Parenting & Family Quote by Mark Udall

The line flips the usual direction of entitlement, and that inversion is the whole weapon. In politics, “inheritance” is a cozy word: it flatters voters with continuity and implies stewardship without requiring sacrifice. Udall swaps it for “borrowing,” a term that smuggles in obligation, interest, and a due date. You can inherit without asking; you can’t borrow without being answerable.

The subtext is aimed squarely at the habits of short-term governance. Democracies reward near-term wins, not long-term maintenance, and environmental policy is where that distortion becomes most visible: the benefits of extraction arrive quickly, the costs show up decades later, and the people paying are literally not in the room. By invoking “my children,” Udall personalizes what climate scientists quantify and what budgets often hide: intergenerational debt, only the currency is soil, water, and a stable atmosphere.

As a politician, he’s also doing coalition work. The phrasing is family-forward and values-coded rather than technical, designed to travel across partisan lines and bypass the culture-war reflex against “environmentalism” as an ideology. It’s a moral argument disguised as plain speech: you don’t need to agree on carbon pricing to understand that borrowing and breaking something before you return it is a kind of theft.

There’s an implied accusation, too. If we’re borrowing from our children, then business-as-usual isn’t just imprudent; it’s a breach of trust. The quote works because it reframes climate action from optional virtue to basic decency under a loan you can’t refinance.