Guest essay by Eric Worrall
What is wrong with a picture of people wearing the products of an energy intensive high tech civilisation demanding more climate action?
A million young people urge governments to prioritise climate crisis
World leaders will meet for Climate Adaptation Summit to consider how to adapt to extreme weather
Fiona Harvey Environment correspondent
Fri 22 Jan 2021 11.01 AEDTMore than 1 million young people around the world have urged governments to prioritise measures to protect against the ravages of climate breakdown during the recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic.
World leaders are due to meet by video link on Monday to consider how to adapt to the extreme weather, wildfires and floods that have become more common as temperatures rise. Ban Ki-moon, the former UN secretary general, will lead the Climate Adaptation Summit, and leaders including Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel and Narendra Modi are expected to attend.
Ban said: “We must remember there is no vaccine to fix our changing climate. As climate change impacts continue to intensify, we must put adaptation on an equal footing with [cutting emissions]. Building resilience to climate change impacts is not a nice-to-have, it is a must, if we are to live in a sustainable and secure world.”
He said efforts to repair the damage done to economies by Covid-19 were in danger of compounding the problem. “I am deeply concerned that in domestic stimulus plans dirty measures that increase carbon emissions outnumber green initiatives by four to one,” he said.
Patrick Verkooijen, the chief executive of the Global Centre on Adaptation, said it was time to redirect spending. “As governments begin to invest trillions of dollars to recover from the pandemic, they have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build a more resilient, climate-smart future – to build adaptation in the next round of fiscal stimulus,” he said. “A coordinated green resilient infrastructure push with the right policy incentives could boost global GDP by 0.7% in the first 15 years and create millions of jobs.”
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/22/a-million-young-people-urge-governments-to-prioritise-climate-crisis
To be fair, looking at their website, the Global Centre for Adaption seems to be steering carefully around calling for emissions cuts. Their emphasis appears to be more on increasing resilience to the predicted rise in storms and rate of sea level rise which global warming is supposed to bring.
I wonder if this could be a new strategy by the UN to build a broader consensus in the USA for shovelling taxpayers’ money into UN programmes.
Demanding money for other countries to build useless renewables is an obviously divisive issue, even some Democrat senators might vote against that. But asking for funding to say improve resilience against flooding in Bangladesh or whatever is less likely to receive an automatic “no”.
Of course, once the money leaves US shores, how the money is spent may differ significantly from the justifications provided to the US government to raise the money.
I’d be more worried about the microfibres from their clothes getting into the ecosystem than the CO2 emissions from their production. Former is a potentially big problem. I’m lucky in that I’ve never bought the idea of synthetics being superior in any way. I stick with cotton for almost all my clothing expect for woollen jumpers and suits.
It would seem that using fossil fuels for making clothes is a carbon friendly use. Or is that too obvious?
It’s a people-friendly use. Who cares if it’s carbon-friendly.
Modern education at its best. Or rather, educational indoctrination….
At least we will be OK with Polysytrene lots to expand and keep us warm with.
p.s. first sythesized from the Styrax tree so can be quite a non-fossil fuel and as CO2 is plant food then all we have to do is plant more styrax trees (and ground nuts and strawberries )
…. prioritise measures to protect against the ravages of climate breakdown during the recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Oh, so the Guardian is upping anti on the language again. From global warming to global heating, from climate “crisis” to climate “breakdown”.
Remember boys and girls, if crying wolf does not work in the first 30 years, the best thing to do is to start screaming wolf for the next 30. If you scream loud enough and long enough you will and this will be good for the planet because you are already a waste of space and resources.
World leaders are due to meet by video link on Monday to consider how to adapt to the extreme weather, wildfires and floods that have become more common as temperatures rise.
Typical deceit from enviro loony Harvey at Guardian. Note the careful wording ” as temperatures rise”. This is crafted to imply that rising temperatures are the cause without actually saying so which would be a lie. All it actually claims is a temporal coincidence.
What is going on with comments? If I post an initial comment I don’t get the format tools like quote/bold/etc.
Then I tried to edit my post to add formatting and I get and empty edit. I cancelled the edit and my post has disappeared.
All looks highly broken.
Oh, the Guardian is doubling down on the hyperbole. From global warming to “global heating”, from climate “crisis” to climate breakdown.
Remember boys and girls, if crying wolf does not work for the first 30 years, the best thing to do is to start screaming wolf. That’s sure to work. Also if you scream hard enough and long enough you will die and this will be great for the planet because you are a curse and a cancer growing on the beautiful face of GAIA. Please die, thanks Fiona.
Typical deceit from climate nutter Harvey at the Guardian. Note the careful wording: “as temperatures rise”. This is carefully crafted to imply that temperature is causing wildfires, which is a lie, but without actually saying so. All it actually claims is temporal coincidence.
Though there is a valid point to be made about our dependence on plastics this article is pretty disingenuous. Many of the items tagged in this image cannot be determined from the photo. The girls top and mask look like they could well be printed cotton; how do you know what the boy’s cap is made of? “Artificial ink” is really getting into silly nit-picking.
This kind of attack will only work when preaching to the choir. Totally pointless.
The fact the UN is coming round to adaptation which is what most skeptics have been saying is what is needed should be leveraged. They are finally realising that they are not going to stop the climate from changing. They are not going to admit it all in one go though.
The way they’ve been pumping this BS, it’s going to take another decade to turn to ship around.
why is there no CANCEL button on a new post ? How do I get out of here?
… and why can’t I at least delete it. Now I can’t even edit my original post !!
BTW coastal flooding in Bangladesh has almost nothing to do “global warming”, 95% is sinking land due to ground water extraction and the fact that they have prevented the annual flooding which used to replenish the delta with silt.
That’s their fault not mine. Not paying.
That they are not intelligent enough to know that a mask is useless is all one needs to know about them.
Ok so funny story time:
When I was in college there was this girl in class with me that was a quasi-activist–meaning she was actively participating in what she believed to be worthy causes by dressing the part but not going further in understanding. And came after me for having a real leather knapsack (which was vintage and a find since it was nasty when I found it and I worked the leather back to it’s gorgeous lustrous condition–a process that taught me a LOT about leather and quality goods). So I let her go on and noticed that in her fury at the audacity of me having a leather bag noticed she was wearing Birkenstocks with permed hair, and synthetic clothing which was chosen not for the fiber content but because it amplified her wanna be grunge style. I knew the designer as I’ve always been fascinated by fashion (lately fashion history). So I let her rant and then pointed out the flaws in her argument using her own clothing as examples.
By the time I finished with how her $250 Birkies were actually made, she had the decency to lift her jar up off the floor and wipe her eyes of tears since she didn’t have the emotional maturity to realize I wasn’t taking the bait but not the mental acuity to respond rather than react. I never made it to the perm in her hair or to the sweatshop design shop for her $160 blouse and $175 pair of cargo shorts…all made out of synthetics.
This reminds me of her. If people honestly understood how their goods come to them, even the process to make them (or even the colors they want to wear), they could at least understand how those goods get to their stores to buy them, then they’d see how it IS all connected. The best argument the “fossil fuel bad” crowd has made is to fragment the overall argument into bits and pieces so nobody wants to see the big picture because it’s all wag the dog–to the point where all they see is pictures of steam stacks and being told it’s bad and that’s all they need.
And if you need further proof of how disconnected people really are: people actually believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows in the US…I am not kidding you.
What needs to happen is education. Education on how manufacturing actually works, how transportation actually works, then maybe they will have ideas on how to make it safer, how to change the textile industry from being the worst polluter in the world to being one of the environmentally conscious and reduce the sheer amount of waste.
Those that believe that the use of fossil fuels is bad should stop making use of all goods and services that make use of fossil fuels in any way. After all it is their money that keeps the fossil fuel companies in business. That includes all goods whose transport involved the use of fossil fuels that includes store bought food, store bought clothing, building materials including materials used in the construction of roads and sidewalks. For example most materials and equipment used in the manufacture of solar and energy devices involved the use of fossil fuels. I bet that those people in the photo did not walk to that location without making use of paved roads and or sidewalks. I bet most of them live in buildings whose construction involved the use of fossil fuels. I bet most of them eat food that was transported by fossil fuel burning trucks. By breathing those people are adding more CO2 to the atmosphere.
I have been advocating for this since the 1980s. Don’t like it? Don’t use it.