On March 15, the Climate Kids Are Coming
A massive, international, youth-led mobilization will demand action on the climate crisis.
By Mark Hertsgaard
Today 6:00 am
Beware the Ides of March, all you climate wreckers out there. The Climate Kids are coming, in massive and growing numbers, and they are not in the mood to negotiate. They know that you—whether you’re a fossil-fuel executive, a politician who takes fossil-fuel money, or a Fox News hack who recycles fossil-fuel lies—have put their future in grave danger, and they are rising up to take it back.
On March 15, tens of thousands of high-school and middle-school students in more than 30 countries plan to skip school to demand that politicians treat the global climate crisis as the emergency it is. Shakespeare made the Ides of March famous with his soothsayer’s warning in Julius Caesar, but ancient Romans actually saw it as a day for settling debts. What bigger debt is there than the theft of a livable future? At the March 15 School Strike 4 Climate, young people will call in that debt and, in the United States at least, demand real solutions in the form of the Green New Deal championed by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
If you don’t know who Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg is yet, you can think of her as Ocasio-Cortez’s international climate-change counterpart. Like the rock-star progressive representative from New York, Thunberg is a charismatic young woman whose social-media savvy, moral clarity, and undaunted truth-telling have inspired throngs of admirers to take to the streets for a better world and call out the politicians, propagandists, and CEOs who are standing in the way.
Just as the 29-year-old Ocasio-Cortez torched the right-wing trolls who laughably derided her as “stupid” after she introduced, with Senator Ed Markey, the congressional resolution to create a Green New Deal, so Thunberg, 16, has gained prominence partly from her blistering callouts of global elites. After riding the train for 32 hours to Davos, Switzerland, in January—for the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering to which many billionaires and heads of state arrive in private jets—Thunberg told a panel (which included Gary Cohn, President Trump’s former chief economic adviser) that “some people, some companies, some decision-makers in particular have known exactly what priceless values they have been sacrificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money.” A pause, and then a final thrust of the knife: “I think many of you here today belong to that group of people.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/greta-thunberg-climate-change-strike/
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