Greta Thunberg was detained by police in The Hague along with other climate protesters. Photograph: Peter Dejong/AP
COP29 is coming to an end.
Posted on X by Greta Thunberg. I’ve had difficulies embedding X for a week or two.
As the COP29 climate meeting is reaching its end, it should not come as a surprise that yet another COP is failing. The current draft is a complete disaster. But even if our expectations are close to non-existent, we must never ever find ourselves reacting to these continuous betrayals with anything but rage.
The people in power are yet again about to agree to a death sentence to the countless people whose lives have been or will be ruined by the climate crisis. The current text is full of false solutions and empty promises. The money from the Global North countries needed to pay back their climate debt is still nowhere to be seen.
Those in power are worsening the destabilisation and destruction of our life supporting ecosystems. We are on track to experience the hottest year ever recorded, with the global greenhouse gases reaching an all time high just last year.
The COP processes aren’t just failing us, they are part of a larger system built on injustice and designed to sacrifice current and future generations for the opportunity of a few to keep making unimaginable profits and continue to exploit planet and people.
With every negotiation, with every speech made by a world leader and with every agreement they sign, it becomes clear that it is up to us as a global collective to take the action we so desperately need and show where the leadership truly lies. They are not going to do it for us, as this COP29 yet again proves.
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg is detained during a climate protests against fossil fuel subsidies in Brussels on October 5, 2024. (Photo: John Thys/AFP via Getty Images)
Renowned activist Greta Thunberg was detained on Saturday at a climate protest in Brussels aimed at ending European Union fossil fuel subsidies.
The protest included hundreds of campaigners from Extinction Rebellion and other groups; they came together under the name United for Climate Justice (UCJ). One group of them marched in an area near the European Parliament, while another group that included Thunberg blocked a section of the Boulevard du Jardin Botanique.
“Our politicians have failed us,” Paolo Destilo, a UCJ spokesperson, told Politico. “European leaders’ continued support for the fossil fuel industry raises serious questions about their commitment to effective climate action.”
Another UCJ spokesperson, Angela Huston Gold, pointed to devastating floods that recently hit Europe and Africa as a warning sign for the planet.
“Increasingly frequent and extreme natural disasters are likely to claim a billion victims by the end of the century, mainly due to the use of fossil fuels,” Huston Gold said in a statement, citing a 2023 study in Energies, a journal. “To avoid ecological and social collapse, fossil fuel subsidies must end now.”
The European Commission published a report last year showing that the EU spent 123 billion euros ($135 billion) on fossil fuel subsidies in 2022, an increase on previous years that was caused by policy decisions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. (2022 was the last year included in the report.) The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development listed still higher figures for 2022.
EU’s Eighth Environment Action Program, which entered into force in May 2022, calls for a phaseout of fossil fuel subsidies, but national governments haven’t taken action, so progress is “uncertain,” according to the European Environment Agency, which is part of the EU.
Thunberg on Saturday told Politico that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who’s been in office since 2019, was not a green champion.
UCJ on Tuesday sent an open letter to von der Leyen and other EU institutional leaders calling for a phaseout of fossil fuel subsidies by 2025. “The EU should provide technical and financial assistance to member states facing challenges in meeting phaseout deadlines and offer incentives for achieving milestones ahead of schedule,” it says.
Staffers at the European Commission were in fact among the demonstrators in Brussels on Saturday, Politico reported.
“There’s a lot of tools the institutions have now to fight climate change, but since the [European Parliament elections in June] there’s been a lot of backtracking,” one commission staffer told Politico, given anonymity in order to speak freely.
“It’s now all about competitiveness and the ‘clean industrial deal,’ whatever that means,” the staffer added. “The urgency has been lost—the Parliament has shifted to the right, the commission in many ways has shifted to the right—and discussion of the climate has faded into the background.”
Thunberg, who’s now 21, came to fame as a 15-year-old activist in Sweden who helped form the global school strikes for climate movement. She’s been arrested numerous times, including at a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Denmark earlier this month.
Thunberg and other activists who sat with interlocked arms on the Boulevard du Jardin Botanique were arrested and taken to the police station, according to The Brussels Times.
Climate strikers march in Stockholm, Sweden, on April 19, 2024. (Photo: Albin Haglund via Greta Thunberg/X)
“We are many people and youths who want to express our frustration over what decision-makers are doing right now: They don’t care about our future and aren’t doing anything to stop the climate crisis,” one young activist said.
Ahead of Earth Day, young people around the world are participating in a global strike on Friday to demand “climate justice now.”
In Sweden, Greta Thunberg joined hundreds of other demonstrators for a march in Stockholm; in Kenya, participants demanded that their government join the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty; and in the U.S., youth activists are kicking off more than 200 Earth Day protests directed at pressing President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency.
“We’re gathered here to fight, once again, for climate justice,” Thunberg told Agence France-Presse at the Stockholm protest, which drew around 500 people. “It’s now been more than five and a half years that we’ve been doing the same thing, organizing big global strikes for the climate and gathering people, youths from the entire world.”
“I lost my home to climate change. Now I’m fighting so that others don’t lose their homes.”
The first global youth climate strike, which grew out of Thunberg’s Fridays for Future school strikes, took place on March 15, 2019. Since then, both emissions and temperatures have continued to rise, with 2023 blowing past the record for hottest year. Yet, according to Climate Action Tracker, no country has policies in place that are compatible with limiting global heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.
“We are many people and youths who want to express our frustration over what decision-makers are doing right now: They don’t care about our future and aren’t doing anything to stop the climate crisis,” Karla Alfaro Gripe, an 18-year-old participant at the Stockholm march, told AFP.
The global strikes are taking place under the umbrella of Friday’s for Future, which has three main demands: 1. limit temperature rise to 1.5°C, 2. ensure climate justice and equity, and 3. listen to the most accurate, up-to-date science.
“Fight with us for a world worth living in,” the group wrote on their website, next to a link inviting visitors to find actions in their countries.
Participants shared videos and images of their actions on social media.
In Asia, Save Future Bangladesh founder Nayon Sorkar posted a video from the Meghna River on Bangladesh’s Bola Island, where erosion destroyed his family’s home when he was three years old.
“I lost my home to climate change,” Sorkar wrote. “Now I’m fighting so that others don’t lose their homes.”
“Young climate activists in Bandarban demand a shift to renewable energy and away from fossil fuels,” said Sajjad Hossain, the divisional coordinator for Youthnet for Climate Justice Bangladesh. “We voiced urgency for sustainable energy strategies and climate justice. Let’s hold governments accountable for a just transition!”
In Kenya, young people struck specifically to demand that the government sign on to the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.
“As a member of the Lake Victoria community, the importance of the treaty in our climate strikes cannot be overstated,” Rahmina Paullette, founder of Kisumu Environmental Champions and a coordinator for Fridays for Future Africa, said in a statement. “By advocating for its implementation, we address the triple threat of climate change, plastic pollution, and environmental injustice facing our nation.”
“Halting fossil fuel expansion not only safeguards crucial ecosystems but also combats the unjust impacts of environmental degradation, ensuring a more equitable and sustainable future for our community and the wider Kenyan society,” Paullette said.
— Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative (@fossiltreaty) April 19, 2024
In the U.S., Fridays for Future NYC planned for what they expected to be the largest New York City climate protest since September 2023’s March to End Fossil Fuels. The action will begin at Foley Square at 2:00 pm Eastern Time, at which point more than 1,000 students and organizers are expected to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to rally in front of Borough Hall.
The strike “is part of a national escalation of youth-led actions in more than 200 cities and college campuses around the country, all calling on President Biden to listen to our generation and young voters, stop expanding fossil fuels, and declare a climate emergency that meaningfully addresses fossil fuels, creating millions of good paying union jobs, and preparing us for climate disasters in the process,” Fridays for Future NYC said in a statement.
The coalition behind the climate emergency drive, which also includes the Sunrise Movement, Fridays for Future USA, and Campus Climate Network, got encouraging news on Wednesday when Bloomberg reported that the White House had reopened internal discussions into potentially declaring a climate emergency.
“We’re staring down another summer of floods, fires, hurricanes, and extreme heat,” Sunrise executive director Aru Shiney-Ajay said in a statement. “Biden must do what right Republicans in Congress are unwilling to do: Stand up to oil and gas CEOs, create green union jobs, and prepare us for climate disasters. Biden must declare a climate emergency and use every tool at his disposal to tackle the climate crisis and prepare our communities to weather the storm. If Biden wants to be taken seriously by young people, he needs to deliver on climate change.”
The coalition is planning events leading up to Monday including dozens of Earth Day teach-ins beginning Friday to encourage members of Congress to pressure Biden on a climate emergency and Reclaim Earth Day mobilizations on more than 100 college and university campuses to demand that schools divest from and cut ties with the fossil fuel industry.
Spokesman Joost Thus: “The A12 blockades have ensured that the injustice of fossil subsidies is clear to everyone. 72% of Dutch people want to get rid of fossil subsidies [1] and more than three quarters of the Second Last October, the House voted in favor of a motion on phase-out plans. The success of the A12 blockades has set in motion an international movement. An international coalition of 25 movements from 14 countries will fight at EU level for an end to fossil subsidies. This week there are Stop Fossil Subsidies actions in 6 European countries. It will be announced on Saturday on the A12 how we will increase the international pressure on politics and the fossil industry in the near future.”
Phasing-out plans for the outgoing cabinet The outgoing cabinet presented the phasing-out plans for fossil subsidies in February. The abolition of fossil subsidies is postponed again until 2030 or even 2035. Moreover, the outgoing government states that phasing out a large part of fossil subsidies is difficult due to international agreements. But this goes directly against the international agreements that the Netherlands made at the G20 in 2009 (!) to phase out fossil subsidies before 2020.
Need to abolish fossil subsidies Fossil subsidies stimulate the large-scale consumption of fossil fuels. Companies such as Shell, Tata Steel and KLM receive huge discounts on the use of oil, gas and coal in the Netherlands. In total, this amounts to between 39.7 and 46.4 billion euros per year in the Netherlands alone. Globally, the IMF reserves an amount of $7 trillion for 2022 [2]. In this way, the use of energy sources whose emissions drive the climate and ecological crisis is supported and stimulated. While this crisis endangers the lives of millions of people, animals and ecosystems.
