Thomas Friedman’s recent piece on Musk and tech capital as a solution to the climate crisis is a jarring poke in the eye for those who decry more geoengineering as a solution to a crisis created by geoengineering. But Friedman missed the crucial history, and issue, at play. Fundamentally, climate change flows from the failure of world leaders to adopt sustainable family planning policies in the Twentieth Century that would have used nature as a limiting factor.

They chose growth, and permitted massive birth inequity, instead. That system also created Musk, which is why he and other concentrations of power are pushing even now for more population growth. They exist because we ignored our historic obligations to give all children equal opportunities in life, and instead treated people as fodder to grow economies. Their wealth is the product of that growth.

The solution? Embrace a new family model based on equity and ecological restoration, and use the wealth bubble at the top of the pyramid – the one that buoys up the uber-rich of the world – to fund the transition as a matter of ensuring every child’s right to a fair start in life. 

Urge @tomfriedman to get it right.

What is Fair Start?

The Fair Start Movement is the convergence of social, eco, and reproductive justice to ensure every child a fair start in life. Let’s stop counting people, and start making people count. How? Move wealth from the top of the economic pyramid and into incentivizing better family planning and more equitable, sustainable families. That wealth was made through poor family planning policies that put costs on women and children. Redirecting that wealth is how to do the most good for children, animals and the environment, and the only way to make people truly free.

Without giving every child an ecosocial Fair Start in life we never come from a just place. Changing that is the first obligation, for all of us, and as such it is achievable by all means effective.