Your sentiment is not, in fact, new. It existed back then as well.

millennials are refusing to shit themselves in fear

Started good...

Like, I’m going to die a slow death from microplastic poisoning. My kids will slowly cook to death as the earth warms. Instant death by fireball sounds pretty nice.

...And then you wrote this. I see contradiction.

I'm really sorry to piss on your little eco-statement here, but climate change fears are relevant for decadent rich societies only. Most of the actual humanity is still more concerned with poverty, illiteracy, hunger, epidemics and genocide.

But I agree that those threats are hollow now, because people who'd never actually fulfill them are voicing them. Mostly thieves from the Russian "elite".

In 1984 the threat would be voiced by bureaucratic leaders of a block occupying large part of the globe which was more or less designed from the ground up for playing "Global Thermonuclear War", you can see than even in the way Soviet military in its every component was being developed starting from the 50s. Those leaders were not even that corrupt, usually (well, such famous Politburo members as Boris Yeltsin and Heydar Aliyev obviously were, but still), what they owned officially and unofficially is upper middle class level, in Western terms.

So maybe boomers were not so cowardly, yes?