Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Alexandria Villasenor, 13, hopes braving brutal polar vortex winter conditions by sitting outside UN Headquarters will inspire others in the US and China to join her school strike against global warming.
How a 7th-grader’s strike against climate change exploded into a movement
By Sarah Kaplan
February 16 at 10:00 AMNEW YORK — On the ninth Friday of her strike, 13-year-old Alexandria Villasenor wakes to a dozen emails, scores of Twitter notifications, and good news from the other side of the planet: Students in China want to join her movement.
Every week since December, the seventh-grader has made a pilgrimage to the United Nations Headquarters demanding action on climate change. She is one of a cadre of young, fierce and mostly female activists behind the “school strikes for climate” movement. On March 15, with the support of some of the world’s biggest environmental groups, tens of thousands of kids in at least two dozen countries and nearly 30 U.S. states plan to skip school to protest.
Their demands are uncompromising: Nations must commit to cutting fossil-fuel emissions in half in the next 10 years to avoid catastrophic global warming.
…
“My generation is really upset.” The deal struck at COP24, the U.N. climate meeting in December, was insufficient, she says. “We’re not going to let them . . . hand us down a broken planet.”
“Huh. Right,” the reporter says. “Big ambitions.”
Alexandria raises her eyebrows.
“Yeah,” she replies, confident.
Afterward, she changes into her striking uniform: waterproof ski pants and a down jacket, all in white, just like the congresswomen at the State of the Union and the suffragists of old. She packs her bag — planner, thermos, gloves — and grabs her plastic-encased cardboard signs, which read “SCHOOL STRIKE 4 CLIMATE” and “COP 24 FAILED US.”
…
Read more (paywalled): https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/how-a-7th-graders-strike-against-climate-change-exploded-into-a-movement/2019/02/15/e20868e2-2fb4-11e9-86ab-5d02109aeb01_story.html
What is wrong with this picture?
Thank you @blkahn! I enjoyed talking to you and you wrote a great article about my @UN #ClimateStrike and our plans for March 15th! @Strike4Youth @StrikeClimate @GretaThunberg https://t.co/PUGfdhQOv4
— Alexandria Villaseñor (@AlexandriaV2005) February 1, 2019
For me, the most striking thing in the picture is the amount of plastic on display – plastic covered signs, and plastic cold weather gear Alexandria is wearing. Most plastic is produced by processing chemicals extracted from fossil fuels.
If kids want to strike against global warming, and strike against fossil fuel extraction, surely the first thing they should do is divest themselves of the products of fossil fuel extraction, products they would deny to future generations.
Alexandria not alone in failing to see the connection between her own life choices and fossil fuel products – most of the pictures I’ve seen of school strikers involve a lot of plastic cold weather gear.
What about the impact on Alexandria’s education? A lot of commenters (including myself) have suggested that school strikers will do their future prospects harm, but on reflection I think it more likely that at least some of today’s liberal universities will give verified student strikers a credit, to compensate for missing their studies while they were out marching against climate change.
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Recommended reading: “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
Did you ever see the film, Barcoo?
I read the book and saw the (original) film. One of the interesting things about the film is that the child actors started to behave off set in just the same way. Then again that was part of the Peter Brook (director) method: he placed the children in almost the real situation, and let the cameras roll, watching them react.
“Climate protest pupils are arrested for halting traffic”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/school-children-go-on-strike-over-climate-change-00s9vc85v
Oh dear, how sad, never mind.
I don’t think there is a penalty in the US for child indoctrination into cultism.
Germany tried to create laws against child indoctrination after the Hitler jungen movement.
The “adults” behind this ought to face jail time. And I mean for child abuse to promote illegal activity
Why do snowflakes fear global warming? 🙂
My earliest memories of childhood indoctrination in schools date back to the late 1960s.
Back then, the WWF was getting us to sell black&white prints of panda bears for charity and telling us that we were going to run out of absolutely everything, particularly rain-forest, unless we repented.
Even then I was slightly skeptical, possibly because the adults probably didn’t really seem to believe it either and children do notice these things. The only thing that seems to have changed over the years is that some of the alarmists have learned to code, but still haven’t themselves much formal science which would allow them to shoot gaping holes in most of the scare stories.
I’ve got tickets for me and the missus for Manchester United v Southampton on Saturday March 02 at 3pm and I will be driving my Kuga the 220 miles down from Scotland and back.
Don’t tell the snowflakes.
The snowflakes would have flown.
These kids have been brainwashed by Leftist teachers following Leftist programs of study, and now the students are being used as tools to further this agenda. Parents need to demand an accounting from the schools regarding these actions. One of the problems is due to semi-qualified teachers whose general knowledge extends no further than the curriculum itself. Someone needs to ask both teachers and students what power sources are supplying the heat and light to their schools and homes, and how they managed to get to the places of protest.
To think that James Hansen started all of this mess. He should be tried for crimes against humanity.
James Hansen is not the one behind the curtain. Behind the curtain must be an Mafia like organisation with unlimited resources. Who could that be? Who wants to enslave humanity?
“Hi, I am 13 and DEMAND that everyone older than me puts me in charge. The future belongs to me and no one else is allowed any say in how the planet will be run.”
What odds young Alex, assuming she doesn’t freeze to death, is willing to let teenagers push her around when she turns 26.
Spoilt ego driven little (cough). You are 13. The planet doesn’t become yours the day you start shaving your legs. There are billions of other people aging at exactly the same rate as you. Many of them will have lives that overlap yours by a significant margin. What remotely makes you think that YOU and YOUR life are more important than theirs?
You are a selfish little snot, Alex. Come back to me after you are responsible enough to pay your own utility bills.
And clean up your room first.
In long run it’ll work against the left.
When kids grow-up they’ll resent being manipulated.
Many will become conservative whereas they likely would not if the left hadn’t been so manipulative.
No like hippies they will remember good things about a really stupid time in their history.
And everything else will be lost in the smoke of legal pot.
These are NOT “School children strikes”, they are teacher orchestrated and funded by taxpayers.
Who has said there is going to be catastrophic global warming?
Alarmists have said there is going to be catastrophic global warming (CAGW).
Skeptics say, there is no evidence that CO2 is adding any net heat to the Earth’s atmosphere, and it was warmer in the recent past even though CO2 concentrations were much lower. So there is no evidence that CO2 is the Earth’s weather control knob.
Is that the kind of answer you wanted, or did you just want to nitpik “catastrophic”?.
Truant officers would detain this child and arrest the parents if this weren’t New York City.
Oh, Man, these kids cannot be as dumb as I was at their age. Convinced that the last trees suitable for paper production were about to run out I did some panic buying. Spent a chunk of my savings on a big stack of A5, saying: “I’m not going to have MY studies disrupted by a lack of something to write on!”
I didn’t know the difference between A4 and A5, and had the stuff on my hands for years.
You were not dumb. You were just mislead.
Is it in the teachers union contract?
The columnist in the (London) Sunday Times – Rod Liddle – was particularly scathing about his 13-year-old daughter’s commitment to the cause.
She was delighted to miss a double maths lesson to go on the march, before leaving the next day for a skiing holiday in Norway with her mother.
Give the kids what they want:
Turn the thermostats down to 50°F in classrooms.
No school busses unless you live over 2 miles from school. You must walk to school withing that radius. Schools will not have parking lots for cars driven by high schoolers. They walk or ride the bus.
Dim the lights to half or use all LED bulbs.
NO computers, cell phones, etc.
All homework must been done on paper (recycled, of course) with a #2 pencil or ink pen.
Lunches will all be COLD and served in reusable bags or trays the kids provide. NO plastic allowed. Wood or paper trays only with the kids names on them.
NO backpacks. Carry your books, pencils and so forth like kids did in the past.
All clothing must be cotton or a natural fabric. Uniforms are best.
No vending machines—they use electricity.
In my day we would have just smacked this child’s bottom and sent her up to her room without supper.
“brutal polar vortex winter conditions by sitting outside UN Headquarters will inspire others in the US and China to join her school strike against global warming.
How a 7th-grader’s strike against climate change exploded into a movement.”
___________________________________________________
Leaves questions:
– when students “strike” every Friday they miss 1 of 5 days in school. That’s 20% study time.
– how can “students” travel to Friday strike cities – does mommy pay for?
– does mommy know student misses 20% study time?
– ain’t mommy + daddy legally required to send students to scool.
___________________________________________________
Who cares. We stick to penguin tossing:
https://www.google.com/search?q=penguin+tossing+game&oq=penguin+tossing&aqs=chrome.
It’s child abuse to frighten children with doomsday scenarios, to use them as propaganda tools, striking against what? The machines that keep them warm at night, that harvest their food, and manufacture their clothes and shelter? The trucks that deliver their sustenance to the cities?
Climate panic has triggered the moral equivalent of tossing virgins onto bonfires to appease the gods.
She “doesn’t remember a world without climate change.” I’ve been on this planet much longer than her and, ironically, neither do I. But really, climate is measured in 30 year intervals. How much climate has she experienced?
? are the parents going to drive them to the march because they will not walk the dog
Alexandria Villasenor doesn’t remember a world without climate change.
Of course she doesn’t, Climate is always changing and always will. That said, what she considers climate change (IE man’s emission of CO2 causing temps to rise) hasn’t actually existed during her short life time, as she’s lived almost her entire life during the “pause” when CO2 rose but the trend in temps was flat (and if it wasn’t for a recent el nino, it would have been her entire life lived during the “pause”)