Children have right idea

LIKE Rod Slater (Children right to protest, M.E.N. Viewpoints,

February 20) I’m a grandfather who salutes the recent ‘Youth strike for Climate’ and, like A Ramsay, I think they show us oldies the way to “unite for the common good”.

Older people’s greed has got us into the mess of plastics – not only in our rivers and oceans but within our food and even our bodies and the cells we are made up of.

We face the loss of innumerable species which will upset our foodwebs and ecosystems in ways we have no grasp of.

We face literal desertification – not only barren landscapes – but being deserted by the nations that lived in areas too dry and hot to support communities. In fact, extinction of life as we know it in a (human) lifetime is a very real probability unless we throttle back radically.

It would be morally bankrupt to wash our hands of responsibility and simply let hundreds of millions of our fellow humankind suffer and they have children as well.

So those of us in the rich northern hemisphere need to stop NOW, each taking action to mitigate our impact – not only switching to sustainable renewable energy but actively backing measures that facilitate this, even when it costs us more.

And this means we should all not only pay our dues, we should demand others do as well.

We’re often reticent about protesting and expect someone else to sort things out.

The protesting young people will have votes in a couple of years. They should use them resolutely to replace the current failing politicians when they have failed to act decisively. J Prome, Heywood