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from the calling-for-compulsary-education-by-skipping-education dept.
Across the world Friday, students skipped class to protest their governments failure to take sufficient measures to curb climate change.
It all started with 16 year old Greta Thunberg of Sweden:
who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year. Since then, the weekly protests have snowballed from a handful of cities to hundreds, fueled by dramatic headlines about the impact of climate change during the students' lifetime.
Thunberg has been nominated for a Nobel peace prize for her efforts.
The protestors are calling for a list of anti-climate change actions and solutions including:
Our Demands
- Green New Deal
- A halt in any and all fossil fuel infrastructure projects
- All decisions made by the government be based on the best-available and most-current scientific research.
- Declaring a National Emergency on Climate Change
- Compulsory comprehensive education on climate change and its impacts throughout grades K-8
- Preserving our public lands and wildlife
- Keeping our water supply clean
Our Solutions
- The extraction of Greenhouse Gases from the atmosphere
- Emission standards and benchmarks
- Changing the agriculture industry
- Using renewable energy and building renewable energy infrastructure
- Stopping the unsustainable and dangerous process of fracking
- Stop mountaintop removal/mining
In a speech Friday outside the United Nations HQ in New York, Alexandria Villasenor, one of the founders of Youth Climate Strike U.S. said:
world leaders weren't listening. "Our world leaders are the ones acting like children," she said. "They are the ones having tantrums, arguing with each other and refusing to take responsibility for their actions while the planet burns."
At one of these planned protests a year or two back, permission forms were sent home in advance so kids could get parental permission to participate in skipping school and protesting. Kids who didn't participate were taunted and harassed by the other kids.
How does your school treat such events?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by looorg on Saturday March 16 2019, @02:26PM (1 child)
This was the COP24 speech. Turns out this is more or less a complete fabrication. The blistering speech was held after everyone had already adjourned for the evening. There was no speech infront of the "world leaders", it was a speech in a basically empty hall. That part somehow always gets left out when the media mentions it.
She is in part a media creation, they wanted an icon so one was created. They pump up her importance which basically makes her a puppet. It probably doesn't hurt either that her mother and father are celebs in their own right and quite well off so they can finance this for her. Her mother used to be very big into the whole "refugees welcome"-scene, when that became somewhat more unpopular they all switched to the Environment instead as their cause.
In pictures she is always shown alone but she has a staff that helps her and follows her around when she travells. So unless they are all doing it for free there is financial backing that they don't really want to mention. This is why they are desperatly downplaying the whole Rentzhog bit.
Getting nominated for a Nobel peace prize isn't all that hard or exclusive, there are lots of people that can submit nominations and the list each year is quite long -- about 300-400 people/organizations are nominated each year. One could probably even argue what she would have done for world peace but then considering previous winners it seems the whole peace part is not that important but the prize has instead turned into some sort of pop culture contest.
From the local news reports it seems to have been all over the place. Some schools appear to have handed out truancy-slips like it was candy while others made it part of the education experience (whatever that is) and allowed more or less every student a skip day.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @05:36PM
You jealous, dear?