> Fly less or not at all, Cut down on meat consumption or go vegan, Join an activist movement, Vote
Two of those are immediately actionable and have significant impact, and the latter two are really important for building political will to overcome the efforts by a rich but minority group who profit from the status quo and whose money will insulate them from many downsides.
> The 20-year-old Swedish activist stuck to her stance against all new oil, gas and coal developments during the fringe event, that was not part of the official conference agenda.
This letter is stronger but calls for things which could be done immediately with no technological breakthroughs needed like removing subsidies for fossil fuels and not expanding usage:
I think it very much depends on your situation. I personally look to her as a role model who's demonstrated the value of strikes and collective action in influencing climate legislation.
Others might take inspiration in her criticisms of air transportation (something that seems to be growing in popularity these days) but I'm not able to give up seeing my aging parents across the country a few more times so that point hasn't reached me quite yet.
Her wikipedia page is worth 5 minutes if you can spare them and maybe go from there.
Come on! Reorganization to cut fossil fuel by 5% year on is doable and hits the 2 degrees target, and no one dies. The deaths are on the side of doing nothing to the status quo and letting the world burn.
“Listen bub, said the slaveowner - if you’ve got a better system I’d be delighted to hear it!”
idk maybe it’s not the job of literal teenagers to come up with solutioning that meets the arbitrary whims and constrains you’ll doubtlessly impose on them? They live within the system that you have built for them.
There have always been very obvious solutions: heavy taxation on carbon emissions, with economic sanctions and perhaps eventually military action for willful and deliberate violations. The problem is that you as adults don’t consider that feasible for your own arbitrary political reasons, and so you’ll push us down the path of collapsing the climate rather than rock the boat.
Just like those Chinese fishing boats cleaning out fisheries etc: really you are only a 50 pound dumb-bomb from a solution if it came down to it. China can’t project force, they certainly can’t defend every fishing boat spread across every coastline on the globe, and if they rattle back then you retaliate in some other way. They need us too, for now. They would quickly see the light on keeping their boats in check.
But you can’t solve the problem within the arbitrary political constraints set up by the current regimes.
We know the status quo doesn’t work and will collapse the climate within decades, and all anyone can do is ask why solutioning can’t be oriented around maintaining and upholding that same status quo. If you don’t change the game we all lose in the long run. But muh stock market will go down if we tax carbon!!!
The laws of the sea say one thing and china obviously won’t sign a new one that removes their right to strip-mine Greenland fisheries or whatever. And no nation will sign a treaty which truly penalizes them for collapsing the climate. And so the question is what next? You assume the answer is “nothing”, but it doesn’t have to be. And it in fact climate change itself is going to have a say too - political and military instability is already identified as a prime outcome from climate change for precisely this reason. You’re whistling past the graveyard.
What happens when some smaller nation (or group) decides drones look like a pretty good way to enforce some of this? We already see them effective with small state sponsors. Can you keep shipping safe around the entire coast of Africa, and every part of the southeast Asian region? Especially when we have absolutely democratized the means of warfare and driven the cost down to zero.
That’s the world she’s growing up and reacting to. You have truly given her and her generation nothing except a world on fire and you laugh at her for even recognizing or acknowledging this let alone attempting to reverse it, and I think that’s not going to work out as “politely” as you think.
But if you’re too shortsighted and intransigent to solve your own maze that you’ve built for yourself… why would you ever expect a literal child to be able to do it? Of course there are solutions, it just can’t be solved within your self-contradictory system. And as with anything - it’s difficult to get someone to acknowledge something when their paycheck (or quality of life, retirement fund, etc) depends on them not acknowledging it.
But ultimately, I think the people who die of climate change aren't just going to go quietly into the good night like you hope. and they get a vote too - they get all of the "boxes of democracy" in fact.
