Young people hindered on climate change issue
I admire the kids who are trying to make their voices heard on climate change (15 February). I would love to see them produce change. Sadly, the dice are weighted against them.
The major thing the kids have stacked against them is the power that comes from vast quantities of money. The major business organisations and the very rich really don’t want to have anything disturb the capitalist status quo. It is claimed that we don’t have bribery and corruption in western society but I struggle to see how “contributions” to political war chests have any other purpose than ensuring that the payers get heard. It’s effectively a big business protection racket.
Go, Guardian, for publicising this David and Goliath battle!
Keith Edwards
Omokoroa, New Zealand
• Your article on student protests offers yet another excuse for skipping school. It further shows the power of propaganda, in that schoolchildren, ignorant about the machinations of politics at the best of times, miraculously find themselves cognisant of this most difficult of topics: climate change.
In your story there was also a passing slight at the current powerbrokers for failing to safeguard the new generation’s world. But the present institutions are run by the greener-than-green hippie generation, who are now billionaire hedge-fund entrepreneurs, bankers, lawyers, organised crime kingpins and politicians.
So the school pupils have nothing to fear, as they too will join the ranks of the objects of their fury.
Sam Nejad
Geraldton, Western Australia
We must deepen our understanding of nature
It is shocking that the “precipitous” decline of insects should be treated as news (15 February) and that we have only now had “the first global scientific review”. It beggars belief that this story emerged because one person happened to revisit a tropical habitat he had worked in 40 years ago. It is a tragedy that we know more about outer space than we do of Earth.
We not only need to divert investment from the military into sustainable development, but we also need to build a global observatory to deepen our understanding of the way human and natural systems interact. This is not a scientific challenge, but rather a political one. To deny access to this knowledge is to connive at the destruction of the future.
Neil Blackshaw
Barbizon, France
Private sponsorship of refugees is happening
One of your letter writers (Why don’t we let citizens sponsor refugees? Reply, 15 February) may be interested to know that Canada has been allowing private sponsorship of refugees since the Vietnamese boat people crisis. At this point, close to half of all refugees to Canada are privately sponsored. Research suggests that privately sponsored refugees are more likely to be successfully integrated than their government-sponsored counterparts.
Private sponsorship is one of the reasons Canadians seem more inclined to accept refugees than many countries. It is a model that should be adopted by any right-thinking country.
Jane McCall
Delta, BC, Canada
Shock of hard Brexit is something to avoid
Nesrine Malik hits the nail on the head in her article Britain needs a day of reckoning (22 February), though I find it hard to accept her conclusion that this entails the shock of Brexit at any cost.
Britain has long suffered from the delusion that “we won two world wars, now we deserve the fruits of those victories”. If this is the long-awaited wake-up call, faced with the question “can we go it alone?” then it is a waking nightmare: no nation, not even the giants America and China, can go it alone for very long in the global arena. The web of trade, politics, migration and climate change requires cooperation at every level, even to maintain the status quo, let alone bring about the changes necessary for our survival.
Sadly, Britain lacks a leader with the courage to grasp the nettle.
Noel Bird
Boreen Point, Queensland, Australia
Where do these people garage their cars?
The article The High Line, on skinny super-tall skyscrapers in New York (15 February), was fascinating. Where do the occupants garage their cars, and where do they put solar panels if they want them?
Peter Hornsby
Mitcham, South Australia
