It appears that my elder generation is dominated by denialists and naysayers who are busy mortgaging and threatening the future of our children and coming generations.  Unfortunately, we are choosing to remain religiously focused upon the endless accumulation of material wealth, the unrestrained increase in per capita consumption of limited resources, and the continuous consolidation of political, economic and military power.

Despite all the cascading rhetoric to the contrary, we need not look far to see that money, power and privilege for ourselves, for our bought-and-paid-for politicians, and for our newly-minted rich minions are the primary object of life among many too many of us.

Regardless of the human-forced calamities -- derived from per human over-consumption, unbridled economic globalization and skyrocketing global human numbers -- that might befall those who come after us, we choose to live large, many of us having celebrity status, in a patently unsustainable fantasy world (we call it reality) of idle comforts, effortless ease, conspicuous consumption, secret handshakes, exclusive clubs, exotic hideaways and thousands of private jets, having abandoned our regard for the less fortunate among us, for the maintenance of life as we know it, and for the preservation of the integrity of Earth. Please understand that our imperious reserve masks the single-minded pursuit of material wealth, power, and privilege to profligately consume and recklessly ignore the requirements of practical reality. Think of our 'rights' to our "over the top" lifestyle as a raison d'etre.

When my not-so-great generation has completed its mission on Earth, I fear young people will look back in anger and utter disbelief at the things we have done, failed to do and called exercises of virtue.

Hopefully wealthy and powerful people, the ones who dominate and manage the activities of the global political economy, make lifestyle changes before too much time has not been wasted, too much of the environment irreversibly degraded, too many species massively extirpated, many too many resources recklessly dissipated and too much of the world we inhabit destroyed by the patently unsustainable lifestyles of the rich and famous.

Congratulations to Al Gore and to the IPCC for their work and their courage.