Greta Thunberg and other climate activists attend a protest in Berlin on March 29, 2019.
The Extinction Rebellion, which is the umbrella term for Britain's most recent large-scale climate-change protests, is said to have disrupted the travel of over 500,000 people, as well as
cost London businesses £12-million per day. Before that, the Youth for Climate strikes, ignited by Swedish teenager Greta Thurnberg and tacitly supported by the U.K. Government,
pulled north of 1.4-million students into the streets on a school day. Given the magnitude of these protests, one might hope that the protestors understood what they were protesting. Regrettably, this isn't the case.
Global-warming research is a hugely complex field, and it's unlikely that any ordinary person -let alone a minor- would have any real grasp of it. Nor would they be able to appreciate the uncertainty that characterizes our understanding of how today's human activity will affect the future state of the earth's climate.
As a teenager, I fully understand the mindset of young people. We're predisposed to leap before we look. This is borne out by neuroscience. Our prefrontal cortices, which regulate (among other things) decision-making, planning, self-awareness and inhibition, do not fully develop until we are in our mid-20s. Until then, we have difficulty analyzing the long-term consequences of our actions. The upshot is that many young people tend toward reckless behaviour.
Our decisions tend to be rooted not in scientific analysis but in emotional reaction; and we tend to see protest not as a tool for social or legislative change, but simply as a chance to upset the status quo. This is especially true of the Youth for Climate movement, which first took inspiration from Thunberg,
a student who is now 16 years old.
The low level of sophistication on display at such gatherings is such that many participants seemingly would be fine with laws that banned flying, driving, gas boilers or even cows.
Comment: See also: