WORDS BY BILL MCKIBBEN
artwork by yannick lowery
Try to imagine the prototypical older voter. She’s a woman, say, 75, with grandkids and all that implies. You might think she votes conservative. Maybe she’s even a climate denier. That’s what the stereotypes, the OK Boomer memes, and the viral Karen videos would all imply.
Maybe you’re right—but maybe not. Because what’s often forgotten is that she was college-age back in 1970, at the first Earth Day. Perhaps she was one of the 20 million who took to the streets that day or even one of the environmentalists who organized it.
So it should probably have come as less of a surprise than it did when surveys from the Environmental Voter Project (EVP), released last autumn, showed that the oldest cohort of citizens trailed only the youngest cohort in their concern for the climate. The numbers are remarkable. About 16.4% of voters over 65 consider climate and the environment as their chief issue, compared with 9.2% of those aged 35-49, and 5.5% of those aged 50-64. To put it another way, one in six Boomers is voting climate first, compared with one in 20 Gen Xers—which, if you think about it, makes some sense. Those Gen Xers had their reality defined by Ronald Reagan, not Rachel Carson; in both cases, early lessons seem to have stuck.
This is why, potentially, older voters may be crucial in this year’s elections. We tend to think of them as conservative (and indeed, the percentage of older voters who dismiss climate change, about 19%, is the highest for any age group). But that’s wrong, perhaps decisively. As the EVP report pointed out, in Arizona and Pennsylvania—two crucial swing states in 2024—the populations of older climate voters are so large that they make up 4.8% and 4.7%, respectively, of the entire electorate in each state. That’s true no matter where you look: In New Hampshire, the quintessential purple state, a quarter of voters over 65 say they’ll make up their mind based on who’s strongest about the climate.
It’s not just climate, of course. Older voters are also swinging towards the progressive end of things on other issues—in large part because many politicians are swinging so hard the other way. Look at the 60 swingiest districts in the 2022 midterms: In early summer, Republicans had a sturdy lead among older voters in 50 of those districts, up 50% to 40%, numbers that had the GOP imagining a red wave. But on Election Day, voters over 65 broke for Democrats in those districts, 49 to 46.
It’s hard for us to imagine that we’re going to be the first generation to leave the world a much worse place than we found it.
What happened? Well, the Supreme Court tossed out Roe v. Wade in early summer. The most vocal demonstrators were young, as you’d expect, since they’re the ones who will bear children or not in the years ahead. But people in their 60s and 70s may have felt a deeper psychic upheaval: A woman’s right to choose had been part of their mental furniture for five decades.
Because we’ve lived our entire lives in what we had imagined was a stable and working democracy, the pictures of January 6 may have hit us harder too. The insurrection seemed so unimaginable. Our own lives may seem fairly secure: For the most part, both sides of the current political divide have decided that Social Security and Medicare are sacrosanct. But that only leaves us free to take on other issues of concern, above all, as the numbers show, climate change.
For young people, climate change is existential—they’re staring down the barrel of a very long gun. That’s somewhat true of older people, too (data show that the elderly fare worst in the ever-worsening string of not-so-natural disasters plaguing our overheated world). But I think we tend to view climate change through a legacy lens: It’s hard for us to imagine that we’re going to be the first generation to leave the world a much worse place than we found it. Through that lens, the melting poles feel oddly personal.
That’s certainly what we’ve found at Third Act, the new and rapidly growing effort to organize people over 60 for action on climate and democracy. We’re less than two years old, but we have 75,000 members, with chapters in pretty much every corner of the country. The people in those chapters are deeply engaged: In the spring of 2023, we staged a hundred demonstrations in a hundred cities, targeting the big banks (Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, Bank of America) that are the biggest funders of the fossil fuel industry. I was at the biggest of them all, in Washington D.C., where the heads of the Sierra Club and Greenpeace joined us, and where we shut down several branches for the afternoon with a sit-in. Since we’re too old to sprawl on the sidewalk for hours, we used rocking chairs—indeed, as the New York Times wrote the next day, it was a Rocking Chair Rebellion.
While we’re not as sprightly as we once were, we’re still fighting for our legacy of change in the ballot box—and when we can, in the streets.
In the fall, we joined the frontline activists along the Gulf of Mexico to make exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) a national issue. Our activists (who, remember, come from an age when penmanship was still a thing) bombarded the Department of Energy (DOE) with thousands of handwritten letters. Then, they got ready to use those rocking chairs again—almost all the activists scheduled to take part in a big February sit-in outside DOE were Third Actors, because, among other things, we have time.
Now, we’re staking out public utility commission meetings across the country and badgering Costco to drop its Citi credit card. But we’re also gearing up for the 2024 elections, with rolling phone banks and texting campaigns. We’re busy writing new high school graduates (we call it Senior to Senior, get it?) telling them what voting has meant to us over our lifetimes and urging them to register. When the election nears, those of us still ambulatory will be out knocking on doors—last time around, we had Third Actors converge on Reno for the razor-thin Senate race there, and when the Democrat won, an opinion in CNN by a former state legislator credited two groups: the mighty culinary workers union in Vegas, and Third Act.
I know it’s sometimes hard for younger people to imagine that their elders might be as progressive as they are. But look at the laws that the rightwing Supreme Court is busy trying to wreck: the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Gun Control Act of 1968, the Clean Air Act of 1971, Roe v. Wade of 1973. We were their age during this social upheaval. This is our legacy. So when people tell me, “Okay Boomer,” I don’t object—it’s true that in too many cases, the second act of our lives was more about consumerism than citizenship. But I also tell them that there’s more there than meets the eye: that if we’re going to save the climate it’s going to take not just heroes from the Greta generation, but also people from the Earth Day generation. We vote like hell, after all: over three times more than 18- to 29-year-olds in the 2022 midterms. While we’re not as sprightly as we once were, we’re still fighting for our legacy of change in the ballot box—and when we can, in the streets.
At the first big climate march that Third Act helped organize, there were hundreds of high school students: they knew exactly what they were facing. They’re somewhat spryer, so they were at the head of the parade. But there was a crowd of us older people trailing them, with a banner that read Fossils Against Fossil Fuels. Ignore us at your peril.
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Bill McKibben: Baby Boomers Are in Their Climate Era
