In human history there are transmissions from generation to generation: cultivated lands, modern languages, standing architectures, accumulated knowledge, stone-built institutions. Even devastating wars left behind a physically intact world, quick to regenerate. What the baby boomer generation is about to bequeath is another nature — and another gravity: an unprecedented global liability, fractured ecosystems, a destabilized climate, dilapidated resources, and a bill that succeeding generations will pay without ever having signed a cheque.

An unprecedented fact in human history

All civilizations have taken from nature. The Romans deforested entire forests to feed their legions and thermal baths. The great Chinese dynasties drained rivers to irrigate their empires. The Mayans have exhausted some of their watersheds. But these samples — as destructive as they were locally — did not threaten the planet's basic biophysical systems as a whole. The ladder was different. The world was absorbing, regenerating, starting again.

What the twentieth century, and more specifically the period 1945–2010, has accomplished is an absolute difference of nature. In the space of two generations, industrialised humanity — Mainly Western — has consumed more non-renewable natural resources than in all the previous history of the species. It has released into the atmosphere amounts of greenhouse gases that alter the Earth's climate regime for centuries. It saturated the oceans with plastics, groundwaters with nitrates, heavy metal soils, and space close to orbital waste.

This is the central historical fact, the most serious and the least discussed in its entirety: For the first time, intergenerational transmission is fundamentally impoverishment.. Not a war. Not an epidemic. Not a natural disaster. A systemic choice, prolonged, documented, and massively denied.

The Baby Boom Century: A Resource Orgy

The Baby Boomer Generation — born between 1946 and 1964 in industrialized economies — grew up in post-war abundance, at a time when Western economies were arming the most powerful tools in history to transform the physical world: low-cost oil, petrochemicals, mass automobiles, commercial aviation, the green revolution and its synthetic fertilizers, ubiquitous plastic, and the consumer society as a model of civilization.

This is not a question of individual bad faith. It's a systemic architecture. Baby boomers have evolved within an institutional, economic, and cultural framework that values infinite growth, rewards consumption, subsidizes fossil fuels, and massively outsources environmental costs. GDP measured anything but what was destroyed. National accounts — and remains largely — blind to natural capital.

But the figures alone do not do justice to the depth of the problem. What is at stake is the degradation of ecosystem services — These functions that nature has provided for thousands of years free of charge and on which all human activities are based: climate regulation, water purification, crop pollination, coastal protection, soil balance. These services have a real economic value, estimated by some environmental economists at tens of thousands of billions of dollars a year. And this value serode, silently, without appearing in any balance sheet.

The accounting balance sheet of a planet

Allow me here an accounting metaphor — because it is often through this prism that abstract realities find their truth the hardest.

A company that consumes its fixed capital without renewing it, sells its stocks without rebuilding them, contracts debts without accounting them and distributes dividends to its current shareholders by puncturing the resources of future shareholders is, technically, financial fraud. What we call modestly « economic growth » Since 1950 seems to misunderstand this pattern: returns distributed today, financed by an environmental liability whose creditors — future generations — are not yet born, and no one has signed the debt recognition.

The standard national accounts are built on a major understatement: it treats non-renewable natural resources as income and not as depreciation of assets. When Nigeria extracts oil, its GDP rises. But oil extracted and burned is a net loss of irreversible natural capital. No depreciation is recorded. No provision is made for reconstitution. The current generation cash; the next generation inherits the hole.

The economist Partha Dasgupta, in his report commissioned by the British Treasury in 2021, has formalized this approach rigorously: if we integrate the depreciation of natural capital in the measure of the real wealth of nations, most rich countries have in fact depleted their global wealth since 1992, the date of the Rio Earth Summit. What we call « development » is partly an accounting illusion backed by non-renewable natural capital consumed without replacement.

The mechanism of denial: how a generation absolved

What makes the story of baby boomers politically singular is not just predation. It's the organized denial who accompanied him — and which still persists today in a significant part of this generation.

Industrial climate denial — financed by ExxonMobil, British Petroleum, Koch Industries and their lobbies — is now one of the best documented records in the history of misinformation strategies. By the 1970s, large oil companies knew. Their own researchers had delivered them climate models of remarkable accuracy. They chose — deliberately, strategically — financing doubt, parasitizing scientific debate, purchasing legislators, and delaying binding regulation for at least three decades.

Meanwhile, governments — dominated by elected baby boomers or concerned about their aging electorate — systematically deferred difficult decisions. Pensions have been preserved, fossil fuel subsidies maintained, carbon taxes voted and repealed, and climate agreements signed with voluntary non-binding commitments. International climate policy often resembles a long series of solemn commitments made by men who will no longer be there to account for them.

The great temporal myopia

There is also, beyond calculated bad faith, a structural temporal myopia. Democracies are built on electoral cycles of four to five years. Financial markets reward quarterly results. Incentive schemes — executive rewards, trader bonuses, politicians' popularity — are all calibrated in the short term. In this architecture, the future costs borne by people who do not yet vote and do not yet hold shares are, by construction, invisible.

This is not the irresponsibility of a generation. It's a deep institutional failure — the tragedy of common goods applied on a global scale. But a failure that has very concrete beneficiaries, and very identifiable victims.

Africa: the great innocent who pays the bill

There is a cruel irony in the fact that African countries, to get out of poverty, are today being urged to « skip the fossil energy stage » and adopt expensive renewables — When countries that have built their prosperity over two centuries of coal and oil continue to subsidize their own fossil industries massively. The moral injunction is all the more difficult to swallow as the rules of the game have been established by the very ones who today ask Africa to play differently.

What future generations will inherit in practice

Let us dwell on what this poisonous legacy actually means. It is not a rhetorical metaphor, but a physical and measurable reality that can be transmitted as title to property — Upside down.

A destabilized climate for centuries

Atmospheric CO2 has a lifetime of centuries in the atmosphere. The climate disturbance initiated is not a one-off event but a trajectory. Even if humanity ceased to emit any greenhouse gases tomorrow, the next generations should still manage the effects of past emissions for at least 200 to 300 years. What we have put in the atmosphere now belongs to the centuries to come.

Non-renewable resources exhausted without compensation

World reserves of oil, natural gas, phosphorus (essential for agriculture), lithium, rare earths — All have been irreversibly detailed. These resources do not reconstitution on a human scale. Every barrel consumed is a barrel that will no longer be there. Future generations will inherit a planet with half empty cupboards, forced to build a different civilization with what remains — and with technologies to be invented in emergency rather than by choice.

Financial debts related to climate inaction

The World Bank and many economists have begun to quantify the cost of future climate damage in terms of lost GDP, forced migration, resource conflicts, infrastructure to be rebuilt. These estimates are in tens of thousands of billions of dollars — an implicit debt that future generations will have to mobilize to repair what they have not broken.

Toxicological Time Bombs

The chemical legacy is also monumental: thousands of industrial sites contaminated with heavy metals, water tables saturated with pesticides, dead marine areas intoxicated with nitrates, nuclear waste whose dangerousness will extend over tens of thousands of years. Some of these legacies will not be cleanable at any realistic cost. They will simply be managed — High fresh — by generations that have not gained any benefit.

Liability without guilt: a new contract between generations

It would be too simple, and analytically false, to reduce this issue to a moral accusation of an entire generation. The majority of baby boomers have not consciously chosen to devastate the planet. They lived in a system that organized this, concealed the consequences, and offered them an abundance difficult to refuse. Individual guilt is an inappropriate category for such a systemic responsibility.

What is unacceptable, however, is the refusal to recognize the reality of the debt. It is the behaviour of the lobbies that continue to fund the doubt. This is the position of governments that sign climate agreements without binding mechanisms. This is the attitude of older politicians who vote against climate policies in the name of economic competitiveness, whose consequences they will never see. It is, in accounting terms, an officer who refuses to sign the consolidated financial statements because they reveal an insolvency that he prefers to hide from his successors.

What humanity needs is a new intergenerational contract — explicit, institutionalized, binding. There are several avenues: commissioners for the rights of future generations in constitutions (Wales did), natural capital accounting mechanisms integrated into national accounts, fiscal rules that integrate ecological debt as well as financial debt, and repair funds fed by the historical profits of fossil industries.