They will skip class to lobby politicians and schools to take action to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.
“Our institutions and our schools keep talking about their concern for our children, but if they’re not going to take it seriously, we’re not going to participate in their institutions,” said Connor Wertz, a student at Middlebury College who helped to plan the protest. “Specifically to do a strike is calling out our institutions for their participation in the inaction we’re seeing today.”
Middle school, high school and college students are all planning to join the strike in Vermont. A demonstration in Middlebury is expecting more than 50 students. More plan to march from U-32 and Montpelier High School to the steps of the Statehouse 2 p.m. Friday. At the University of Northern Vermont-Lyndon, atmospheric sciences students plan to hold a teach-out to discuss climate change.
There will also be public discussions at the Statehouse about the steps Vermont needs to take to address the climate crisis.
Hundreds of thousands of students in more than 100 countries are expected to take part in the movement, started by Greta Thunberg, a teenager from Sweden.
Vermont students are demanding that leaders support the Green New Deal, halt all construction of fossil fuel infrastructure, the declaration of a national emergency on climate change and comprehensive climate change education from an early age.
“These institutions … aren’t really respecting our autonomy as youth and what’s going to happen to us in the future,” Wertz said. “Striking is a way to get people to listen.”
At a Statehouse press conference Wednesday on the climate resolutions more than a dozen Vermont towns adopted on Town Meeting Day, former gubernatorial candidate Christine Hallquist urged all Vermont students to participate in the action.
“We are facing an environmental catastrophe unlike anything humankind has ever seen,” Hallquist said. “The last time we saw carbon levels where they are today was 250 million years ago.”
Today, 40 percent of species are in decline, Hallquist said, and extinction is happening at a rate 1,000 times faster than before humans existed.
“The good news is we can solve this problem, and it’s an incredible business opportunity,” Hallquist said. “It took us 100 years to build the fossil fuel economy that we have today. And we’re going to transform that economy in a mere few decades. And in that transformation, we’re going to create an incredible number of jobs, and incredible innovation like we’ve never seen before.”
Mary Droege, who worked to pass a climate resolution in Castleton last week, spoke at the press conference about her work on the resolution, which passed 378 to 315.
“I want you legislators to understand that a band of citizens in a small town in Vermont felt strongly enough about this issue that we did all this work in just three months time,” Droege said. “We’re all united in the belief that we want to see more action on climate change, at the local level, and that’s our job, but also at the state level, and that’s your job.
“This resolution was appealing to many, because it was seen as a way to vote on an issue that we don’t normally get to vote on, and because of the promise that our vote would roll up with all the other towns that passed their resolutions, that our voice and our passion would be heard in Montpelier,” Dorege said. “So hear our voices, we need climate change solutions and we need them now.”
Rep. Diana Gonzalez, P-Winooski, spoke about H.477, a bill that would put a fee on fossil fuels to be reinvested in public transportation and weatherization and returned as tax credits for low-income and rural residents, though the bill has garnered no momentum this session.
“Sometimes, when we think about climate solutions, we think, ‘oh my gosh, this is arduous, this is not going to be possible, this is so much bigger than we can possibly imagine,’” Gonzalez said. “And really, there are very smart solutions that can keep money here in Vermont and reduce our carbon pollution, and it doesn’t actually take that much work.”