Horowitz: The World’s Youth Send Strong Message on the Climate

Tuesday, September 24, 2019

Rob Horowitz, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

Greta Thunberg PHOTO: European Parliament/Wikipedia

This past Friday millions of the world’s youth, including hundreds of thousands of young people all across the United States, walked out of their classrooms or jobs to participate in the Global Climate Strike, telling their elders in no uncertain terms that they needed to do much more and act much faster to limit the worse impacts of global warming.

“Oceans are rising and so are we,” read the sign that 13-year-old Martha Lickman carried through London. While students from Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring Maryland heading to the Us Capitol, chanted, “Whose Future Our Future,” reported The Washington Post.

And that is precisely the point. Our children will inherit the world we leave them- -and as they increasingly recognize on the climate, unless we speed the transition from fossil fuels to non-carbon producing renewable energy-- we are dealing them a bad and perhaps unrecoverable hand. Making major progress over the next ten years is essential, according to scientists.

Throughout the world, public concern about climate change is growing and it is increasingly becoming a top tier political issue, but this concern is particularly pronounced among younger people.

In the United States, for example, 73% of millennials say they are personally concerned about climate change, according to a poll conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. More than twice as many younger Republicans believe that climate change is caused by human activity than do older Republicans.

This large-scale and well-covered youth protest was especially well-timed as the United Nations Climate Action Summit was held at the United Nations yesterday, highlighting countries and businesses that were stepping up and increasing their commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to re-forest. In predictable fashion, President Trump skipped the Summit continuing his record of abandoning any American global leadership on climate change.

As the Washington Post reported, one of the signs at the New York City Climate Strike event that attracted 250,000 people said, “You know it’s time for change when the children act like leaders and the leaders act like children.”

That is a message we elders must keep front of mind if we like our parents did, are truly committed to leave our children a world better than we found it--and not markedly worse.

Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits, businesses, and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.