Frankie the Dinosaur tells world not to 'choose extinction' in U.N. video urging climate action

[sinkingfeeling]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/10/28/cop26-talking-dinosaur-speech-united-nations/

A recent speaker at the United Nations had a message that has been heard many times: refusing to drastically cut back on fossil fuels could drive humans to extinction. What made the speech unusual was the bearer of the warning: Frankie the Dinosaur.

Days out from the U.N. climate summit, known as COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland, the U.N. Development Program released a video of the computer-generated Frankie calling on the world not to “choose extinction.”

“Going extinct is a bad thing. And driving yourselves extinct? In 70 million years, that is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard,” said Frankie, who is voiced in English by actor and songwriter Jack Black, from the podium of the U.N. General Assembly. “You are headed for a climate disaster and yet every year governments spend hundreds of billions of public funds on fossil fuel subsidies.”

https://m.

[hunter]

1. We could quit fossil fuels in fifteen years if we took the threat seriously.

We have all the technology we need. We don't have to wait for magical solutions.

Humans may not go immediately extinct, but our world civilization may not survive global warming as billions of us suffer and die.

What horrors will finally convince people that fossil fuels are dangerous? The loss of a major city? The collapse of a "first world" nation?

[Eyeball_Kid]

2. Greed. It makes us stupid.

We, as a species, fail to ADAPT to a changing environment because some of us are short-term thinkers who value greed. We are on the path to extinction because we fail to adapt.

I recall a professor in a biology class I took many decades ago, asserting that, from a biological perspective, species express intelligence by their ability to adapt to changing environments. Throughout the billions of years of evolution, the 99% of species that have gone extinct were those who lost the ability to maintain survival in the face of changing environmental impacts on their living conditions. Most of the adaptations that never materialized were due to genetics that couldn't change fast enough for even the slow, by our standards, changes in the environment.

Presently, humans are changing the environment at an extremely rapid rate. This is causing massive extinctions of species all over the planet RIGHT NOW. Those extinctions are largely out of our awareness, but that doesn't make them unreal or imaginary. It's really happening. And the obscene greed of people who have gained riches (from poorly regulated capitalism) prevents us, as a species, from taking bold and needed action.