Global youth protests urge climate action
Fearful of future and angry at inaction, they take to streets
NEWYORK— A wave of climate change protests swept the globe Friday, with hundreds of thousands of young people sending a message to leaders headed for a U.N. summit: The warming world can’t wait for action.
Marches, rallies and demonstrations were held from Canberra to Kabul and Cape Town to New York and German police reported that more than 100,000 turned out in Berlin.
“Global Climate Strike” events ranged from about two dozen activists in Seoul using LED flashlights to send Morse code messages calling for action to rescue the Earth to Australia demonstrations that organizers estimated were the country’s largest protests since the Iraq War began in 2003.
“Basically, our Earth is dying, and if we don’t do something about it, we die,” said A.J. Conermann, 15, a high school sophomore among several thousand who marched to the Capitol building in Washington.
“I want to grow up. I want to have a future,” Conermann added.
In New York, where public schools excused students with parental permission, tens of thousands of mostly young people marched through lower Manhattan.
“Sorry I can’t clean my room, I’m busy saving the world,” one protester’s sign declared.
And in Paris, teenagers and kids as young as 10 traded classrooms for the streets. Marie-Lou Sahai, 15, skipped school because “the only way to make people listen is to protest.”
The demonstrations were partly inspired by the activism of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, who has staged weekly “Fridays for Future” demonstrations for a year, urging world leaders to step up efforts against climate change.
Thunberg is expected to participate in a U.N. Youth Climate Summit on Saturday and speak at the U.N. Climate Action Summit with global leaders on Monday.
The world has warmed about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) since before the Industrial Revolution, and scientists have attributed more than 90% of the increase to emissions of heat-trapping gases from fuel-burning and other human activity.
Scientists have warned that global warming will subject Earth to rising seas and more heat waves, droughts, powerful storms, flooding and other problems, and that some have already started manifesting themselves.
Nations around the world agreed at a 2015 summit in Paris to hold warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) more than pre-industrial-era levels by the end of this century.
But President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the agreement, which he said benefited other nations at the expense of American businesses and taxpayers.
Trump called global warming as a “hoax” before his election. He has since said he’s “not denying climate change” but is not convinced it’s manmade or permanent.
New York protester Pearl Seidman, 13, hoped the demonstration would tell the Trump administration “that if they can’t be adults, we’re going to be adults. Because someone needs to do it.” At least one Trump supporter waved a large “Trump 2020” flag as the demonstrators marched in Manhattan.
On the West Coast, student-led protests drew in some Google and Amazon employees.
Amazon, which ships more than 10 billion items a year, vowed Thursday to cut its use of fossil fuels, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai told the Financial Times in a story published Friday that eliminating the company’s carbon emissions by 2030 didn’t seem “unreasonable.”
Thousands of schoolchildren and their adult supporters demonstrated in London outside the British Parliament. The British government said it endorsed the protesters’ message but didn’t condone skipping school — a stance that didn’t sit well with some protesters.
“If politicians were taking the appropriate action we need and had been taking this action a long time ago when it was recognized the world was changing in a negative way, then I would not have to be skipping school,” said Jessica Ahmed, a 16-year-old London student.
In South America, scores of demonstrators gathered outside the Rio de Janeiro state Legislature in Brazil, where a recent increase in fires in the Amazon region stirred an international outcry.
In Africa, demonstrators rallied in Johannesburg and the South African capital, Pretoria, while some young protesters in Nairobi, Kenya, wore hats and outfits made from plastic bottles to emphasize the dangers of plastic waste, a major threat to cities and oceans.