Slashdot Mirror
Kids From At Least 112 Countries, Including the US, Go on Strike To Protest Climate Change
It started 29 weeks ago when 16-year-old Swede Greta Thunberg began skipping school on Fridays to protest climate change by standing outside of her nation's parliament building. Today, kids from more than 110 countries, including the United States, are following Thunberg's lead and will play hooky from classes for something they think is ultimately more important: preventing the warming of their planet. Live updates, from The Guardian. Further reading: Thousands of scientists are backing the kids striking for climate change.
I'm just thinking how envious we should be that a kid found a way to play hooky that has the publicity and backing to keep them out of detention.
Wish I'd thought of this when I was in high school (the assholes in charge would never have let it fly though!)
The problem of meat is not its energy density, but the amount of energy required to grow, especially beef and lamp. Pork and chicken are much better for the environment.
Go watch this: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/... then go ahead and tell us all about how global climate change and the human role in it is just bullshit. Rhetorical on my part of course you Dominionist types are practically begging for the End Of The World anyway, and anything you can do to hurry that along is all to the good so far as you're concerned.
This is about climate change, not about pollution.
Let’s see if the kids will give up the conveniences in their lives that are necessitated by what they propose. Skipping out of school is viewed as a perk as far as kids go (I don’t suspect that today’s youth are any different from my generation) so right now I don’t place much value on their actions. It’s similar to the Kony 2012 slacktivism that’s easy to subscribe to because it carries no personal cost. I wonder how many would start walking to school instead of driving, hold on to their four year old phone for another four years because it’s still good, or not go on their family ski trip that they fly cross-country to every year.
Carbon consumption and sprawl went down in the last recession. States started looking at their criminal justice and drug policies and examining the costs of mass incarceration. The economic stimulus program started funding transit projects like electric trains and light rail. Manufacturers started putting out smaller cars (sadly, the US is back on the fucking SUV wagon now), and electric cars started taking off. Recession = reform.
Policies that limit pollution. What are you afraid of, economic catastrophe? Mommy telling you what to do?
My college roommate was an environmental engineer. The actual tenet of the field is: "there is no such thing as too little pollution, but there is such a thing as too little production".
Something to consider. If it's free of hard tradeoffs, it's not engineering.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
But we don't have scientific consensus that the cost of mitigating it today is lower than the cost of dealing with it in the future. From an economic and human prosperity standpoint it's entirely possible that doing nothing today is the best course of action because it lifts the most people out of poverty and advancing technology will allow us to live in a warmer global climate more comfortably than we live today.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Do you contribute to a retirement account? Why do you do it if past performance is no guarantee of future results?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
You mean, based on kids going on strike because their schools are forcing them to? A bunch of schools in Belgium have turned these protests into an extracurricular activity, with mandatory attendance. I kid you not (in Dutch)
Something similar happened in the Netherlands when schools allowed children to attend. One of the school's principals was interviewed, and stated that it's good to encourage children to demonstrate and voice their opinion in this manner. Then, in an unbelievably rare case of a journalist actually asking a good follow-up question, he was asked if he would be just as happy with the kids skipping school in order to demonstrate against the effects of mass migration. (He wouldn't be ok with that, of course...)
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...