Waggers or future leaders? Students skip school to fight climate change

Students across Australia will skip school en masse to protest inaction on climate change, drawing both praise and criticism from pundits and politicians.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison told students to
 stay in school, urging "less activism". 

“We are school kids temporarily sacrificing our education in order to save our futures from dangerous climate change,” School Strike 4 Climate organisers said of the Friday protest.

While former Gillard government education minister and longtime environmental activist Peter Garrett applauded the students, the Prime Minister, many commentators and parents have slammed them as shirkers.

“The patronising idiocy of climate-deniers is contemptible,” Mr Garrett said on Thursday.

Read the story from The New Daily - “Waggers or future leaders? Students skip school to fight climate change.”

What should we praise and what should we protest at Paris?

W

hich proposals should we praise, and which should we protest?

Read some more in the New Internationalist story - “What's on the table at Paris?”

Bill Gates is forever optimistic

Bill Gates’ optimism must be admired.

Bill Gates - no 'poor countries by 2035.

He and his wife, Melinda, through their Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, have done some wonderful work kin easing the lot of millions of people around the world.

But now, apparently flushed by the foundation’s success and subsequent praise, the billionaire software baron has boldly predicted that the world will be free of poor countries by 2035.

Writing in story headed: “Bill Gates predicts almost no poor countries left by 2035 in annual letter” the ABC reported on his optimism in the Australian Network News.

In discussing riding nations of poverty, Mr Gates’ emphasis appears focussed on a “business-as-usual” paradigm and takes no countenance of the rigours nations of the world will encounter as climate change enlivened weather events, be they droughts, storms, floods and the resultant deterioration of top soil begin to influence outcomes.