I rang my daughter yesterday after seeing the news online about the children’s strike against government inaction on climate change. ‘Are you on strike then?’ ‘Yes’, she said. ‘I’m in Bristol’. She and her friends had taken the train up and joined other school children in Bristol and across Europe protesting against adults who have still not heard the urgent warning from scientists around the world that we have twelve years to turn our entire economies around and away from fossil fuels to prevent runaway global warning. ‘Brilliant!’ I said, proud that she had joined the child movement that has gripped people’s imagination and offered us adults inspiration to do something.
In fact our children appear to be the only group behaving like adults at the moment. Our local MPs in Dorset who campaigned against an offshore windfarm but have been silent about the dirty great oil rig now sitting off Poole’s shoreline, are the ones who show absolutely no maturity. They, like Donald Trump in the US, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and other right wing flat earthers, refuse to grow up and take responsibility for our children’s future. It’s time we forced them to act.
Our inaction on global warming is like ignoring the doctor who tells you if you don’t quit the cigarettes you will have terminal cancer in a decade which they won’t be able to treat. At some point someone has to take the fags away. And it may be our children who are the only ones who really get this. In fact, we are all being shamed by our children. We should be the responsible ones and they should be having fun, not worrying themselves to death about our idiotic refusal to deal with the oncoming climate chaos. We have been warned over and over again, but we won’t vote for parties that vow to immediately act on decarbonising the economy. We have to leave fossil fuels in the ground and switch NOW to a greener way of working and living. Scientists have told us how this can be done – we just need to do it.
Let’s start by telling our kids they are right to go on strike and let’s join them. Politicians won’t act until we do. If all adults stopped working Fridays and joined schoolchildren in protests the government and businesses would soon listen. Especially if we protest in front of the big polluters – the oil company offices and lobbyists, the corporations, car manufacturers, national and local government offices. They have to sit up and listen NOW and our children have shown us how it can be done.
David Mcqueen
