Thousands of Young People Thronged Australian Streets to Protest Climate Inaction
In Australia, recently more than 300,000 children came out of their classrooms with parents and supporters as they rallied against climate inaction, demanding politicians and businesses take immediate and drastic steps to stop global warming.
Thousands of teenage students from across Asia and the Pacific have started, what is going to be the world’s largest climate protest in history, demanding adults to act now to stop the environmental disaster. Children from Sydney to Seoul, Manila to Mumbai, agreed to the rallying cry of fellow teen activist Greta Thunberg and shut their textbooks in a collective call to action.
In Australia, recently more than 300,000 children came out of their classrooms with parents and supporters as they rallied against climate inaction, demanding politicians and businesses take immediate and drastic steps to stop global warming.
The numbers of protesting students are gradually growing since its first strike in last May, which culminated in New York, where 1.1 million students from around 1,800 public schools have been permitted to skip school to protest climate inaction.
During the recent strike in Australia, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg who has now become a symbol of generational tensions over management of the planet, insisted that solutions were being long ignored and called on the kids to take up the responsibility.
She said in her message to supporters, “Everything counts, what you do counts”.
There was a similar sense of defiance across Asia, 12-year-old Lilly Satidtanasarn, who is also known as Thailand’s Greta, for her campaigning against plastic bags in malls said, “We are the future and we deserve better. The adults have just been talking about it, but they are not doing anything. We don’t want excuses”.
In India also the school children rallied in New Delhi and Mumbai and called for positive action.
In Australia, as the protest started, some local authorities, schools and business encouraged children and people to take part in the protest strikes, while some have warned that absences must have to be explained. But most of the Australian students remain undeterred.
16-year-old Will Connor said, “We are here to send a message to people in power, the politicians, showing them that we care and this is really important to us. Otherwise we are not going to have a future”.
Meanwhile, Australia’s conservative government seems are in denial mode for climate change and therefore has sought to frame the debate as a choice between jobs or abstract CO2 targets.
While, ruling coalition Parliamentarian Craig Kelly has warned the protesting children saying that, “everything you are told is a lie. The facts are, there is no link between climate change and drought, polar bears are increasing in number”.
Australia is one of the world’s largest coal and uranium exporters and therefore has approved large-scale mining, which also brings jobs. This has assured three decades of uninterrupted economic growth of the country. But it has also suffered because of the compounding effects of climate change. In recent years Australia has witnessed historic droughts, devastating floods, intense bushfires and the blanching of the Great Barrier Reef.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is going to host an emergency summit on Monday in which he will appeal the world leaders to raise their commitments, which are made in the 2015 Paris climate accord.