I hope a lot of school kids join this global children’s strike on Friday and I hope they’re mocked and traduced by their elders in politics and the media, because those elders aren’t really their betters on this issue; they’re mostly either dangerous fools or mendacious swine.
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The hammer of the coming climate catastrophe will fall most heavily on these kids and eventually upon their children and grandchildren, 20, 30, 40 years from now, and it will do them no harm to take a few rhetorical knocks from a bunch of bloviating, overpaid idiots simply because they chose to step up and take action now. It’ll be good practice.
They’re going to be doing this for the rest of their lives, unless they’re cool with those lives ending in famine, superstorms and wars over diminishing water supplies, and shrinking remnants of arable land.
Protest won’t directly change that of course. Only radically revised policy settings, massive expenditure on clean energy R&D;, and the accelerated deployment of paradigm shifting new technologies can change that. But that change will come only when political actors feel a real sense of terror for their futures. Not the future of the planet and its inhabitants, mind you. Just for their own immediate futures. Their pay cheques.
When they feel that existential terror creeping up on them, you’ll start to see things like Tony ‘climate change is BS’ Abbott, perform the sort of tortured interpretive dance routine the electors of Warringah have enjoyed this week.
Abbott is tying himself into Yogi Master knots as he tries to fend off the challenge of Zali Steggall, a highly accomplished and impeccably conservative independent candidate for his seat, who somehow manages to believe in the free market, the primacy of the individual, franking credits for everyone and how awesome it would be if our lives didn’t end in famine, superstorms and war over diminishing water supplies etc, etc.
The only reason Abbott and his fellow travellers on the dirty great coal train to oblivion feel any need to move away from their previous embrace of pro-apocalypse energy policy is because they can see that public opinion has moved on. Year after year of worsening climate and extreme weather events will eventually do that to people.
All those kids who strike on Friday are helping to move that opinion. Yeah, they’ll be derided and ridiculed, their motives questioned and belittled. But they just need to remind themselves that those who caused this problem will soon enough all be dead, leaving them to clean up the mess.
Best they get started now.
