Responding to climate emergency with a sense of agency

I thought I had misread the statement below, written and submitted to me today by one of the fellows in the Spartan Superway who has just graduated and is considering his next move:

"As a young person, [I see] all projections point to catastrophic climate destabilization in my lifetime. It has never been more critical to have a sense of agency about carbon emissions."

Don't you mean, "a sense of urgency"?

Oops, au contraire, he meant just what he wrote: a sense of agency "is the subjective awareness of initiating, executing, and controlling one's own volitional actions in the world...."

Can we really afford to invest a scarce minute of our precious time to better engineer fossil fuel use? If not us, who can deliver a turn-it-around solution for our children's sake? What might happen if we just say no to coal?

Are we young enough to care about their (our) future?

"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now-w-w-w."
                                                                 My Back Pages, Bob Dylan