Newsdesk – September 22

‘Our Futures Are At Risk’: Meet The Kids Skipping School To Join The Global Climate Strike. Greta Thunberg’s one-girl protest on Friday last August launched a global movement, which lead to strikes in March and May this year attended by hundreds of thousands of students in over 100 countries. Thunberg called for adults to take part in the Global Climate Strike to join young people on September 20th to raise awareness of global warming, draw attention to local problems linked to climate change, and place pressure on politicians and policy makers. Many of striking kids are a long way from voting age—and see protests as a way to channel their fears of the existential threat facing our planet. Anna Siegel, 13, is the lead organizer for Maine’s Youth Climate Strike. Her favourite classes are science and art. She loves spending time outdoors: roaming the woods, looking for wild blueberries, and riding her bike. She strikes weekly since she worked out how to manage her school workload. Climate change was something that she first has been exposed to as a problem only affecting cute, cuddly polar bears. The realization that climate change was real concepts playing out upon our planet fully hit her in sixth grade. It was the year when she first became politically active. Carr, 15, has a passion for performing arts and musical theatre. English is her favourite subject, and her creative writing and poetry have won awards. In late February of 2019, she stumbled across a post with a screenshot of a news headline that read: “Thousands of students across Europe skip school to protest Climate Change inaction,” followed by several photos of people holding up snarky, witty posters. Carr says that she has gained more knowledge about the government works through her experience planning protests and writing to legislators about climate-sensitive bills than she ever learned in her whole year of taking civics in school. “I want to change the world, and I think everyone else in this movement does too”- Newsweek

• Global climate strike: millions protest worldwide – in pictures – The Guardian
• Here Are the Most Powerful Images (So Far) from the Climate Strikes Happening Around the World – People
• Global Climate Strike: How young people lost trust in politics and launched a global movement – The Washington Post
• After strikes, youth climate activists keep pressure on leaders – Reuters
• This is what climate change looks like in Australia – in pictures – The Guardian
• The world has a third pole – and it’s melting quickly – The Guardian
• US says man can bring back ‘skin, skull, teeth and claws’ of hunted Tanzania lion – The Guardian
• Extreme weather events (and the costs) are piling up – NBC News
• Germany Unveils $60 Billion Climate Package – The New York Times
• Money Is the Oxygen on Which the Fire of Global Warming Burns – The New Yorker
• Why nurses, America’s most trusted professionals, are demanding ‘climate justice’ – The Washington Post
• Climate change is affecting the food you eat. Here’s how – CNN

It’s Greta’s World But it’s still burning. The extraordinary rise of a 16-year-old, and her Hail Mary climate movement. It had been less than a year since she first walked out of school as an unknown, awkward, nearly friendless 15-year-old making a lonely protest outside the Swedish Parliament against her country’s absolute indifference to the climate crisis. By the time she stepped off the yacht in New York on August 28 this year, wobbly legged from the weeks at sea, she had become something even more unusual than an adolescent protester or even a generational icon. She was the Joan of Arc of climate change, commanding a global army of teenage activists numbering in the millions and waging a rhetorical war against her elders through the unapologetic use of generational shame. 2019 has been a remarkable one for climate, with all those protests and town halls, rising poll numbers for concern about climate change 10 points in a single year in the U.S. Wind and solar power are expanding around the globe, now are cheaper in many parts of it than dirty energy. But even a climate optimist would tell you this progress isn’t enough. It has been just three years now since the historic signing of the Paris climate accords, which formalized the two-degree goal, and here is what has happened in the meantime: Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, pledging to boost coal, kill wind power, and roll back environmental regulations. Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil, promising to deforest the Amazon at such a rate that scientists of his own country estimated the impact would be, over the course of a decade, equal to adding a second China and the second U.S. to the global carbon footprint. What this means is that while Greta can look like a refreshing vision of a green future, in other ways her protest embodies the climate politics of the era now ending, when the forces of denial and delay so shaped the boundaries of political discourse. Advocating for action and demanding we respect the science could sound, at first, like a radical gesture and perhaps sufficient. Greta knows it isn’t anymore, which is why she has pointedly said that what she wants now is “a concrete plan, not just nice words” – New York Magazine

Jane Goodall: These 4 Issues May Not Seem Related to Climate Change. But They Are and We Need to Solve Them Now.  As she travels around the globe, people tell her how the weather patterns have been disrupted and the worst kind of hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones are getting more destructive and more frequent. It is because we are polluting and destroying the environment by using natural resources in an unsustainable way. In order to slow down climate change, we must solve four seemingly unsolvable problems. We must eliminate poverty. We must change the unsustainable lifestyles of so many of us. We must abolish corruption. And we must think about our growing human population. There are 7.7 billion of us today, and by 2050, the UN predicts there will be 9.7 billion. How is it possible that the most intellectual creature ever to walk the earth is destroying its only home? There has been a disconnect between our clever brains and our hearts. We do not ask how our decisions will help future generations, but how they will help us now, how they will help our shareholders, etc. Yet every day we are also inventing technology that enables us to live in greater harmony with the natural world (clean energy, for example). The same communities around Gombe are using smartphones and satellite imagery to monitor their forests and set aside village land for regeneration. Goodall still believes that we have a window of time to have an impact. She still remains optimistic – TIME