UK's youth protest Trump's climate stance

From mowing messages to marches, Britain's youth are using Donald Trump's visit to the country to protest against the US president 's stance on climate change.

An art student had a clear message for Donald Trump, mowing "climate change is real" and a massive polar bear into grass underneath the US president's flight path into London.

Ollie Nancarrow, 18, spent the weekend cutting the message in huge letters into the lawn of his family home near Hatfield Heath in Essex, about 65km northeast of London.

In a bid to grab more attention at the start of the three-day state visit to Britain, Nancarrow also wrote "Oi Trump" and mowed a penis into another field, while other young climate activists prepared to join marches and protests in London.

"I decided to mow the message because Trump especially, but many leaders from across the entire world, refuse to believe in climate change and refuse to do anything about climate change," Nancarrow told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

"They worry about all these other issues but none of that matters if we don't fix the climate first."

Nancarrow, who is also involved with an online eco-marketplace, said he had his parents' permission to carve out the message in the lawn.

A growing global movement of young protesters demanding action on climate change - inspired by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg who started a weekly vigil outside parliament last year - has spread from Sweden across Europe, and to countries from the United States to Australia.

Trump has come under fire for plans to withdraw the US from the 2015 Paris Agreement in which nearly 200 nations aimed to limit a rise in average world temperatures to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times.

Sara Arnold from Extinction Rebellion, a campaign group seeking rapid action to curb global warming, said anything like Nancarrow's stunt that put climate change in the news was welcomed.

"It's a massive problem that the United States is not tackling climate change, but the UK is also massively lagging behind where we need to be on this," she said.

"It's shameful that we're seeing children having to take responsibility into their own hands because of the inaction of governments and the rest of the public."

A British government spokesman said Prime Minister Theresa May had raised climate change with Trump before and would do so again this visit as tackling climate change was "a priority".

"As the Prime Minister has said previously, we were disappointed by the US decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement in 2017 and continue to hope they will return," the spokesman said.


Share
3 min read

Published

Source: AAP


Share this with family and friends


Get SBS News daily and direct to your Inbox

Sign up now for the latest news from Australia and around the world direct to your inbox.

By subscribing, you agree to SBS’s terms of service and privacy policy including receiving email updates from SBS.

Download our apps
SBS News
SBS Audio
SBS On Demand

Listen to our podcasts
An overview of the day's top stories from SBS News
Interviews and feature reports from SBS News
Your daily ten minute finance and business news wrap with SBS Finance Editor Ricardo Gonçalves.
A daily five minute news wrap for English learners and people with disability
Get the latest with our News podcasts on your favourite podcast apps.

Watch on SBS
SBS World News

SBS World News

Take a global view with Australia's most comprehensive world news service
Watch the latest news videos from Australia and across the world
UK's youth protest Trump's climate stance | SBS News