Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg’s group Fridays for Future on Thursday launched a series of rallies to protest Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The group said it plans to hold events in over 40 cities around the world.
Fridays for Future specializes in “youth strikes” that involve students marching out of their classrooms to demand action on their climate change agenda. The same technique will evidently be used for the protests against Russia.
“We are running a demonstration at 12 p.m., in the middle of the day, because the lives of the Ukrainian people have been stopped, not by their choice. We also want to stop our lives in solidarity with them,” a Fridays for Future activist student in Warsaw told Yahoo News.
“Ukrainian voices, refugee voices, will be leading that demonstration, and we as Fridays will be just the host, providing logistics to make it happen,” the student said, referring to the large number of Ukrainian refugees who have crossed the border into Poland during the Russian attack.
Fridays for Future rallies have been planned in Germany, Portugal, Italy, and Nigeria, and the group says it might change the global climate protest they planned for March 25 to focus on the Russian invasion instead.
Thunberg and her group are studiously oblivious to the effect climate activism has had on regional politics by throttling European energy production and boosting the value of Russia’s oil. At best, comments from the group to Yahoo and other outlets indicated they think Russia’s economic leverage supports their cause because the world can only neutralize it by completely abandoning fossil fuels.
The UK Independent on Friday quoted economists who echoed that line, unironically saluting Thunberg as “more effective than any Western sanctions” because climate activists can supposedly bankrupt the oil-rich Russian tyranny by re-primitivizing the Western world.
“What can Europe do now about its energy dependency? If they’d done what we’d said in 2014, Russia wouldn’t have the strength it has today. If Germany had reconsidered its approach to nuclear power, for instance. Russia’s making billions. Every time people in Europe turn on their heating, Russia’s making money,” said Renaissance Capital chief economist Charlie Robertson, having evidently given little thought to what happens when people in Europe do not heat their homes during the winter.
Europe’s fantastically expensive efforts to follow climate alarmist advice and switch over to “green energy” have been a spectacular disaster during high-demand periods, such as freezing cold winter months. One reason Russia has so much leverage right now is that Europeans spent the last months of 2021 scrambling to buy oil and gas to “pick up the slack” from underperforming “green energy” networks, pushing energy prices to record highs.
As for nuclear power, the climate change movement remains largely opposed to it, convinced that nuclear plants are dangerous and generate too many greenhouse gasses. Thunberg herself demanded Europe abandon all plans to finance nuclear plants, but the European Commission rejected her demands in December and classified nuclear power as “sustainable energy.”
The hair-raising battles fought near Ukrainian nuclear plants, including the infamous Chernobyl site, will not help to alleviate safety concerns.
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