Guest essay by Eric Worrall

A green journalist despairs that ordinary people are so far unmoved by school child climate heroes, mass hippy protests and Bill McKibben’s apocalyptic climate rants.

We’re losing the war on climate change



Analysis by John D. Sutter, CNN

Updated 0006 GMT (0806 HKT) April 22, 2019

(CNN)

For years now, people like environmentalist and journalist Bill McKibben have been screaming from the treetops that we need a World War II-scale mobilization to fight the scourge of climate change.

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I mean, yes, I’ve met Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teen who is “schooling world leaders” on climate policy and who started a global school walkout movement. …



But the scale of the outrage in no way matches the magnitude of this disaster, which, like WWII, threatens to cripple or even obliterate human life on the planet as we know it.

We’ve known the truth about climate change — that people are burning fossil fuels and warming the atmosphere, with potentially catastrophic consequences — for decades now. James Hansen testified about the dangers of global warming when he was an NASA scientist in 1988. The New York Times headline: “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.”

Since then, the eco-woke among us have created more than enough deadlines to try to force change. In 1990, as George Marshall wrote in his book “Don’t Even Think About It,” the magazine Ecologist published a book called “5,000 Days to Save the Planet.” About 5,000 days later, the Institute for Public Policy Research declared that there were “Ten Years to Save the Planet.” In 2008, he wrote, the New Economics Foundation said it was “100 Months to Save the World.”

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Project Drawdown and others have identified and ranked the solutions that work. But to date, there have not been enough carbon taxes or other incentives to scale those ideas globally.

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