The Climate Kids Are Coming

If you don’t know who Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg is, you can think of her as an international climate-change counterpart to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Like the rock-star congresswoman from New York, Thunberg is a charismatic young woman whose social-media savvy, moral clarity, and fearless speaking truth to power have inspired throngs of admirers to take to the streets for a better world and call out the politicians and CEOs who are standing in the way.

Greta Thunberg speaks at World Economic Forum in Davos.

Ocasio-Cortez, 29, is known for championing the #GreenNewDeal and schooling right-wing haters on Twitter. Thunberg, 16, is known for launching the #SchoolStrike4Climate movement—tens of thousands of high-school students worldwide are skipping school on Fridays until their governments treat the climate crisis as an emergency—and for torching billionaires and heads of state at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week.

Read the story from The Nation by Mark Hertsgaard  - “The Climate Kids Are Coming.”

Species on the move

As climate change impacts habitats around the world, species are on the move, trying to adapt — and survive.

With climate change comes
a new threat to Lemurs.

Lemur - these furry, charismatic mammals adored by many, are intrinsic to Madagascar. Roughly 100 lemur species live in the African island nation, where they play a critical ecological role in maintaining the forest habitats. 

Healthy lemur populations mean a healthy environment—but lemurs are far from thriving. 

Habitat loss from deforestation has been devastating, making the species among the most endangered in the world. 

Further losses—like those projected from climate change—could trigger extinction cascades. That could have disastrous consequences both ecologically and economically, because lemur-driven tourism revenue is central to Madagascar's economy. 

Read the Inside Climate News story - “Species on the move.”

We need eloquent, charismatic and courageous leadership to avoid climate change

Leadership that is eloquent, charismatic and courageous is critical, especially if humanity is to avoid the worst of climate change.

Nature abhors a vacuum and at local, state, federal and national levels we have just that, a vacuum (mostly) of leadership that ascribes to the science that articulates the damage done by humans to Earth’s atmosphere and along with that the certain resultant catastrophic consequences.

Those who understand climate science and call for action may well be leaders in their respective fields, but are not emboldened sufficiently to step into the political arena and impress populist values with their views. It’s in colloquial terms, “not their bag”.

Leaders at most levels are simply too addicted to values and ideas that are a consequence of the energy-rich fossil fuel era and so with thinking hobbled to thoughts that humanity’s future security is unquestionably linked to profit and growth, they are unable to see that human life on Earth can be done differently.

Some leaders, of course, would like to do much more. but faced with populist opinion reinforced by myths propagated by those addicted to and entrenched in 20^th Century values and ideas, among them and primarily the fossil fuels industry and the infrastructure it has spawned, find their positions tenuous and personal political survival threatened.

“Populist” equates with democracy and although many believe we live in a democracy, it is, in fact, something else, maybe an oligarchy that sees just a few corporations (less than 150 trans-national corporations) with sophisticated public relations departments (read propaganda) that have convinced the world that what they are offering is democracy, when it is something else; something that ensures their profit and growth.

It was the Zurich-based Swiss Federal Institute of Technology that looked at 37 million companies and investors worldwide and analyzed all 43,060 transnational corporations and share ownerships linking them.

They built a model of who owns what and what their revenues are and mapped the whole edifice of economic power; a power that in reality will have be challenged and unseated if the world is to ever address climate change.

Those 147 trans-national corporations have pulled some remarkably effective and influential strings, but they have overlooked one, and probably the most important, nature.

It’s a power they can not control and unless they are prepared to listen to the “eloquent, charismatic and courageous” the edifice they have built on fossil fuels will soon come crashing down.