Global Climate Strike: Greta Thunberg and School Students Lead Climate Crisis Protest – as It Happened

Millions of people from Sydney to Manila, Dhaka to London and New York are marching for urgent action on climate breakdown

Fri 20 Sep 2019 21.03 EDT
Guardian

For the past 24 hours, the Guardian has been reporting in real time as millions of people joined in a worldwide, youth-led climate strike – with correspondents filing dispatches from the demonstrations across the globe.

We’re ending our liveblog here , but not our commitment to covering the climate crisis.

Workers from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter staged walkouts in what may be the largest coordinated worker action in the history of the tech industry.

At the demonstration in Seattle, more than 3,000 tech workers walked out of their workplaces on Friday and thousands more joined actions across the country, according to Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a group calling for Amazon to make more effort to address climate change.

Globally, more than 1,800 Amazon employees walked out across 25 cities and 14 countries on Friday to protest the company’s failure to take more action to address the climate crisis.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, has made some efforts to address climate concerns, including an announcement on Thursday that the company expects to be carbon neutral by 2040 and a February announcement of a goal, known as Shipment Zero, to be carbon neutral on 50% of shipments by 2030.

But workers are asking for more: zero emissions by 2030, increasing the number of electric vehicles in its fleet, and refusing to set contracts with companies that damage the climate.

“Amazon still has a long way to go,” said Danilo Quilaton, product designer at Amazon in San Francisco. “What kind of climate leader can we be if we’re still partnering with fossil fuel companies, selling our AI technologies to extract oil faster?”

Other tech companies were present at marches in San Francisco and beyond. Twitter workers walked out, marching alongside workers from tech payment firm Square in San Francisco. Facebook workers walked out of offices around the country, including employees who left the headquarters in San Jose.

More than 1,800 workers at Google signed a pledge supporting climate action from the company, including zero emissions by 2030, eliminating contracts with oil and gas companies, and promising zero harm to climate refugees. Hundreds walked out of Google offices across the US, including in New York City and at the headquarters in San Jose.

“As individuals, we may feel alone in facing climate change,” the Google petition said. “But if we act together – if we act now – we can build a better future.”

As people make a stand on the escalating climate crisis in this week’s global climate strike, The Guardian is joining them – to demand climate justice for everyone and an end to the age of fossil fuels. And we are joining forces with more than 250 other news organisations to increase climate coverage in the media ahead of Monday’s UN climate summit.

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Hundreds of Amazon workers left their desks Friday to join a thousands-strong climate strike march in Seattle.

Workers rallied in front of Amazon’s focal point – the Amazon Spheres, geodesic glass terrariums marking the company’s center of gravity in downtown Seattle – before marching to city hall. The mood was light, their march well ordered and rife with signage playing on Amazon slogans, including “Customer Obsessed = Climate Obsessed”. Those gathered joked that they were skipping a lunch at their desks to join the noontime protest.

The grim realities of the climate crisis were mentioned, particularly the challenges facing Amazon warehouse workers in southern California, but the 2,000-or-so workers and throngs of supporters were prepared to celebrate. They’d won, after all, Amazon’s first broad pledge to contain its carbon footprint.

EVAN: Bobbing along with a stream of colleagues, Evan Pulgino was awestruck.

Pulgino, a software engineer from Pittsburgh who arrived in Seattle three years ago to work at Amazon, was a face in the crowd of several thousand Amazon and Google employees and their supporters. Badges colored to mark seniority, standard at Amazon, hung from lanyards and fobs.

Having set out from the Amazon Spheres in downtown Seattle, the tech crowd merged with throngs of high schoolers arriving on Fifth Avenue to join the march on Seattle’s City Hall. Pulgino described the disparate mass of humanity – Amazon’s orderly herd of 20s and 30-somethings mixing with exuberant teens – as “incredible”.

Pulgino, who has been active on climate issues since October, said he was cheered by the commitment made Thursday by Amazon to attain zero net carbon emissions by 2040. It was a start, he said, and a heartening one. Pulgino objected to Amazon’s continued financial support for climate change-denying thinktanks and politicians, and to Amazon Web Services’ contracts with fossil fuel companies.

“It was important to be part of the fight,” said Pulgino, carrying a sign that read “Stop funding climate denial, start leading for zero emissions”.

“Tech drives so much change,” the 38-year-old continued. “If Amazon leads the way, other companies will follow.”

ROSHNI: Roshni Naidu, a five-year Amazon veteran, expected something out of Finding Nemo when last year she traveled to Australia to take in the Great Barrier Reef. Naidu, 28, was shocked to find a graying, vacant space.

“It was nothing at all like what I expected,” said Naidu, a senior technical product manager.

Returning to Seattle shaken by witnessing the degradation of the planet, Naidu got to work at her work. She began agitating with other Amazon employees for the company to get it right on climate change.

Amazon, she said, can lead on climate. She described herself as “cautiously celebratory” after company leaders announced a suite of climate change-related reforms aimed at eliminating Amazon’s carbon footprint by 2040.

“It’s a sign that collective action works,” Naidu said. Friday’s march, she added, “puts even more pressure on Amazon to do more.”

It’s great, she said, to be able to say she’s “saving the world”.

NICK: Milling among his climate activist colleagues, Nick Andrews, a program manager now in his sixth year at Amazon, was ready to scream. Which, as a chant leader, was his job for the afternoon.

Andrews, 32, had been active for months pushing Amazon to reduce its climate footprint and cut ties to the fossil fuel industry. Like several of his colleagues, he struck a tone more disappointed than angry. Amazon workers tend to believe their company can do anything, including save the planet.

At the outset, Andrews said, pushing the sometimes autocratic company seemed like it would be nerve-racking work. It didn’t turn out that way.

“Everyone came in with trepidation,” Andrews said. “But it’s really received a company-wide embrace.”

It helps, he said, that he and other Amazonians turn out – unsurprisingly to those who’ve watched the company come to dominate the retail economy and cloud computing – to be “very good organizers”.

He celebrated on Thursday when Amazon leaders announced a series of steps designed to eliminate Amazon’s net carbon footprint. He looks forward to Amazon doing more, though.

“We pride ourselves on being a bar-pushing company,” Andrews said. “This is a good start, but I think we can do better.”

The main climate strike action in the Bay Area today was in the center of San Francisco, always a magnet for regional progressive activism. But across the bay, Richmond, population 110,000, more than held its own.

The small crowd at the city’s civic center peaked at about 100 before a short youth-led march. Speakers took turns addressing the group from atop a park bench, rallying with call-and-response chants and songs, and impromptu speeches about factory farming, a Green New Deal and geoengineering. But while this may have been a small branch of a global day of action, the main thrust here was local issues, as residents shared updates on local organizing efforts to stop the climate pollution happening in their own town.

Richmond is actually younger than the 117-year-old, 2,900 acre Chevron oil refinery that occupies much of the city’s scenic bayside hillscape, and the fossil fuel giant has long exerted outsized influence not just over the city’s environment, but also its politics. Richmond also feels the impact of over a million tons of coal and petroleum byproducts exported from its bayside terminal each year – the city’s asthma rates are far above those of other Bay Area communities.

Urgency on the global climate crisis won the day worldwide, but in Richmond and other front-line cities, the impacts of the fossil fuel industry and issues of environmental justice feel even more immediately dire.

At the third Rio de Janeiro demonstration of the day, Tereza Arapiun, a chief from the Arapiun tribe from the Amazon state of Pará, called for international help for Brazil’s indigenous people. “We are surrounded by destruction, loggers and mining,” she said. “We need help.”

Amazon deforestation, fires and land invasions worsened under Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, she said. “He encourages it. Before, there was protection. He destroyed it.”

Arapiun welled up as she told how a friend described hearing the screams of dying animals as fires raged recently near Alter do Chão, a renowned beauty spot in the same state. “It is very painful. It is like they are burning our soul,” she said. “We need help – and help won’t come from Brazil.”

Demonstrators have begun to gather at parks and squares across Colombia now. Here in Bogotá – the capital – the historic Plaza de Bolívar in front of the congress building is slowly drawing crowds despite the rain.

“Colombia, our land,” one group of students chanted as they arrived. “Without plastic and without war!”

Near the statue of the country’s independence hero Simón Bolívar, demonstrators banged drums and burnt incense, waving signs that read “Rebel or burn out”.

“When the problem is as urgent as climate change, it’s only by coming together that we can make a difference,” said Alejandra Moreno, a student from Bogotá.

In Bogotá, a dog wears a placard reading, “We do not have voice nor vote... You do.”

Unlike many similar events around the world, this one was not preceded by a major strike and schools were open as normal. This could be because events got little publicity in local media. The two main dailies, El Espectador and El Tiempo, ran agency-written stories online on worldwide strikes that did not once mention Colombia.

Instead, the mantle to promote today’s march was picked up by an opposition political party, Colombia Humana, and local environmental activists. Both used social media extensively.

“Why in London are people so willing to move to pressure their government and the world for drastic measures to attack the climate crisis and not in Colombia, if the problem is the same?” the senator Gustavo Petro – the leader of Colombia Humana and a former presidential candidate – tweeted this morning. “Because of something called asymmetrical information: in Colombia the danger is ignored.”

Colombia has made efforts to position itself as a regional leader on environmental issues, recently hosting a summit in its Amazonian city Leticia, where Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru agreed on measures to tackle the nearby raging rainforest fires.

However, local activists say it is just window-dressing given that Colombia remains one of the most dangerous countries for environmentalists. Twenty-four environmental activists were murdered here in 2018, second only to the Philippines, according to the watchdog Global Witness.

“Colombia is living through constant threats of damage to ecosystems and deforestation, and our cities are heating up,” said Isabel Cristina Zuleta, an environmental activist with the Rios Vivos movement, who has received many death threats for her work. She was attending a march in Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city.

“In Colombia, to protest and to march is to put yourself at risk,” Zuleta said. “That’s why today it is so important to see people in the streets.”

Students protest outside city hall in Miami Beach. Photograph: Lynne Sladky/Associated Press
The climate strike has wrapped up in Miami Beach after a “historic” day that saw thousands of schoolchildren, college students and workers gather at two events at city hall. But organizers say this is just the start of something much bigger.

“You saw how many people were here, it was incredible,” said youth climate activist John Paul Mejia, who spoke at the morning school strike and evening rally for those who couldn’t take time off during the day.

“Now we need to keep the conversation going, to build on this historic day and get things done.”

The Miami protestors were heading for an after-strike party with live music at a bar in nearby Overtown arranged by 350southflorida, an environmental group.

The relaxation will be short, however. Next week’s planned protest activities include a sit-in at Miami Beach’s sustainability committee meeting and a strike in downtown Miami at Chase Bank, which 350southflorida says is the world’s biggest funder of fossil fuels.

The “week of action” wraps up with an End of the World party on the second Global Climate Strike day next Friday.

 Thalita Alves, 20, left, and Gabriela Cunha, 18, from Federal Fluminense University demonstrate Friday on the steps of the state legislature in Rio de Janeiro. Photograph: Dom Phillips/The Guardian
There were small demonstrations across Brazil on Friday. In the morning, dozens of school and university students occupied the steps of Rio de Janeiro’s state legislature in hot sun. They sang, waved placards and called for the removal of business-friendly environment minister Ricardo Salles.

Striking high school student Maria Hardman, 15, was angry over far-right president Jair Bolsonaro’s failure to protect the Amazon. “He does not value the environment,” she said. “Bolsonaro is an imbecile. He does not represent me.”

Brazilians have yet to grasp the scale of the climate emergency, said Mariana Império, 30, a masters student at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Thalita Alves, 20, a trainee teacher at the Federal Fluminense University, said people began waking up when fires in the Bolivian Amazon caused São Paulo skies to darken. “Brazilians who voted for Bolsonaro … faithfully believe what he says,” she said. Later another demonstration marched from Ibama, the environmental agency, to the city centre.

High school students formed a human mosaic reading: “Save the Amazon” in Recife and held up placards with data on Amazon fires in Salvador. Students marched in the town of Novo Friburgo and in the capital Brasília, an SOS Amazon banner was hung on the walls of the environment ministry.

In the Amazon city of Belém, hundreds gathered beside the Marajó Bay. “Coming from the Amazon, I feel it’s a duty to fight,” said Lidia Seabra, 24, studying a masters in biology at the Federal University of Pará. “We are united here to defend the Amazon,” said engineering student Devyison de Jesus, 21.

In São Paulo, a few thousand blocked Paulista Avenue after cheering speeches from children such as Cora Ramos, 10, who held up a placard she had made that read “there is no planet B”. “If we destroy this one, there won’t be another,” she said.

Brazilian activists were also present at marches abroad. Alessandra Munduruku, an indigenous activist from the Munduruku tribe of Pará state, made a short, powerful speech to an enormous crowd in Berlin. “My people are grateful to have good people fighting and defending the Amazon,” she said through a translator to deafening cheers.

“I saw many children, many young people, parents, old people, I thought that demonstration was very beautiful,” she told the Guardian. “I had goosebumps.”

Climate protests started early outside the National Palace in central Mexico City, where President Andrés Manuel López Obrador usually holds a daily press conference. The president – commonly called AMLO – was instead in the state of Yuctán on Friday and didn’t speak of the climate issue. But he boasted, “The fall in [Mexican] petroleum production has stopped and we’re starting to produce more petroleum. ... We’re now producing more petrol in Mexico’s refineries.”

AMLO has bet big on boosting Mexico’s petroleum output and promised to lower the price of gasoline. He’s also pushed ahead with plans to build an $8bn refinery in the state of Tabasco – even starting construction prior to completing the environmental permits. AMLO also cancelled an electricity auction, which would have allowed more renewable energy into the market, and the Federal Electricity Commission (CRE) has announced plans to instead burn more coal.

“There a campaign that renewables are cheaper and it’s a lie,” CFE director Manuel Bartlett said earlier this year.

The government’s focus on fossil fuels has put in question the country’s commitment to generate 35% of its energy with renewables by 2024, according to climate change analysts.

Marchers in Mexico City targeted AMLO, chanting, “We want a future, not hydrocarbons!”

The crowd in Battery Park roared in anticipation of Greta Thunberg, who was introduced by Alexandria Villaseñor, Thunberg’s NYC equivalent who her spends her Fridays protesting outside the UN headquarters in New York City.

“Greta! Greta! Greta!” the crowd chanted as Thunberg got on the stage.

The 16-year-old started her speech off by marking the number of people who participated in the strike around the world. In New York City, 250,000 people marched. Worldwide, more than 4m demonstrated.

Thunberg’s directed her speech to the hundreds of students in the crowd, though she acknowledged that adults also skipped worked to strike.

“We will do everything in our power to stop this crisis from getting worse, even if it means skipping school or work, because this is more important,” Thunberg said. “Why should we study for a future that is being taken away from us?”

Thunberg had to pause her speech twice to point out that people in the crowd needed medical attention. Many people had been in the sun all afternoon waiting for Thunberg to speak. The crowd patiently waited for Thunberg to start speaking again, each time cheering when she continued.

Thunberg elicited laughter when she described all the politicians she had met who asked for selfies and “tell us they really, really admire what we do” yet have done nothing to address the climate crisis. “We demand a safe future. Is that really to much to ask?”

“No!” the crowd shouted back.

At the end of her speech, Thunberg emphasized that the strikes around the world are just the start of change.

“If you belong to that small group of people who feel threatened by us, we have some very bad news for you, because this is only the beginning,” Thunberg said. “Change is coming whether they like it or not.”

Students in the crowd said they felt moved seeing Thunberg speak in person.

“I started crying. I just found it powerful and empowering,” said Juliana Rubiano, 16. “She represents a lot of people, and that’s us, that’s the youth.”

California is not a place that requires convincing that the climate is changing. The people here don’t even need to see the science — they’re feeling the impacts firsthand, as the state teeters between an eroding coastline and growing wildland fires.

Perhaps because of its many vulnerabilities, California has taken arguably the strongest stance of any US state in fighting the climate crisis, at times also fighting with the federal government in the process. When the Trump administration moved to undo California’s strict vehicle emissions standards this month, the state vowed to fight. Governor Gavin Newsom hit back with, of course, a tweet: “We will prevail. See you in court.”

Earlier this week, the University of California pledged to divest over $80bn in endowment and pension funds from fossil fuel companies, citing the “financial risk” posed by the industry, compared to renewable energy. Climate advocates called it the biggest single commitment by any university, and perhaps the beginning of a new divesting trend.

California cities, including Berkeley and San Jose, are leading the country with a wave of local laws to phase out natural gas hook-ups in new construction, despite strong and well-funded opposition from the gas industry. Natural gas is the greatest source of carbon emissions from buildings, while fully electrifying homes and businesses could allow them to run on clean, renewable energy instead.

California’s municipalities have also taken direct aim at the industry responsible for so much of the climate crisis. Eight cities and counties in the state have filed civil lawsuits against fossil fuel companies, alleging public nuisance and in some cases negligence. The suits seek billions of dollars in damages to help mitigate climate impacts.

Coming up, West Coast environment correspondent Susie Cagle will be sharing sketches and scenes from the demonstration in Richmond, California, across the bay from San Francisco. A Chevron refinery older than the town itself looms over it, and the area is home to some of the boldest climate-minded activism in California.

And Los Angeles correspondent Sam Levin will bring us dispatches from the protests in southern California.

Thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets of Mexico City to join the global climate strike this afternoon.

“Se ve, se siente, la tierra está caliente,” the crowds shouted as they processed down the city’s main avenue, Reforma towards its presidential palace. “You see it, you feel it. The earth is getting hotter.”

Protesters - many of them school children and teenagers - carried homemade banners reading: “There’s no money in a dead earth” and “Action now!” One placard urged demonstrators to make love, not CO2.

There were reports of other demonstrations, big and small, across Mexico in cities including Acapulco, Irapuato, Guadalajara and Tijuana. Unlike in Brazil, where far-right president Jair Bolsonaro has ignored today’s movement, the protests received the blessing of the Mexican government which tweeted its support.

In a Twitter video Victor Toledo, Mexico’s environment secretary, urged the country to reflect on the environment “insurgency” taking place around the world and to take action where possible.