Attenborough Calls Us Out, All of Us.

Let's drop the farcical notion that we haven't screwed our youngest generation and those that will follow them. Let's stop pretending.

Listen to naturalist, David Attenborough who says their plight, already dire, is very much our doing.

“[Young people] understand the simple discoveries of science about our dependence upon the natural world,” he said. “My generation is no great example for understanding – we have done terrible things.”

The protests by young people were enormously encouraging, Attenborough said. “That is the one big reason I have for feeling we are making progress. If we were not making progress with young people, we are done.” 

However, asked about the world his great-grandchildren will live in, he said: “I don’t spend time thinking about that because I can’t bear it. I’m just coming up to 93, and so I don’t have many more years around here. I find it difficult to think beyond that because the signs aren’t good.” 

On Friday, the youth strikes will continue with protests expected in 485 towns and cities in 72 countries, according to the Fridays for Future website. Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager whose solo strike sparked the worldwide action, told politicians this week: “You lied to us. You gave us false hope.”

“There will be cynics who try to dismiss [the school strikers] and say they don’t understand the world and how it works,” Attenborough said in the interview, released in a podcast on Friday by Figueres’s Global Optimismgroup. “Young people may lack experience but they also have clear sight.” 

“They can see perhaps more clearly than the rest of us who have been around for some time,’” he said. “We older ones should take notice of what they say.”

Attenborough recently presented a primetime BBC documentary, Climate Change - The Facts, which was watched live by almost 3 million people in the UK. “The scientific evidence is that if we have not taken dramatic action within the next decade, we could face irreversible damage to the natural world and the collapse of our societies,” he said in the show. 

Attenborough told Figueres action to stop climate change and the destruction of the wildlife was essential: “We have no option, if we want to survive. We have a [moral] obligation on our shoulders and it would be to our deep eternal shame if we fail to acknowledge that.”

What's at stake? Irreversible damage to the natural world and the collapse of our societies. Just try to get your head around that. Utter dystopia and nothing less. And we have barely a decade to implement the dramatic measures to perhaps avert that.

No leader who wants to promote the export of bitumen is on the side of those kids and their future.  That puts Justin Trudeau where he belongs, in the same boat with Andrew Scheer. They're both climate wreckers. Given the NDP's track record on climate change I don't trust them either.

It's said there are 195 countries today, 193 of them members of the United Nations. Of all those countries Canada ranks in the top 10 for total greenhouse gas emissions. Canada ranks in the top three for per capita greenhouse gas emissions and we don't count the additional emissions by those foreign customers who process and burn our high-carbon bitumen. Now our governments, federal and provincial, want to ramp up the sale of bitumen.

"The scientific evidence is that if we have not taken dramatic action within the next decade, we could face irreversible damage to the natural world and the collapse of our societies."

We need to be throttling down our fossil fuel sector, not expanding it. Yet we're buying them 60-year pipelines from the public purse and we're still rewarding them with massive subsidies although Mr. Trudeau says that will end in 2025 - supposedly. Mr. Trudeau has shown us the folly of taking him at his word.