Thousands of people around the world joined a global climate change protest yesterday, with pupils walking out of schools and workers downing tools to demand action.  The British demonstrators numbered about 100,000.

The British Education Secretary Gavin Williamson predictably said “every child” should be in school.   “They should be learning, they shouldn’t be bunking off and it’s very irresponsible for people to encourage children to do so.”

One demonstrator is quoted as saying, “School is important but so is my future. If politicians were taking the appropriate action we need – and had been taking this action a long time ago when it was recognised the world was changing in a negative way – then I would not have to be skipping school.”

Another said,  “If we’re going to sustain this planet we need to get to net zero emissions a lot, lot quicker than 2050 [the government’s target].”. Unbelievably, yet another is quoted as saying that her employer declined to give her time off work to join demonstrators “because they didn’t think it was important”, (a lack of imagination to day the least).

I personally will never see the full effect of climate change, but it should be an Epicurean imperative  to protect the planet and the lives of all our young people, (my own grandchildren included). For a start every country, including the United States,  should be signed  up to the Paris Agreement, which commits signatory nations to keeping global temperatures “well below” 2.0C (3.6F) above pre-industrial time.  It seems to me incredible that, with all the dire weather events we have been having, there are still climate change deniers out there at all. I realise there are deeply entrenched special interests, but even oil company employees must read the news and feel uncomfortable about their company money going to politicians as  a sort of protection racket.  We should support, not criticize the children.  A day missing school is nothing in comparison to mass migration, homelessness, insecure food supplies, foreseeable violence and misery.

( The quotations come from a BBC report on the demonstrations)

When Cordelia Mellon Scaife was born in 1928 she was the world’s “richest baby”. Her grand-uncle, the industrialist-turned-U.S. treasury secretary Andrew Mellon, spent his lifetime squeezing workers and fighting to cut rich people’s taxes. But Mellon’s impact on American life didn’t end with his 1937 death. His heir Richard Mellon Scaife — Cordelia’s brother — spent his inheritance bankrolling the right-wing organizations that funded the Reagan pushback against the New Deal.

Cordelia, the New York Times revealed last month, made an equally destructive impact. She quietly became the nation’s single largest donor to anti-immigrant ideologues, bankrolling the. founding and operation of the nation’s three largest anti-migrant groups.” Her life’s goal: keep the United States from “being invaded on all fronts” by immigrants who “breed like hamsters.” Before her 2005 death, Cordelia Mellon Scaife May exhorted her foundation’s board “to exercise the courage of their convictions” once she departed. Thanks to the Mellon dynastic fortune, that foundation now holds assets worth half a billion, and continues to oppose immigration, particularly from Latin America. And this  in a country built by immigrants for immigrants.

One could argue that Epicurus had nothing against people being successful and making money, but he would expect them to do good with it, as well as living comfortably; that is, help those poorer  than were and pay a rate of taxation that underpinned a fair and thriving community.  He would also expect them to be decent and caring employers.  The current capitalist system is based on the idea that if a person is born poor he or she can, with hard work and a good idea, become rich.  This is true of a tiny fraction of the population, and the odds against it are growing, unremarked, year by year.  One day Americans will realise that the system is loaded against them.  How long will it then last?