Climate change knows no holiday

A train full of children and teens, singing John Lennon’s “Imagine” and Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive”, arrived in Oranienburg from Berlin on the first Friday of July. “Oh hey! It’s hot out here, there’s too much carbon in the atmosphere!” they broke into a rather appropriate chant, since last month was the hottest June ever recorded on earth, according to the European satellite agency, Copernicus Climate Change Service.

As the train pulled into Oranienburg, a town of 45,000 inhabitants, roughly 35 km from the capital, the Fridays for Future protesters on the train and at the station merged into one. “Tell me what democracy looks like?” asked 15-year-old Tobias Fiedler, a local co-organiser, on a makeshift stage. “This is what democracy looks like!” was the thunderous response of over 350 children and teens, holding banners and placards made of recycled material. Most, aged eight to early 20s, were unaccompanied by their parents, holding banners like, “Vote because our planet can’t”, and chanting, “We are unstoppable, another world is possible.” The weekly protests, started in August 2018, have seen students around the globe skip classes every Friday to demand political action against climate change.

The Fridays for Future paralysed Oranienburg for a few hours as the protesters walked for almost 4 km in the town centre, culminating the march outside the Oranienburg Palace. A series of speeches followed the march, including one by Luisa Neubauer, Germany’s Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist who started the School Strike for Climate movement in August last year.

Ahead of elections in three east German States — Brandenburg and Saxony in September and Thuringia in October — Ms. Neubauer urged political parties to factor in climate change in their manifestos. As schools in Brandenburg have shut for summer holidays, Fridays for Future is travelling around the State. “Our demands are to make climate change a priority, because no political party is doing enough,” says 15-year-old Masha Wille, who hopes the protests will influence the coming elections.

The march in Oranienburg halted outside the city administration office for a few minutes. As the students demanded better environmental policies, more public transport, less cars and a heavy tax on carbon footprint, government officials stepped outside the building looking bewildered. “Hey hey, who does not jump, he’s for coal!” chanted one of the protesters as the rest jumped in support. In the last Fridays for Future in June, before the legislators went on a summer recess, protesters made a human chain around the Reichstag building in Berlin that houses the German Parliament, symbolically blocking exits. “People who don’t make climate policy don’t deserve a break,” the organisers wrote on Twitter. June also witnessed the biggest Fridays for Future in Aachen, where over 40,000 students from around Europe gathered to demand a quicker end to coal dependency and the reduction of greenhouse gases.

‘Good initiative’

The movement also got a boost after German Chancellor Angela Merkel backed the demonstrations in a video podcast early this year, calling Fridays for Future a “good initiative”. The pro-environment Greens party has also been riding high on climate politics. But the movement seeks to remain independent from supporting any party. “Those using us for their political agenda should leave this demonstration now,” shouted one of the speakers at the Oranienburg protest.

A week before the Brandenburg election, Fridays for Future Berlin plans to organise its biggest summer protest. But the challenge is to maintain the momentum through the summer vacation. “The break is also an incentive for those kids who don’t want to bunk school for the protest,” says 20-year-old Louis Motaal, one of the organisers in Berlin.

Protesters like Mr. Motaal and Ms. Wille see the movement gathering more participants. “To mobilise students, we use WhatsApp quite a lot, like in India,” says Mr. Motaal, who spent a year around Jaipur on a student exchange programme. What about Facebook? “Who uses Facebook?” he smirks, before diving back into the sea of students.

(Kennith Rosario works with The Hindu.)