‘Climate Kids’ Set Out to Change the World, Led by Swedish Teen Activist
And some local restaurants just don't care.
One person can change the world, maybe. On Friday March 15, a student strike is gearing up to be one of the biggest environmental protests the world has ever seen, with participants in more than 60 countries and more than 700 locations taking time off to say the time to act on climate change is now.
It’s all grown out of the actions of a 16 year old student fiercely determined to change the world who drew inspiration from how young survivors of a mass school shooting in Parkland Florida brought attention to the cause of gun safety. This is a cause worth worth cutting class for.
Greta Thunberg started a movement on a Friday in August 2018 when she opted to skip school and sat down outside the Swedish parliament building, declaring her support for climate justice.
Eight months later, her determination has won the cause world wide fame, including a Nobel prize nomination. Now she’s described as the best news for the climate movement in decades. Her TED Talk has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Thunberg has been praised at the UN, met with French president Emmanuel Macron and been endorsed by German chancellor Angela Merkel.
A Nation magazine profile described her as a “charismatic young woman whose social-media savvy, moral clarity, and undaunted truth-telling have inspired throngs of admirers to take to the streets...”
Just as the 29-year-old Ocasio-Cortez torched the right-wing trolls who laughably derided her as “stupid” after she introduced, with Senator Ed Markey, the congressional resolution to create a Green New Deal, so Thunberg, 16, has gained prominence partly from her blistering callouts of global elites.
After riding the train for 32 hours to Davos, Switzerland, in January—for the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering to which many billionaires and heads of state arrive in private jets—Thunberg told a panel (which included Gary Cohn, President Trump’s former chief economic adviser) that “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.” A pause, and then a final thrust of the knife: “I think many of you here today belong to that group of people.”
From her letter to the Guardian:
We finally need to treat the climate crisis as a crisis. It is the biggest threat in human history and we will not accept the world’s decision-makers’ inaction that threatens our entire civilisation. We will not accept a life in fear and devastation. We have the right to live our dreams and hopes. Climate change is already happening. People did die, are dying and will die because of it, but we can and will stop this madness.
We, the young, have started to move. We are going to change the fate of humanity, whether you like it or not. United we will rise until we see climate justice. We demand the world’s decision-makers take responsibility and solve this crisis.
Although the bulk of the world-wide rallies & protests are in Europe and Australia, there are San Diego events slated Friday morning in Chula Vista,, Pacific Beach, and Oceanside.
From Sher Watts-Spooner at Daily Kos:
Besides the March 15 climate strike, some U.S. students have a climate action project of their own. As told on 60 Minutes on March 3, a lawsuit filed on behalf of 21 students in 2015 charges that the U.S. government failed to protect them from the effects of climate change by continuing to allow the burning of fossil fuels.
Few took Juliana v. United States seriously, but judges are allowing the case to go forward as the U.S. Supreme Court rejected two motions by the Trump administration to delay or dismiss the case. “Four years in, it is still very much alive, in part because the plaintiffs have amassed a body of evidence that will surprise even the skeptics and have forced the government to admit that the crisis is real,” Steve Kroft said on the show. Those representing the 21 students have 36,000 pages of evidence covering 50 years of inaction by U.S. officials.
It’s just one court case, and maybe just one missed day of school for many of those who will take part in the March 15 climate strike. But all of these “climate kids” are doing their best to save the world. As Parkland survivor David Hogg tweeted, “So when are we going to start walking out against climate change in the US? We live on planet Earth too.”
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While we’re talking about the environment...
In San Diego, the crusty reactionaries at the California Restaurant Association have filed suit to halt the city’s upcoming ban on polystyrene foam.
You’ll love the reasoning, as described in the Union-Tribune:
The lawsuit, which was filed on behalf of three local restaurants and a company that makes foam containers, contends that San Diego failed to properly analyze the ban’s effects on the environment…
“...Evidence before the city when it adopted the ordinance uniformly showed that a ban on expanded polystyrene, which is recyclable, will not reduce litter or trash and will result in polystyrene foam being substituted with replacement products that have far greater environmental impacts and result in increased litter and trash,” the lawsuit says.
One hundred and twenty other localities in California have banned or limited the use of the ubiquitous to-go containers. Polystyrene is not biodegradable, is made from material listed as a carcinogen under California’s Proposition 65 in 2016, and programs to recycle the stuff have never succeeded.
The City of San Diego has been paying $90,000 annually for recycling services of expanded polystyrene, despite the fact most containers are contaminated and end up in the landfill.
From a 2018 Voice of San Diego op-ed by Surfrider:
The Surfrider Foundation’s San Diego Chapter volunteers collected 12,575 pieces of expanded polystyrene from San Diego County beaches in 2017 alone. Unfortunately, the majority is blown into the ocean because it is light in weight and easily breaks into very small, uncollectible pieces. Once in the ocean, polystyrene is often mistaken as food by marine life and ingestion of the single-use plastics can become fatal.
The ocean is estimated to have by 2050 more plastics than fish by weight. University of California, Davis, performed a study in 2015 that found a quarter of all fish sampled in California grocery stores had trace amounts of plastics. Marine life and consumers are eating plastics!
The stuff is derived from petroleum, a non-renewable resource, and creates a large amount of hazardous waste as a byproduct of its creation. Polystyrene manufacturing (though CFCs are no longer used) creates greenhouse gases, meaning they increase the effect of global warming.
So why are we even having a discussion about this stuff?
Taking a page from the tobacco industry’s campaigns, there’s a wave of propaganda circulating making dubious claims about saving small businesses (many of which are initially exempt from bans, anyway) and casting doubt on the science used in researching the harmful effects of the polystyrene.
Ultimately, this is about corporate profits.
A group of polystyrene manufacturers in November offered San Diego nearly $2 million to boost its fledgling polystyrene recycling program, but the offer was contingent on the city not moving forward with the ban.
One of those manufacturers, Dart Container Corporation, is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit.
Antojitos Colombianos and Orlando’s Taco Shop in Logan Heights, along with Mariscos El Golosito in Sherman Heights are the restaurants recruited as the other plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
I hope they enjoy their short-term profits as the long-term consequences of pollution and climate change threaten civilization in coming years.
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Lead image: Wikimedia Commons