Youth Climate Activists Call for a Halt to Fossil Fuel Investment – Right Now

Greta Thunberg and twenty other youth climate activists have issued a letter in which they “demand” (their word) that, at the World Economic Forum meeting scheduled for later this month in Davos, Switzerland,

“all companies, banks, institutions and governments immediately halt all investments in fossil fuel exploration and extraction, immediately end all fossil fuel subsidies and immediately and completely divest from fossil fuels.”

And they want these things done “right now” (their emphasis).¹

While they go on to say that they understand “that the world is complicated and that what [they] are asking for may not be easy”, they don’t seem to care.  The climate crisis “is an emergency”, and it seems like nothing else matters.

Instead of investing in the fossil fuel economy, they call on the world’s leaders to invest in “existing sustainable technologies, research and in restoring nature.”  What they don’t tell us, however, is how we are to bridge the gap between the energy we give up when we stop investing in fossil fuels and when the energy from sustainable technologies, etc., comes on line.

Maybe the theory is the new energy from sustainable technologies will be there before the energy from fossil fuels leaves.  But if the new energy isn’t there, there is going to be a problem.  What if we don’t have enough energy to grow the food the world needs and to get it to people to eat?  What if we don’t have the energy to heat people’s homes or to enable them to get to work?  What about producing medicines?  And, perhaps, mostly, what about people whose parents may not be as rich as those of the youth climate activists signing this letter?  It seems to be pretty much tough luck on those parents’ hopes for a better life for their kids.

I realize the youth climate activists will say that, without doing everything and doing it right now, there won’t be a future for anybody’s children.  That is easy to say and I do not doubt that they believe it.  But the world is more complicated than that.  And demands like this are mostly an example of the old saying that nothing is impossible – if you don’t have to do it yourself.  Or, I would add, have to feel the consequences of the sacrifices you are asking other people to make.
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¹ I completely agree that we should stop subsidies for fossil fuels.  But then I would like to get rid of as many governmental subsidies as possible – for as many things as possible.