The Children Striking For Climate Change
Walkouts held in towns and cities across Britain in protest at environmental crisis. School students in London said the media had to share some of the blame for the global failure to tackle climate change. “Climate change is a big problem that is being ignored by mainstream media. The MPs in parliament are not doing much. There will be rising sea levels, no more Antarctica, the climate will be destroyed. Loads of terrible things.”
Children across the UK have gone on strike from school as part of global protests over climate change. Organisers, Youth Strike 4 Climate, say strikes are taking place in 60 towns and cities across the country, from Cornwall to the Scottish Highlands, in the face of “an alarming lack of government leadership” on climate change.
At the London arm of the protest in Parliament Square this morning, several thousand children and young adults vented their frustration about the lack of climate action and voiced their fears for the future. Worries are stoked by politicians not doing nearly enough, while offering just token gestures. “The ice caps are going to be a huge disaster if they fully melt. It’s my future, I feel like I should be protesting for it.”
Prime minister Theresa May Responds
Prime minister Theresa May has released a statement criticising the protests saying, “Disruption increases teachers’ workloads and wastes lesson time that teachers have carefully prepared for.” The prime minister might also have disagreed with one of the protest signs featuring a grotesque caricature of her face with the slogan, “Soon there won’t BE a field to run through” – a reference to her answer to an interview question during the 2017 general election.
While opposition MPs including Carline Lucas from the Green Party have expressed support for the demonstrations.
This attitude is exactly why young people are on #schoolstrike4climate.
Teachers work hard to prepare children for their futures – but right now those futures are at real risk.
If the possibility of the end of life on Earth isn’t a good enough reason to miss lessons, what is? https://t.co/4lNZwYmN7u
— Caroline Lucas (@CarolineLucas) February 15, 2019
Students in the UK are demanding the government declares a climate emergency and takes active steps to tackle the problem, communicates the severity of the ecological crisis to the public and reforms the curriculum to make it an educational priority.
“We’re here because we don’t think enough is being done to prevent climate change,”
The strikes come in the wake of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which warned that the impacts of climate change could become increasingly severe unless global temperature rises were limited to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. The report called for cutting global carbon dioxide emissions by almost half within 12 years. One young protestor in London was an 8-year-old boy with his mother. He carried a banner saying: “Be cool, be green, not a dinosaur.”
