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World Sees ‘Largest Environmental Protest in History’ for Climate Action

The protests, which are being called ‘Fridays for future’, saw adults being led by school children.

New Delhi: With world leaders due to meet in New York and table their plans of action for minimising climate change, a global strike led by the youth is taking place across the world. The protests, which include 5,200 events in 156 countries are led by a range of organisations like 350.org, Fridays for future, Extinction rebellion and Earth Day Network.

The protests began in the east, which rises before the rest of the world. In Australia, over three lakh people took to the streets across cities. This has been described as Australia’s largest mobilisation since the protests in 2003 against the Iraq war.

Pacific island nations like the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu also participated in the strike. A recent leaked UN report has once again driven home the threat that small islands face due to rising sea levels as a result of human-induced climate change. According to the leaked report, by 2050 small islands and low-lying nations are going to suffer due to ‘extreme sea-level events’ every year.

The protests, which are being called ‘Fridays for future’, for the first time included adults being led by school children. The movement took off after Greta Thunberg, the then 15-year-old Swedish girl, went on a strike all by herself every Friday outside the Swedish parliament in August last year.

Also read: ‘We Are Striking to Disrupt the System’: In Conversation with Climate Activist Greta Thunberg

Subsequently, school students across the world followed her lead and began protests which involved skipping school and protesting at a public place in their city or town (it largely remains an urban phenomenon). The Friday protests reached a crescendo in March when an estimated 1.4 million students in 123 countries missed school to protest and demand that governments across the world take stronger measures to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Photo: The Wire

Since she took the lead last year, Thunberg has become the face and energy behind the movement. “Greta has become almost a synecdoche for the global climate movement: its mascot, its theorist, its revolutionary, and a representative “victim” of generational malice,” the journalist David Wallace-Wells wrote in a recent piece about her in the Intelligencer.

She has spoken at events around the world populated by world leaders, the wealthy and the wise. In December last year, she addressed the UN Climate Conference (COP 24) in Katowice, Poland, urging world leaders present to act and accusing them of ‘stealing their kids’ future’. Subsequently, she spoke at the World Economic Forum at Davos, addressed the European Economic Conference and the US Congress, where she asked the members not to listen to her but to scientists and submitted a copy of the UN SR 15 report as her testimony.

The report was released in October last year and has been referred to as the ‘doomsday’ report. It has warned of dire consequences even if the commitments made by nations under the Paris agreement are met. Under the 2015 agreement, 195 nations agreed to cut emissions in order to restrict global temperature rise ‘well below’ two degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels and ‘pursue efforts’ to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degree Celsius.

The SR 15 report warned that the 2-degree target would be insufficient to avert climate catastrophe. It said that the world is already at one degree of warming and the climate impacts would be exponentially more between a 1.5 degree warmer world as compared to a two-degree warmer world. Several hundred million more people would be vulnerable to ‘climate-related risks and susceptible to poverty’ and ten million more people would face permanent inundation due to the rise in sea-level.

The report also said that the pace at which emissions are required to be cut, in order to avert large scale climate change impacts, need ‘unprecedented changes’. It warned that the window to act in order to keep the world below a temperature rise of 1.5 degree Celsius above pre industrial levels is fast closing. According to the report, the world has until 2030 to cut emissions by 45%, instead of the 20% that the 2 degree pathway requires.

Photo: The Wire

The SR 15 report and the rise of the school students’ movement has coincided to bring forth an unprecedented focus on the climate crisis that the world is heading towards. The movement has gathered strength and has led to some tangible changes.

In February this year, the European Commission committed to spending 25% of its budget on climate change mitigation between 2021 and 2027. Democratic candidature hopefuls for the US Presidential elections of 2020 are debating policies for climate change mitigation. In June, the UK vowed to bring its greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2050.

Today’s protest was organised with a firm eye on the UN Climate Action Summit scheduled to take place next week in New York. The UN secretary-general has called upon world leaders to focus on action. “Don’t bring a speech—bring a plan,” he said earlier this week.

Also read: Climate Change Poses Serious Threats to India’s Food Security

World leaders are expected to take to the podium and improve upon the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which they had announced after the Paris agreement and which detail each nation’s efforts to curb national emissions.

According to estimates, New York alone would see 1.1 million school students hit the streets. The organisers are upbeat that by the end of Friday, in all parts of the world, the number of protestors would be far greater than the number who had joined in March. The mobilisation is being called by some the ‘largest environmental protest in history’.

The protest was also observed in 70 cities and towns across India including tier 2 and 3 cities like Indore, Tehri, Ludhiana and Meerut apart from the larger metropolitan centres of Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Delhi.

Photo: The Wire

In Delhi, over a hundred school children aided by their parents and several others gathered outside the Ministry of Urban Affairs and Housing demanding action against emissions emanating from cities in particular. With Delhi being one of the most polluted cities in the world, air pollution was a significant focus for the protestors who demanded that more trees be planted, polluting vehicles be banned and polluting industries be closed.

Also read: Interview | ‘We’re Finally Talking About Solutions on the Scale of the Crisis We Face’: Naomi Klein

The protestors will continue through the week and the protestors will pick up different environmental issues – including felling of trees, interlinking of rivers, use of plastic – every day. The week of protest will culminate on September 27 when the protestors will march to the Prime Minister’s office to urge him to declare a ‘climate emergency’.

“And we will be back on the streets every Friday,” said 17-year-old Geetika Sharma in Central Delhi holding a banner which read, ‘Satyagraha for future generations.’ “If 16-year-old Greta can do it, so can we,” she said.

UN Secretary General Urges Public Pressure to Address the Climate ‘Emergency’

“Nature is angry,” but a Green New Deal can help, says António Guterres.

The United Nations secretary general says that he is counting on public pressure to compel governments to take much stronger action against what he calls the climate change “emergency.”

“Governments always follow public opinion, everywhere in the world, sooner or later,” António Guterres said Tuesday in an interview with Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets. Guterres, a former prime minister of Portugal, added, “We need to keep telling the truth to people and be confident that the political system, especially democratic political systems, will in the end deliver.”

Guterres refused to comment on US President Donald Trump and the Trump administration’s hostility to climate action, but a CBS News poll released on September 15 found that 69 percent of Americans want the next president to take action, while 53 percent say such action is needed “right now.” Guterres said that “it would be much better” if the United States was “strongly committed to climate action,” just as it would be better if Asian countries (notably, China and Japan) stopped exporting coal plants. Until then, he said, “what I want is to have the whole society putting pressure on governments to understand they need to run faster. Because we are losing the race.”

Also Read: ‘We Are Striking to Disrupt the System’: In Conversation with Climate Activist Greta Thunberg

With six days remaining before the UN Climate Action Summit on September 23, the secretary general cited the “fantastic leadership” of young activists as a leading example of how civil society can pressure governments to honor the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius and preferably to 1.5˚C. Recent election results across Europe—in which green parties gained significant public backing—also left Guterres optimistic that at next Monday’s summit the European Union will announce that it promises to be “carbon neutral” by 2050, as the Paris Agreement mandates.

‘Nature is angry’

“Nature is angry,” said Guterres, who recently returned from a visit to the Bahamas, where Hurricane Dorian unleashed what he called “total destruction.” He further cited a ferocious drought in Africa, melting glaciers, bleaching coral reefs, the hottest month in recorded history last July, and a potential future sea-level rise of 10 to 20 meters (33 to 66 feet) as evidence that “you cannot play games with nature. Nature strikes back.”

“Don’t bring a speech—bring a plan,” Guterres famously told heads of state in the months leading up to this summit, and it appears that only leaders who followed his instructions will be allowed to speak at the plenary session. To gain a slot, a country had to commit to doing one of three things, said UN officials: be carbon neutral by 2050; “significantly” increase how much it will cut emissions (or, in UN jargon, significantly strengthen its Nationally Determined Contribution); or make a “meaningful” pledge to the Green Climate Fund, a pool of money provided by wealthy countries to help developing countries leave fossil fuels behind and increase their resilience against climate disruption. UN officials expect that 60 to 70 countries will have made sufficiently solid commitments by next Monday that their leaders will be invited to outline their country’s plans from the dais, with each leader granted a mere three minutes to speak.

While emphasising that he had no desire to intervene in the 2020 US presidential election, Guterres spoke positively about a proposal by a leading Democratic candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders, for a Green New Deal that would be global. Most of the leading Democratic presidential candidates endorse one form or another of the Green New Deal, a program in which the US government would create millions of jobs by investing in solar power, energy efficiency, and other measures to reduce heat-trapping emissions. But a new report by The Nation pointed out that only Sanders’s Green New Deal meets the scientific imperative of cutting global emissions by 45 percent by 2030 on the way to carbon neutrality by 2050. Sanders’s Green New Deal does this by pledging not only to slash emissions in the United States but to help developing countries cut their emissions as well.

Democratic US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Photo: Reuters/David Ryder

On the Paris Agreement

“The Paris Agreement was very clear,” said Guterres. “There was a commitment by the developed countries to mobilise $100 billion per year, from private and public sources, to support the developing world both in mitigation [i.e., reducing emissions] and adaptation [preparing against impacts]. Obviously, it is essential that all countries, including the United States, play a role in relation to this.”

Rich and poor countries have wrestled with the question of whether and how much financial assistance the rich should give the poor ever since governments first began debating the climate problem at the UN “Earth Summit” in 1992. The poorer countries argue that the rich countries’ emissions are the foremost cause of global warming and climate disruption, while poor countries are the ones that suffer most from that disruption. Rich countries generally do not dispute those facts and have paid lip service to providing assistance, but actual contributions have been modest. The United States, for example, has contributed only $1 billion, and the Trump administration blocked any additional contributions.

Also Read: Five Climate Change Science Misconceptions – Debunked

Guterres said in the interview Tuesday that “of course” he was aware of the global dimensions of Sanders’s Green New Deal, and he added, “Any attitude from a country like United States to increase…finance to the developing world would be of course welcome.” As required by UN protocol, the secretary general was careful to add, “That doesn’t mean that we want to interfere in the American election.”

As a former elected official himself, Guterres also emphasised the need for governments to show the public that climate protection need not mean economic hardship. The secretary general advocates in particular for climate-smart tax reform: reducing taxes on people’s incomes while increasing taxes on heat-trapping emissions. “If I [as a politician] take money from you with an increased carbon tax but I give you nothing in return, people will be against [it],” said Guterres. Although rarely described this way, corporate subsidies for the production of fossil fuels are also a form of tax. “Let’s be clear: Subsidies are paid with taxpayers’ money,” he said, adding with a smile, “I really do not like to see my money as a taxpayer going to bleach corals and melt glaciers.”

Guterres disputed a common criticism of a Green New Deal—that it will cost too much—by turning the question around. “What is the cost of the consequences of taking no action?” he asked. Depending on what governments do at the Climate Action Summit next Monday, and are pressured to do by civil society in the weeks and years to come, the world may learn the answer to that question soon enough.

This story originally appeared in The Nation. It is republished here as part of The Wire‘s partnership with Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.