Children's Climate protests.

[TheGreenGoblin]

We are on the wrong side of history here... and I suspect about 90% of us will be dead in the next 20 years..

[Sisemen]

OK Doomer.

When you say 90% “of us” I presume you are referring the us old crusties on this site?

If you’re referring to the population at large I’m happy to bet everything I’ve got that you’re wrong.

[OFSO]

Madrid Conference, total waste of time. Most polluting countries uninterested in changing their ways. And one, Germany, spouting pious platitudes while generating a substantial amount of electricity from burning lignite.

[Rwy in Sight]

It is annoying that we get named storms for something that is a normal winter rain. I am getting more sure about having a climate change is very beneficial to some people.

[OFSO]

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

A new moniker I've just come across for the perpetually scowling St Greta - Scoldilocks.

[Sisemen]

This is what you get as a result of bad parenting, and exploitation by adults that ought to know better. The precocious little ***** seems to have developed a sense of entitlement.

Just a day after she was forced to apologise for apparently calling for violence against world leaders, teen climate activist Greta Thunberg is locked in to a Twitter war of words with Germany's national railway company.

The 16-year-old Swede's latest misstep began on Sunday local time when she posted a picture of herself sitting on the floor of a carriage, surrounded by luggage.

"Travelling on overcrowded trains through Germany. And I’m finally on my way home!" Thunberg wrote.

But a slightly shirty social media specialist for Deutsche Bahn responded by suggesting the image may have not been the whole truth.

"Thank you for supporting us railroad workers in the fight against climate change! We were pleased that you were on the ICE 74 with us on Saturday. And with 100 per cent green electricity," the German government-owned railway company spokesperson posted on Twitter.

"It would have been even nicer if you had also reported how friendly and competent you were looked after by our team at your seat in first class," the company spokesperson continued.

But Thunberg hit back.

"Our train from Basel was taken out of traffic. So we sat on the floor on 2 different trains.

"After Gottingen I got a seat. This is no problem of course and I never said it was.

"Overcrowded trains is a great sign because it means the demand for train travel is high!"

Deutsche Bahn confirmed via a media statement that she had a seat in first class between Kassel and Hamburg, and that other members of her team were already sitting in first-class from Frankfurt onwards - just a few hours into the trip.

As a first-class passenger, Thunberg and her clique would have enjoyed far more legroom with just three - rather than four seats per aisle - and access to lounges.

Thunberg was travelling home from Turin in Italy, where she had delivered an incendiary speech telling a crowd of supporters that world leaders should be put against the wall over their failure to act on climate change.

"We will make sure they, that we put them against the wall, and that they will have to do their job and to protect our futures," she said.

She apologised later, saying she was improvising her speech and the expression "putting someone against the wall" in Swedish describes a situation when someone is forced to address difficult questions.

[bob2s]

Something I came across today.A reply to Greta

Adrian Matthiassen - Social Media CommentatorLike Page
December 14 at 11:31 PM ·
An open letter to Greta from Philosopher Jason D Hill that I thought I would share with you

Greta Thunberg:

You have declared yourself a leader and said that your generation will start a revolution. You have comported yourself as a credentialed adult and climate change activist who has fearlessly addressed politicians and world leaders. You have dropped out of school and declared that there isn’t any reason to attend, or any reason for you to study since there will be no future for you to inherit. You have, rather than attend your classes, been leading Friday Climate Strikes for all students in your generation across the globe. Your attendance at oil pipelines has been striking. There, you unequivocally declare that all oil needs to remain in the ground where it belongs.

I shall, therefore, against the backdrop of your activism, address you as an adult rather than as a child.

In September of 2019 you crossed the Atlantic in a “zero carbon” racing yacht that had no toilet and electric light on board. You made an impassioned plea at the United Nations in which you claimed that, “we have stolen your dreams and our childhood with our empty words.” You claimed that adults and world leaders come to young people for answers and explained in anger: “How dare you!” You claimed that we are failing you and that young people are beginning to understand our betrayal. You further declared that if we continue to fail your generation: “We will never forgive you.”

You have stated that you want us to panic, and to act as if our homes are on fire. You insist that rich countries must reduce to zero emissions immediately. In your speeches you attack economic growth and have stated that our current climate crisis is caused by “buying and building things.” You call for climate justice and equity, without addressing the worst polluter on the planet China; the country that is economically annexing much of Africa and Latin America. You dare not lecture Iran about its uranium projects -- because that’s not part of the UN’s agenda, is it?

You proclaim that we need to live within the planetary boundaries, to focus on equity and “take a few steps back” for the sake of all living species. You resent the hierarchical distinctions between human and animals and entertain no qualitative distinction between a monkey, a malaria-infested mosquito and a snarling hyena. You mouth slogans such as: “We have set in motion an irreversible chain reaction beyond control,” and you advocate for universal veganism on the Ellen DeGeneres show. You do not buy new clothes, and you don’t want the rest of us to either. You want us all to stop flying in jet planes without giving us an alternative as to how we would re-transform our financial and trading systems—to say nothing of our personal enjoyment of the world—without regression to a primeval era. Few can afford to cross the Atlantic in a $6M zero carbon yacht financed by rich people who made their wealth by the very means you condemn as loathsome.

There are a few things that we, the rational adults of the world who are not bowing to you like guilt-ridden obsequious Babbitts need to say to you, Greta.

First, we did not rob you of your childhood or of your dreams. You are the legatee of a magnificent technological civilization which my generation and the one before it and several others preceding it all the way to the Industrial Revolution and the Renaissance, bequeathed to you. That growth-driven, capitalist technological civilization has created the conditions for you to harangue us over our betrayal. It is a civilization that eradicated diseases such as small pox from the word, and that lifted millions out of abject poverty in a universe you think is dying and decaying. It assured you a life expectancy that exceeded that of your ancestors. Most likely by focusing on economic growth which you demonize, and scientific advancement, that civilization will further enhance a robust quality of life and health for your descendants.

Here is a hard truth to ponder, Greta: if the great producers of this world whom you excoriate were to withdraw their productivity, wealth and talents—in short—their minds from the world today, your generation would simply perish. Why? Because as children you have done nothing as yet, with your lives besides being born. This is what we expect of children until such time as they can be producers by learning from their elders. You are understandably social and ecological ballast. You are not yet cognitively advanced to replicate the structures of survival of which you are the beneficiaries.

Children are important installments on the future. We have invested in you. It is you and your smug generation which think they have nothing to learn from the older ones who are failing themselves. Whom do you expect to employ the majority of you if you have neither the job credentials or life competency skills to navigate the world? The future unemployable-skipping- school-on-Friday obstreperous children?

The truth, as one anonymous blogger aptly put it, is that your generation is unable to work up to forty hours per week without being chronically depressed and anxious. Its members cannot even decide if they want to be a boy or a girl, or both, or neither, or a “they.” They cannot eat meat without crying. I might add that your generation needs “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” as pre-conditions for learning in school. Its members have a pathological need to be coddled and protected from the challenging realities of life. Your generation is the biggest demander and consumer of carbon spewing technological gadgets and devices. An hour without any of them and too many of you succumb to paralyzing lethargy. Your generation is the least curious and most insular set of individuals one has ever encountered. Your hubris extends so far that you think you have nothing to learn from your elders.

Yes, we have betrayed you: by capitulating the world of leadership to bored, attention-deficit children who spout bromides, platitudes and slogans that a rudderless and morally relativistic culture accepts because a significant number of its denizens have become intellectually bankrupt and morally lazy.

The logical endpoint of your ecological vision would see us living in primeval conditions eking out an existence in jungle swamps in which we would regard poisonous snakes and man-eating tigers as our moral equals. We would have to adapt ourselves to nature rather than adapt nature to meet our needs, like all members of civilized civilizations do. Your vision would see us foraging for mushrooms and plants without knowing which were inimical to our digestive systems. Under your system we would swelter from heat, die from rampant plagues and starvation because there will be no air-conditioning units, no sophisticated plumbing and irrigations and sewer systems, no anti-bacterial soap made from animal matter, no pesticides and chemicals to sanitize our food and drinking supplies: just one primordial swamp of human putrefaction.

If civilization is left in the hands of your ecofascist supporters we will be living in grass huts, drinking animal feces infested water, and shrinking in fear from polar bears instead of killing them for food when they attack us.

Greta, living in complete harmony with nature is the death of creativity. Understand this. All great civilizations were forged in the crucibles of proper exploitation of the earth. Those who lived on land with oil and did nothing with it never had a right to it in the first place. Non-usage of God’s resources is the cardinal sin because it results in the un-development of our human capabilities, and makes us indistinguishable from beasts.

Your generation needs to be taught the morality of wealth creation, rather than only parasitically benefiting from it. The only revolution you will lead is one into nihilism and civilization regression. You need to learn about the moral case for fossil fuel. You owe it to yourself to understand how as, Kathleen Hartnett White has detailed, the harnessing of the vast store of concentrated energy in fossil fuels allowed mankind, for the first time in human history, to escape intractable constraints and energy limits that had left all but the very privileged in total poverty and depravity. Before the Industrial Revolution all societies were dependent on a very limited flow of solar energy captured in living plants for subsistence needs such as food, fuel and shelter.

But we, the creative enterprisers, will not go back to the Dark Ages. Your philosophy can be summed up as follows:

What was good for my anthropoid ancestors is good for me. Do not rock the boat, or even build one as that will require cutting down a tree. Do not disrupt nature. Do not dare to see the earth as rightfully belonging to us. We don’t have the right to use our brains in a manner that can transform our needs into a material form. Let’s conveniently forget that production is the application of reason to the problems of survival. Let’s all diminish the grandeur of man and his luminous potential. Crush the Thomas Edisons of this world.

The apocalyptic world vision you hold has been a strip landing for those who have hated progress throughout history. Your apocalyptic predictions have been made for millennia, and, we’re still here. We will still be here long after you’ve grown up and we have forgiven you for skipping classes, thereby lowering the intelligence quotient of an entire generation

[Sisemen]

[OFSO]

Poor Greta, having to sit on the floor on a German train, despite her and her entourage having first class tickets....

[Capetonian]

Capture.JPG (85.93 KiB) Viewed 508 times

Something she may wish to reflect upon next time she travels first class on a clean, safe, comfortable and punctual train, or on a luxury yacht.

[G-CPTN]

Gritter Thunberg

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

The second highest generator of CO2 per capita, just behind Saudi Arabia, is Australia, at 15 Te* per capita.
China is currently building more coal fired power stations, 121 GW, than the rest of the World combined.
Australia exports more than double the coal of any other nation (37.8% of global total, 2018), 25% of which goes to China.

My personal CO2 generation is (just calculated it) 2.35 Te/yr, which is less than one sixth of my national average, and under half of typical residential usage. I plan on cutting that by another 40% in the next 3 years. PEI gets 76% of its electricity from non-CO2-generating or CO2-neutral sources.

*Te = Tonnes-equivalent of CO2 per annum.

Some of you may be wondering why I am using so little CO2 generating power, and reducing that, yet think the AGW argument is bollocks. The thing is, my CO2 reductions are a secondary effect of my aims of reducing energy consumption for financial reasons, and reducing reliance on external sources of power. We lose mains electricity here around 3-5 times a year, and that can be for up to three weeks in the worst ice storms. Furthermore, one can't use the roads then either. It therefore makes sense to have one's own means of power generation. Utilities price inflation has been rocketing for decades, and so reducing consumption is a better investment for the future than any financial investment returns. In simple terms, I end up with more spare cash spending money on reducing my energy bills than I do from investing the same amount in the financial markets.

[Rwy in Sight]

Fox 3 that means more electricity powered tools, and more electricity in general then?

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

Yes, and No.
On a domestic level, portability of tools means portability of energy sources for those tools. In most circumstances one has to take the tool to the job, not bring the job to the tool. If one does have to do the latter, then one needs to consider tool placement and job flow carefully.
Obviously there's the portability of oneself for manual tools, but there are secondary problems with using oneself for a tool energy source. The first is safety, and as I get older I am less inclined to climb steep roofs to fix shingles, for example, and trying to hit something hard manually needs better balance than letting a power tool do the job. In the longer term, I am working on robot design to do my heavy and dangerous stuff. The second is problems like Repetitive Strain Injury, to which I am prone for hereditary reasons. I don't wish to do major builds entirely manually for that reason. The third is the time factor, which is important here because of the weather, both daily and seasonally. Humans are power-limited and speed-limited compared to power tools.
The cheapest way of providing power is air tools, once one needs enough tools to justify the cost of a compressor. I have a portable compressor and two 50ft air hoses. This is sufficient for me to reach anywhere in my buildings. Air tools give me more power than electric tools for fast work, and indeed as much power as I need for any residential work. It is cheaper and easier to have a compressor that runs off an electric motor.
Electric battery tools are, with lithium batteries, able to do all the less powerful work I need to do for as long as I can stand to do it. Using all my batteries allows me to run my grass strimmer for 30 minutes, but my arms get tired after 25 minutes anyway. I have adaptor plates that allow all my tools from whatever manufacturer to run off the same generic batteries.
A couple of doors up from me, one of my neighbours has his own 50 acre woodlot out back. He has a tractor to manage that, and a lot of his tools run directly mechanically, or hydraulically off a hydraulic pump, from the tractor. Like an air compressor, once one can justify buying a tractor, it makes sense to run lots of tools off it because it is more portable than mains electricity. The tractor runs off diesel, but tractors could run off steam or LPG also.
So, for a lot of reasons, electricity is the tool power source of choice. However, just because mains electrical energy usage increases residentially does not mean overall national energy use increases. In my case at least, it means the opposite. For example, I can do all work on my property myself, from pouring foundations to reroofing. That means tradesmen aren't driving here to do it, with the cost in gas for them to do so. Also, by using batteries as a temporary energy store, and recharging them when I'm not using other equipment like the washing machine, I can spread out my energy usage to reduce peak power, and even to align my usage with the intermittent supply from solar or wind.
Who owns the tools also needs consideration. It makes sense to own tools that, in the simplest sense, one will wear out. That is, one will use them often and hard enough that one gets the entire life of the tool. This might be 10 years for a drill, or 40 years for a mitre saw, but one will eventually wear it out. Where one only needs a tool occasionally, like a valve spring compressor, it makes sense to locate the tool where the usage is. That means ones local garage for the compressor. If a job can be done domestically, then it would be ideal (in energy usage terms, as well as financially) if the tool could be borrowed from one's local hardware store where one buys the consumables for the work. My hardware store two miles down the road does this. For bigger stuff with less frequent usage, like plate compactors for driveways, then a hire place in the nearest big settlement makes sense. An important element in the distribution system is at what stage one goes from specialist delivery to personal delivery, and this generally depends on population density, frequency of use, and level of individual skill. There is a reason Canada is Truck Nation - we have lots of pickup trucks because we need them, and it makes world energy sense for us to have them. Not everyone who has them needs them, of course, but here the vast majority do.

[barkingmad]

Spoiler Alert!! My heart sinks as BBC Radio4 informs me that one of their “guest editors” for their morning wake up show will be the esteemed Gretel Thunderbird on one morning during the festive season.

Better schedule a long lie in that morning with alarm inhibited?

[Rwy in Sight]

Spoiler Alert!! My heart sinks as BBC Radio4 informs me that one of their “guest editors” for their morning wake up show will be the esteemed Gretel Thunderbird on one morning during the festive season.

Better schedule a long lie in that morning with alarm inhibited?

You may treated as a comedy show provided she is not paid.

[Capetonian]

Can someone please let me know which day, so I can make sure I set my wake up alarm something other than Radio 4 that morning. All I can find is:
'between Boxing Day and New Year's Eve.
The five guest editors this year will each take over the programme at some point between 26 and 31 December 2019.
The show is usually on air weekdays from 6:00am to 9:00am and from 7:00am to 9:00am on Saturday.
Greta will be interviewed as part of it (all guest editors are) and she's asked for reports to be produced from the Antarctic and Zambia.
She's also requested an interview with Mark Carney who's the Governor of the Bank of England.'

[barkingmad]

One could always listen to this audio-only video to pass part of the 3 hours away?



A couple of years ago, on the Radio4 morning show, an informative and upsetting interview with a female survivor of domestic abuse was terminated at 12 minutes before the program end so’s the presenter could gushingly talk to the ‘guest editor’ about that person’s full-time job.

And the job-was that of a female boxer......... Back to my home planet, cabby, and please be quick!

[Sisemen]

Presumably, as is the case for most children of a tender age and not used to the big world, her name is on her jacket in case she gets lost?