Kids today... running around trying to save the planet when they could be yawning through algebra. . .

IT might seem odd at first that a Taoiseach would express support for thousands of children going on the hop en masse. Skipping school is a serious business, and those of us who are of an age well remember the punishments handed out to those caught mitching.

Last year, a 16-year-old Swedish student called Greta Thunberg organised the first strike by schoolchildren to highlight the damage her generation will face from climate change, and it captured the imagination of her contemporaries. A week from today, potentially thousands upon thousands of children, here and worldwide, will stay home in what is known as the Fridays For Future strike.

When asked by Solidarity/People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy what he thought about the action, Leo Varadkar was remarkably unequivocal. ‘The fact that young people are taking action, protesting and are going to strike and take a break from school on March 15 is good,’ he said. ‘They are children, pupils and students, telling all the adults in all parties to get our act together and to do more about climate change because it is their future that is in jeopardy.

‘That is why I support what they are doing and why we all must listen to what they are saying.’

Cataclysmic

Now I don’t know about you, but I’m struggling to remember any time in history when any government leader welcomed a strike, least of all one by children taking a day off school, but I agree with the Taoiseach, and here’s why.

Like many of my generation, I initially was sceptical not of climate change itself, but rather about what caused it. The Earth has heated up and cooled down for millions of years. Cataclysmic events have eliminated entire species, which is just as well, or we still might have Tyrannosaurus Rexes rooting around in our bins, and I saw all of this as part of a natural rhythm that played out over multiple millennia. I flippantly thought to myself, ‘global warming? Bring it on, and’s let’s be having the first decent Wexford cabernet sauvignon in 2030’.

Then I started reading the science and, for me anyway, the penny dropped. The Fifth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2014 said there was no doubt that warming of the atmosphere and the oceans was real, and had occurred since 1950 at rates unprecedented in record-keeping history. It concluded that it is ‘extremely likely’ (defined as a 95-99% probability) that human influence has been the dominant cause of observed warming in that period.

Look at the statistics for this century alone, which has given us 17 of the 18 hottest years on record, and it is abundantly clear that climate change is happening. Worldwide, the average temperature last year was 0.83 degrees Celsius hotter than in the years between 1951 and 1980. That might sound very little, but it is a global average – in individual regions, it would be greater or lesser, impacting our ability to grow crops and leading to increased sea levels as the polar ice caps melt.

The Paris Agreement, negotiated by 196 countries in 2015, comes into effect next year, with the aim of limiting the rise in temperature to 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels, and that means major changes in how we live. Many countries have announced deadlines for banning the sale of petrol and diesel cars, while massive investment will be made in wind, solar, hydro-electric, tidal and other alternative power sources.

Plant-based

What we eat might have to change too, with meat a rare treat as we adopt plantbased diets. Methane is a greenhouse gas produced in massive quantities by farm animals, especially cattle and pigs. Cows release between 30 and 50 gallons of the stuff every day, and there are between 1.3 and 1.5billion of them on the planet. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation attributes 14.5% of all greenhouse-gas emissions to livestock.

Now, I had to look up a lot of this stuff, because I don’t always pay a lot of attention. At 55, I’ll be lucky, and statistically unlikely, to see another 30 years, and while climate change is alarming, it simply is not sufficiently rapid to daily prey on my mind. My house is 30metres above sea level, so there’s little chance I’ll ever drown in my bed.

Children, on the other hand, know all this stuff. They know it backwards. Pester power used to see them admonish Mam or Dad to stop smoking, but now their concern is more global, because they know they will inherit our mess.

If you ask why we should bother limiting our emissions while China opens new fossil-fuel power stations every week, they turn our own timeworn logic against us: ‘Wasn’t it you who asked if Johnny put his hand in the fire, would I do it too? Now you’re saying that just because China opens a power station, we should do nothing and just give up?’

And they’re right. They are the ones who instinctively know why we need to ban plastic straws and other single-use plastics – coffee cups, food wrapping, cotton buds and so on – not just to save the resources expended on making them, but to keep the oceans pristine too. They’re the ones who ask for all the lights to be turned off for Earth Hour, who read up on electric cars and, yes, the ones more likely to adopt vegetarian and vegan diets. We might look at them and laugh at what we see as a fad, but the last laugh might be on us.

Fear

Last year, I was hugely impressed by the coolly practical and socially progressive reaction of students in Florida’s Parkland school, who sent fear through the establishment by demanding stricter gun-control laws after 17 children and adults were shot dead by a former student there.

Those of us who are older remember being politicised at a young age in the 1980s, when we marched in protest at South Africa’s apartheid regime, and punitive levels of PAYE, against, or for, the Eighth Amendment, and so on. We were on the street once a week, it seems in retrospect. Much of that advocacy and anger now has migrated to the online sphere, where many seemed to think their greatest triumph was preventing an X Factor winning song reaching No 1 in the UK chart by buying a Rage Against The Machine track instead.

Seeing young people so engaged with climate change, a tangible issue that will affect every facet of their lives and they move towards adulthood, is exhilarating. No matter what you think of climate change, man-made or natural phenomenon, and no matter what you think of a school strike – ‘good for them!’ or ‘the pups need to cop themselves on’ – there must be admiration, grudging or not.

A generation that seemed politically apathetic instead is becoming energised and making its voice heard. Classrooms that have become obsessed with learning by rote instead of promoting critical thinking are revitalised. And somewhere among next Friday’s strikers, a seed might be planted and eventually blossom, and a new generation of leaders will emerge. And if they end up telling all the adults in all parties to get their act together, as the Taoiseach says, then I’m firmly on the side of the kids.