Foteini Simic, 16 years outdated, and Petros Kalosakas, 18 years outdated, are high-school college students and Greenpeace volunteers from Athens, Greece.  

There are few moments in life that depend without end. Selecting who (and if) to marry, turning into a mum or dad, shopping for a home… Earlier than all of those come the final years of the Greek Lykeio (senior highschool) and the crucial ultimate exams held through the month of June. The grades one will get on the finish of these three years give form to all of the life milestones to come back.  

This 12 months’s exams – particularly their ultimate days, June 11-13 – had been for positive memorable… Temperatures soared to 43C within the month of June in a lot of the nation – an unprecedented incidence in our lifetime, which pressured us to undergo this essential ceremony of passage on the finish of highschool in insufferable circumstances.  

Issue to focus and breathe, dry mouths throughout oral exams, stifling warmth slowing one’s handwriting, and temperatures that the human physique can not endure for lengthy – these weren’t the perfect circumstances for a profitable commencement.  

However the heatwave that tousled our commencement exams isn’t just unhealthy luck. It’s the results of very unhealthy choices. Latest research have attributed Greece’s searing warmth and ensuing wildfires of the previous years to local weather change. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Local weather Change (IPCC) concludes that the burning of fossil fuels is a major trigger for the extreme heating and quickly rising temperatures.

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This 12 months’s heatwave was not solely intense, however sooner than in earlier years. As colleges shut for 3 months in the summertime when the summer time warmth is excessive, there’s usually not a lot want for air-con and most public colleges don’t have greater than ceiling followers to chill off.  

The local weather disaster has turn out to be an unfair impediment to our particular person prospects, affecting our total era throughout international locations and continents. After all, we’ll work laborious to undergo all the dear moments that life can supply, however it will likely be unimaginable to look again at this boiling month of June and ignore how badly it impacted our grades – and our future.  

This could be a 12 months that fossil fuels, and the businesses that revenue out of them, stole our alternative to make reminiscences and construct a brilliant future. 

Local weather chaos hitting youngsters

What we now have missed in Greece this 12 months pales compared to what others all over the world have misplaced. Hundreds of thousands are displaced by floods in Bangladesh, whereas wildfires and storms declare victims from the Caribbean to China and Canada.  

Kids are sometimes these extra severely affected: we’re residing by a world decline within the provision of training, with the variety of youngsters lacking out on education inflating to a quarter billion. Excessive warmth waves, fuelled by fossil gasoline firms, threaten our era’s future. In our instances, the local weather disaster is now not only a warning. It’s a harsh actuality that has effects on our each day lives. 

Local weather chaos is actual – and we’re already going through its impacts. But governments have failed to maneuver past fossil fuels and proceed to rely on oil and fuel firms, whose earnings have been going robust, at a mean of $3 billion a day for the final 50 years.  

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Massive oil and fuel majors like Shell, TotalEnergies, and ENI have identified in regards to the impacts of local weather change for many years. But although they saved making file earnings – they by no means devoted their abilities and sources to repair the issue. They didn’t use their political ties to ring the alarm bell. They slightly invested thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands in greenwashing and denial.  

Many others knew as properly. Even our grandparents knew the traces of Greek singer Cat Stevens (right now Yusuf Islam): “You roll on roads… pumping petrol fuel… However they simply go on and on and it appears you can’t get off.” It was unimaginable to disregard.  

Now it’s undoubtedly time to leap off the fossil gasoline wagon. Our era should commit all its energies to boost consciousness of how local weather chaos is affecting us all, and to mobilise extra folks to assist local weather and environmental motion. Options have to be pursued, and historic polluters should pay for all that they’ve taken from us – together with our future.