(AP Photo / Markus Schreiber)
I am incredibly impressed and equally embarrassed by the existence of Greta Thunberg, a 16 year old student from Sweden who has single-handedly reinvigorated the climate action movement by engaging in a School Strike for Climate at her school every Friday since August 2018. Initially it was only her, stationed alone with her sign outside the Swedish Parliament. Now she is joined each Friday by tens of thousands of students and others in cities around the world expressing the futility of attending school or going to work until economic and political leaders around the world treat climate change as the existential crisis we already know it is.
Her movement of fear and desperation is growing.
Greta speaks with simple and direct clarity. She has no time to waste on climate poseurs or deniers. She doesn’t ask for sympathy. She rejects those who deliver words of false hope without delivering action. She is a realist who is afraid of what is coming in her lifetime.
Her message is clear: The Earth is warming unsustainably. The burning of fossil fuels and the gases they create are the undeniable root cause of this warming. The greed of a handful of people and corporations cause them to pretend (or lie) that it’s not happening. So that those few can become obscenely rich a purposeful denial and misinformation campaign has been executed around the world that slows or stops effective countermeasures from being employed. Time is running out and that insidious greed may very well doom humanity to inescapable and horrible outcomes.
At Davos, Greta said to a panel of wealthy attendees, “Some people, some companies, some decision makers in particular have known exactly what priceless values they have been sacrificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money. I think many of you here today belong to that group of people.”
All of this from Ms. Thunberg inspires me immensely. What embarrasses me is that it is all being spoken by a 16 year old Swedish girl in 2019. Where have I – and the rest of us – been hiding to not have been this serious about climate change a hell of a lot sooner than today? So many of us have known what’s happening but continued to act nonchalantly. We’ve behaved like time is unlimited and tiny, almost irrelevant changes will have actual impact. They will not.
For me, and hopefully for billions of us, this stops here and now.
Every action I take and every decision I make will be guided and informed by the scientific fact that the planet is warming and that the consequences are severe, disastrous to humans and the natural world, and that those consequences are existentially significant.
This will include but not be limited to:
- I will not support any political candidate without an aggressive climate change action plan being key to their agenda and platform
- I will not support any political party without an aggressive climate change action plan being key to their agenda and platform
- I will actively work against any and all human beings, corporations, and political entities who implicitly or explicitly dabble in climate denial
- I will not tolerate those – in life and on social media – who minimize the environmental threat before us
- Every life decision I make will be run through the filter of climate change sanity before being acted upon
- I will work to inform, educate, and motivate others to take similar positions and actions
Like the courageous Greta Thunberg, who said, “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day and then I want you to act,” I will be a realist.
I will let environmental panic be my guiding light.