A group of RMIT student activists participated in a mass protest today in the Melbourne CBD as a part of the #globalclimatestrike.
Alongside everyday Melburnians skipping work for the event, the students abandoned their classrooms to march in order to combat climate change.
Global strike 4 Climate organisers expect that over one million people globally will participate in these strikes in 150 different countries.
The strike challenges the Australian Government to make the transition to 100% renewable energy by the year 2030. This includes ceasing to invest in new coal, oil or gas projects and creating a program to support workers facing redundancy throughout this upheaval.
A group of RMIT students have congregated on Bowen Street in anticipation of the strike. We spoke with a few of them, including 18-year-old Shreya Srivastava, who was waiting with her friends for the protest to begin.
Shreya Sirvastava, a student protester at RMIT University Melbourne
Srivastava said, in her view, renewable energy technologies are the best trade alternative to coal in terms of Australia’s Economy. She touched on the idea that we have access to alternative energies beyond solar, hydro and wind – her example being algae which can be used to generate and store energy.
22-year old Cormac, another RMIT student activist and Student Union representative, sees the school strike as “one of the most visible aspects of the climate movement”. He believes that raising awareness is one of the protests’ primary goals.
According to Cormac, who is also a member of the ecological preservation group Extinction Rebellion, the “small consumer choices” cannot tackle the bulk of the climate crisis – he hopes the #globalclimatestrike will “challenge the governments for their inaction.”
When asked about the potential benefits of the strike, Cormac was stoic in the need for a “reformation of the Union movement”; he was also dismissive in regard to the Government’s acceptance of the strike, suggesting that the ALP “wouldn’t do anything” in support of the event.
There were evident concerns for the protesters’ end goal of attaining 100% renewable energy by 2030, Cormac going on to claim that it would be an “impossible” goal under a system predominantly revolving around “constant economic growth”.
RMIT student activists ready for climate strike
Evangeline Stogiannou, 20, was active in organising the protest. She says that she understands that changing to 100% renewable energy would take time, but the government needs to at least acknowledge and declare that there is a climate emergency. “Science tells us that we only have 11 years to change the trajectory of the planets extinction,” Eva says.
“11 years doesn’t mean we start that process in 11 years, it means that we need to start now.”
