26/01/2019

Teenage Activist Takes School Strikes 4 Climate Action To Davos

The Guardian - 

Swedish youth climate activist Greta Thunberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos, eastern Switzerland.
Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images
The 16-year-old activist behind the fast-growing School Strikes 4 Climate Action has taken her campaign to the streets of Davos, to confront world leaders and business chiefs about the global emissions crisis.
Greta Thunberg, whose solo protest outside Sweden’s parliament has snowballed across the globe, will join a strike by Swiss schoolchildren in the ski resort on Friday – the final day of the World Economic Forum.
Thunberg travelled by train for 32 hours to reach Davos, and spent Wednesday night camped with climate scientists on the mountain slopes – where temperatures plunged to -18C.
Having already addressed the UN Climate Change COP 24 conference, Thunberg is rapidly becoming the voice for a generation who are demanding urgent action to slow the rise in global temperatures.
As she travelled down Davos’s funicular railway from the Arctic Base Camp – while more than 30,000 students were striking in Belgium - Thunberg said the rapid growth of her movement was “incredible”.
“There have been climate strikes, involving students and also adults, on every continent except Antarctica. It has involved tens of thousands of children.”


In Brussels 35,000 students march to demand action on climate change.

Thunberg started her protest by striking for three weeks outside the Swedish parliament, lobbying MPs to comply with the Paris Agreement. After the Swedish election, she continued to strike every Friday, where she is now joined by hundreds of people.
“This Friday I can’t be there,” she told the Guardian. “So I will have to do it here in Davos, and send a message that this is the only thing that matters.”
Students around the world have been inspired by Thunberg, with thousands skipping school in Australia in November. Last Friday there were strikes in Germany, Belgium and Switzerland, where more than 20,000 students skipped school.
Missing gym class, geography and religion each Friday is something of a sacrifice for Thunberg, who says she loves school and can’t pick a favourite subject.
“I like all subjects. I love learning, which people maybe don’t think about me.”
She’s also been forced to give up her hobbies, as climate change activism has taken more of her time. “I used to play theatre, sing, dance, play an instrument, ride horses, lots of things.”
She’s sanguine, though, pointing out that climate activism is much more important: “You have to see the bigger perspective.”
Thunberg said she would like more students to join her strike. “That would have a huge impact, but I’m not going to force anyone to do this.”
In the UK, only a small number of students have so far begun strikes, including 13-year-old Holly Gillibrand in Fort William. But plans are now being made for a big strike on 15 February. Thunberg predicts there will be protests in many locations.
She believes parents should be supportive if their children tell them they’re striking on Friday. “Everyone keeps saying that the young people should be more active, and they’re so lazy, but once we do something we get criticised.”
The world’s scientists warned in October that, without a dramatic ramping up of action to cut emissions, global temperatures would rise by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, with severe consequences for humanity.
Thunberg believes the older generations need to acknowledge that they have failed to protect the environment.
“We need to hold the older generations accountable for the mess they have created, and expect us to live with. It is not fair that we have to pay for what they have caused,” she says.
Thunberg has also called on business leaders and politicians to commit to “real and bold climate action”, and focus on the “future living conditions of mankind” rather than economic goals and profits.
In a video address for leaders attending Davos she says: “I ask you to stand on the right side of history. I ask you to pledge to do everything in your power to push your own business or government in line with a 1.5C world.”
Thunberg has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, which she believes helps her see the problem of climate change clearly.
“My brain works a bit different and so I see things in black and white. Either we start a chain reaction with events beyond our control, or we don’t. Either we stop the emissions or we don’t. There are no grey areas when it comes to survival.”
The school strikes last Friday were by far the biggest to date. In Germany, an estimated 30,000 students left their schools in more than 50 cities to protest, carrying banners including: “Why learn without a future?” and “Grandpa, what is a snowman?” One 17-year-old student in Kiel, Moritz, told Deutsche Welle: “We want to help shape and secure our future so that there will be another world for us to live in in 60 years.”
Greta Thunberg speaks to the media at the Arctic Basecamp in Davos.
Photograph: Ennio Leanza/EPA
In Belgium, 12,500 students went on strike last Thursday and plan to strike weekly until the EU elections in May. Some teachers were tolerant of the truancy. Patrick Lancksweerdt, in Brussels, said: “Education has to turn youngsters into mature citizens. By their actions, they proved that they are.”
School strikes also took place in 15 cities and towns in Switzerland. In Geneva, 12-year-old Selma Joly said: “Frankly, I would rather demand climate action than go to school. Otherwise, years from now, we may no longer be here.”
Janine O’Keeffe, who helps coordinate and keep track of the school strikes from her home in Stockholm, Sweden, was surprised at the scale of last week’s actions: “I am still in shock, actually – a nice kind of shock.”
Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace, says youth activism on climate change gives her hope. “The 15-year-olds just speak truth to power.”

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This Could Be The Biggest Scandal Of The Climate Change Era

Huffington Post - Sandrine Dixson-Declève* | Anders Wijkman*

The world is headed for up to 5 degrees Celsius (9 F) of global warming above pre-industrial levels by 2100, which would lead to devastating consequences for billions of people. Anton Petrus via Getty Images
Governments and businesses habitually set out emergency response plans to protect their economies, jobs, cities and other crucial assets from potential disaster. Yet when it comes to climate change ― the biggest, most urgent threat the world faces ― there is no emergency plan.
On the issue of our lifetime, countries can agree very little. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2019 published last Tuesday found that increasing divisions between the world’s major powers is the most urgent global risk we face because it stymies vital collective action on climate change.
Instead of action, we see delays, rejections and avoidance, as December’s United Nations climate summit in Katowice, Poland, so acutely reminded us. The event, which brought together world leaders, scientists, campaigners and the private sector, settled most of the rules needed to ensure countries follow the climate pledges they have made to date. What it failed to do is push countries to step up their targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions ― currently the only viable way to prevent climate breakdown. The Middle East, the U.S. and Russia refused to even welcome landmark scientific predictions on climate change, signaling their intention to continue blocking progress.
Amid all this wrangling, climate change marches on. It now appears virtually impossible to limit the global temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) ― the threshold beyond which scientists say risks irreversible climate change. The world is now headed for 3-5 C (5.4-9 F) of warming above pre-industrial levels by 2100, according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, which would lead to devastating consequences for billions of people.
A huge barrier to solving this problem is the failure of conventional economics to acknowledge the severity of climate change. Take William Nordhaus, one of 2018’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences winners. While Nordhaus agrees that climate change is a serious problem, he weighs up the costs of mitigation against the predicted damages that will be inflicted by a warming planet and concludes that our objective should be to limit temperature rises to 3.5 C (6.3 F) because to be more ambitious would be too expensive.
But a decision based on this kind of cost calculation is highly questionable. How do you put a cost on the destruction of coral reefs? Or on millions of people being pushed out of their homes, or killed by rising sea levels? And how do you account for the consequences of possible “tipping points” ― such as the melting of the permafrost?
Coral inside the Egadi Islands Marine Reserve in Italy. How do you put a cost on the destruction of coral reefs? Alessandro Rota via Getty Images
Our economy is based on a concept of continual growth. And for advocates of this principle, any questioning of it is simply a leftist plot to stop growth at all costs.
That was the criticism leveled at The Limits to Growth, a report commissioned back in 1972 by the Club of Rome, in which we both are actively engaged. The essence of this report was that the quest for unlimited growth in population, material goods and resources on a finite planet would eventually lead to economic, social and environmental collapse. It’s already starting to happen. Since 1970, the world has lost an average of 60 percent of its populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians.
ur message is not to stop development but to shrink the human footprint. For that to happen, growth policies and indicators of economic success must be re-evaluated. We need an overhaul of our economy and society. It’s startling that business and policy leaders seem firmly convinced that a future technological fix will eliminate climate threats, while overlooking the simple pragmatism of planning for the worst in the short term.
The first step is to assess the risks and identify potential emergencies. Here, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has already done the work for us. In its report last year on the impacts of a temperature rise of 1.5 C and 2 C (2.7 F and 3.6 F, respectively), the scientists made clear that global emissions must be halved by 2030 and slashed to zero by 2050 in order to avoid the worst effects. That is an unprecedented task ― reducing emissions by at least 7 percent a year, when annual reductions in most countries so far have been many times lower.
We then need a thorough climate emergency plan to address the biggest challenges to limiting global warming to 1.5 C (2.7 F). To start with, new investments in coal, oil and gas exploration and development must end by 2020, with the existing fossil fuel industry phased out by midcentury. Meanwhile, annual investment in renewable energy and efficiency must be at least tripled. Specific priority should be given to low-income countries to support a transition to renewables and avoid a situation where these countries are left with outdated fossil fuel infrastructure that is ever more expensive to run.
It’s vital to recognize that this must be a socially equitable transformation. A carbon tax, for example, would help shake out the true cost of fossil fuel use and could be used to generate tax revenues for research, development and innovation of low-carbon solutions. Or it could be put into the pockets of the general population.
Beyond the transformation of energy systems that still rely heavily on fossil fuels, we need to stop excessive waste by promoting reuse, recycling and reconditioning of products and materials, and scale up ways to use land to absorb rather than emit carbon dioxide. Annual investment in large-scale reforestation in developing countries should be tripled and farmers around the world should be given incentives to build up carbon in their soils.
An emergency plan will need to lay out quick priority actions and broad-based collaborations between industrial sectors, local and national government departments, and investors. We also need an international task force to explore how to promote disruptive technologies for sectors where emissions are most difficult to eliminate, such as agriculture, aviation, shipping, aluminum, steel and cement.
All of this must come with broader social and economic changes. Progress should be indicated using new measures of welfare and well-being, rather than production growth, while education and health services should promote reproductive health and rights for girls and women. Workers and communities affected by the shift to clean energy and lower emissions ― such as coal mining regions ― should be retrained and supported so they are not left behind by the transition.
The worst disasters can still be avoided but only if leaders move swiftly on new emergency action plans. Only a few brave leaders have begun down this path. In December, London Mayor Sadiq Khan unveiled a plan to protect people from ”floods, fires and the political upheaval” caused by climate change. He agreed to bring forward his carbon neutrality goal from 2050 to 2030 by focusing on a comprehensive investment program that will help retrofit hundreds of thousands of homes and offices to make them more energy efficient, decarbonize the national grid, install low-carbon heating systems, and electrify private and public transport.
Planning for a climate emergency in this way is not a doomsday scenario. It’s simply a pragmatic response to a known risk and humanity’s insurance plan for survival and a positive future.

*Sandrine Dixson-Declève is president of the Club of Rome and Anders Wijkman is honorary president.

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