Last week over 300,000 Australians participated in the #Global Climate Strike and 4 million people world wide took part. The time is now to keep calling for significant climate action by our leaders!
A number of St George’s Members took part in the Strike –
Read Greta Thunberg’s address to the UN Climate Summit, NYC, September 2019
“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope? How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!
For more than 30 years the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away, and come here saying that you are doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight?
You say you “hear” us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.
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.
Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution, or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my 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.
To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5C global temperature rise – the best odds given by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the world had 420 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide left to emit back on 1 January 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatonnes.
How dare you pretend that this can be solved with business-as-usual and some technical solutions? With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than eight and a half years.
There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today. Because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.
You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us I say we will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.”
Wondering what to do after the #Global Climate Strike? Any of the following would be a great way to start –
- Come along to our Church services and meet others who are passionate about God’s beautiful earth being nurtured and protected
- Sign up to receive Common Grace Climate Justice information
- Sign up for Students Strike for Climate Information
- Write to our local MP Dave Sharma and tell him about your concern for climate action. His email address is: Dave.Sharma.MP@aph.gov.au
- Sign up for Market Forces campaigns and join shareholder activities to reduce the effects of businesses closely aligned to fossil fuel production
We’d love to support you as you seek to participate in protecting God’s beautiful earth. Write to info[@]paddington.church if you’d like to talk more about how you can do this with your skills and abilities.