13/03/2019

Striking Schoolkids Should Wear Storm Of Criticism As A Badge Of Honour

Fairfax - John Birmingham

I hope a lot of school kids join this global children’s strike on Friday and I hope they’re mocked and traduced by their elders in politics and the media, because those elders aren’t really their betters on this issue; they’re mostly either dangerous fools or mendacious swine.
The hammer of the coming climate catastrophe will fall most heavily on these kids and eventually upon their children and grandchildren, 20, 30, 40 years from now, and it will do them no harm to take a few rhetorical knocks from a bunch of bloviating, overpaid idiots simply because they chose to step up and take action now. It’ll be good practice.
These are the people who will have to deal with the consequences of their critics' inaction. Credit: Nick Moir
They’re going to be doing this for the rest of their lives, unless they’re cool with those lives ending in famine, superstorms and wars over diminishing water supplies, and shrinking remnants of arable land.
Protest won’t directly change that of course. Only radically revised policy settings, massive expenditure on clean energy R&D, and the accelerated deployment of paradigm shifting new technologies can change that. But that change will come only when political actors feel a real sense of terror for their futures. Not the future of the planet and its inhabitants, mind you. Just for their own immediate futures. Their pay cheques.
When they feel that existential terror creeping up on them, you’ll start to see things like Tony ‘climate change is BS’ Abbott, perform the sort of tortured interpretive dance routine the electors of Warringah have enjoyed this week.
Abbott is tying himself into Yogi Master knots as he tries to fend off the challenge of Zali Steggall, a highly accomplished and impeccably conservative independent candidate for his seat, who somehow manages to believe in the free market, the primacy of the individual, franking credits for everyone and how awesome it would be if our lives didn’t end in famine, superstorms and war over diminishing water supplies etc, etc.
The only reason Abbott and his fellow travellers on the dirty great coal train to oblivion feel any need to move away from their previous embrace of pro-apocalypse energy policy is because they can see that public opinion has moved on. Year after year of worsening climate and extreme weather events will eventually do that to people.
All those kids who strike on Friday are helping to move that opinion. Yeah, they’ll be derided and ridiculed, their motives questioned and belittled. But they just need to remind themselves that those who caused this problem will soon enough all be dead, leaving them to clean up the mess.
Best they get started now.

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Amsterdam's First National Climate Change March Draws 40,000 People

Time - Amy Gunia



Tens of thousands of people joined a climate change protest in Amsterdam on Sunday, urging the Dutch government to take action on climate change.
The demonstration, the first of its kind in the Netherlands, drew around 40,000 people despite heavy rain, according to Agence France-Presse.
“The high turnout is the proof that people now want a decisive policy on climate from the government,” Greenpeace, one of the march organizers, said in a statement.


The waterlogged European country is expected to be especially vulnerable to the rising tides brought on by climate change. Much of the country already sits below sea level, and some of its land is sinking.
While the U.S. has been backpedalling out of global climate change agreements like the Paris accord, Dutch lawmakers have passed ambitious climate change laws, seeking a 95 percent reduction of the 1990 emissions levels by 2050. But according to some in the country, the action isn’t happening fast enough. In January, a Dutch environmental research agency said the government is lagging behind its goals.
“We are under sea level, so we really need to do something about it,” demonstrator Esther Leverstein, a 21-yer-old climate studies student at Amsterdam University, told AFP.
Students around the world have been leading protests to prompt their governments to address climate change. A worldwide school strike is planned for later this week. Greta Thungerg, a Swedish teenager widely known for her climate change activism, said on Twitter that at least 82 countries plan to participate in the upcoming protest.

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