The UN Summit and the Children’s Climate Strike

4 Million Youth, All Over the Planet:
We Demand a Right to a Future, for All of Humanity!

Global Rulers: Fuck You!
What Are We Gonna Do NOW?!?

September 30, 2019 | revcom.us

Four million children and young people strike and take to the streets across the world, demanding that action be taken to save the planet NOW. Fired with a sense of defiance, mission and responsibility, they want to hear solutions and be part of solutions. They want to see people act, to change that future.

Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old climate activist, as part of her powerful and blistering denunciation of world leaders, says: “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” It is a stance based on scientific and moral clarity.

The UN Summit,¹ true to form, does nothing, accomplishes nothing. Declares: Fuck You!

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, dueling with Trump for most surreal, fascist declaration-of-the-year award, tells the UN General Assembly that the Amazon forests, the very lungs of the planet, which went up in flames this summer, were “practically untouched.” He blames a “lying and sensationalist media” for propagating fake news—and went on to reject and ridicule the idea that Amazon rainforests are “a heritage of humankind.”

Narendra Modi, India’s fascist leader,² offers honeyed words at the UN, while his government has set a target of expanding coal production by almost 50 percent—to 1 billion tons next year—inviting in foreign companies to facilitate this mad rush for coal.

Down the street from the UN meeting, a conclave of 13 of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies hold a forum to make their case that they “care” and are doing something. They promise a brave new world of carbon sequestration technologies that just scoop it up like a vacuum—a pile of public relations bullshit to keep drilling ever more deeply and in ever more remote parts of the globe. According to the New York Times, “…since 2018, major oil companies have invested at least $50 billion in fossil fuel projects—like Shell’s $13 billion liquefied natural gas project in Canada and BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil and Equinor’s $4.3 billion deepwater oil project in Azerbaijan—that would not be financially viable if the world were to meet the 1.5-degree target [keeping global temperature from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius more].”

Trump himself tweeted mockingly about Thunberg, giving the green light for a barrage of sickening vilification that was spread through the internet. In mocking derision, he tweeted: “She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!” (as MeinTrumpf retweeted a clip of the teenager’s speech). The U.S. under the Trump/Pence fascist regime has been expanding coal and oil production, removing already paltry environmental protections, and censoring and attacking climate science.

Worse Than You Think…and We Must Take Things Into Our Own Hands

In a recent book, The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells sounds the scientific alarm that “It [the climate crisis] is worse, far worse, than you think.” These responses and non-responses on view this past week from the capitalist and imperialist rulers of the world and corporate-capitalist titans are “worse, far worse, than you think.” They are telling us that they are going to pollute, that they are going to ravage the planet, and frankly don’t give a fuck about the future of humanity and planet Earth.

The rulers of this system will not—and cannot—listen to reason. (See the clip “The Destruction of the Planet by Capitalism-Imperialism” from Bob Avakian’s filmed speech Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can Really Make Revolution.)

The people MUST take matters into our own hands—to act in the interests of humanity and the planet. For the defiant young people who took to the streets not to let up but to step up, and challenge and draw others into the swirl…for scientists not to be intimidated but to redouble their efforts to project and fight for the truth…for activists and people of conscience who care about the planet not to let themselves get corralled into bourgeois electoral and other dead-ends but to resist ever more ferociously.

Look at the world today. Destruction of the environment. Youth in the inner cities robbed of a future, “presumed guilty” for being Black or Brown, hounded and shot down by police, incarcerated in huge numbers. Women raped, battered and murdered, denied their basic humanity and their full potential as human beings. People scorned, bullied, brutalized for being gay, or just being “different.” Millions of children dying every year from starvation and disease. Immigrants driven from their homelands, forced into the shadows, exploited, deported, ripped away from their children. Slaughter and enslavement in the name of one god or another. Wars, torture, and massive government spying.

Things are this way because of the system that rules over us and declares its “special right” to rule the world. A system like this is a system that no one should put up with or go along with. It needs to be swept off the face of the earth. And it can be.

—Bob Avakian (from 2014 New Year’s Message)

1. The UN is a body of the world’s governments in which major decisions are taken by so-called international leaders. As such, it is merely a body of the heads of these oppressive states of capitalism-imperialism and a tool of their global domination and rivalry. [back]

2. In a sign of the times, and what this system’s “corporate philanthropy” is truly about, Modi even got an award from Bill Gates for his schemes to expand “toilet” access, despite protests from human rights and other activists. Among his many crimes: (a) autonomy was revoked in Muslim majority Kashmir, basically locking down seven million people; (b) in the state of Assam, a repression campaign rendered two million Muslims stateless; (c) as chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat in 2005, he presided over the lynching of over a thousand Muslims. [back]