‘OUR FUTURE IS AT STAKE’
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg spoke to thousands youth, activists and community members at the legislature Friday for a climate strike organized by Climate Justice Edmonton and a number of other environmental groups.
It was a gracious Greta Thunberg in Edmonton on Friday, composed and articulate, forceful on the need for action on climate change, even as she came off as unaware of obvious solutions.
In her speech to a crowd of thousands at the Alberta legislature, Thunberg was savvy and polite enough not to wade into partisan Canadian politics before Monday’s federal election, let alone lash out against Alberta oil and gas.
Instead the famous 16-yearold climate change activist from Sweden implored people to take action to prevent catastrophic climate change. She sounded grateful to deliver her message at the Edmonton event.
“Thank you for the wonderful reception I have received here in Alberta,” she said. “People are so kind.”
Thunberg’s speech came off without interruption, free from catcalls from the civil Canadian crowd, even as it was peppered with folks holding pro-oil and gas signs.
“We are doing this,” she said of her regular Friday climate strikes, “because we want the people in power to unite behind science.
“We teenagers aren’t scientists, nor are we politicians. But it seems many of us, apart from most others, understand the science because we have done our homework.”
While Thunberg exalted science, her speech was short on answers. Perhaps some more homework is in order. There are numerous brilliant scientists and public policy experts now putting forward such solutions. Near the top of that list is Andrew Mcafee, whom I’ve read up on in recent weeks, part of my own ongoing homework on this topic.
Mcafee, a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is the author of More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources — and What Happens Next.
If science tells us the world is in trouble, science is also giving us the way out, Mcafee argued in his book, as well as on a recent podcast with a leading American public intellectual, Sam Harris.
The most developed parts of the world are moving from a voracious and rapacious industrial economy to a second machine age, based on computers, where we continue to grow our prosperity but are treading more lightly on the planet, Mcafee told Harris.
“We finally invented this (computer) technology that lets us find all of these different ways, all of these overlapping complementary ways, to get more from less, to get more prosperity from less metal, less fertilizer, less water, less cropland, less of all of these material inputs to the economy.”
This transformation has been driven by private industry, which is hugely motivated to cut down on its use of raw materials in order to increase profit, Mcafee said.
“Capitalism is this voracious thing, it’s a relentless quest for profits. The flip side of all that, and where the news starts to turn good, is it’s also a voracious quest to save a buck. A penny saved is a penny earned.”
Mcafee pointed out a story about our drive for efficiency, which came from a retired newspaper reporter.
The reporter was going through old papers when he came across a Radio Shack ad from 1991. There were 15 gizmos in the Radio Shack ad, but 13 of them (from cameras and video recorders to cordless phones and answering machines) had vanished, each incorporated into one small device, the modern cellphone.
The next necessary change is the adoption of nuclear energy, Mcafee said.
New Generation 4 reactors are being designed to use the radioactive waste from old plants as fuel and to be meltdown proof.
“I think the current distaste for nuclear energy is not grounded in evidence and is serving us really, really poorly, especially in an overheating world,” he said. “We have one power source that is clean, green, safe, scalable and somewhere near cost efficient and we’re running away from it around the world. This is lunacy to me.”
Mcafee doesn’t have Thunberg’s mass audience, but perhaps he and others in the eco-modernist movement can win her attention. She came across in Edmonton as bright, open and motivated. To date, she’s been somewhat sour about nuclear energy, but perhaps she’s been getting out-of-date information from folks still rooted in thinking from the 1980s when nuclear energy was demonized by groups like Greenpeace.
Thunberg implores adults to act, but they are acting. She can play a huge role by championing their best ideas.
Activists would do well to make good on their promise to accept science by embracing innovative technological solutions.
Our openness to adopting nuclear is where the climate change battle will be won or lost.
Activists would do well to make good on their promise to accept science by embracing innovative technological solutions.