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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 17 2019, @12:06AM
Where I live, every now and then, there is a campaign to promote changing heaters or HVAC systems to more efficient ones... but fixing the insulation, installing heat exchangers for air and water... those have way less campaigns, sometimes zero (exchangers? what is that?). When the proper thing is to fix the insulation first, and any new houses be built with best insulation possible, best general orientation (not possible in cities, but fine in single houses) and other things that cost zero like selecting window size based in Sun.
But you probably know why: because those measures could mean a house that has even less consumption. Same about longer lasting things or small gardens for self consumption. Economy, or better said "must grow at all costs market" is between the sword and a hard place. After the automation factor, it gets even worse. If you don't push the crap of your field (let's say toys), you don't eat or get clothes, and the neighbour will lose the job too later when you can't buy his crap (say shirts). Death hug.
BTW, last LED light we are getting here fail worse than crappy CFLs of years past, and those were already worse than first CFLs. Price is similar, but we are buying them faster, so more money... and more waste. Last batch even stopped liying about duration, down from 40000 to 15000 hours, but diying in two years (always on would be less than 18000h). Last CFLs I remember were marked as 10000, and lasted around that. The circuits and general soldering of LEDs are crappier (one lamp flicks for first 10-30 secs when cold), and the designs seem to be infradimensioned for heat output and uncapable of limiting current once one part fails, when with LEDs those factors are key (one I opened had chips with black dots). And no, I am not imagining it, I started marking lamps when transitioning to CFLs, so I know when they were installed and can estimate daily usage.
Some cars of the 80s had aerodynamics (Cx) as good as current, and they were smaller too (Cx per surface), making them better. The 90s or 00s had worse Cx, and the size has gone up, so they are worse in general. Past week I saw a modern 5 door (hatchback) VW Polo [wikipedia.org]... as I don't follow cars much I thought it was a Golf, because it was as big as 90s ones [wikipedia.org] (it looked bigger, probably optical effect, they are becoming "visually heavier" as time passes, and until recently, also "fatter in kg"). The front grill was small, mostly closed, some European brands just use colors to fake the size.