YOUNG VOICES
“Our future was sold so that a small number of people could make unimaginable amounts of money. You liked to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to.” GT
Listen to these young voices and what they say about their future:
“It’s been years of talking, countless negotiations, empty deals on climate change, fossil fool companies being given free rides to drill beneath our soils and burn away our future for their profit. Emissions must drop rapidly – in the next twelve years we must create a completely transformed world. It is time for all of us to unleash mass resistance – we have shown that collective action does work. We need to escalate the pressure to make sure that change happens, and we must escalate together. This is not a political action. It is people’s self-defense against planet destruction. Planet destruction is like an advancing army that must be resisted. Survival is too important to leave to politicians and corporate executives.”
“We’ve had 30 years of pep-talking and selling positive ideas. And I’m sorry, it doesn’t work. Because if it would have, the emissions would have been down by now – and they haven’t.”
“We do need hope. Of course we do, but the one thing we need more than hope is action. Once we start to act, hope is everywhere.”
“We have not come here to beg world leaders to care. You have ignored us in the past and you will ignore us again. We have run out of excuses and we are running out of time. We have come here to let you know that change is coming, whether you like it or not. The real power belongs to the people.” “If there really was a crisis this big, then we would rarely talk about anything else. As soon as you turned on the TV, almost everything would be about that: headlines, radio, newspaper. You would almost never hear about anything else. And the politicians would surely have done what was needed by now, wouldn’t they? They would hold crisis meetings all the time, declare climate emergencies everywhere, and spend all their waking hours handling the situation and informing the people what was going on. But it never was like that. The climate crisis was treated like any other issue or even less than that… And we must admit that we are losing this battle… Most of us don’t know almost any of the basic facts, because how could we? We have not been told. Or more importantly, we have never been told by the right people. You cannot rely on people … to read through the latest IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report, track the Keeling Curve, or keep tabs on the world’s rapidly disappearing carbon budget. You have to explain that to us repeatedly, no matter how uncomfortable or unprofitable that may be… This is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced… For too long, the people in power have gotten away with basically not doing anything to stop the climate and ecological breakdown. They have gotten away with stealing our future and selling it for profit. But we young people are waking up. And we promise, we will not let you get away with it anymore.”
Greta Thunberg, 16 year old from Sweden
“Humanity finds itself in an event unprecedented in its history. We, in alignment with our consciences and our reasoning, declare ourselves in rebellion against our Government and the corrupted, inept institutions that threaten our future.” Extinction Rebellion
“We have the most to lose out of all the generations, so when we see those older generations who are responsible for causing the problem not doing anything, knowing they’re not going to be the ones to experience it, that makes us really angry. It’s that anger that motivates us.” Izzy Warren, 15 year old from London