Cold Open

It’s March 15th, 2019 at a small clothes store in central Belfast, Northern Ireland.

The store’s owner re-arranges a dress on a mannequin in the window display. It’s a typical Friday—a few customers wander the street outside, but it’s nothing like the busy weekends when youngsters descend on the city center to check out the latest fashions.

As the manager smooths out the garment, though, he hears the distant sound of chanting echo down the street outside. Sounds like hundreds of voices shouting. And they’re getting closer.

The man can’t see much out of the window, so he leaves the mannequins and climbs out of the display. Exchanging confused glances with a colleague, he goes to the front door… and peers out down the street.

The store owner immediately sees the source of all the noise—a huge group of teenagers. The man watches nervously as the crowd approaches, hoping they aren’t here to make trouble. But as the teenagers come closer, the store owner reads the signs they’re carrying: “There is no planet B” and “Denial gets us nowhere.”

Sensing an opportunity to get some footage for the store’s social media, the owner pulls out his phone. And as he begins to record, a teenage boy in the crowd grabs a megaphone.

In a voice brimming with conviction, the boy declares that the teenagers are on strike—they’re skipping school to urge the government to do something about the ongoing climate crisis. The boy pleads with onlookers to take climate change seriously and says that people who deny that the world is getting warmer are “utter idiots.”

The store manager watches and cannot help smiling as the good-natured, boisterous crowd floods past his store, their signs held high and their young faces shining bright.

This protest in Belfast is not an isolated event. On the same day, more than a million children around the world skipped school to attend similar demonstrations. Each protest has the same aim: to spur governments to combat climate change. It’s a huge, coordinated effort with one person at its center: the Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg. Thanks to Greta’s tenacious efforts, the environmental protest movement will enter a new era after hundreds of thousands of youngsters take to the streets in a global School Strike for Climate on March 15th, 2019.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is March 15th, 2019: Greta Thunberg’s School Strike Goes Global.

Act One: Heating Up

It’s the morning of August 20th, 2018 in Stockholm, Sweden; seven months before the schoolchildren’s global protest.

15-year-old Greta Thunberg walks past Parliament House, a large, palatial building in the center of the Swedish capital. The day’s first tourists are already taking photographs outside, but Greta isn’t here to admire the building’s grand Neoclassical architecture. Today is a Monday, and Greta should be in school. But instead, she’s playing hooky to raise awareness of something that means even more to her than her education: climate change.

Although Greta is still only a teenager, she’s been passionate about the environment ever since she understood the concept of climate change and how little was really being done to stop it. She's persuaded her parents to lower their own carbon footprint by becoming vegan, recycling more, and giving up flying. But Greta has realized that one family’s efforts alone are nowhere near enough to prevent a global catastrophe. So today, she’s here in central Stockholm to pressure the Swedish government to do more to combat climate change at a national level.

Greta selects a prominent spot on the steps outside Parliament House and then sits down. By her side, she places a simple hand-painted sign, saying “School strike for the climate” in Swedish. As tourists pass, they look at the young woman curiously, and Greta silently hands out flyers to anyone who will take them. These too carry a simple but blunt message: that adults are wrecking her generation’s future.

The Swedish general election is due to take place in four weeks’ time. Greta hopes that her protest will help steer the results of that election toward a more environmentally-minded future for the country. So, she skips school and returns to Parliament House every day. Her parents initially disapprove of her protest, but they soon change their minds as more people start to take notice of Greta’s resolve.

Greta posts photos from outside Parliament House on social media, and she explains why she’s protesting. Gradually, other teens join her. Even a couple of her own teachers are inspired by the tenacity of their young student and sit with Greta outside Parliament House. And as the small but determined group of protestors continues to grow, soon it’s not just other Swedes seeing Greta's posts online. A Finnish banker who’s also worried about climate change retweets Greta's posts to more than 200,000 followers on Twitter. Climate activists in other countries start sharing her content too, spreading awareness of the protest across the globe.

As Greta's message is amplified on social media, her movement is noticed by the press. Just like the protests themselves, the media coverage starts small, then begins to grow. Local newspapers write about the demonstration, which gains the attention of national, and then international, broadcasters. Greta’s school strike makes a great story, and she speaks knowledgeably about climate change in television and print interviews. She points to Sweden’s record-breaking heatwaves and wildfires as evidence that climate change is getting worse. And she calls on the Swedish government to drastically lower its carbon footprint in line with the pledges it’s made to tackle the issue in the past.

But Greta knows that she can’t miss school indefinitely. On September 7th, the last school day before the Swedish general election, Greta announces she’s returning to class—but she promises to continue her protest once a week on Fridays, and she names this new phase “Fridays for Future.”

But even if now only weekly, Greta's school strikes still inspire. In other countries, children also start skipping school in protest. Five Dutch students spend days sitting outside the country’s House of Representatives at The Hague. In Berlin, striking children demonstrate outside the German Parliament with signs saying “Strike for Climate” and “Follow Greta”,  making the Swedish teenager a new celebrity.

In December 2018, she is invited to give a speech to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poland. And despite facing an audience of Europe’s leading politicians, Greta doesn’t hold back in her criticism of their governments. The following month, she repeats her complaints about the lack of climate action to powerful leaders at a meeting of the World Economic Forum.

And Greta's willingness to take on the political establishment will inspire more teens around the world to organize their own climate protests. And as her reputation grows, Greta will become an icon not just for other youth activists and teenagers like her, but for the entire environmentalist movement.

Act Two: Into The Streets

It’s February 21st, 2019 in Brussels, Belgium, three weeks before the global School Strike for Climate.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, takes to the stage at a conference of social policy activists. Juncker has a hard act to follow though, because the speaker before him was the new face of environmentalism, the Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg.

It’s only been a few months since Greta started her weekly Friday for Future protests in her hometown of Stockholm, but already she and her wider movement have gained global attention. Thanks to her increased profile, Greta's appearance at the conference in Brussels has attracted more than 10,000 students to join her in the Belgian capital. These young people are already noisily marching outside the conference site to demand that politicians like Juncker take action to combat climate change.

Juncker begins his speech by paying tribute to Greta and her fast-growing Fridays for Future movement. He promises that he is listening to their concerns. And to prove it, he outlines a radical proposal to alter the EU budget, dedicating a quarter of all the organization’s funds for efforts to combat climate change.

Greta welcomes Juncker’s speech. His plan would mean the EU dedicating hundreds of billions of Euros to the cause. But the budget is only a proposal at this stage, and Greta knows it’s unlikely to be enacted. She’s also all too aware that many politicians make promises they cannot deliver on. It’s not just her country, Sweden that is failing to live up to its pledges to tackle climate change—governments around the world are backtracking on their commitments too.

So, after her appearance at the Brussels conference, Greta promises to keep up the pressure on world leaders by increasing the scale of her Fridays for Future protests. Less than four weeks later, the biggest demonstrations yet take place. On March 15th, 2019, Greta collaborates with activist groups around the world to encourage children to participate in a one-day mass school strike.

And when it happens, over a million young people in more than 120 countries participate in this unprecedented global demonstration. They’re joined by sympathetic adults, including scientists and researchers in Antarctica, who conduct their own protest in support. The Global School Strike for Climate, as the coordinated protests are named, is the subject of intense media coverage. Television channels broadcast footage of the marches. Newspapers carry live commentary and analysis on their websites.

All this attention on her and The Global School Strike for Climate raises Greta's profile even further. Afterward, she’s invited to consult with world leaders and speak in national parliaments. But not everyone is willing to listen, and some politicians who disagree with her assessment of the climate emergency boycott her speeches. Greta is able to find a warmer welcome at the Vatican, where Pope Benedict commends her perseverance and the importance of defending the environment. But Greta doesn’t forget how her activism began. If any of her engagements land on a Friday, she makes sure to participate in a nearby Fridays for Future protest with local children.

And despite all of her globe-trotting, Greta also refuses to break the pledge she made years earlier not to fly on aircraft. She chooses to take less polluting forms of transportation—regardless of the distance. This doesn’t make things easy for her when she’s invited to speak at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York City. Since Greta has vowed not to fly, she takes a racing yacht across the Atlantic Ocean in a trip that takes two weeks. The longer journey time over choppy waters are no issue for her, though, and she turns the voyage into another opportunity to promote her cause, sharing videos and photos from the yacht on social media and using the journey to raise awareness of greener modes of travel.

Then when she arrives in New York, Greta joins other young environmentalists to speak at a panel discussion on climate change. She and her fellow activists call out nations that are failing in their pledges to reduce their carbon emissions. To Greta and the other panelists, this failure amounts to child endangerment, since it threatens the future that all young people will have to face as they grow up.

So, by the end of 2019, Greta will have become a figurehead of the climate movement and even be named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. But at the beginning of 2020, Greta will face a new challenge. The climate crisis will be overshadowed by a new global emergency, one that will also threaten the world’s future but in a very different way.

Act Three: The Movement Continues

It’s March 13th, 2020 at Greta Thunberg’s home in Stockholm, Sweden, one year after the global School Strike for Climate.

Greta poses in her bedroom with a homemade sign that says “school strike for the climate,” the same sign she’s used ever since her protests began eighteen months prior. Right now, hundreds of millions of children around the world are absent from school too—the reason has nothing to do with climate activism.

Several months ago, rumors began circulating about a new illness in China. Soon, this new disease, named COVID-19 by scientists, began to rapidly spread around the globe. A few days ago, countries began to go into lockdown: governments ordered their citizens to stay at home, work remotely where possible, and close schools.

Greta checks the photo she’s taken of her holding the sign in her bedroom and posts the image to Twitter. Alongside it, she explains that she can’t attend a Fridays for Future protest in light of the coronavirus outbreak—but she does intend to continue the fight online. She encourages other young people to join her in protesting digitally, telling them to snap a selfie with a homemade poster and share it using the hashtag “ClimateStrikeOnline.”

The idea of a digital strike doesn’t originate with Greta. Other youth climate activists who didn’t want to skip school have voiced their support online ever since the Fridays for Future movement began. But now, digital striking offers an option to continue Fridays for Future, as long as the lockdowns last—and Greta's own involvement legitimizes and promotes the online protest.

Greta will throw herself into the digital protests with as much enthusiasm as she had in any other—and when the COVID-19 restrictions ease, she will resume attending protests in person. Thanks to her high school graduation in June 2023, Greta will no longer technically be able to join the school strikes—but she will continue to support Fridays for Future protests and be a figurehead of the movement, a position cemented when more than one million children joined her in The Global School Strike for Climate on March 15th, 2019.

Outro

Next on History Daily. March 18th, 1314. Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, is burned at the stake.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Muhammad Shahzaib.

Sound design by Mollie Baack.

Music by Thrumm.

This episode is written and researched by Georgia Hampton.

Edited by Scott Reeves.

Managing producer Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are William Simpson for Airship, and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.