To End War, We Should End Our Dependence On Fossil Fuels

Youth climate activists: our answer to war must be radical exit from fossil fuel.

By Leanna First-Arai, Truthout

Just before noon on Tuesday, March 1, following a morning of intermittent air-raid sirens, a tweet went live from an account geotagged to Independence Square in Kyiv, Ukraine. “We are scared,” its author wrote. “We need you to be there for us.”

The tweet, posted to the account of Ukraine’s chapter of Fridays for Future — the youth activist group named after Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg’s now-iconic weekly protest — ricocheted quickly around online climate communities.

A soldier dressed in military uniform with a machine gun stands on the road and looks at houses (buildings) destroyed by hostilities.

“We are youth climate activists usually fighting a crisis we didn’t cause, now finding ourselves at the front lines of a war we didn’t start,” the thread continued. “We ask for all of our brothers and sisters from Fridays for Future to go on the streets, to demand this war to end, to fight for peace in our name.”