Kids are absolutely right to go on strike

John Lanchester’s new novel “The Wall” imagines Britain ater “The Change.” Following a dramatic shit in temperature and sea levels, the UK has barricaded off what remains of the coastline; in Lanchester’s dystopia, there aren’t any beaches let.

Young citizens bore no responsibility for any of this, but they’re the ones who must guard the wall and violently repel increasingly desperate migrants, known as “The Others.” If they fail, the young are themselves cast out to sea as punishment. Not surprisingly, they’re prety unhappy about their lot.

“None of us can talk to our parents,” says Kavanagh, the novel’s protagonist. “It’s guilt: mass guilt, generational guilt. The olds feel they irretrievably f**d up the world, then allowed us to be born into it. You know what? It’s true. That’s exactly what they did. They know it, we know it. Everybody knows it.”

It’s a sentiment shared no doubt by the schoolchildren protesting around the world on Friday to demand far more decisive action on climate change. Inspired by 16-year old Greta Thunberg’s weekly vigil outside Sweden’s parliament, the movement has expanded to dozens of countries, including the US. Thunberg has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Can you really blame the kids? The planet has warmed by “only” about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times and yet the destructive effects of climate change have become frighteningly apparent. The heatwaves, floods, deadly wildfires and violent hurricanes we’ve experienced lately are mild compared to what our children will contend with. The world is on track to heat up by more than 3 degrees by 2100 and the warming won’t miraculously stop then.

“The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human culture and civilization, is now, like a parent, dead,” writes David Wallace-wells in “The Uninhabitable Earth.” Unfortunately, this isn’t another Lanchester-like work of speculative fiction. It’s non-fiction.

Wallace-wells’s book documents the horrors and chaos that those cuting class on Friday want to avoid: Tens of millions of climate refugees, trillions of dollars of economic damage, deadly heat, fresh-water scarcity (the glaciers of the Himalayas will lose at least 40 per cent of their ice by 2100, he notes) and “much more fire, much more oten, burning much more land.” A single California wildfire can undo all the emissions gains made that year via the state’s environmental policies, just one of several terrifying climate feedback loops he describes.

We adults are proud of the progress we’ve made in other areas – life expectancy, equal rights, education and poverty, to name a few. But when later historians write about this period, that isn’t what they’ll remember. Despite the rapid adoption of wind and solar power, big improvements in energy efficiency and electric vehicles, our carbon emissions are still rising. We’re locking in more destruction for our kids to cope with.

Linking the Fridays For Future movement and young people’s enthusiasm for policies like the Green New Deal is the belief that the time for incrementalism is over. Yet governments and corporate bosses continue to drag their heels. Even those, like Germany’s Angela Merkel, who support the kids’ right to protest are guilty. Supposedly a climate leader, Germany is recklessly phasing out nuclear power but plans to continue burning coal for another two decades.

Telling teenagers to be patient or realistic, as US Sen. Dianne Feinstein tried to do, won’t wash. With the United Nations warning that we have only 12 years to fix the crisis, kids aren’t inclined to hang around.

It’s even more reprehensible that some adults are trying to stymie even our insufficient climate-change efforts, by maligning experts and retreating from international cooperation. President Donald Trump, who wants to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, happily expresses his skepticism about the science, but oten demonstrates his total ignorance of the subject in the process.

His rise showed the oncoming cataclysm still wasn’t a big enough priority for many Americans of voting age in 2016. If he’s reelected in 2020, the die casting today’s adults as climate villains will have been cast. Three cheers for the kids, then.