A plea to Gen Z

If you are under 30, there’s a message you’ve likely received many times during this painful year: You’re inheriting the wreckage of a once-great world, and your life will be less prosperous, peaceful or productive than the one older generations have enjoyed. You’ve heard it apologetically from your parents and their peers, ominously from the media, and perhaps angrily from your own mind. You may even be among those who’ve vowed not to bring children into “this world.”

I get it. The unprecedented period of global growth and betterment that lasted from about 1990 to 2010 predated your adult life. Instead you’ve watched, over the last decade and especially over the last year, as older generations and their leaders have crashed the planet ecologically, allowed autocratic-minded figures and intolerant extremists to seize key parts of the democratic world, set out to replace human labour via resource-guzzling data centres, and left you a future seemingly without decent jobs or affordable housing and a catastrophically diminished world order.

But this is a dangerously shortsighted vision.

Today’s end-time pessimism is a fallacy. It’s built on path dependency: the notion that the downward curve on the graph will continue, that the current decline has become irreversible. And it’s built on this century’s underlying belief among liberals and moderate conservatives that we must be passive victims of history, rather than its agents.

In fact, it is much more likely that Gen Z has come of age at a fortuitous time. We are not approaching the end, but coming to a beginning.

People who are young today will very likely be the heirs to the greatest period of rebuilding, growth and new invention of this century – not as a matter of choice or ideology, but out of urgent necessity. They face a role comparable to those who were young in 1946, when the decades of rebuilding after the Second World War had only begun.

At that time, surrounded by the endless ruins of nations and institutions and economies and the threat of terrifying new technologies, prospects for the new generation looked grim. The young adults of 1946 were surrounded by severe inflation, unemployment, food shortages and the worst government debt in history. Western countries struggled with fears that the forces of nationalism and authoritarianism that had propelled the war were about to come sweeping back, supported by a miserable generation suffering declining living standards, without any of the glory of the war years.

Yet the opposite proved true. The boomers inherited an era of renewal. The rebuilding of the world’s economies and the creation of new international structures and institutions led to the greatest explosion of economic growth, well-being and international co-operation in human history, one that propelled two decades of full employment and upward mobility and an unprecedented spread of democracy and human development.

This comparison might have seemed hyperbolic before the catastrophic events of 2025. The collapse of the United States into a shockingly extreme form of far-right strongman rule – one that even cautious and conservative analysts now freely call fascism – has rapidly threatened the security, institutional and democratic stability of the free world. It became a global threat earlier this year when Washington made the promotion of extreme-right and racially intolerant governments in European democracies its official international-security policy. “The decades of the Pax Americana are largely over for us in Europe,” Friedrich Merz, Germany’s conservative chancellor, declared this month. “It no longer exists as we know it.”

And 2025 capped off the three consecutive hottest years in recorded history, leading scientists to declare that a dangerous atmospheric warming of 1.5 C (at least temporarily) is now unpreventable. That occurred as the United States, the world’s second-largest greenhouse-gas emitter, withdrew from virtually all climate agreements and aggressively pushed its own economy away from renewable energy and electric vehicles and toward coal, while constricting global trade with punitive tariffs and shutting down the world’s largest sources of humanitarian, medical and military aid.

After a decade of democratic governments backsliding into de facto authoritarianism and illiberalism, this year marked a nadir: The Sweden-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance declared that 2025 saw the worst decline of democratic freedoms this century.

Unlike the Second World War, today’s global emergencies won’t have a clear end date. The rebuilding has to begin while multiple crises are still taking place, and while major countries are opposed to solutions. But that also has precedent: The rebuilding of the 1940s began before the Second World War was finished, and often before its end was a sure thing (the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions that still regulate the world economy were being created while the war was at its peak). And of course, that age of rebuilding took place amid the Cold War, and thus on two isolated but competing tracks – one democratic and one authoritarian – which is also similar to what’s happening today, with China’s share of climate rebuilding already substantially under way.

Building a climate-resilient and non-emitting world, and restoring the world’s institutions of governance, economy and security in the absence of the United States, will be a massive undertaking that will occupy decades and cost more than any project in world history. It will require, and create, great amounts of economic growth over long periods, and will be a major source of employment. Current fears that artificial intelligence will destroy job markets will likely be answered by this need: Given the soon-to-be non-growing size of the global workforce, both human and non-human employment will likely be maxed out, for a considerable time, by the looming demands of such projects.

In fact, the rebuilding has already begun – albeit only in some places. Both Canada and Germany this year elected governments that wouldn’t otherwise have been very popular with voters, but won rare cross-party support because they were singularly focused on building new institutions and relationships to replace the hole left by the disappearance of the United States, in security, trade and climate. While you may not agree with the targets or quantities of Mark Carney’s or Friedrich Merz’s security and “nation-building” investments, their popularity speaks to a mass public appetite for programs intended to build a new world rather than tear down the old one.

There will be an era of rebuilding, even if we do not know when it will fully begin, how long it will last, or whether it will fully succeed. It will not be the product of a choice, a specific ideology or belief system: It will arise from necessity. We have brought the political and ecological challenges of the world to the point of unavoidable crisis, and the sane majority will have no option but to act.

The big question is whether we have a sane majority.

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Although extremist regimes have rarely attracted a majority of voters (including in the United States), they excel at manipulating the electoral system to gain power. It is entirely possible that France or Germany could end up with a neo-fascist government for a time. What if support for parties of hate and isolation is not declining but growing, especially among the young?

There is strong reason to believe that it isn’t.

The past year was marked with dramatic uprisings by young people, especially in poorer countries, that sought to overthrow entrenched dynastic authoritarian regimes and to restore or introduce something resembling democratic or at least more normal and accountable government. These “Gen Z revolutions” began in Bangladesh, where students and other people under 30 successfully drove the resignation of a long-serving and corrupt ruling family in late 2024 and delivered a democratic moment that continues to inspire hope. They continued this year with regimes forced out of office in Nepal, Mongolia, Madagascar, Peru and Bulgaria, with major protest movements continuing in a dozen other countries.

There’s reason to be skeptical of the “Gen Z” branding: It has always been people under 30 who have dominated protests, riots and revolutions, everywhere in the world. Virtually any mass uprising could have been named after whatever generation happens to be in its teens and twenties at the time.

But there is something measurably distinct about under-30s in many countries. The voting waves that have brought authoritarian-minded governments to power have, with only a few exceptions, been dominated by people in their 40s and 50s. And the principal victims of the decline in economic conditions and freedoms created by these governments have been the youngest generations.

There is substantial evidence that a majority of young people in most countries – democratic or otherwise – strongly desire a change in the system to one that is more representative and reformist, especially on issues such as inequality and climate change, not less.

A major meta-analysis of multiple international surveys conducted this year by professors Bobby Duffy and Paolo Morini at King’s College London found that, contrary to some headlines and small-scale surveys wrongly suggesting that democracy has fallen out of favour among the young, the authoritarian-minded population under 30 is exceptionally small – under 6 per cent in Britain – and that more detailed studies showed a desire among youth to replace those elected populist governments that have shortchanged them. “They have significant issues with how the political system has not delivered for them,” Prof. Duffy said, “but they’re not looking to tear it up and replace it with autocratic leadership.” Their results were supported by a Pew Research Center study that found that in 10 countries (including Canada), the proportion of under-35s who want dramatic economic-system changes to reduce inequality was typically 50 per cent again larger than older groups.

The economic harm of tariffs and protectionism, and the increased inequality and reduced freedoms caused by far-right governments, tends to accrue disproportionately to the young. And these regimes oppose climate-change policy – one of the top two things that young people in most countries say they are disproportionately concerned about, even more than earlier generations were at the same age. So it’s quite likely that Gen Z uprisings will become more widespread, and increasingly successful, as demographic change makes that cohort a larger share of the electorate.

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Much of the current end-times pessimism is rooted in the way we think about the climate crisis. Too often this century, the message has been one of loss: “Unless we do something painful, this is going to be devastating, and potentially fatal to human civilization.” But it should have been one of cost and opportunity: “Solving this is going to be expensive and labour-intensive – and the longer we delay, the more expensive and challenging it will be.”

We have now reached the point where the climate emergency is actually taking place, and will surely get worse before it gets better.

That doesn’t mean we will quietly await our tempestuous fate. Majorities in most countries understand the need for very large-scale public investments to reduce the risk.

It means we now face a triple challenge: First, to replace our carbon-based energy and transportation sources with non-emitting ones; second, to develop and implement new technologies and methods to reverse existing warming; third, to erect vast amounts of infrastructure to protect our cities and farmlands against existing warming and ocean-level increases while keeping them productive.

The last decade has seen the publication of several global estimates of the investments required to end, and then reverse, atmospheric warming (usually by 2050) from the International Energy Agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and from groups of scholars. All estimate that de-carbonizing electrical generation and transportation is the single largest need, the sine qua non: If the largest economies can manage that, we’re most of the way there.

Most estimates say that about 1,000 gigawatts of renewable and nuclear energy capacity will need to be constructed for each of seven years to meet a 2050 goal; in 2024, only 585 gigawatts were added, although major investments in China and Europe are raising that number.

This will require investments of around US$5-trillion by 2030, or about 2 per cent of world GDP – about double what humans are currently spending. The world is on track to meet about 85 per cent of this required renewable growth, in large part thanks to Chinese investments. In fact, one clear way for liberal democracies to win popular support back from the autocrats is to start outdoing them in climate investment.

Most estimates say the world will need to retire or retrofit perhaps 2-billion internal-combustion passenger cars by 2050. Electric cars now represent around 25 per cent of light vehicle sales worldwide, up from 14 per cent in 2022. Half of that production was in China, and a quarter of it in Europe; the United States and India have lagged behind. Charging infrastructure and battery production will also require enormous public and private investments.

Some of the biggest opportunities come from our pending need to de-carbonize commercial land and sea transportation (the latter is estimated to require a trillion dollars in investment by 2050), steel and concrete making, and eventually air travel – some of which still require the development of new technologies. If we are unable to electrify some of those sectors, we will need to invest even more heavily in carbon capture and CO2 removal, an underperforming sector that will require even more trillions of investment.

Because we have waited until the crisis is upon us, some of our largest investments – and our least optional investments – will be needed not to prevent but to protect us from the effects of the warming and ocean-level rises that will happen regardless. Massive sea barriers will be needed in most maritime cities. Drought-resistant crops will need to be engineered and cultivated throughout large regions, as well as new irrigation solutions and urban infrastructure.

The notion of investing an estimated US$150-trillion over 30 years may sound implausible, especially after the devastating political and economic events of 2025. But that ignores the fact that most worldwide economic activity in the coming decades will contribute to this goal, directly or indirectly. About half the world’s economies, according to estimates by the Energy and Carbon Intelligence Unit, are now “absolute carbon decoupled” – that is, every dollar of economic growth in those countries now causes a decrease, rather than a rise, in greenhouse-gas emissions (because most investments result in the replacement of ecologically inefficient technology). China and most of Europe are there; Canada is just barely decoupled but faltering; the United States is not, although a return to its 2024 policies would soon get it there.

That illustrates why the ecological crisis is so intimately tied to the political crisis; it also suggests why a decade of democratic backsliding is unlikely to hold. Tariffs and closed borders and military misadventures don’t just choke off growth and lower living standards –they choke up the atmosphere.

Sooner or later, an excluded generation will begin to clear the air, and step clear of the wreckage. The rest of us ought to stop apologizing to them, and get ready to thank them.