Column by Jim Shultz | Child car seats and climate change - New Castle News

JIM SHULTZ: Child car seats and climate change | Opinion | lockportjournal.com

The blessings of being a grandfather are many. There are the bedtime stories, bike rides, summer ice cream, the hugs and the laughing. But then there is the curse of being a grandparent, the thing that can drive any sober-thinking human being out of their mind: the child car seat.

It has been more than 50 years since we landed men on the moon and child car seat technology still feels like it was designed by drunk people. Getting the darned thing in the car is one struggle. Getting a squirming toddler into the seat is another one. Seriously, is it beyond us to make the whole thing work with Velcro or magnets?

My five-year-old granddaughter can’t even fathom the idea that children once climbed around like wild monkeys between the front seat and the back seat while our parents sped down the freeway. She thinks liberation is getting to ride in the front passenger seat for a loop around the block.

Why do we subject ourselves and our children to this? Because child car seats have cut child deaths in car crashes by nearly half. Every day we are surrounded by tens of thousands of children growing up happy instead of being buried in the ground by their devastated families. We saw a danger to our children, took it seriously, and took action.

If only we were so responsible about the world of dangers we are handing our children through global climate change.

This past July has now been recorded as the hottest month on Earth since humanity started keeping temperature records in 1880. And in all likelihood it will end up being one of the coolest summers our children will experience for the rest of their lives. This is not an isolated event. The eight hottest years on record have been since 2014.

The impacts of a heating planet are everywhere and they are grave. Here in western New York and much of the eastern U.S. we have spent parts of this summer buried under one thick cloud of smoke after another from Canada’s raging wildfires (a hotter climate means drier and more flammable forests). Summer days that our children would normally have spent playing happily outside under blue skies turned instead into indoor confinement to prevent serious illness. And this is just a preview of what is to come.

Extreme heat records have been smashed this summer in the U.S., Italy, Spain and elsewhere. In scorching Phoenix, touching a hot doorknob or falling on pavement can leave you with a third-degree burn. A city in China last month hit 126 degrees.

UNICEF is the United Nations agency for children that works on the front lines of every child crisis imaginable. It recently declared, “There may be no greater, growing threat facing the world’s children — and their children — than climate change.” I was in Senegal in West Africa working with UNICEF last May. The teams there told me that they are preparing for millions of climate refugees in the region as climate change decimates local water supplies and local farming. It is children who will suffer the worst.

Our children in America will not be spared. We are on track for summers that will become even more sweltering and deadly, storms that will become even more fierce and more fatal, and the world around them becoming more unstable and more violent.

How can we possibly want this for our children? Putting our heads in the sand on all this is like ditching the child car seat and just hoping they won’t go flying headfirst through the windshield.

The thing about car seats is that what it takes to keep our kids safer is simple and clear. You buy a seat, you put it in. Dealing with climate change is more complicated because a whole world needs to act. We have known for decades now that burning coal, oil and gasoline wraps the planet in a deadly blanket of heat-trapping carbon emissions. But the action we have taken is too little and too slow.

What can we do? Everything all at once, fast. Individually, we need to drive less (and bicycle more). We need to put solar panels on our homes and plant trees in our communities. Most important of all, as citizens we need to elect leaders who understand that climate change is a genuine crisis, not a Chinese hoax. We need leaders who will champion the kind of practical public investments that move us as quickly as possible away from the fossil fuels that so deeply threaten our children’s futures.

Every generation tells stories to the next one about how life used to be when they were young, like being able to climb like monkeys between seats in a speeding car. Unless we take serious and swift action now, the stories my grandchildren will tell their children will be about a time when summer was a joy, not a threat, and when 100-year storms came every 100 years, not every two.

If we really love our children as much as we say we do, we will not ignore the warnings of summer 2023, we will do something. What is at stake otherwise is unfathomable.