You may have heard of Greta Thunberg. She is a young Swedish girl who has attracted international attention since becoming a climate activist before the age of ten.
Happy Sixteenth Birthday Greta!
Also, many thanks for your diligent and persistent efforts to literally shame the Earth's adult population into urgent action to fight climate change.
|
|
|
Greta recently spoke at COP 24 in Katowice Poland
|
I first learned about Greta from my friend and colleague, Stuart Scott, Executive Director of
ScientistsWarning.org.
Stuart is also responsible for bringing Greta to the COP 24 Conference in Poland in December of 2018. Since then, she has become world famous.
- Like me, Greta got curious about climate change seven years ago and began conducting her own research. Unlike me, she was was only eight years old at the time.
- Like me, she learned about the primary drivers of climate change: things like automobiles, passenger planes, eating animal-based foods and the perpetual consumption of far too much STUFF.
- Like me, she adopted a plant-based diet, started consuming far less stuff and - in her own way - became a climate activist. Inspired by the students in Florida after the Parkland shootings, her activism continues with a steadily growing, weekly Friday school strike outside the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm.
- Like me, she says that the overall "system" must be changed to a sustainable model for humanity.
- Finally, like me, she has occasionally regretted learning so much critical information about humanity's impact on our planet. Impossible to unlearn - it's like a tipping point that changes the rest of your life.
Last month, in her speech at the COP 24 Climate Change Conference in Poland, she scolded a huge international audience for their abdication of responsibility concerning the most terrifying threat in the history of humanity.
For example, here is one statement in this 4-minute video:
"You are not mature enough to tell it like is. Even that burden you leave to us children."
|
|
|
Greta Thunberg's Statement to World Leaders at COP-24 in Poland (Dec. 2018)
|
Is the global media failing us on climate change?
Even when they occasionally focus on the topic for a day or two, they fail miserably when it comes to advising the public regarding exactly what they can do to make the biggest difference in the fight against climate change.
Case in Point: CBS's
Meet the Press
(12-30-18) focused exclusively on climate change. Yet there was not a single word about eating animal-based foods - even though it's the only major driver of climate change that people can easily change overnight if they so choose.
It gets worse. CBS made that horrible omission, even though (according to widely publicized U.N. data) a global shift away from animal-based products would do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than eliminating ALL of the cars, trucks, busses, trains and ships in the world. For CBS
not to share this crucial information with the public is shameful.
This is exactly why a 15-year old child must scold the spineless adults in the media for caring more about ad revenue than broadcasting the truth about the most important issue in human history. For much more data on the incredible connection between animal-based foods and climate change, take a look at my April 2016 Paper.
FYI, my original title for this blogpost was
Greta, Graphics and Gratola but I later decided to go instead with a simple Greta birthday greeting. Here's one more climate change observation: I am writing this BSB on New Year's Day in the New York City metro area, where it is a balmy 62 degrees at 11 o'clock in the morning.
Now for the "Graphics and Gratola" portion
Here are a few of the slides I am using in my presentations to explain a vision of a lifestyle that would make it possible for
everyone to easily live "green" enough to please Mother Nature.
Lest my audiences think my message may be all doom and gloom, I use this uplifting slide near the beginning of my presentations to convey how our overall "system" of living can change for the better.
|
|
| AGRA (American Green Region Authority) |
Later in the presentation, I go back to explain how Gratola can make it possible for everyone to make totally "green" lifestyle choices without even trying:
The next few slides provide just a sampling of many ideas for re-thinking and re-inventing how we live - so that we may soon reach a level of harmony with nature that is sustainable indefinitely.
In just the past 200 years, roughly 1/10th of one percent of our time on Earth, our population has grown from one billion to nearly eight billion.
During that same timeframe, we've gone from being mostly farmers, living in harmony with nature, to an industrialized world - where almost everything we do is causing incalculable, irreversible damage to the ecosystem that gives us life.
As such, individual, uncoordinated efforts - while admirable, will never solve the sustainability crisis we have created. Our entire "system" of living on Earth must change.
The Bottom Line. We can no longer ask people to "just do what you can" to help the environment. As Greta says, we must awaken the leaders of the world to the disasters that our collective way of living is causing.
Then, those leaders must address the overall planet as a "system" - and must take bold steps to optimize that
system. In all of my BSBs since 9-21-18, I have referred to an
envisioned solution that is technologically possible today.
Who knows if that envisioned solution will ever happen? But the "vision" alone may help some world leaders recognize the absolute necessity of completely re-inventing the way humans coexist with nature on planet Earth.
"The climate is not going to collapse because some party got the most votes. The politics that's needed to prevent the climate catastrophe - it doesn't exist today. We need to change the system, as if we were in crisis, as if there were a war going on." - Greta Thunberg
