Context: Remember the first time someone said you could undo the environmental harms of your flight by paying a few dollars for an “offset”? It seemed too good to be true, right? Thousands of dollars going to extract and burn jet fuel offset by a few dollars?

It was too good to be true and you knew it.

Nearly none of the projects achieved the effects they promoted. Nearly all would have happened anyway. The demand for something to work that was impossible led to fraud around the world, people offering bogus offsets. Fraudsters pocketed the money while people who wanted to help actually flying more—that is, destroying more people’s life, liberty, and property without their consent—mistakenly believing they weren’t.

Sure, teaching kids about something important helps. I’m not saying not to teach them. Keep teaching them, but to imagine teaching kids today will meaningfully affect our environmental situation misses the scale, the timing, and who can make a difference. Believing teaching them helps creates perverse incentives, like offsets. Sure, some might help a fraction of a percent, but it leads people to hold back from serious work, thinking some program for kids makes a difference.

Who can make a difference: Kids don’t vote, sit on corporate boards, know how to lead, or do anything remotely close to necessary to stop pollution and depletion.

Timing: Teaching children, if it made a difference, would help decades from now.

Scale: Whatever kids can do is minuscule. What corporate and political leaders can do is huge. If you think kids can make a difference, you can make a bigger difference. Whatever you think they can do, if you believe it’s valuable, you do it!

Perverse incentives: Thinking that teaching kids helps motivates people to devote time, money, relationships, and other resources to a negligible project that could make a difference.

Counterproductive: When you teach kids to do what you don’t, you’d like them only to hear the words you say, but they learn from your behavior too.

They learn:

• Polluting and depleting are like drinking alcohol or cursing: adults tell us not to, but they do it. We just have to keep it secret and lie about until we’re adults. Then we can do it as much as they do.
• Teachers, parents, and scientists are hypocrites.
• We have to do what they say because they force us to. The only way to act on sustainability is to force facts and numbers on people, or to force behavior they don’t do themselves.

Creating a generation of people who

Coercion doesn’t work: Our generations were taught as kids to value and respect the environment by adults who didn’t do what they taught us to. What do you know, we’re accelerating what they tried to get us to decelerate, passing the buck to future generations.

Why we promote teaching kids: We’re cowards, authoritarians, and liars. And we’re wrong.

Say a genie granted you the ability to lead one person on sustainability and you could choose between

• A ten-year-old
• The CEO of Exxon
• The president of a nation

what kind of idiot would you have to be to pick the ten-year-old? The corporate and political leaders would make much more difference.

So why does everyone pick the kid in practice? Because we can force them to sit in a room. We can force them to listen. We can force them to do projects that we lie to ourselves will lead them to act differently than how they see us acting. We can grade them and punish them if they don’t comply. In other words, we’re authoritarian.

Why does no one pick the corporate and political leaders? Because we fear it won’t work. We fear contacting them. We think we have to cram information down their throats or force them to do projects like the ones we force kids to, but we can’t coerce them because we can’t threaten to hurt them or take something away. We don’t challenge ourselves to think of ways to lead them. We fear approaching them since we think we have to fight them and we know we’ll lose. In other words, we’re cowards.

At the root of it all, We don’t believe living more sustainably leads to a better life. If we did, we wouldn’t have to coerce. We could just lead and inspire. We would expect corporate and political leaders to thank us. We don’t, because without trying ourselves, we believe the lies we tell ourselves that a modern economy requires energy that requires pollution and depletion, etc. In other words, we lie to our children because we lie to ourselves.

We’re wrong

Humanity can live with more health, safety, security, longevity, joy, and all we value most with no pollution or depletion. I didn’t say the reconstruction would be quick or easy, but the biggest challenges are internal, mainly with lack of imagination, especially yours if you can’t imagine what I wrote in the last sentence. I’m saying it’s possible and that those results are impossible if we keep polluting and depleting.

What to do instead

Instead of coercing children and calling it education, learn to lead effectively. By lead, I mean to help people do what they already wanted to but haven’t figured out how. When you can lead others, you can change systems and cultures. You can’t through coercion. Whatever effect an individual can make, by leading them so they feel gratitude instead of coercing them, you enable that individual action to multiply by billions.

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