“The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5C degrees, and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.
Maybe 50% is acceptable to you. But those numbers don’t include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of justice and equity. They also rely on my and my children’s generation sucking hundreds of billions of tonnes of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist. So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us – we who have to live with the consequences.”
Greta Thunberg’s full speech to world leaders at UN Climate Action Summit
If world leaders choose to fail us, my generation will never forgive them
Greta Thunberg
Greta Thunberg, in her own words, at the Montreal climate march
‘Some would say we are wasting lesson time. We say we are changing the world,’ Swedish teen told throngs
Theory of change:
“Through history, the most important changes in society have come from the bottom up, from grassroots. And the numbers are still coming in. But it looks like 6.6 million people have joined the Week for Future, the strikes for this [Friday] and last Friday [when demonstrations took place in the U.S. and elsewhere.]
That is one of the biggest demonstrations in history. The people have spoken, and we will continue to speak until our leaders listen and act.
We are the change, and change is coming.”
Greta Thunberg, in her own words, at the Montreal climate march
11:30 a.m. — Trudeau pledges to plant two billion trees
At a media event in Montreal this morning, Justin Trudeau pledged that a re-elected Liberal government would plant two billion trees over the next 10 years.
That amounts to about $300 million per year and the Liberals expect that it will create 3,500 seasonal jobs in tree planting. These costs will be offset by forthcoming revenues from the Trans Mountain pipeline, the Liberals said.
At the event, Trudeau said he had a “wonderful conversation” with teen climate activist Greta Thunberg and said he agreed with her opinion that his government hasn’t done enough on the environment.
https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/federal-election-2019-roundup-trudeau-meets-with-teen-climate-activist-greta-thunberg
“This is worth pointing out – not to claim Thunberg for any particular political faction, but to note that her main rhetorical targets are not denialist wingnuts, but the same mainstream politicians who invite her to speak and praise her activism. They beam at her as if she were their own child, and, perhaps in a similar way, they don’t appear to hear her when she says it’s their fault her life is ruined. It’s the reaction of a group who have long considered themselves on the correct side of the climate divide, and thus, of history. As if a grand “we tried” would satisfy the generations after them.”
Greta Thunberg’s enemies are right to be scared of her message. Her new political allies should be too | Stephen Buranyi | Opinion | The Guardian
Is ‘Arming the Future’ with Geoengineering Really the Lesser Evil? Some Doubts About the Ethics of Intentionally Manipulating the Climate System
Climate Ethics: Essential Readings, Oxford, 2010
30 Pages Posted: 2 Dec 2012 Last revised: 17 Jul 2014
Stephen Gardiner
University of Washington, Seattle
Date Written: February 19, 2009
The term geoengineering lacks a precise definition, but is widely held to imply the intentional manipulation of the environment on a global scale. Proposals to geoengineer our way out of the climate crisis have not achieved much traction in the last twenty years. But in 2006 the climate scientist Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Laureate, reignited the debate by arguing that so far our response to climate change has been so dismal that we should start preparing for the nightmare scenario where we are forced to choose between attempting geoengineering and allowing a catastrophe to occur. In such a scenario, Crutzen claims, geoengineering should be chosen as “the lesser evil.” Given this, he argues, we should start doing serious research now on how best to geoengineer, so that we can “arm the future” with the right technology.
My main aim in this paper is to outline some of the ethical issues which complicate this argument for geoengineering. As a secondary matter, I argue for three more specific conclusions. First, the Arm the Future Argument assumes much that is contentious, and is overly narrow in its conclusions. Second, the Argument obscures much of what is at stake in the ethics of geoengineering, including what it means to call something an “evil,” and whether doing evil has further moral implications. Third, the Argument arises in a troubling context: climate change is a perfect moral storm. This implies that its role in the current debate should be viewed with suspicion.
About that perfect moral storm:
https://www.sindark.com/genre/8props.pdf
Greta Thunberg calls for climate action in Alberta but doesn’t talk oilsands
‘This is oil country’: Newly painted Greta Thunberg mural gets defaced, covered in slurs
The artist says nothing lasts forever
Greta Thunberg gives €1m award money to climate groups | Environment | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/21/greta-thunberg-gives-1m-award-money-to-climate-groups