Young people have led the climate strikes. Now we need adults to join us too

Tomorrow, schoolchildren and students will be out on the streets again, in huge numbers, in 150 countries, at over 4,000 events, demanding that governments immediately provide a safe pathway to stay within 1.5C of global heating. We spent weeks and months preparing for this day. We spent uncountable hours organising and mobilising when we could have just hung out with our friends or studied for school.

School students protest against the climate crisis in Melbourne, May 2019.

We don’t feel like we have a choice: it’s been years of talking, countless negotiations, empty deals on climate change and fossil fuel companies being given free rides to drill beneath our soils and burn away our futures for their profit. Politicians have known about climate change for decades. They have willingly handed over their responsibility for our future to profiteers whose search for quick cash threatens our very existence.

We have learned that if we don’t start acting for our future, nobody else will make the first move. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Read the opinion piece from The Guardian - “Young people have led the climate strikes. Now we need adults to join us too.”

Our view of time makes the complexities of climate change even more complex

The road to hell?

Humans are creatures who by nature live and operate within a rather short time-frame.

Therein is the prime difficulty in having people understand the unfolding complexities of climate change – in a geological sense the outcomes of climate change will be here “tomorrow”, but on a human time-scale, those complexities are considered, by many, to be, wrongly a lifetime a way.

The science is now telling us that even people who are middle-aged today (50-60) will feel the early beginnings of a changed climate, their children most definitely and their grandchildren, oh dear!

Writing in a story headed: “United Nations predicts climate hell in 2050 with imagined weather forecasts” The Guardian tells about 'Reports from the future' that warn of floods, storms and searing heat”.

Interestingly 2050 is simply too far away for most people to contemplate or plan for.

Creating tomorrow's energy source

In what was once a Polaroid factory 50 miles south of Boston, a high-tech company is printing sheets of solar cells made of plastic, trying to create tomorrow's energy source amid the tumult of today's energy market: reports Climate Central.

The article Plastics Put Solar on the Verge of an Energy Revolution published in Climate Central tells this exiting story.