be in school if you did your job”

Why one Adelaide student joined the school strike for climate action

no trivial goal. The Adani coal mine would ravage our land, killing, polluting, destroying.

Carbon pollution from burning fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas is changing our climate and warming our planet.It’s simple: the more carbon pollution in the air, the more the sun’s energy gets trapped as heat. Which means things keep getting hotter. In fact, the world has already gotten nearly 1°C warmer since 1880.

Warmer temperatures have real consequences for all of us - not just for polar bears. Sea levels around the world have risen nearly 20cm since 1901, swallowing entire islands and creeping closer to populated areas of great coastal cities like New York, Melbourne and Dakar. Plus, extreme weather events like hurricanes, floods and droughts are becoming more frequent and intense.

So why then, was no action being taken to stop this? Why was this burden being placed on the shoulders of schoolchildren?

the facts? What good did it do to sit on chairs all day while our planet and our civilisation were being sacrificed for the greed of a very small number of people?

We wanted the Adani coal mine stopped. It was only a small stepping stone towards a better future, yet, it was

Because profit once again was being prioritised over people; being prioritised over the future of my generation.

Big polluters like oil and coal companies aren’t going down without a fight. After all, they’re making billions from dirty energy while the rest of us pay to clean up their mess. That’s why they’ve spent decades running wellfunded campaigns to mislead and deceive the public about what’s really happening to the planet.

For years, as we grew up, we watched as the climate debate happen before our very eyes; on television, on the news, in the newspapers, and evenin our classrooms. We sat back and we watched, and we listened. We decided to trust the people in power to make the right decisions. After all, this was our future, our lives, that they were debating - but they were dismissing and ignoring and sweeping under the rug.

And today, there is no debate. Climate change is real and happening now and is most definitely a crisis.

The lapse in what climate experts are saying and in the actions that are being taken in society have such a drastic difference that we have decided to take matters into our own hands.

The only power we had over the Government was that they wanted us in schools. So, we took that away.We marched for not only stopping Adani, but for keeping the fossil fuels in the ground, for reducing carbon emissions as per the Paris Agreement, for necessary policies on global warming.

And we will continue to strike, protest, and act, until our objectives are achieved. Because if we don’t take action now, there will be no future generations.

As Greta Thunberg so succinctly put it, “We have had thirty years of pep talking and selling positive ideas. But it doesn’t work.We do not need your hope, we need your action.”

Bhuvi, 17, is a Year 12 student at Glenunga International High School