The Strength of Youth

Thu. 14 March 2019 — Salt Lake City, UT

The global school strike for climate began this hour at Robert Louis Stevenson School, Samoa. Over the next 24 hours, over 1.4 million children and youth around the world will participate in a school strike to protest the inaction of the older generations on the crisis of CO2 emissions, the observed 0.9°C increase in global mean surface temperature (GMST), and the 3–4°C increase in GMST which they will witness before the end of this century if radical changes are not made today.

CO2 is not an environmental issue that gets enough recognition in Utah. On Feb. 13, 2019, Rep. John Curtis (R-UT) of Utah’s 3rd District, said, “If you ask Utahns what the largest environmental crisis is, they’ll say clean air, and they’ll say it about 15 times a year. Otherwise, we enjoy beautiful mountain clean air.” In reality, air pollution is killing elderly Utahns — even when the air is relatively clean. Air pollution is also terminating pregnancies. While medical abortions terminated 2800 Utah pregnancies in 2016, air pollution terminated over 1000 of the about 7000+ Utah miscarriages; tell that to March for Life.

Utahns don’t viscerally worry about rising seas, floods, and mega-storms already caused by increased GMST, but we can’t help but soften the edges around the rhetoric of what is killing us. Despite the harm it does, Utah’s polluted air does not pose an existential threat like burning fossil fuels does. To avoid the worst consequences of our addiction to fossil fuels, increase in GMST must be limited to 1.5°C (and we’ve already reached 0.9°C). We are less than one generation away from apocalyptic social upheavals brought on not by concern about climate change, but by actual consequences of climate change. We must reduce the trend of increasing GMST we’re on by at least 2°C, and the only way to do that is to immediately begin using less fossil fuels and use no fossil fuels within 10–20 years.

Rep. Curtis, who won’t even recognize the seriousness of the lesser problem of air quality, said, “I believe personally, having been a former mayor, that if you want to reduce it by two degrees, mayors know how to solve this.” If Rep. Curtis is representative of the mayors in Utah, I guarantee that the majority of Utah mayors do not know how to solve this. But the solution is simple, listen to the science and stop burning fossil fuels. This is what the March 15 strike for climate is about.

In Utah, there is a lot of rhetoric in the way of listening to the science. There are deep notions that the earth is ours to dominate with ‘responsible stewardship’, that natural resources are meant to be used for the benefit of mankind, that mankind is nothing compared to nature and Nature’s God so that human action cannot have a large effect on nature, that there’s a salvation point around the corner even if we are destroying the earth, and that the ‘science’ is disputed. Let’s briefly review what is not disputed:

1. Atmospheric CO2 causes a greenhouse effect, trapping heat in the earth’s biosphere.
2. Concentration of atmospheric CO2 has risen sharply in the last 100 years. This increase in atmospheric CO2 has one cause: burning fossil fuels.
3. Since the early 19th century, over 2,267 billion tonnes (Gt) of CO2 has been emitted into the atmosphere by human burning of fossil fuels.
   Such an astronomically large number needs to be visualized in more familiar terms so we can appreciate the scale of our effect on the environment. If you were to condense all 2,267Gt of CO2 into dry ice (solid CO2) and pile it in Salt Lake Valley, the dry ice (solidly packed) would fill the valley up to the Bonneville Shoreline at least twelve times over.
4. There is already an observed 0.9°C increase in global mean surface temperature. As a result, total energy in the atmosphere has increased, ocean temperatures have increased, glaciers have disappeared, sea levels have risen, and ice continues to melt.

What is not certain is just how quickly temperatures will rise in the future, and just how damaging rising temperatures will be to our economy and our ecology. We can, however, make very educated forecasts (which, for obvious reasons, are so much more accurate than a weather forecast that the two can’t even be compared).

Without the strength of our rising generations, of our children, youth, and young adults, we are on a certain path to destruction. On March 15, 2019, on Capitol Hill in downtown SLC and around the world, our youth are striking for climate. Will you stand in the way, or will you listen?