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Why is youth talking about Climate Emergency ?

Spoiler: fundamentally because they can read

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Small reminder of what is important in life

Eating is part of the foundations of human life.

Hunger implies the collapse of the whole pyramid of needs.

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5 scenarios of possible futures

Source: IPCC AR6 WG1 SPM - 2021 - Fig. SPM.4

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Currently we are on SSP2-4.5, 3-7.0 or 5-8.5 essentially function of economic growth

  • SSP5-8.5 sustained growth
  • SSP3-7.0 ordinary growth
  • SSP2-4.5 recession, stagflation and other economical disasters

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Where will we be in 2050, if nothing proactively significant is done?

Source: IPCC AR6 WG1 SPM - 2021 - Table. SPM.1

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And what happens at >+2°C ?

At +2°C and beyond, we enter a world where there are “sustained food supply disruptions globally”

It means hunger everywhere, even in Switzerland.

It means war everywhere, even in Switzerland.

So yes, young people find it urgent.

By 2030, we will have sealed their fate.

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What are we doing against it?

Nothing.

The COPs pass, and CO2 inexorably increases in the atmosphere.

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Act now and courageously

We are faced with an historical challenge, of such magnitude mankind has never met:

  • Either we embrace a happy sobriety, by re-basing our values on human relationships, art and beauty, so our children will live in a better world than ours.
  • Either we pursue our eternal quest of material growth and consumption, and our children will live into hell.

The choice is ours.

There is no physical impossibility in building a better world.

Only our conditioning and the death of our imagination condemn us to prefer the image of life on a screen to life itself.

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