Swedish Climate Activist Brings Major Youth Protest to Paris

Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg brought her class-boycott campaign to Paris on Friday, hoping to encourage more French students to hit the streets with demands for bold efforts to combat climate change.

A crowd of around 1,000 people took part in the protest in central Paris, one of dozens planned in cities across Europe as part of her “Fridays For Future” movement.

The Friday protests that the 16-year-old Swede launched in August have gained little traction so far in France, where the landmark COP21 international accord on cutting emissions was signed in 2015.

After urging the E.U. in Brussels to move more aggressively on greenhouse gas cuts on Thursday, Thunberg then traveled to Paris where she met up with young activists from France, Belgium, and Germany for a march which was also joined by French actress Juliette Binoche.

“I never thought it would get so big and I think it’s amazing,” she said of her campaign, speaking to journalists ahead of the march. “We, children, we should not have to do this, adults should be taking responsibility.”

Last Friday, only around 200 students protested outside the environment ministry in Paris.

Out of Excuses, Out of Time

Thunberg’s determined campaign to hold adults accountable for looming climate change consequences has gained global resonance since she began skipping class for weekly Friday protests in Stockholm six months ago.

She made global headlines in December with a strong-willed speech at a U.N. climate meeting in Poland, and last month took her message to the top corporate echelons at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to us children,” Thunberg told world leaders in Poland.

“You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes … You have run out of excuses and we have run out of time.”

In the last six months, tens of thousands of high school students – in Sydney, Brussels, Berlin, The Hague, London, and other cities – have followed her lead.

On Thursday, she joined around 7,500 Belgian student activists who staged a march in Brussels, their seventh such protest.

“I think it is very good that the young protest in the streets of Europe to defend the environment,” European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker said on Thursday, urging adults to join them.

But despite the enthusiastic reception, Thunberg said she had received little indication on Thursday that E.U. leaders were ready to heed her call for faster action.

“I didn’t hear any concrete promise by political leaders and officials; they only say that they are going to try their best,” she said.

‘It Takes Time to Mobilize’

Outside Paris, only two other class-cutting marches have been organized – one in Beauvais just north of Paris and one in the southwestern city of Dax.

“I don’t know why young people mobilize massively in some countries and not others,” Thunberg said in an interview with Le Parisien which was published on Friday.

“France, the country of COP21, needs to do what it says it will,” she added.

Under the 2015 Paris deal to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the 28-nation EU has pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40 percent by 2030, compared to 1990.

Still, France’s climate efforts have come increasingly under the spotlight since August when high-profile green activist Nicolas Hulot resigned abruptly as environment minister saying the government was not making enough progress.

“There have been other social movements which were very active” in France, said 22-year-old Romaric Thurel, one of the coordinators of Youth For Climate France.

“France is a big country and it takes time to mobilize, but we feel a shift.”

More on the Subject

Until recently, the “Green New Deal” was a concept only discussed in wonkish, left-wing circles of American political discourse.

All that changed on November 13, 2018, when a large group of young climate activists with the Sunrise Movement held a sit-in in soon-to-be Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s office. Demanding bold action to address climate change and the formation of a Select Committee for a Green New Deal, the protesters were joined by Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was already a rising star in the Democratic Party.