According to this Instagram post from The Newtonite, Newton North students are organizing to participate in this Friday’s Boston Climate Strike. Students will first march to Newton City Hall to hear what Newton is doing on the climate front and how students might get involved. Then they’ll head downtown Boston City Hall, where a rally begins at 11:30.
I’ve yet to hear whether NPS will excuse students who participating in the strike (as NYC public schools recently announced), or whether other Newton schools are also organizing participation. Anyone have more to add?
IMHO, the view that CO2 is a pollutant is the biggest hoax in human history. CO2 is plant food.
In any event, are Newton students planning to head from Newton City Hall downtown to Boston City Hall via motor vehicle(s) powered by fossil fuel?
I’ll be there at City Hall at 8:30am to support the students! They are encouraging the public to join them at City Hall and I hope others will come too.
I’ve asked school committee and it appears to be an unexcused absence as of now.
Wow Jim ! A climate change skeptic in Newton! That’s a rare bird!
@Jim I have heard from the students that they will be walking from City Hall to the Newton Centre T to head into Boston.
Good for the students and I understand the students are welcoming all residents to join them at city hall. Climate change is the biggest threat we have faced in our lifetime and we must act. It is sad it takes students to raise the alarm .
Wow, what a great point: motor vehicles are a major cause of climate change. I’m sure that none of the protesters were aware of this.
Rick, yes, you’re correct (at least insofar as man made with feasible economic or societal means to retard or reverse).
BTW, apparently Barack and Michelle Obama are more than climate change skeptics, so much so, that they recently purchased a $15 million Martha’s Vineyard waterfront estate with 7,000 square foot main house; to say nothing of multi billion dollar developers of the waterfront Boston Seaport District.
Jim,
Would you assert that comprehensive scientific data is fallacious? The global energy infrastructure and human behavior must change. Is this a politically charged issue for you? If so, why, and what’s at stake for you?
While I don’t have a problem with a student deciding to skip school to attend the event, they should absolutely not be given an excused absence. If my child wanted to skip school to rally against (insert any progressive cause here), I’m sure NPS would not give them an excused absence.
I appreciate the sentiment and political expression, but whose opinion does this demonstration want to influence? A bunch of Newton residents staging a climate demonstration in Boston is preaching to the choir.
A teach-in would be better. The students could learn some facts that many “Green” adults don’t know or don’t want to admit: that nuclear power is carbon-free, cleaner, and vastly more safe than fossil fuels; that fracking has REDUCED overall US carbon emissions over the past decade by supplanting dirtier fuels; or that to power the earth with wind turbines, solar cells, and batteries, we would have to mine so many metals that a different environmental disaster would ensue.
Scientists and engineers–not politicians–will get us out of this mess. We had better train more of them.
Rick, yes, you’re correct (at least insofar as man made with feasible economic or societal means to retard or reverse).
BTW, apparently Barack and Michelle Obama are more than climate change skeptics, so much so, that they recently purchased a $15 million Martha’s Vineyard waterfront estate with 7,000 square foot main house; to say nothing of multi billion dollar developers of the waterfront Boston Seaport District.
@Jim The cool thing about the natural sciences is they don’t care what Barrack or Michele Obama do, nor what the developers do!
Alicia, the T’s source of electric power is fossil fuel.
Rick, billions of dollars would not have been spent to build and then invest in Boston’s waterfront Seaport District if what you call “natural sciences” was deemed a real threat.
Rick, apparently the Boston Mayor, City Council and Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) don’t care about what you cite as the ‘natural sciences’ either — fully permitting, actually inviting and promoting, the waterfront Boston Seaport District. It appears when it really counts, Democrat politicians (including President Obama with his new waterfront estate) reveal what they really think about ‘climate change’.
Alicia, the source of the T’s electrical power is fossil fuel.
Skipping school to “protest” climate change sounds like an effective plan.
Wake me up when the kids pledge to avoid air travel, or at a bare minimum sacrifice something more meaningful than plastic straws.
i recently decided to do some research on the CO2 effects of airtravel. It’s definitely giving off more CO2 per mike for short trips, but the amount of carbon used to maintain, plow, resurface roads puts cars on a fairly even footing. They could give up flying for spring break. But then we could all just start taking staycations too.
The global communities wealthiest are the biggest contributors to climate change. What does this say? The US’ public transportation infrastructure needs an overhaul. People don’t want to be inconvenienced, make sacrifices, changes, or alter their lifestyle. The go-to is to break these issues down on political party lines. Maybe it’s time that we just look at the issue for what it is. Politics need to be put aside for the sake of the planet.
Getting rid of CO2 in the atmosphere and the oceans is no easy task. If we were to just, on a global scale, stop using carbon emitting fuel, climate wouldn’t revert back to what it was 20-50 years ago, it’d just stay at what it is now.
Yeah, Plants, Algae, Plankton, etc may consume CO2 and reduce the quantity in the atmosphere/dissolved in the ocean (ocean acidification is another main higher atmospheric CO2 related issue), but when those plants die, they decompose and put it right into the atmosphere.
The more plants exist, the more they shed leaves, which then dry out, and thus create risk for forest fires, which forces you to do controlled burns of forests to prevent larger scale damage and promote growth on the forest floor.
The massive amounts of CO2 humanity has put into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels can’t be gotten rid of by natural processes unless we’re willing to wait a couple tens of millions of years for it to compress back into fossil fuels and get hidden under the earth’s crust.
The only real way to get that sheer quantity of CO2 out of the atmosphere is to build machines to compress it into blocks and utilize them for some purpose or just stack em up somewhere.
Also most renewable energy pose significant disadvantages that make them unviable on a large scale, such as Wind being reliant on weather conditions and location, Solar requiring large battery bank facilities and specific conditions to work ideally, and Hydro requiring ecosystems to be destroyed and entire cities relocated to build large reservoirs and dams.
I’d say the best course of action would be:
– rely very heavily on nuclear for the next 50 years or so as it generates very little waste and lots of power without all the debilitating drawbacks of renewable energy
– during that time, just pump a ton of money into researching new methods of generating renewable energy and improving on what we already have to make it more viable (more durable and low friction turbines, room temperature superconductors for massively improved efficiency for all electronics, especially electricity transportation, fusion generators, etc)
– make it mandatory for UN nations to contribute money towards an improved version of China’s belt and road initiative (infrastructure projects in poor nations). This improvement on transportation, education, health standards, and waste management in poor nations around Africa, India, the Middle East, and SEA, would cut out most of the sources of mass pollution and garbage dumping on a global scale, as well as on-board more nations with the global cleanup initiatives by giving them the infrastructure necessary to comply
– Use excess energy to run machines that compress existing atmospheric CO2 into a solid form without the need of waiting millions of years for plants to absorb it and then plant matter to get buried underground and form into oil and coal. This would also allow nations worldwide to not need as much forest life to manage CO2 levels in the atmosphere, thus deforestation would not affect global climate change because you could just construct more machines that take CO2 out of the atmosphere and turn it into carbon fiber megastructures like artificial islands and massive ultradurable buildings.
Jason, for humans truly to have a significant impact on global warming (if it does exist) would entail essentially shutting down modern civilization along with demands of the developing world (wind and solar alone cannot come close to replacing fossil fuel) — with one exception, which global warming subscribers ironically reject, nuclear power (which today’s generation of nuclear power is essentially fail safe and consumes its own waste).
Jim, I think they’re idiots. If I were a hedge fund player, I would make a long term short bet on Boston real estate.
Hmmm, maybe I will, I’ll have ask my investment advisor.
Jim,
How is global warming is a ruse? Is science partial to democrats? If so, how, why, and where? Climate deniers don’t want their lifestyles infringed upon, or to have ways of making money eliminated. I hate to belabor the point, but money is the central issue. Money is tied to fossil fuels in an omnipresent fashion. Fossil fuels are tied into everything humans do. Humans are incredibly intelligent, capable, and innovative. So are humans at the mercy of a self-created circumstance? This challenge won’t change overnight. There is a multitude of ways that people can engage in preventive based behavior. Americans are apt to TREAT but have an aversion to engaging in PREVENTION. I know very little about nuclear energy. However, defunct uranium rods are radioactive for 10,000 years.
@Rick Frank: if you want to bet that the Seaport will be flooded out of existence by rising seas, there are plenty of Dutch civil engineers who will take the opposite side of that bet. I believe in rising CO2 and sea levels; I also believe in our ability to deal with them.
@Michael Singer I have no double that the levies and berms can be built- although New Orleans kind of shows that our own army Corp of engineers seemed to be lacking. But it’s the private profits/ public bail outs ( pun intended) that bother me. Who’s gonna pay for it?
@jason I agree- but we have to do both, because with all that we can do we have China and India still getting people out of poverty. So we have to cut back ( take the train to Disney world?) AND we have to start building sea walls, pumps, and not allowing incentives for development in areas that will be flooded often in 39 years. Like Boston.
No doubt! Geesh when is auto correkt going to be smart.
The students have every right to participate in the Boston Climate Strike. We are leaving them a frightful legacy with climate change and concomitant threats to the environment and we’ve squandered decades knowing what we should have been doing, but failing to follow through. Much of what we’re now experiencing was all so unnecessary.
Since 1986 I’ve been aware of the broad outlines of this unfolding tragedy. Many others were aware as well. I was working at EPA in Washington on air related trends reports and documents where a lot of data, information and formal studies flowed into my office. I was the guy they called on to write the first draft of many of these documents and public information pieces. A friend at the Energy Department told me I should include a section describing “climate change” and he offered to send me a lot of preliminary research from government, the academic world and private sector. This was the first time I had even heard of it. I devoured everything he sent and spent several hours on the phone talking with the sources that produced many of these products. I found them to be credible and concerned. It took more than a year to clear anything through EPA, but I finally got a segment into one of our major public information products. There was much that was speculative or not fully understood, but we were still able to describe the likelihood of rising sea levels, floods and drought, the primacy of protecting the Amazon Rain Forests, adverse impacts on species and habitats, the need for international action and a growing consensus within the scientific community that a “tipping point” could occur somewhere down the road where things could accelerate and get out of hand. I still have a copy of this old publication in my desk.
I had heard about the “Greenhouse effect” from reading Isaac Asimov’s non-fiction books in the 70s.
It was still in its early stages back then.
https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/why-is-it-called-the-greenhouse-effect
The ideas have been percolating for a long time. We now have further evidence of its effects, and we need to take action. But that action also has to including mitigation, for, I believe we are too late and “we” (meaning the US) even if we did take a U-Turn cannot alone offset what so-called developing countries are doing.
We need to reduce our carbon output
We need to plan for rising sea levels.
We need to chew gum and walk at the same time on this.
On the topic of over development in the flood zones of Boston, I heard from my tennis buddy Shri that Illumina (a biotech company) is opening an office in the Seaport and hiring 200 engineers.
I guess it’s our job to build them housing (?)
I’m surprised by the many negative comments about the students, especially since I would guess those commenting don’t personally know the students or their choices about their way of life, and also given the whining that has gone on from adults about giving up gas leaf blowers and the seemingly insatiable appetite for McMansions in this City. Let’s let the kids lead for once without slinging mud at them.