What world will you leave your grandkids?

95 years ago an 8 year old child started working in a coal mine 3 hours west of Sydney. He was my grandad, Richard Percival Young.

“I worked in the coal mines from when I was about 8. They were still using pit ponies then. They had skips that usually weighed about a tonne. We’d fill them with shovels. We were allowed to fill ten tonne a day. Start work at 8am. If you were good at it you could knock off earlier.”

“I was working on the Invicible Mine at Cullen Bullen — went down a fair way. We traveled in and out of the mine in skips. I was in cave-ins. Once two boys were killed. Ceiling fell in onto them. They were in a tunnel next to mine.”

My daughter was born at the height of the pandemic in April 2020. Becoming a parent changes your thinking about both the past and the future. Grandad is a big part of the reason I have the life I do, which now transfers to my daughter, as he pulled himself up from nothing into running his own farm and helping his kids towards a better life.

But… what world will my daughter’s children be living in when I’m the age my grandfather passed?

“We used to drill the coal face. We’d put in a charge of dynamite and a long fuse. We’d light it and run like hell. We’d be in the tunnel when it exploded. Different ones had their hands blown off. One bloke I knew had an eye knocked out. There were no jackhammer or big machinery. It was all hand work.”

Every piece of coal grandad pulled from the earth has been burned for fuel. And while grandad is no longer with us the C02 pollution from the coal is, and will be in the atmosphere warming the planet for the next 300 to 1000 years.

We’re already living in a vastly different climate to what existed for the 50 years grandad ran our farm. The last seven years have been the hottest in recorded history, and 2019 (ahead of Australia’s horrific bushfires) was the hottest and driest year in Australia’s history.

I look back at my grandparents lives with admiration… but how will our grandchildren look at what our generation leaves for them?

If we don’t all help drive huge changes in how we create and use energy we’ll likely be leaving a planet with no coral reefs, thousands of animal species extinct, and whole sections of the planet unsuitable for human life.

For our children’s children: Here’s how to get started on taking action for the climate.