“Our house is burning”

Greta Thunberg won’t be hitting Canberra any time soon. Beijing and Washington too are off limits. The sixteen-year-old environmental prophet, whose weekly sit-downs outside Sweden’s parliament since last August have inspired a transnational “school strike for climate,” shuns air travel. That, and becoming vegan are modest steps in the change she is sure the world must make to avert ecological breakdown. Her family has taken her lead, at some cost to the career of her mother, an opera singer who — somehow, inevitably — once represented Sweden in the Eurovision song contest.

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg speaks to
BBC television journalist, Nick Robinson outside
the Houses of Parliament in London on 23 April 2019. 

Yet judging by her March–April procession through Berlin, Strasbourg, Rome and London — all journeys made by rail — Thunberg also needs to go (or at least talk) to those capitals and their hinterlands if her message that “our house is burning” is to take effective hold. This is but one paradox in a meteoric rise that seems already to hold both room for lasting good and risk of early burn-out.

Read the Inside Story by David Hayes - “Our house is burning”.”

Swedish student leader wins EU pledge to spend billions on climate

BRUSSELS, Feb 21 (Reuters) - The European Union should spend hundreds of billions of euros combating climate change during the next decade, its chief executive said on Thursday, responding to a Swedish teen who has inspired a global movement of children against global warming.

Teenage Greta Thunberg said she and hundreds of thousands
like her were skipping school each week to focus politicians'
minds on a 2020 deadline for countries to step up planned emissions cuts.

In a speech alongside 16-year-old Greta Thunberg in Brussels, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker also criticised U.S. President Donald Trump for suggesting climate change was "invented" and “ideological".

"In the next financial period from 2021 to 2027, every fourth euro spent within the EU budget will go towards action to mitigate climate change," Juncker said of his proposal for the EU budget, which is typically 1 percent of the bloc's economic output, or 1 trillion euros ($1.13 trillion) over seven years.

"Mr. Trump and his friends believe that climate change is something that has just been invented and its an ideological concept, but ... something dangerous is already underway," Juncker said.

Thunberg was in Brussels to join a seventh week of demonstrations by Belgian children skipping school to protest against global warming.

Read the Reuters story by Clare Roth  - “Swedish student leader wins EU pledge to spend billions on climate.”