The Climate Kids Are All Right - keep it up!
It didn’t take long
for the death threats to start. Alexandria Villaseñor, a 13-year-old
environmental activist, had just been featured in an Agence France-Presse article
republished by Breitbart
News about dozens of students staging a “die-in” at United Nations
headquarters in New York. Villaseñor was
protesting that day in mid-March for the same reason that she decided to start
a school strike four months earlier: to demand that world leaders quit dragging
their feet and take swift action to combat global climate
change.
“Don’t stage it, just
die,” one Breitbart reader commented on the right-wing publication’s website.
“I would be more impressed if they doused theselves with gas and set themselves
on fire,” wrote another. “You don’t deserve a future, you pathetic halfwit,”
said a third. The repugnant online
trolling might send most seventh graders cowering, but Villaseñor shrugged it
off. Her fight is about ensuring that her generation and future ones are left
with a habitable planet. She wasn’t about to let a bunch of angry deniers get
in the way. “I think if more
people really understood the climate science, the extinction rate and just all
the terrible statistics about what we’re doing to our planet, they would be
motivated, too,” she told HuffPost. “If everyone just paid attention to the
facts, everyone would be a climate activist.”
The last five years
were the five hottest on record. The amount of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere has soared past 410 parts per million ― a concentration that hasn’t
been seen in 3 million years, when sea levels were up to 66 feet higher,
according to a recent
study. Human-caused climate change is driving sea-level rise, drought, extreme weather and a biodiversity crisis that scientists have declared Earth’s
sixth mass extinction event. As many as 150 species die off each day. Monday is Earth Day,
the 49th anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement and a day of action
celebrated by more than a billion people around the globe... read more:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/youth-climate-earth-day-thunberg-villasenor_n_5cb5097ae4b082aab08abaffMore posts on climate change