27/03/2019

The Rise Of Students Against Climate Change

Independent Australia -

Students striking against the lack of climate change policy are a strong voice against an ineffective government, writes Peter Henning.
A sea of placards were the voice of a generation wanting a better future (Screenshot via YouTube)
IT IS NOT OFTEN in Australian history that school students have been politicised to the extent of taking direct action on an issue. There have been other occasions, but they are fundamentally different from what is happening now in relation to the failure of the political system to address climate change.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, high school students who participated in demonstrations against the Vietnam War, against apartheid, on civil rights issues and against environmental destruction, for example, rallied in support behind a much broader movement without playing the key role in leadership.
The same is true of other public protests on a range of issues since then, such as saving the Franklin River, stopping old-growth logging, Aboriginal rights, gender equality — until now.
It is difficult to say at this point in time how this will play out because it is unprecedented for high school students to take the lead on an issue of such importance. The turnout on 15 March was clearly a shock to politicians and other authorities. In Melbourne, the police attempted for a brief period to keep the roads and tramlines clear at the top end of Collins Street but then gave up. They were simply overwhelmed by student numbers.


It was a sea of placards across the 20,000 people there and they dominated the space and told a story which is no flash in the pan.
People like Scott Morrison, Matthias Cormann, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, her Education Minister and other climate change deniers and delayers were variously “appalled”.  Take them back in time and they would have opposed the eight-hour day, the old-age pension and the abolition of slavery. As in the case of all organised attempts at reform from beyond the corridors of established political and economic power and influence extending back in time and place for generations, the age-old canard of people being manipulated by “professional activists/agitators” has been raised once again.
In the vacuous rhetoric of Morrison et al, we can hear the voices of Bjelke-Petersen with Reds under the bed, John Howard opposing Wik and Mabo and an apology to the stolen generations, Tony Abbott proclaiming that same-sex marriage will wreak havoc and Scott Morrison informing us that lumps of coal are lovely, divinely-created gifts.
When Greta Thunberg commented that the statement of the NSW Minister for Education “belongs in a museum”, she could have been saying the same thing about nearly every Liberal and National Party politician in Australia.
Such political opposition to students having a voice about their own future will only strengthen this generation’s view that the current political class are active agents against them, with little interest in anything except their own piece of cake.

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The placards were unequivocal in their overt contempt for the current Federal Government —
‘Governments are supposed to help. So where the bloody hell are you?’; ‘It’s time to change politics like we change PMs’; ‘Fossils should be in the ground not parliament’; ‘I can’t believe I’m marching for facts’; ‘I bet the dinosaurs thought they had time, too’; ‘School taught me that dinosaurs were extinct’; ‘If climate was a bank it would have been saved’; ‘The water is rising. Get your budgie smugglers ready’.
Young Australians articulating a clear understanding that the Federal Government is essentially ignorant and contemptible is somewhat different to anything we’ve seen before.
One student, 17-year-old Manjot Kaur of Sydney said:
“The action of striking is so important. Students are so afraid, so upset, so worried about their future that they’re literally sacrificing their education to show how serious this problem is. Because right now we aren’t treating it as a crisis. The act of striking is us saying this needs to be treated as an emergency.”
In Melbourne on 15 March, it was obvious that many schools fully supported the strike and encouraged students to wear their school uniforms with pride. On the other hand, some school principals threatened that those who participated could jeopardise their assessment results.

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Schools which threaten sanctions and punitive action in this way are contradicting one of their essential and fundamental educational purposes to develop democratic values, participation in public life and critical thinking in students.
Such schools are contributing to the development of a mindset which encourages silence, passivity and acquiescence in the face of overwhelming evidence that climate change is here with us now and that Australia is already being severely impacted.
Schools not actively promoting discussion of climate change are breaching their responsibilities as educational institutions, undermining educational standards, inhibiting access to vital knowledge and are engaged in the wilful promotion of ignorance.
The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority has recently stated that government inaction “is rapidly moving beyond a purely partisan or moral issue — indeed, the threat is distinctly financial in nature”. The regulator predicts “economic and environmental disaster” to Australia under the current leadership vacuum.
As Greg Jericho wrote in The Guardian, the RBA is no longer equivocating about the threat to the economy, either, saying that:
“...the physical impact of climate change and the transition are likely to have first-order economic effects”.
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 According to Jericho:
‘This week really should mark the end of the line for anyone within politics or the media being able to spout climate-change denialism without being met with scorn and jeers. It also should mark the time when boldness and verve becomes the norm for any climate-change policy’. 
Former corporate coal boss Ian Dunlop has come out swinging against proposals for new fossil fuel projects in Australia, labelling them as ‘crimes against humanity’ which must stop immediately:
‘To halt our suicidal rush to oblivion, the community must ensure no leader is elected or appointed in this country unless they are committed to emergency action.’
The three main goals of the student campaign are to stop the Adani coal mine, no new gas or coal projects and 100 per cent renewables by 2030. The majority of informed Australians, including students, are well ahead of the main political parties. Energy Minister Angus Taylor inanely claims that Labor’s 45 per cent emissions reduction target is ‘aggressively high’, when, in fact, it is too low. We are at the end of an era. Australia is at a crossroad it hasn’t faced since late 1941.
The students are right. Ian Dunlop is right. This is a crisis. People like Taylor belong in a museum. If the incoming Shorten administration displays the same flat-Earth blind stupidity, it will follow the current Morrison Government into irrelevance. We simply can’t afford any more gutless and ignorant Federal administrations. Time is too short.
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Why Fear And Anger Are Rational Responses To Climate Change

The Conversation - 

Cyclone Idai wreaks havoc in Mozambique. EPA-EFE/JOSH ESTEY
Not everyone cheered for the school children striking against climate change. In the US, democratic senator Dianne Feinstein accused them of “my way or the highway” thinking. German Liberal Democrats leader Christian Lindner said that the protesters don’t yet understand “what’s technically and economically possible”, and should leave that to experts instead. The UK’s prime minister, Theresa May, criticised the strikers for “wasting lesson time”.
These criticisms share a common accusation – that the striking children, while well-intentioned, are behaving counter-productively. Instead of having a rational response towards climate change, they let emotions like fear and anger cloud their judgement. In short, emotional responses to climate change are irrational and need to be tamed with reason.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) – his moral philosophy had a lasting influence on how we view emotions and rationality. Johann Gottlieb Becker/Wikipedia
The view that emotions are intrusive and obscure rational thinking dates back to Aristotle and the Stoics – ancient Greek philosophers who believed that emotions stand in the way of finding happiness through virtue. Immanuel Kant – an 18th-century German philosopher – saw acting from emotions as not really agency at all.
Today, much of political debate is moderated with the understanding that emotions must be tamed for the sake of rational discourse. While this view stands in a long tradition of Western philosophy, it invites Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro to insist that “facts, reason and logic” can dismiss an emotional response to anything in debates.
However, the view that emotions aren’t part of rationality is false. There’s no clear way of separating emotions from rationality, and emotions can be rationally assessed just like beliefs and motivations.

Emotions can be rational
Imagine you’re walking in the woods, and a huge bear approaches you. Would it be rational for you to feel fear?
Emotions can be rational in the sense of being an appropriate response to a situation. It can be the correct kind of response to your environment to feel an emotion, an emotion might just fit a situation. Fear from a bear coming towards you is a rational response in this sense: you recognise the bear and the potential danger it represents to you, and you react with an appropriate emotional response. It could be said to be irrational not to feel fear as the bear walks towards you, as this wouldn’t be a correct emotional response to a dangerous situation.
Imagine you find out that a meteor will kill millions of people across the world, displace hundreds of millions more, and make life for the remainder of humanity much worse. The world’s governments neither put a defence system in place, nor do they evacuate the people threatened. Fear from the meteor, and anger at the inaction of governments, would be a rational response as they are an appropriate reaction to danger. And if you don’t feel fear and anger, you’re not appropriately responding to a dangerous situation.
As you’ve probably guessed, the meteor is climate change. The world’s governments aren’t addressing the causes of climate change or preparing to mitigate its impact. For the people of Mozambique, who are reeling from the devastation of Cyclone Idai, anger is entirely appropriate. Climate change is largely a product of economic development in richer countries, while the world’s poorest are bearing the brunt of its effects.
A woman and child take shelter in Beira City, Mozambique, after the passage of Cyclone Idai.
EPA-EFE/TIAGO PETINGA
Are emotions counter productive?
Regardless of how fitting an emotional response is, it may sometimes be unhelpful for what a person wants to achieve. Theresa May makes this point about the school strike: understandable, but young people missing valuable lessons makes it harder for them to solve climate change. As others have already pointed out, climate change demands rapid action – waiting until some vague point in the future when the children are old enough to do something is relinquishing responsibility instead of meaningful action.
It is, however, hard to deny that fear and anger sometimes lead people to choices they regret. However, dismissing emotional responses on this basis is too quick. There are many examples where fear and anger have triggered the correct response and created a motivational push for change. As Amia Srinivasan, an Oxford philosopher working on the role of anger in politics, puts it,
Anger can be a motivating force for organisation and resistance; the fear of collective wrath, in both democratic and authoritarian societies, can also motivate those in power to change their ways.
Young people take part in a climate strike in Edinburgh, Scotland. Lauren McGlynn, Author provided (No reuse)
 A lot of social change has happened because of anger against injustice, empowering the weak and oppressed, while causing those in power to fear they may be ousted leads to reforms and change. We do need scientific understanding of the climate crisis to solve it, but banning emotions from the debate and dismissing rational fear and anger about climate change may encourage people to do nothing.
So, not only are children, who are angry and scared about climate change, rational, they might be more so than the adults criticising them. Emotions play a bigger part in life beyond rationality – they mark values and indicate what people care about. Fear of the future and anger at inaction are ways young people can express their values. Their emotions are, in the words of feminist writer Audra Lorde, an invitation to the rest of society to speak.
Dismissing the emotions of school children not only invalidates their rational responses to a grave situation – it implicitly states that their values aren’t taken seriously, and that adults don’t want to reach out to them.

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These 8 Cities Are Taking Bold Steps To Get Rid Of Cars

Fast Company - Adele Peters

Cities around the world are starting to see that they’ll be cleaner, healthier, and just better overall if people–not cars–are the priority.
In downtown Cairo, it’s not uncommon to see streets clogged with cars. But in a proposed redesign for a central thoroughfare, they’re hard to spot. Instead, in the concept illustration for what looks like the Egyptian version of Amsterdam, a two-way bike lane, a sidewalk, and a plaza filled with palm trees replace the sea of street parking.
Similar changes are now happening in every part of the world. Some cities are going further, transforming larger swaths of space that were previously dedicated to cars and restricting when and where the most polluting vehicles can drive. For most cities, the primary reason for the change is air pollution, which now kills more people than smoking. It’s also a way for cities to tackle their climate change goals–and to deal with the fact that there just isn’t enough room on city streets for everyone to sit in a car of their own, especially as populations grow. Here are a few of the cities transforming fastest.

Oslo
Cyclists on Oslo City Bikes. Photo: Åsmund Holien Mo/Urban Sharing
In the city center of Oslo, former parking spaces on the street have been transformed into bike lanes, benches, and tiny parks. By the beginning of this year, the city had finished a process of removing 700 parking spaces as a way to incentivize people not to drive in the area, while adding some charging stations for electric cars and more parking for drivers who are disabled. At the same time, Oslo is improving public transit and making it easier to bike. The goal: to reduce pollution while making better use of limited public space. “Cities, like Oslo, have been built for cars for several decades, and it’s about time we change it,” Hanne Marcussen, Oslo’s vice mayor of urban development, says in an email. “I think it is important that we all think about what kind of cities we want to live in. I am certain that when people imagine their ideal city, it would not be a dream of polluted air, cars jammed in endless traffic, or streets filled up with parked cars.”

Buenos Aires
Photo: ITDP/Fabrico Di Dio
On a massive boulevard in Buenos Aires that used to have 20 lanes of traffic, the center of the road is now dedicated to buses. When the city made the change a few years ago, commuting times shrank dramatically. Buses also no longer needed to use crowded side streets, which freed up around 100 blocks to become fully pedestrianized, or pedestrian-priority zones where cars are restricted and limited to six miles per hour. Since then, the city has continued to add new pedestrian zones in other areas, and is trying to keep people safe on all its streets. At busy intersections, paint and planters help reshape the street to make it safer for pedestrians, using the same kind of tactical urbanism that has also been used in cities like Boston to quickly test new changes. “It’s pretty inexpensive and it can be deployed quickly, so the public can judge if it actually improves the streets,” says Luc Nadal, technical director for urban development at the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy, which worked with the city as it made its initial changes. “Usually, people adopt it fully. Local businesses find that foot traffic increases and that their business improves, and eventually permanent facilities can be implemented.”

London
Photo: Luke Stackpoole/Unsplash
As London grows over the next couple of decades, an extra 100,000-plus people will need to commute to the “Square Mile” in the heart of the city, and the area will also add an extra 3,000 residents. If all of those people drove, traffic wouldn’t move. To deal with the growth–and the air pollution problem it already has–the city is proposing a new plan that would eventually make half of the streets either completely car-free or “pedestrian priority,” meaning that cars (and bikes) would have to yield to people on foot. The city also wants to build protected bike lanes on most major streets. Where cars are allowed, the plan proposes a 15-mile-per-hour speed limit. It’s the latest in a long series of steps to reduce traffic. In 2003, the city pioneered a congestion charge, a fee that drivers pay if they enter central London during peak driving hours. In 2010, the city started opening its first “cycle superhighways” on busy routes. Since 1999, the volume of cars has dropped by about a quarter. The city will finalize its new transport strategy this spring.

Seoul
Photo: Flickr user Bryan
In the first year after the city of Seoul finished converting a highway overpass into a High Line-like pedestrian pathway in 2017, 10 million people used the path and business improved in the area, with sales increasing 42%. Now, the city plans to add new pedestrian zones. Some traffic lanes on major streets will be converted to bike lanes and dedicated bus lanes. The city is also starting to roll out new electric buses, and plans to have 3,000 by 2025, while it also improves bus routes to encourage more people to choose the bus over a car. A rating system for cars is designed to keep the most polluting vehicles out of the city center, and by 2020, only electric cars will be allowed.

Madrid
Photo: Flickr user Nicolas Vigier
Unless you happen to live in central Madrid, there’s a good chance you can’t drive there anymore. In November 2018, the city started rolling out sweeping restrictions across the city center to try to address its air pollution and traffic problems. Older, polluting vehicles are banned, but electric cars can still use the streets. There are exceptions: Residents of the neighborhood and disabled people can still drive more polluting cars, and emergency vehicles can still access the area. Taxis that run on gas or diesel can still drive in the area if they’re relatively new. But when the laws started taking effect, traffic quickly dropped 32%. The low-emissions zone is designed to be “a lung for the city in the heart of Madrid,” the city explains on its website. Inspired by the success, in late 2018 the Spanish government proposed banning any cars that aren’t zero-emissions vehicles from large city centers throughout the entire country.

Beijing
Photo: zhang kaiyv/Unsplash
To fight traffic congestion and cut pollution, Beijing has closed 23 major streets to non-resident cars, says Nelson Peng, an associate and director of the China practice at the urban planning firm Calthorpe Associates. Where drivers are allowed, they’re restricted based on license plates: If their license plate ends in a particular number, they won’t be allowed to drive on a particular day each week. The city also offers small financial incentives for people who choose not to drive an additional day. And because there is a lottery to get license plates in the first place,  most people who want cars can’t get them. Other Chinese cities also have restrictions on when and where people can drive. In a new district in Xiong’An, planners have considered banning private cars and only using self-driving cars that run on clean energy. Visitors to the area’s civic center currently leave their cars in a parking lot and take a bus to the center, where companies are testing new autonomous cars. “If China can successfully switch the [auto] industry to autonomous, clean vehicles, I can imagine permanent restrictions of old-style cars in large areas in the near future,” Peng says.

Paris
Photo: rabbit75_ist/iStock
In 2017, a busy highway next to the Seine River became a car-free pedestrian pathway and park. It’s one piece of the city’s ongoing work to cut pollution by reducing traffic. The city also restricts older, more polluting cars from entering the city on weekdays. By 2024, no diesel cars will be allowed, and by 2030, gas cars will be forbidden. Intersections are being redesigned to give people priority over cars, and bike lanes and public transit options are growing. “I was just there a few weeks ago, and it’s pretty impressive what they’re doing,” says Timothy Papandreou, founder of Emerging Transport Advisors, a consulting firm that works with cities. “You look at the hordes of people that are walking or riding a bicycle or taking a scooter down these riverbanks, and you quickly count the number of people–there’s no way you could move this number of people if they were all in their individual cars.”

Chennai
A bike share in Chennai. Photo: Flickr user ilugc in
Until recently, shopping on busy Thyagaraya Road in Chennai, India, meant navigating through throngs of cars and auto rickshaws. But the street is now transforming to a pedestrian plaza, which will be completed in the next few months. Before building the new plaza, the city ran two trials to block off traffic and give people the experience of a car-free pedestrian mall–something that is common in other parts of the world, but a new idea in Chennai. Nearby, the city also recently launched a new bike-sharing system. Chennai, like other cities in India, struggles with air pollution, in part from transportation. In 2017, the Indian government said that it wanted all new cars to be electric by 2030. Though it later scaled back that goal, it recently committed $1.4 billion in new incentives to help kick-start sales of electric and hybrid cars.

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