their massive estates against the rabble.”

This is where Suzuki’s voice grows cold and clear: we’re not going to be rescued by governments as long as they’re controlled by greedy, psychopathic, on-the-take “conservatives.” He urges communities to prepare like wartime neighborhoods:

“Start assessing the routes of escape… Who has wheelchairs? Who has batteries or generators? Where is the water? You’re going to have to inventory your community…”

This isn’t prepper paranoia. This is adaptation in the face of ecological collapse: a call to get real, to get local, and to get ready.

Because, according to the world’s top scientists, we’re no longer fighting for victory: we’re simply fighting for survival.

The Iroquois Confederacy taught that every decision should be weighed for its impact on the next seven generations. Not just the next quarter. Not just the next election.

And now we know why.

Because once the line is crossed—once the planet’s equilibrium tips—you can’t buy your way back. You can’t deregulate the atmosphere. You can’t frack your way out of collapse.

As I laid out in my book on the end of the era of fossil fuels, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It’s Too Late, many indigenous communities wiped out their local environments and food supplies tens of thousands of years ago and learned—through famine and mass death we can see memorialized in the remains of abandoned cities like the Pueblo people of Mesa Verde, the Cahokia Mound Builders, and even ancient Iraq—that you must work with, not against, mother nature.

And the people who knew this—the indigenous leaders, the climate scientists, the youth activists—were mocked by cynical, greedy Republicans and billionaire-owned media like Fox “News.” Ignored. Laughed off by fossil fuel-funded media and bought-off Republicans.

As the brilliant historian Heather Cox Richardson noted yesterday:

“Project 2025 called for breaking up and downsizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, claiming its six main offices—including the National Weather Service— ‘form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity,’ by which it meant the fossil fuel industry.”

But the ancient people and today’s scientists—dating back to the first warnings in the 1960s and before—were right.

And now we’re out of time, at least for our ability to prevent more disasters like Kentucky and Texas, when the Trump-gutted National Weather Service failed to warn against disasters that are clearly caused by a warmer atmosphere holding massively more water than during previous generations.

You’re still reading. That means you still care.

So, please, don’t look away.

Don’t let your neighbors, your family, your community pretend this isn’t happening. Don’t let them buy the GOP’s and rightwing media’s lie that we can still drill, build, burn, and somehow bounce back.

We won’t.

But we can still build lifeboats. We can build resilient communities and uncouple ourselves from fossil fuels and the billionaires who sell them to us. We can build justice and empathy and courage to work with what remains. We can wake up enough people to reclaim our democracy and, with it, our efforts to stop this disaster from getting far, far worse.

This fight isn’t over. It’s just changed.

Hope, now, looks like readiness and unrelenting political action.

And that starts with sharing the truth as far and wide as possible.

Tag, you’re it.

Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann, one of America’s leading public intellectuals and the country’s #1 progressive talk show host, writes fresh content six days a week. The Monday-Friday “Daily Take” articles are free to all, while paid subscribers receive a Saturday summary of the week’s news and, on Sunday, a chapter excerpt from one of his books.

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