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from the calling-for-compulsary-education-by-skipping-education dept.
Across the world Friday, students skipped class to protest their governments failure to take sufficient measures to curb climate change.
It all started with 16 year old Greta Thunberg of Sweden:
who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year. Since then, the weekly protests have snowballed from a handful of cities to hundreds, fueled by dramatic headlines about the impact of climate change during the students' lifetime.
Thunberg has been nominated for a Nobel peace prize for her efforts.
The protestors are calling for a list of anti-climate change actions and solutions including:
Our Demands
- Green New Deal
- A halt in any and all fossil fuel infrastructure projects
- All decisions made by the government be based on the best-available and most-current scientific research.
- Declaring a National Emergency on Climate Change
- Compulsory comprehensive education on climate change and its impacts throughout grades K-8
- Preserving our public lands and wildlife
- Keeping our water supply clean
Our Solutions
- The extraction of Greenhouse Gases from the atmosphere
- Emission standards and benchmarks
- Changing the agriculture industry
- Using renewable energy and building renewable energy infrastructure
- Stopping the unsustainable and dangerous process of fracking
- Stop mountaintop removal/mining
In a speech Friday outside the United Nations HQ in New York, Alexandria Villasenor, one of the founders of Youth Climate Strike U.S. said:
world leaders weren't listening. "Our world leaders are the ones acting like children," she said. "They are the ones having tantrums, arguing with each other and refusing to take responsibility for their actions while the planet burns."
At one of these planned protests a year or two back, permission forms were sent home in advance so kids could get parental permission to participate in skipping school and protesting. Kids who didn't participate were taunted and harassed by the other kids.
How does your school treat such events?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 17 2019, @06:38AM
If this were in the US, you'd be speaking of somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 per year, which includes cost of resources and human labor, but probably not all of the externality of the power. Even in a place like Germany which supposedly has factored in those externalities , it's still $1000-1500 per year. That's just not much return on a considerable imposition.
If there was nothing more important than the conservation of physical resources, then human extinction would be a reasonable strategy. No humans to consume resources is optimal after all.
But since we don't want that, we have to consume resources in order to survive and to do the things we want to do. It turns the easy problem into a hard one.
And one thing to remember about optimization is that one can only optimize so far. For example:
Much, much better aerodynamics isn't much better than the present aerodynamics. Even perfect aerodynamics will experience wheel friction loss and similar things.
I find it telling, for example, that Ford and GM are planning to abandon all vehicles subject to CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy). The economics of mandating very high levels of fuel efficiency are backfiring in this ending of significant parts of the US economy.
Another example is from the AC replier to your post:
But if you're look for larger vehicles, because you want or need one, then it's no longer better to get a small vehicle. Larger vehicles haul more stuff, are more comfortable, and do better in crashes, for example. "Better" is relative.
My view is that extreme conservation of resources is misguided. We don't use resources merely because we want to waste resources or we hate Gaia. It's because we do things that are more valuable than those resources which are consumed. Even modest impositions can be more costly than they're worth. Getting a car that doesn't do what the driver needs it to do is an even bigger waste of resources.