‘Live simply so others may simply live’
Joe Burlington writes in support of Tradable Energy Quotas
In August last year, a fifteen-year-old girl, Greta Thunberg, decided to sit outside the Swedish parliament rather than go to school. Education has little point, she said, if the politicians continue to ignore climate facts. A few weeks later, she addressed 10,000 people in Helsinki, Finland. ‘Today we use 100 million barrels of oil every day,’ she said. ‘There are no politics to change that… Everything needs to change and it has to start today.’ She has also stimulated demonstrations: an estimated 15,000 left their classrooms in thirty locations across Australia on 30 November; more than 20,000 demonstrated in Switzerland; and 12,500 in Brussels on 18 January. There were many thousands more in Germany, Uganda, South Africa, Nigeria, Finland, the Czech Republic, Italy, the UK, Sweden, the US, Canada, Colombia, the Faroe Islands and Ireland.
