Tag Archives: Fridays for Future

Breaking News, Climate Solutions, Earth and Ecology, News, Politics

Hundreds of Thousands Take to Streets Worldwide for ‘Uproot the System’ Climate Strikes

Greta Thunberg

Above: Photo Collage / Lynxotic

“The climate crisis has not disappeared,” said Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. “It’s the opposite—it’s even more urgent now than it was before.”

Young people by the hundreds of thousands took to the streets across the globe on Friday to deliver a resounding message to world leaders: The climate crisis is getting worse, and only radical action will be enough to avert catastrophe and secure a just, sustainable future for all.

“As emissions and inequalities increase, we rise up and demand climate justice.”

From Pakistan to Italy to Germany to the Philippines, the worldwide “Uproot the System” actions marked the largest climate demonstrations since the coronavirus pandemic forced campaigners to take their protests online last year. Climate activists in developing countries—where access to vaccines is limited due to artificial supply constraints and hoarding by rich nations—were still forced to limit the size of their demonstrations Friday as a public health precaution.

“Last time it was digital and nobody was paying attention to us,” Yusuf Baluch, a 17-year-old activist from the Pakistani province of Balochistan, told Reuters. “In the global north, people are getting vaccinated so they might be out in huge quantities. But in the global south, we are still limited.”

Above: Photo Collage / Great Thunberg – via Instagram / Lynxotic

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, whose solitary sit-down strike outside her home country’s parliament in 2018 helped spark the global Fridays for Future movement, said that “it has been a very strange year and a half with this pandemic.”

“But of course, the climate crisis has not disappeared. It’s the opposite—it’s even more urgent now than it was before,” said Thunberg, who on Friday joined a large demonstration in Berlin, which was hammered by massive, climate-linked floods in July.

Watch Thunberg’s full speech in front of the Reichstag building:

Organizers said that more than 1400 climate strikes are set to take place in at least 70 countries Friday, with hundreds of thousands expected to attend demonstrations in Germany alone.

“As emissions and inequalities increase, we rise up and demand climate justice,” saidBerlin-based climate activist Luisa Neubauer.

The latest youth-led global action kicked off just weeks ahead of the pivotal COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, which many civil society organizations want to be postponed over fears that inequities in coronavirus vaccine access could prevent delegates from developing nations—those most vulnerable to the climate crisis—from attending.

Equalizing global vaccine distribution is one of the six demands that climate campaigners are aiming to put before world leaders during Friday’s mass demonstrations. The full list is as follows:

  1. The Global North needs to cut emissions drastically by divesting from fossil fuels and ending its extraction, burning, and use. We need concrete plans and detailed annual carbon budgets with roadmaps and milestones to ensure we get to net-zero with justice and equity in the time needed to address climate change.
  2. The colonizers of the north have a climate debt to pay for their disproportionate amount of historic emissions and that starts with the increase of climate finance to implement anti-racist climate reparations, the cancellation of debts especially for damage caused by extreme weather events, and providing adaptation funds that serve the communities.
  3. Work towards a genuinely global recovery from Covid-19 by ensuring equitable vaccine distribution worldwide and suspending intellectual property restrictions on Covid-19 technologies. This is an essential step towards a global, green, and just recovery.
  4. Recognize the tangibility of the climate crisis as a risk to human safety and secure the rights of climate refugees in international law.
  5. Recognize the invaluable impact of biodiversity on indigenous communities’ lives and culture, and commit to make ecocide an international punishable crime.
  6. Stop the violence and criminalization against indigenous peoples, small farmers, small fisherfolk, and other environmental and land defenders. Support the work they do. Respect and listen to our defenders. 

The worldwide demonstrations came a week after the United Nations warned that even if the 191 parties to the Paris Agreement meet their current climate targets, global greenhouse gas emissions will still rise 16% by 2030 compared to 2010 levels. The U.N. also estimated that the planet is on track for 2.7°C of warming by the end of the century, a level of heating that experts say would be cataclysmic—particularly for developing nations.

At the U.N. General Assembly in New York this week, the leaders of vulnerable countries pushed wealthy nations—the largest contributors to the climate emergency—to stop shirking their responsibilities to confront the planetary crisis.

“We simply have no higher ground to cede,” Marshall Islands President David Kabua said Wednesday. “The world simply cannot delay climate ambition any further.”

Participants in Friday’s global action pointedly amplified that message. Valentina Ruas, a Brazilian activist, told The Guardian that “the global north should be developing climate policies that have at their core climate justice and accountability to the most affected people and areas.”

“Instead,” she added, “they continue to exploit vulnerable communities and recklessly extract fossil fuel, while bragging about their insignificant emission reduction plans.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under Creative Commons.

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Climate Solutions, Entertainment

Greta Thunberg is back in Hulu Documentary: rise of Acclaimed Young Climate Activist

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An intimate look inside the life and rise of the remarkable Ms. Thunberg

At the 2019 United Nations Climate Action Summit, a young girl made headlines as she condemned world leaders on destroying the climate and leaving the younger generation to deal with the environmental repercussions. Her heartfelt speech received much attention from fellow activists, celebrities and leaders.  During the UN Climate Action Summit, she said “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic grow – How Dare You!”  

Read More: “Kiss The Ground” Documentary Offers Hopeful Remedy To Climate Change Focusing On Soil Regeneration

The, then 16 year old, soon became the inspired voice for the youth, a next generation’s leader, as she has continued her mission in raising awareness of the global climate emergency. Last year, Time Magazine named her ‘Person of the Year’ and she has also been nominated two years in a row for a Nobel Peace Prize.  Her name, if you already didn’t know, is Greta Thunberg.  

The upcoming “I am Greta” documentary which will stream on the Hulu platform November 13 follows the teenage climate activist during her rise to prominence and how she sparked a global impact with her school strikes and protests.   The doc gives viewers a deeper look and will include never-before-seen-footage, capturing meetings with government leaders, public appearances and global protests. 

The film will also show the young lady behind the scenes and how she lives her daily life, including scenes of being with her family, her process of writing speeches, how she deals with the stress of nonstop travel and her Asperger’s syndrome. The doc also features footage of Greta having to deal with the public scrutiny, from climate-deniers to hangers-on and the toll taken from being the “face of climate change”.   

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The documentary culminates with Greta’s extraordinary two-week journey on a wind-powered sailboat. Her voyage across the Atlantic Ocean starts as she leaves the UK  in order to reach the UN Climate Action Summit in New York City.  Thunberg took to the sea as she no longer flies to any events due to the high carbon emissions caused by air travel.

Nathan Grossman, a Swedish director, told press when asked what he hopes viewers will take away from the film, “Greta and other young people demand a safe future and that leaders listen to the science – instead they are met with empty words from politicians, and ridicule or even death threats from individuals. This is the source of so much of her frustration and I hope viewers will leave with a lot of that frustration as well.”

No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference

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The groundbreaking speeches of Greta Thunberg, the young climate activist who has become the voice of a generation, including her historic address to the United Nations 

In August 2018 a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, decided not to go to school one day in order to protest the climate crisis. Her actions sparked a global movement, inspiring millions of students to go on strike for our planet, forcing governments to listen, and earning her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.

No One Is Too Small to Make A Difference brings you Greta in her own words, for the first time. Collecting her speeches that have made history across the globe, from the United Nations to Capitol Hill and mass street protests, her book is a rallying cry for why we must all wake up and fight to protect the living planet, no matter how powerless we feel. Our future depends upon it.

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Climate Solutions

Earth Day Turns 50: Environmental Activism can Save a World on Fire

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“OUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE” COURTESY OF FRIDAYS FOR FUTURE / FF LOS ANGELES

Celebrating Earth Day’s 50th must mark a New Beginning for the Next 50

April 22nd, 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of the original Earth Day. While Earth Day is not technically a national holiday, many people in power recognize the occasion, and its momentum over the past half-century has evoked real environmental change.

Earth Day was first conceptualized in late 1969, when U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson hired Harvard grad student Denis Hayes to organize the inaugural event for the following spring. At first, the senator and student imagined the day as a nationwide teach-in to celebrate the natural world, educate about the environment, and push for activism.

According to Hayes in a recent New York Times article reflecting on the 1970 event, the first Earth Day “was not an anti-litter campaign… it was talking about fundamental changes in the nature of the American economy.” The occasion drew over 20 million people to rally in city streets across the country.

The event was a serious push for dire political and economic transformation that eventually proved immensely effective. In the months following Earth Day, President Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and progressive amendments were added to the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts. It also launched America’s environmental movement into full throttle.

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Taking Action and Raising Awareness is Still the Most important Focus for Earth Day

Earth Day’s original incarnation occurred during a far from tranquil period in American history. The Vietnam War was at a tumultuous height, civilian protests were ubiquitous, the Civil Rights movement was ongoing, and the Cold War was far from over. Still, with passion and perseverance, the event turned out being a success and managed to evoke positive change in an unlikely time.

Now, fifty years later, America is on the brink of multiple crisis points at once. Politicians and constituents are ideologically polarized, the 2020 presidential election is starting to boil, and most pressingly, the entire world is working to combat and understand COVID-19.

Just like the first Earth Day, ED-2020 comes at a deeply turbulent time.

Climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss as a result of human activity will not stop in the face of the novel coronavirus pandemic. Neither will the political responses to it—Trump, for example, cut fuel efficiency standards right around the same time that the stateside coronavirus shutdowns began.

Simultaneously, Earth Day 2020 has the potential for inspiring a path toward great opportunities.The recent oil crash signifies the possible end for the hegemonic, dangerous and corrupt fossil fuel industry. Meanwhile, a new report from the International Renewable Energy Agency suggests that investing in green energy right now might be the economy’s best chance at recovery from the COVID-19 stock plummets.

The issues may have changed over the past fifty years. The world certainly has. Nevertheless, Earth Day still fights for the same overall goals that it did back in 1970: an environmentally sound and equitable planet for everyone sharing it.

Although social distancing orders may be hindering Earth Day’s regular festivities this year, its supporters still celebrate with virtual activities accessible from home.

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