“However good the methods of analysis one has at any given time They're not going to be perfect. And so one needs to keep some humility and keep an open mind and keep on learning and not assume that you're on top of things. So, one lesson I would draw for education is we really do need to teach people to think critically and not just try to pump them full of the beliefs that we think are right.

People like Greta Thunberg, that's what gives me the most hope is that there is one segment of society, namely the youngest people, who are fired up and who do see the problem and do want to do something about it. I think it's really accurate to say that the battle to get a grip on climate change is also the battle for democracy. Our politics are now heavily influenced if not literally controlled by vested interests. And these include fossil fuel interests. So the Clear evidence of this is that the richest governments in the world are subsidizing the extraction of fossil fuels.

I mean, the United States and the UK have tax breaks and other subsidies for fossil fuel. So that's a climate problem, but it's also a democratic problem because it means that the politics are not being run for the benefit of the general public. They're being run for the benefit of some relatively small numbers of vested interests. So we need things like youth movements on climate change for the sake of the climate and for the sake of getting our politics back under democratic control.”

Henry Shue is Professor Emeritus of Politics and International Relations at University of Oxford’s Merton College. He's the author of Basic Rights, as well as The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now, among many other publications. In 1976, he co-founded the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland. He was a supporter of the successful campaign by Virginia's Augusta County Alliance to stop the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, and now works primarily on explanations for the urgency of far more ambitious policies to eliminate fossil fuels in order to avoid irreversible damage for future generations.

www.merton.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-henry-shue
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691202280/basic-rights
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691226248/the-pivotal-generation

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