"Think we should be at school? Today’s climate strike is the biggest lesson of all", 15 Mar 2019

Strikes started in front of the Swedish parliament, on 20 August – a regular school day. Greta Thunberg sat with her painted sign and some homemade flyers. This was the first school climate strike. Fridays wouldn’t be regular schooldays any longer. The rest of us, and many more alongside us, picked it up in Australia, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, New Zealand, Uganda. Today the climate strike will take place all around the world. This movement had to happen, we didn’t have a choice. We knew there was a climate crisis... These strikes are happening today...because politicians have failed us. We’ve seen years of negotiations, pathetic deals on climate change, fossil fuel companies being given free rein to carve open our lands, drill beneath our soils and burn away our futures for their profit. We’ve seen fracking, deep sea drilling and coalmining continue... Last year’s UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report on global warming could not have been clearer about the extreme dangers of going beyond 1.5C of global warming.... Scientists have also shown us that burning fossil fuels is “the world’s most significant threat to children’s health”... [T]he worst effects of climate change are disproportionately felt by our most vulnerable communities...