Thread: Australian students kick off global climate strike

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Thousands of school students walked out of their classrooms and onto Australian streets on Friday to kick off a global strike demanding world leaders gathering for a UN Climate Action Summit adopt urgent measures to stop an environmental catastrophe.

“Stop denying the earth is dying,” read a handmade sign, carried by one student protesting in Sydney’s city precinct, as social media posts showed students gathering around the country including state capitals and outback towns like Alice Springs.


“We didn’t light it, but we’re trying to fight it,” read another sign in Sydney.


Similar protests, inspired by the 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, are planned in some 150 countries on Friday. The aim is for students and others from around the world to speak in one voice about the impending effects of climate change on the planet.

The strike will culminate in New York when Thunberg, who has been nominated for a Nobel prize for her climate activism, will spearhead a march at the home of the United Nations headquarters.


The UN summit brings together world leaders to discuss climate change mitigation strategies, such as transitioning to renewable energy sources from fossil fuels.

In Australia, climate change policy has become a political football as the coal-rich country grapples with its renewable energy targets.


Australian Finance Minister Mathias Cormann told parliament on Thursday that students should not take part in the protest movement. “When school is sitting, students should go to school,” he said.


Danielle Porepilliasana, a high school student in Sydney’s inner west, said climate change was the biggest threat to her generation and politicians needed to wake up to the challenge.

“World leaders from everywhere are telling us that students need to be at school doing work,” said Porepilliasana, wearing anti-coal earrings.


“I’d like to see them at their parliaments doing their jobs for once.”


Global warming caused by heat-trapping greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels has already led to droughts and heatwaves, melting glaciers, rising sea levels and floods, scientists say.



Carbon emissions climbed a record high last year, despite a warning from the U.N.-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in October that output of the gases must be slashed over the next 12 years to stabilize the climate.


Organizers said the demonstrations would take different forms around the world, but all aim to promote awareness of climate change and demand political action to curb contributing factors to climate change, namely carbon emissions.

https://www.thaipbsworld.com/austral...t-do-your-job/

Extinction Rebellion fascinates and troubles business in equal measure.

september 20 2019, 12:01am,

the times

matthew gwyther



You would hardly expect the Extinction Rebellion (ER) handbook to be a barrel of laughs (the end of the world being nigh is no sniggering matter). The pink volume’s bleak and apocalyptic 200 pages, peppered with matt black skulls plus hourglasses, are best read with Johnny Cash’s The Man Comes Around playing in the background.

But with 1,130 arrests at Easter and a quarter of a million Twitter followers, the protest movement has gone from zero to global hero in less than 12 months. ER fascinates and troubles business in equal measure, not least because the woolly corporate buzzword of the moment is “purpose”, with mere CSR (corporate social responsibility) old news and relegated to a tick box list of hygiene factors. ER has purpose in spades. It is purpose embodied.

In the vanguard of the purpose paradigm was Unilever’s recently retired chief executive, Paul Polman, who has called for a cohort of “heroic CEOs” to fight climate change and global inequality. Even Blackrock’s Larry Fink (net worth more than $1 billion) has woken up to the fact that his outfit may have to go a little further than Friedmanite maximisation of shareholder return to justify its continuing licence to operate. PWC appointed a chief purpose officer and the Financial Times, another paper pink ’un, announces in a wraparound cover this week: “The long-term health of free enterprise capitalism will depend on delivering profit with purpose.”



So how can business sup a drop of ER’s secret sauce? Organisational behaviourists are intrigued by its bottom-up, holacratic style, which consists of “self-organising, non-hierarchical interlocking circles”. It makes much of autonomy and the absence of conventional leadership. But ER’s co-founder is Roger Hallam, a wide-eyed zealot with a man bun and a serious messiah complex. Hallam is a one-time small organic farmer from Carmarthen with personal adverse climate experience: “It rained every day for seven weeks, which destroyed all my crops. I went bankrupt.” (We can safely assume that he hadn’t sown genetically modified, deluge-resistant seeds.)

Hallam’s message is clear. “All this means one thing: no food . . . It means economic collapse. That means mass starvation. Many people won’t die from lack of food, they’ll die from the secondary effects: the slaughter of global war, mass mental breakdown, mass torture, mass rape. You all know this, it’s all connected. It’s the end. It’s over.” Disciples who want the feel-good factor should go elsewhere.

It is very welcoming to novices. For newcomers to ER meetings there is even an initial trigger warning: “You will feel grief, anger, denial, numbness, shock. It will be stressful. But you are not alone.” At the gathering I attended the phenomenon of birth-striking was considered: women refusing to have kids until we get CO2 levels down.

A virtue for which ER is envied is its youthful incorruptibility. (Its poster child Greta Thunberg told the US Congress this week: “Please save your praise. We don’t want it. Don’t invite us here to just tell us how inspiring we are without actually doing anything about it because it doesn’t lead to anything.”)

Its engagement levels would send any HR department into raptures. ER is sustainability’s Eliot Ness, abjuring the blandishments of business and suspicious of purpose-peddling and woke-washing. (Although its seed funding was provided by the reeky soap retailer Lush and a top up came from J Paul Getty’s granddaughter.) In the summer, however, it addressed an open letter to the advertising industry warning: “Making a small campaign to give up drinking from plastic straws is not going to cut it. Neither is doing some pro-bono for an anti-palm oil initiative.”

Philip Thomas, who runs the legendarily sybaritic annual Cannes Lions awards, sniffed disruption ahead and invited ER for talks. Over a glass of rosé at the Majestic Hotel he suggested that rather than throw fake blood all over his red carpet why did ER not meet some top execs from Procter and Gamble, Coca-Cola and Unilever for a serious discussion. A deal was struck.

This was all looking promising until the Mayor of Cannes vetoed the plan. The order had come down from President Macron that any political activists, especially the gilets jaunes, were to be no-platformed. (The irony won’t be lost on many that the yellow jackets’ ire was initially roused by an increase in excise duty on car diesel.)

“Extraordinary,” remarks Mr Thomas. “I mean anyone with half a brain agrees with ER’s basic premise. And they’re completely non-violent, reasonable, earnest, authentic.” Honest, decent and true, even.

If it ever gets face-to-face with ER the problem business will find is that ER is not that interested. It has had it with “neoliberal” capitalism, which it blames for the excess consumption that led to the climate crisis in the first place. Its puritan vision demands a purpose-based or planned economy not a free market. The ER Declaration of Rebellion states: “The wilful complicity displayed by our government has shattered meaningful democracy and cast aside the common interest in favour of short-term gain and profit . . . we hereby declare the bonds of the social contract to be null and void.”

Neither are they impressed by Mark Carney’s entreaty that there are entrepreneurial billions to be made from global warming. If you suggest that achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2025 would crash the economy three times faster than a no-deal Brexit the reply is “so be it”. Out for scrap would go 38 million cars, 26 million gas-fired boilers and your Ryanair app. But who would dare to write them off as a flock of Chicken Lickens? The denial stance has never been further beyond the pale. Meanwhile the next wave of ER protests is coming, perhaps with a pink beached boat, to a crossroads near you on October 7.

Matthew Gwyther is a journalist, author and consultant. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewGwyther

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/b...sure-7w6xq9lfb

Why baby boomers' grandchildren will hate them

19 Sep, 2019 8:54am


Washington Post
By: Stephen Stromberg
COMMENT


For decades, Americans could remember previous generations with reverence. The Greatest Generation freed Europe and established the liberal world order. The Silent Generation helped them build post-World War II prosperity and battle international communism. And the baby boomers had their moments, mostly long past: marching for civil rights; speaking out against an endless war; revolutionising the culture. But when their children and grandchildren look back at the boomer legacy, "reverence" is not the word that will come to mind.


A new Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll gauged how US teenagers feel about climate change. Nearly all - 86 per cent - believe in the near-unanimous conclusions of the scientific community.


Fifty-seven per cent of teens say climate change makes them feel afraid. Fifty-two percent feel angry. Forty-three percent feel helpless. Only 29 per cent feel optimistic. Anger, fear, helplessness: These are the sorts of feelings so many of the nation's recent leaders - and those who elected them - will increasingly elicit.


Millennials and Generation Z were raised with climate science. And even for those who weren't, the Earth's changes will get ever harder to ignore. Experts reckon that the planet is currently on the path to warm 3 degrees Celsius or quite a bit more by 2100. Even at 2 degrees of warming, the consequences would be severe. Pest-borne disease would be far more widespread. Heatwaves would be longer, more intense and more deadly. Droughts would last longer. Coastlines would flood. Species would die out.


Climate "tipping points" (for example, permafrost melting and releasing vast quantities of new greenhouse gas emissions) could be reached that would make the warming more extreme.


Young Americans will face the challenge, because their parents and grandparents did not.


They will do so with little time and a cash-strapped federal Treasury that the baby boomers fleeced to pay for tax cuts and retirement benefits. The Post poll found that about a quarter of today's teens had engaged in some form of climate activism. Others have not done much, but they will likely demand more as the problem gets worse and their political power grows. Generational change will bring policy change.


"That's the way it should be," some conservatives might say. In its most compelling form, conservatism counsels against ambitious reform and for the preservation of economic arrangements, social structures and mores to which people had become accustomed, because trying to sweep away too much, too quickly, results in backlash, disorder and civil conflict - more harm than good. In this view, steady evolution in policy and culture, in part via generational change, is preferable to rapid, large-scale reform.


Ascribing this instinct to conservatives who oppose acting aggressively on global warming is one way to give them some benefit of the doubt that they are not knowingly and selfishly condemning future generations to climate hell.


But this logic fails in the face of an issue such as imminent climate change. Though millennials and younger generations will eventually have their opportunity to govern the country, the problem will be ever more severe.


The planet does not care about conservatives' concerns about national reform or President Donald Trump's inability to think rationally. It will change while they dither and deny. They are assigning to others the task of more rapid, more radical change. That is why so many opponents of acting on climate change prefer to play down or deny the climate threat.


What is the point of politics - of life, even - if not to leave a positive legacy for future generations? Not every issue so clearly implicates such big questions, in part because not every issue offers such a clear distinction between right and wrong, responsible and irresponsible, reality and reality denial. But climate change, the greatest self-imposed long-term threat facing humanity, offers that clarity.


Today's youths will curse their forebears for failing to accept the truth.

they can curse all they want, and maybe they have a very good reason to curse, but every movement that has risen in order to seeks utopia has failed to take into account one thing, and that is human nature.


Adapt and we’ll defy Greta Thunberg’s expectations
niall ferguson

The teenager’s call for panic could do more harm than good



In 15th-century Peru, we learnt last week, children were sacrificed to propitiate the Chimu gods in an attempt to end natural disasters caused by the climatic phenomenon we now call, appropriately enough, El Niño. In our time the roles have been reversed. Now children warning of an impending climate catastrophe are the ones that have to be propitiated. Now it is they who demand sacrifices.

The arrival of Greta Thunberg in New York on Wednesday was one of many recent events that illustrate how rapidly modern environmentalism is degenerating into a millenarian cult.

Greta, 16, is in New York at the invitation of the United Nations, having already established herself as a public figure in Europe by leading mass truancies to protest against climate change (“Fridays for Future”). Rather than flying, she sailed across the Atlantic in an “emissions-free yacht” to spare the Earth’s atmosphere the exhaust from a plane that was flying to New York anyway, with or without her.

“Just before 3pm,” reported The New York Times, “a shout went up from those waiting in the intermittent light rain to greet her . . . most of them young activists. The boat’s black sails had come into sight just blocks from Wall Street, the heart of the global financial system whose investments in fossil fuels are one of the main targets of climate protesters.”

Amid the drizzle, the bankers cowered before the wrath of Greta. From the headquarters of the once-mighty Goldman Sachs came the feeble tweet: “We’re committed to helping win the race and proud to welcome @GretaThunberg to New York.” They’ll be sacrificing the oil company accounts on Tuesday.

“Sea levels are rising and so are we!” the young activists chanted, according to the priceless Times report. Once safely ashore in Manhattan, Greta lost no time in urging Donald Trump “just to listen to the science, [as] he obviously doesn’t do that”.

Science. Or perhaps science fiction. There is at first something unnervingly reminiscent of John Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos about Greta. The pigtails. The unsmiling stare. But then you learn that she has struggled with mental health conditions, including high-functioning autism and obsessive-compulsive disorder. This makes it hard to criticise her.

Yet what does it tell us about our world that Greta is about to add the UN general assembly to the list of august bodies she has addressed in the past year, after the Pope, the World Economic Forum and the European parliament? “I want you to panic,” she said at Davos in January. “I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.” That is not the voice of science. It is the voice of a millenarian cult leader.

The end of the world is not nigh, however.

Now, I am not about to deny that climate change is happening or that global warming is going to have adverse effects in the foreseeable future. Not even Bjorn Lomborg, the sceptical Danish economist, says that. The point, as he argued in a recent, brilliant presentation at the Hoover Institution, is that — as in the past — we humans are capable of adapting to climate change in ways that can significantly mitigate its adverse effects.

It would be foolish to do nothing to prepare for a warmer planet. But it would be more foolish to pretend that we are doing something that will significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions when we are not.

Greta’s carbon-neutral Atlantic crossing is a case in point. As yachts require crews, it is almost certain that more people will end up flying across the Atlantic as a result of her stunt than if she had caught a scheduled flight. The Paris climate accord is a scaled-up version of this. Even if adhered to, it will scarcely increase the share of global energy that comes from renewable sources. The effect on average temperature will be negligible: just 1% of what would be needed to limit the rise in global temperature by 2100 to 1.5C.

It would be even more foolish to take, on the basis of apocalyptic visions, extreme precautions that end up costing more than inaction would. Subsidies to renewable energy have a cost. Cutting CO2 emissions has a cost. Those costs in terms of forgone growth could exceed the costs of climate damage if we overreach in the way that, for example, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal would. The key point, as Lomborg says, is that vastly more people die as a consequence of poverty each year than die as a consequence of global warming. A CO2 emissions target is not the optimal target if meeting it would trap millions in poverty, not to mention ignorance and ill-health.

Back in the 1400s people in Peru believed that sacrificing their children would reduce rainfall. Not only did that not work. Regardless of their grim, murderous rites, they were soon to be hit by a far worse natural disaster than rain, namely the various lethal pandemics that swept the Americas after the arrival of Europeans. We know climate change can happen, because it followed hard on the heels of this “great dying”: the collapsing population in the New World reduced carbon dioxide levels as large areas of land returned to the wild, leading to the so-called Little Ice Age.

I have said more than once in recent years that our era has more in common with the 16th and 17th centuries than with any intervening period — and not just because of the splendidly Stuart-style constitutional crisis currently gripping the British Isles. It is the early-modern world all over again, not least because the effects of the internet on popular belief so closely resemble the effects of the printing press.

The challenge of millenarianism — as Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore pointed out in my favourite sketch from Beyond the Fringe — is what to do when the end of the world fails to happen.

Greta is right about one thing. The chances are virtually nil that the governments of the world will do as she asks. While the West virtue-signals, China, India, Brazil and others will continue to attach more importance to growth than to curbing emissions. The planet will grow warmer, just as it grew colder in the 1600s. And we shall adapt, taking advantage of the technological innovations that will gradually improve how we generate and store electrical power and ward off flood waters.

It is 2059. To the embarrassment (but, I hope, relief) of Greta Thunberg, now 56, her great expectations of the end of the world have not been fulfilled. Jair Bolsonaro didn’t torch the Amazon. Trump didn’t incinerate the planet. You should come back to New York to celebrate our survival, Greta.

But, this time, fly.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/my-articl...ions-zccbnxskw

Wanting to not choke to death or render the planet inhabitable is hardly seeking 'utopia'.

It would be even more foolish to take, on the basis of apocalyptic visions, extreme precautions that end up costing more than inaction would. Subsidies to renewable energy have a cost. Cutting CO2 emissions has a cost. Those costs in terms of forgone growth could exceed the costs of climate damage if we overreach in the way that, for example, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal would. The key point, as Lomborg says, is that vastly more people die as a consequence of poverty each year than die as a consequence of global warming. A CO2 emissions target is not the optimal target if meeting it would trap millions in poverty, not to mention ignorance and ill-health.

.....

Those costs in terms of forgone growth could exceed the costs of climate damage if we overreach in the way that, for example, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal would. The key point, as Lomborg says, is that vastly more people die as a consequence of poverty each year than die as a consequence of global warming. A CO2 emissions target is not the optimal target if meeting it would trap millions in poverty, not to mention ignorance and ill-health.

This is the biggest problem of them all. For those that think money is everything, economic growth must happen. For growth to happen, populations must increase. If populations increase, poverty and hunger increase.

If climate change wipes out the inhabited coastal areas of the planet, there will be roughly one tenth of the world's population seeking another place to live.

It really needs a global rethink and the abolition of capitalism in its current form, which will probably only happen when global extinction is knocking at the door.

Yet, these well intended good-niks have never thought of adapting to change their lifestyles of mindless and needless consumption, which is the root of all of their fashioned ills.

Blind to twisted irony.

Trendy imagery and a fraudulent thought process rules the day.

I remember 60 years ago, when at school, we were taught about deforestation and as kids we were asked to donate to planting trees. 60 years later we're still back at base. Someone made money way back then.

the world is not going to stop driving cars, travelling by air, producing goods or growing, rearing and consuming vast amounts of food, or improving their lives and dragging themselves out of poverty

so this delusion of being able to cut co2 to zero within the next 20 years is utter nonsense.

the only way that c02 emissions will be cut is by reducing the earths population, thereby reducing the need for so much food and the mostly throwaway goods whose manufacture provides employment and income to billions.

and the only way that population growth will be reduced is when nature decides to release some killer virus, disease or a resistance to the antibiotics that cure most of our illnesses.

humans will never be able to implement a workable solution, especially the idealistic dreamers that are leading this ridiculous kiddies revolt.
human nature will never allow it.

but nature will most certainly find a way to preserve the planet, it always has done, and always will, even if it means killing half the population.

It really needs a global rethink and the abolition of capitalism in its current form

and replace it with what exactly? living under a bush and eating leaves.

adolescent dreamers and vote hungry politicians can never willingly convince humanity to give up the advances of the past 200 years, and it wouldnt make the slightest bit of difference even if they did. there are too many of us to feed and house.

dont think too much harry, enjoy your life, drive your V8, eat your steaks and buy loads more chinese tech, but just leave it to nature to bring about the readjustment if and when it deems it necessary.

Originally Posted by taxexile

so this delusion of being able to cut co2 to zero within the next 20 years is utter nonsense.

If would save energy and definitely reduce some blowhard greenhouse emissions if you stopped trying to erect these silly straw men.

have you asked india or china or indonesia or any of the other countries valiantly trying to drag their populations out of poverty what they think about it?

silly straw men

Originally Posted by taxexile

have you asked india or china or indonesia or any of the other countries valiantly trying to drag their populations out of poverty what they think about it?

And more blowhard greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere!

if you say so.

Originally Posted by taxexile

have you asked india or china or indonesia or any of the other countries valiantly trying to drag their populations out of poverty what they think about it?

Here's a simple equation: If you haven't got enough food to go around X people, then you're going to have even less to go around X+n people.

Stop growing the population when you can't feed the one you've got.

^

i think i said that 3 hours ago.

do try and keep up harry lad.

Ah right what did the Nobel prize nominee say again, that global climate change has been around since the 15th Century. Jeez I thought homes we're made out of renewable resources.

What was causing Global climate change then?


Must of been the cows....

Originally Posted by taxexile

^

i think i said that 3 hours ago.

do try and keep up harry lad.

Trying to make it simple for him.

You're right, probably futile.

Originally Posted by Chico

Ah right what did the Nobel prize nominee say again, that global climate change has been around since the 15th Century. Jeez I thought homes we're made out of renewable resources.

What was causing Global climate change then?


Must of been the cows....

Are you trying to make yourself look like an imbecile or is it that effortless?

Harry,just following your lead.

Originally Posted by Chico

Harry,just following your lead.

I rather suspect you're more following Buttplug's.

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Stop growing the population when you can't feed the one you've got.

How many kids do you have again?

Originally Posted by cyrille

How many kids do you have again?

One.

And in case you struggle with maths, that is enough to decrease the population over time.

One thing the chinkies got right (for a while).

So....what happens after these highly fashionable and very public attention seeking "strikes"/protests? [as they were quite numerous the world over]

Walking the walk or just talking BS?
Actually, living one's protest or being the change you want to see in the world?

Going through the motions, falsely, just for noted vogue stylish image isn't practical.

Originally Posted by HuangLao

So....what happens after these highly fashionable and very public attention seeking "strikes"/protests? [as they were quite numerous the world over]

Walking the walk or just talking BS?
Actually, living one's protest or being the change you want to see in the world?

Going through the motions, falsely, just for noted vogue stylish image isn't practical.

That depends if they are reflected at the ballot box, doesn't it?

Although in the case of Hong Kong it forced the chinky stooge to back down on one demand. No-one saw that coming.