Climate Change - The Imagination Acts

CLIMATE CHANGE provides space for lengthy pieces which elaborate IMAGINATIVE ACTION

JANUARY 2020

Dear Readers,

We are changing the focus of this page from TALES to CLIMATE CHANGE.

Whilst important and loved as are the longer stories in Tales, the urgent priority is getting ALL our heads around NOW ACTION.

So, each month we’ll jot down examples of ‘The Imagination Acts’ belief ….that, you and me can DO something when we leap with the parachute of our IMAGINATIONS on our backs.

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Greta Thurnberg speaks at the recent UN Climate Change COP24 Conference

Full transcript below

Climate activist Greta Thunberg, 16, addressed the U.N.’s Climate Action Summit in New York City on Monday. Here’s the full transcript of Thunberg’s speech, beginning with her response to a question about the message she has for world leaders.

“My message is that we’ll be watching you.

“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you’re doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.

“You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.

“The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.

“Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.

“So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences.

“To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise – the best odds given by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.

“How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just ‘business as usual’ and some technical solutions? With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years.

“There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

“You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.

“We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.

“Thank you.”

Greta Thunberg, 23 September 2019

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And the trees burn …..

SEE HERE – Wildfire photos of Amazon rainforest and around the world

TURKEY – A fire rages in the Karabaglar district of Turkey’s Izmir province on August 19, 2019.

GREECE – Flames rise from a forest fire near the village of Makrimalli on the island of Evia, northeast of Athens, on August 13, 2019.

GRAN CANARIA – A fire began on August 10 in the town of Artenara and has destroyed up to 1,500 hectares of forest on Spain’s Grand Canary Island, seen here on August 17, 2019.

INDONESIA – Indonesian firefighters tried to extinguish a 139-hectare peatland fire at Ogan Ilir, located in the South Sumatra province of Indonesia, on August 6, 2019.

RUSSIA – A view of a forest fire in Russia’s Krasnoyarsk territory, where more than 1 million hectares of woodland have been hit by wildfires, on August 4, 2019

FRANCE – A fire fanned by a strong wind devours vegetation near the village of Monze, in southern France, on August 15, 2019

AUSTRALIA – Ongoing Australian bushfires have destroyed at least 1,200 homes and scorched at least 14 million acres of land since September, with authorities fearing lightning may spark fresh blazes across Victoria as hotter temperatures lash the state over the weekend.

AMAZON – Brazil’s space research center INPE has detected almost 72,843 wildfires raging in the Amazon rainforest.

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ELECTRIC TAXI SERVICE

Dear Readers, do you recall Jackson ? As a youngster he collected for CALM, the charity aiming to prevent male suicide, in turn, supported by the splendid socially aware Reading Bus Company. Now at 14 years, Jackson encourages Climate Change awareness and action.

Part of this links with his father Dave’s new venture : an ELECTRIC CAR TAXI SERVICE”

Managing director David Sanders set up Zero Cars in 2018 with a passion to change the taxi industry from highly polluting diesel cars to zero emission

Our vision is that by 2025 all journeys taken in taxis will be in vehicles that are run on zero polluting energy. SEE HERE – Zero Cars UK

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PREVIOUS CLIMATE CHANGE

May 2019