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Saturday, April 16th 2022, 9:00 am – What started as a lone Swedish teen sitting outside her country’s parliament house has turned into sustained global protests that have attracted millions of climate advocates.
It’s a slightly chilly overcast day as roughly a dozen protesters huddle outside of the Royal Bank of Canada in downtown Calgary — the heart of our country’s oil and gas headquarters — for the latest Global Climate Strike on March 25.
With prompts on their phones, the dedicated climate advocates cycle through clever chants they’ve obviously used in the past, picking up steam with each new round.
“It’s time to act on scientific fact.”
“Climate change is not a lie, please don’t let our planet die.”
“What do we want: divestment. When do we want it: now,” the youth shouted.
It’s the third year that these mostly youth-led protests inspired by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future initiative have been popping up on streets in front of government and corporate buildings around the world, calling on those behind the walls inside to put people before profits. Thunberg was famous for asking other youth to follow her example and skip school to raise their voices.
Since that day there have been worldwide events — some held every few months, some held each Friday — that have attracted droves of people or sometimes just a handful of dedicated climate activists. The September 2019 event was the largest, attracting millions of people from all over the globe.
It was one of those small moments that inspired Mackenzie Cumming, then 14, to speak out in support of climate action and later became an organizer.
“I thought, hey, this is a way I can make change,” she told the Weather Network.
“It’s really, really scary to not know what your future holds. Not just about what I want, but if it exists. And that’s something that’s hard to grapple with, particularly in a pandemic. I struggled with that a lot in 2020 — just that unknown.”
Cumming and the other youth feel that they are making an impact.
Legal action is one part of this impact as reported by the Guardian. 16 young people are suing Montana for its lack of climate action in “what will be the first youth-led climate case to make it to trial.”
Here, in Canada Seven young Ontarians launched an legal challenge with help from Ecojustice over the Ontario government’s decision to weaken the province’s 2030 climate targets claiming it “violated their charter rights to life, liberty, and security of the person.”
Mackenzie Cumming took on the organizing role for Fridays For Future Calgary. She was initially drawn to the protest by her desire to do something about climate grief, or the heavy burden of the climate crisis on some. (Rachel Maclean)
Cumming explains that the reason they targeted RBC March 25 was to send a letter to the bank asking it to sell its fossil fuel interests.
“We had a huge shift in the dial in 2019 with the big September protests. Climate is now a household topic. Now it’s up to us … to keep holding space. Truly make sure the climate remains a topic of conversations and to put pressure on companies, like RBC,” Cumming said.
Banks are part of a huge industry that invests billions each year, she said, and it’s now part of their strategy to lobby against the money behind the oil and gas.
“We’ve now expanded to being a little bit more specific in our demands,” she continued.
Transparency is a problem. Canada’s banks and energy companies aren’t lining up to share the financial risks that climate change puts on their businesses, reported The Narwhal after they combed through 130 “yawn-worthy” documents of financial disclosures. Their investigation revealed that dozens of publicly traded companies lobby against proposed rules that would make them more accountable and transparent about finances.
Cumming, a young man, believes that transparency is not enough.
“We simply cannot tackle climate change without tackling fossil fuels,” she said.
A CHILLY RECEPTION
Calgary is not easy to convince to give up oil and gas. Two angry supporters of oil and gas approached the March 25 protest with their own take, but the youth continued to chant.
Polarization is a real problem in climate solutions.
“We’ve always seen, whenever there is instability in society, people reach for these unhealthy forms of control and certainty — whether or not that’s extremist ideologies, extremist theologies, conspiracy theories, rejectionism — that’s all part and parcel of societies under stress,” Sean Holman, Wayne Crookes Professor of Environmental and Climate Journalism, told The Weather Network.
And we are a society under stress right now, Holman says, adding there’s a huge amount of resistance these protests have to overcome — and a rapidly disappearing timeline. Yet Holman believes the youth-led protests are keeping climate change on everyone’s radar, but questions whether it will happen fast enough to make a difference. He also says there’s been a lack of response from many in politics.
In 2019, thousands marched in Toronto as part of a Friday for Future protest to raise awareness about climate change issues. (Shawn Goldberg/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
“The real value of these protests is the creation of those communities that didn’t otherwise previously exist,” Holman said. “Being able to feel that they’re not alone in these concerns, and being able to find commonality among one another.”
Holman believes that more people will protest as the reality sets in and demands solutions.
“We are in an era of climate change right now. That’s in the present tense, not the future tense,” Holman continued. “And we do know that over the next 30 years, climate change is pretty locked in — in this country and around the world. And we’re going to need better communities than we have right now to withstand the forces that we’re going to be confronting as a result of climate change.”
THE ACCOUNTABILITY FACTOR
Climate Access executive director Cara Pike says that Canada is very concerned about climate change. The non-profit recently translated roughly 60 public and private surveys published between 2021 and early 2022 for key trends for an April 13 event about climate and energy in today’s geopolitical landscape.
“The global youth movement was really having an impact and elevating the issue at the community level, but also in the media. We looked at how climate change was being covered by the media in 2020. And one of the main messengers was Greta Thunberg, you know, in Canada — like that was who was in the media influencing the debate,” said Pike. “So I think it’s very important. We know that Canadians younger than 40 are more concerned about climate change and want to see solutions at a greater level. This is really, really important. But there’s also a role that youth play in terms of influencing their families.”
Mark Hertsgaard (co-founder and executivedirector of Covering Climate Now), based out San Francisco, is an environmental correspondent for The Nation magazine. He believes that the international Fridays For Future campaign to combat climate change is not only helping to attract public attention but also critical media attention. Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO) found “2021 was the year with the highest amount of coverage of climate change or global warming since our global-level monitoring began 18 years ago in 2004.”
Hertsgaard says that coverage does help when it comes to exerting pressure on governments to actually make changes when it comes to climate policy — even though many are still resistant to take immediate action.
Mark Hertsgaard has been covering the climate story for over 30 years. He was the first American journalist to cover Greta Thunberg’s story in the early days of her fame. (The Weather Network).
“It’s partly because we live in a social media era, but I think it’s also because [the youth] are much more impatient to see real change happen,” said Hertsgaard, adding the protests in September 2019 were a real game changer.
Moreover, Hertsgaard says journalists should be covering the activists as newsmakers — just as they would a politician or CEO.
“When you put six million people in the streets, and you force governments to do things, that defines you as a newsmaker,” said Hertsgaard.
“Our role is to look at what’s going on in society, reflect that back to society, hopefully, with some context and so forth and hold people to account,” he continued.
Thumbnail credit: Rachel Maclean
