Protests are planned across Europe and beyond Friday in solidarity with Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg who started her climate campaign 11 years ago, dubbed “Greta Friday.”
Twelve-year-old Greta is fast approaching a rare milestone she calls the “thunderclap,” when climate change-themed demonstrations will mark the anniversary of her first “Greta Friday” climate protest.
Protesters around the world are expected to demonstrate against the rising cost of fossil fuels, governments’ failure to adequately act and the rising number of deaths from air pollution.
As always, the themes are global — April’s “March for Science” featured massive rallies against proposed cuts to scientific funding, and in Berlin tens of thousands of people spilled onto the city’s streets as Germany changed the legal definition of Sunday to support the protestors.
Meanwhile, protesters in New York this week filed a lawsuit against the city to halt a controversial deep-bore fracking project. In Paris, labor unions called for a July strike to protest against what they say is growing authoritarianism under the administration of President Emmanuel Macron.
In Europe, plenty of attention has been focused on Britain, where Chancellor Philip Hammond claimed at the Conservative Party conference this week that Britain will not be subject to climate targets set by the European Union and urged the European Commission to allow the UK to stand alone on its own climate policies.
And in Scotland, a crowd of thousands are expected in Glasgow on Friday to hear the views of a Scottish Parliament Member at a packed rally, and not long afterwards a group of students will join Thunberg in a march to the EU headquarters in Brussels.
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How Thunberg launched a real-life climate protest
How they did it
