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Tag: Greta Thunberg

  • Pro-Palestine activists shut down Maersk headquarters in Copenhagen

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    Original article republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

    800 demonstrators shut down Maersk headquarters (Photo via Palestinian Youth Movement/X)

    Nearly 1,000 activists stage demonstration at the entrance to the headquarters of shipping giant Maersk in protest of weapons transport to Israel

    On February 24, nearly 1,000 activists staged a demonstration to shut down the headquarters of Danish shipping giant Maersk in Copenhagen.

    BREAKING

    Today in Copenhagen 800 people from all over Europe shut down the main Maersk HQ for the day as part of the CRAC Camp under the Mask Off Maersk slogan “Cut Ties from Genocide”.

    Police were outnumbered but quite brutal to those participating in the action. The crowd… pic.twitter.com/4II83Eo8Jt

    — Palestinian Youth Movement (@palyouthmvmt) February 24, 2025

    The pro-Palestine demonstrators were protesting Maersk’s shipment of arms to Israel, under the slogan of the international “Mask off Maersk” campaign, as part of a protest camp organized by the CRAC Collective. Swedish activist Greta Thunberg participated in the demonstration, saying that “we take it on ourselves because we know that these big companies are all about profit.” 

    The Palestinian Youth Movement launched the international “Mask off Maersk” campaign last year, targeting one of the largest shipping companies in the world. Maersk has shipped millions of tons of military cargo from the US to Israel since October 7, playing a key role in the Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people. 

    Pro-Palestine demonstrators have launched actions against Maersk globally, including outside the Port of Elizabeth in New Jersey, a major site of weapons shipments to Israel. The campaign won a major victory in November of last year when Spain blocked two Maersk ships carrying military cargo bound from Israel from docking at the port of Algeciras.

    Demonstrators blocked the entrance to Maersk’s headquarters for over four hours, demanding that the logistics giant stop transporting military shipments to the Zionist state, and end all contracts with the Israeli Ministry of Defense. 

    Thunberg called on Maersk to “terminate all contracts and investment that support the genocide and occupation of Palestine.”

    Original article republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

  • Europe humiliated, but still subservient, after remarks from US officials

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    Original article by Ana Vračar republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

    NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte meets with US Vice President JD Vance. Source: NATO/Flickr

    Statements by US Vice President Vance and Defense Secretary Hegseth on the Ukraine war and transatlantic relations have left European leaders in shock

    “If American democracy can survive ten years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk,” US Vice President JD Vance told European leaders at last week’s Munich Security Conference. His remarks came during a draining week for those leaders, as Trump officials announced peace talks with Russian authorities—without European or Ukrainian involvement—while signaling they expect Europe to handle peacekeeping and being paid for their support in minerals from Ukraine.

    Speeches by Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threw European leaders into disarray, seen as not-so-subtle indications of a cooling in transatlantic relations. These interventions attacked everything from the EU’s efforts to regulate social media platforms to its approach to far-right parties in parliamentary life. In response, French President Emmanuel Macron called for an emergency summit of select regional powers on Monday, February 17 – just a day before US and Russian representatives are expected to meet in Saudi Arabia.

    While Ukrainian officials and some European leaders have insisted they will not accept any deal that excludes Ukraine’s direct involvement, their stance appears to carry little weight.

    Read more: Far-right surge or status quo? Understanding the 2024 European elections

    At the same time, the new US administration has increased pressure on its European allies, demanding a ramping up of their defense budgets and taking on the responsibility of a potential peacekeeping mission in Ukraine. This comes as no surprise: a number of US officials, including Donald Trump himself, have said Europe does not contribute enough to NATO and essentially freeloads off the US. Vance’s speech in Munich only reaffirmed this stance, ultimately reducing high-ranking figures to tears over the apparent breakup between allies.

    While the focus of European reactions to recent US statements has been on Ukraine, many leaders have admitted that more is at stake. “Yes, it is about Ukraine – but it is also about us,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wrote on X. Unfortunately, the conclusion she drew going further is upsetting: “We need an urgency mindset. We need a surge in defense. And we need both of them now.”

    Unlike healthcare, education, or social programs—sectors where European governments are consistently told their budgets must remain limited—military spending is expected to face no such barriers. Many European countries have already embraced the shift, with Polish officials, for example, boasting about spending close to 5% of their GDP on defense and warning of looming “wider wars” to convince other states in the region to do the same.

    Read more: Elon Musk and AfD’s Alice Weidel’s align ahead of elections in Germany

    Despite the apparent fracture in US-Europe relations, European leaders have shown no inclination to rethink their dependence on Washington. Instead, most have done exactly what the Trump presidency wants them to do and swiftly pledged to increase military spending. Some have even already expressed willingness to deploy troops for peacekeeping in Ukraine. What remains absent from their reactions is any consideration of a future less dictated by US interests and more aligned with the needs of the people living in Europe.

    Since the beginning of the war three years ago, activists have urged Europe to reject NATO’s warmongering and prioritize peace in Ukraine alongside social justice at home. Instead, the coming surge in military budgets will almost certainly coincide with cuts to public services, further fueling the rise of the far-right—a political force that Trump officials, including Vance and Elon Musk, have (more or less) openly backed during interventions in Europe. From this perspective, unlike the conservative circles who “survived ten years of ’s scolding,” Europe’s liberal elite is unlikely to emerge from its current crisis unscathed. Whether their refusal to acknowledge the failure of their anti-people policies will push the entire region into the hands of parties like Brothers of Italy and Alternative for Germany remains to be seen.

    Original article by Ana Vračar republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

    Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
    Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
    Power-mad orange gasbag Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
    Power-mad orange gasbag Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.

    Hi GT ;)

  • Greta Thunberg on COP29’s death sentence, false solutions and empty promises

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    Greta Thunberg was detained by police in The Hague along with other climate protesters. Photograph: Peter Dejong/AP
    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.

  • Climate activists vow to take to streets to stop fossil fuel extraction

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    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/16/climate-activists-vow-to-take-to-the-streets-to-stop-fossil-fuel-extraction

    ‘Cease and desist’ letter signed by over 650,000 people sent to oil and gas CEOs follows removal of Greta Thunberg from coal protest

    Hundreds of thousands of young climate activists have said they will continue “protesting in the streets in huge numbers” against fossil fuels, a day after Greta Thunberg was removed by German police from a condemned village atop a massive coal deposit.

    In a cease-and-desist letter to the CEOs of fossil fuel companies, youth campaigners accuse them of a “direct violation of our human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, your duties of care, as well as the rights of Indigenous people”.

    “This cease-and-desist notice is to demand that you immediately stop opening any new oil, gas or coal extraction sites, and stop blocking the clean energy transition we all so urgently need,” the letter says.

    …

    The letter warns that failure to act would mean citizens around the world would consider taking “any and all legal action” to hold the companies accountable. “And we will keep protesting in the streets in huge numbers,” it says.

    Signatories included Vanessa Nakate from Uganda, Greta Thunberg from Sweden, Helena Gualinga from Ecuador and Luisa Neubauer from Germany. They say: “It feels extremely difficult to keep hope alive in the face of climate devastation around the world. But our hope lies in people – in the millions of us who are determined to come together and demand action. It’s time to put these CEOs on notice – showing them that 2023 will be a watershed moment for accountability.”

    …

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/16/climate-activists-vow-to-take-to-the-streets-to-stop-fossil-fuel-extraction

  • It Is ‘Strange,’ Says Greta Thunberg, That Biden Is Seen as a Climate Leader

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    Image licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. In August 2018, outside the Swedish parliament building, Greta Thunberg started a school strike for the climate. Her sign reads, “Skolstrejk för klimatet,” meaning, “school strike for climate”. Author Anders Hellberg

    “The U.S. is actually expanding fossil fuel infrastructure,” the 18-year-old Swedish climate activist said in a new interview.

    JAKE JOHNSON December 28, 2021

    In an interview published in The Washington Post Magazine on Monday, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg said it is “strange” that some consider U.S. President Joe Biden a climate leader even as his administration fails to take the ambitious steps necessary to tackle the intensifying planetary crisis.

    When asked whether she is “inspired” by Biden or other world leaders, Thunberg pointed out that “the U.S. is actually expanding fossil fuel infrastructure” under the current administration.

    “I’ve met so many people who give me very much hope and just the possibility that we can actually change things.”

    “Why is the U.S. doing that?” she asked. “It should not fall on us activists and teenagers who just want to go to school to raise this awareness and to inform people that we are actually facing an emergency.”

    “People ask us, ‘What do you want?’ ‘What do you want politicians to do?’” added Thunberg, who helped spark a global, youth-led climate protest movement with a solo strike outside of the Swedish Parliament building in 2018. “And we say, first of all, we have to actually understand what is the emergency.”

    “We are trying to find a solution of a crisis that we don’t understand,” she continued. “For example, in Sweden, we ignore—we don’t even count or include more than two-thirds of our actual emissions. How can we solve a crisis if we ignore more than two-thirds of it? So it’s all about the narrative.”

    While Biden has touted his decision to bring the U.S. back into the Paris agreement, his pledge to cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, and other initiatives as a show of leadership in the face of an existential threat to humanity, his administration has also approved oil and gas drilling permits at a faster rate than former President Donald Trump’s did.

    During Biden’s presidency, according to a report released earlier this month by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has approved an average of 333 oil and gas drilling permits per month this year alone—40% more than it did over the first three years of Trump’s White House tenure.

    “When it comes to climate change policy, President Biden is saying the right things. But we need more than just promises,” Alan Zibel, the lead author of the report, said in a statement. “The reality is that in the battle between the oil industry and Biden, the industry is winning. Despite Biden’s campaign commitments to stop drilling on public lands and waters, the industry still has the upper hand. Without aggressive government action, the fossil fuel industry will continue creating enormous amounts of climate-destroying pollution exploiting lands owned by the public.”

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    Thunberg’s interview with the Post came at the end of a year that saw planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions quickly rebound to pre-pandemic levels as the U.S. and other major nations continued to burn fossil fuels at an alarming and unsustainable rate.

    As Glen Peters of the Center for International Climate Research noted Tuesday, “2021 saw the second-biggest absolute increase in fossil CO2 emissions ever recorded.”

    Despite the failure of world leaders to act with sufficient urgency as the climate crisis fuels devastating extreme weather events across the globe, Thunberg said she is “more hopeful now” than she was when she kicked off her lonely school strike in 2018.

    “In one sense, we’re in a much worse place than we were then because the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are higher and the global emissions are still rising at almost record speed. And we have wasted several years of blah, blah, blah,” said Thunberg. “But then, on another note, we have seen what people can do when we actually come together.”

    “I’ve met so many people who give me very much hope and just the possibility that we can actually change things,” she added. “That we can treat a crisis like a crisis.”

    Republished from https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/12/28/it-strange-says-greta-thunberg-biden-seen-climate-leader under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.