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'I Want a Future': Global Youth Protests Urge Climate Action

Associated Press

   NEW YORK - Young people afraid for their futures protested around the
   globe Friday to implore leaders to tackle climate change, turning out
   by the hundreds of thousands to insist that the warming world can't
   wait any longer.

   Marches, rallies and demonstrations were held from Canberra to Kabul
   and Cape Town to New York. More than 100,000 turned out in Berlin.
   Days before a U.N. climate summit of world leaders, the "Global Climate
   Strike'' events were as small as two dozen activists in Seoul using LED
   flashlights to send Morse code messages and as large as mass
   demonstrations in Australia that organizers estimated were the
   country's largest since the Iraq War began in 2003.
   "You are leading the way in the urgent race against the climate
   crisis,'' U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres wrote in a message to
   the young protesters on Twitter. "You are on the right side of history.
   Keep pushing us to do the right thing.''
   In New York, where public schools excused students with parental
   permission, tens of thousands of mostly young people marched through
   lower Manhattan, briefly shutting down some streets.
   "Sorry I can't clean my room, I'm busy saving the world,'' one
   protester's sign declared.
   Thousands marched to the Capitol in Washington, including 15-year-old
   high school sophomore A.J. Conermann.
   "Basically, our earth is dying, and if we don't do something about it,
   we die,'' Conermann said.
   Thousands packed the streets around Seattle's City Hall, following a
   march where tech workers from Amazon and Google joined students
   demanding an end to fossil fuel use.
   Demonstrations came in smaller cities as well. Washington Gov. Jay
   Inslee, who recently abandoned his climate-focused presidential run,
   addressed a rally in Spokane, and a crowd chanted inside the rotunda of
   the state Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin.
   "It's really unbelievable and really startling to know how little time
   we have to reverse the damage,'' said Maris Maslow-Shields, a high
   school student from Santa Rosa, California, who marched in San
   Francisco.
   In Paris, teenagers and kids as young as 10 traded classrooms for the
   streets. Marie-Lou Sahai, 15, skipped school because "the only way to
   make people listen is to protest.''

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