While here in Europe, Russian gas and oil prices occupy all our discussions, in Australia, this high school student tackles another fossil fuel: coal, one of the worst sources of greenhouse gas emissions. greenhouse, and of which his country is the world’s fourth largest producer. Anjali Sharma, 17, lives in Melbourne, and since 2020, she has been suing her government for allowing the opening of yet another coal mine, and thus having failed in her duty to protect the future of the younger generations.
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Along with eight other teenagers, ages 14 to 17, she won her trial last year, in 2021, in federal court. But the Ministry of the Environment appealed. A dramatic turn of events on Tuesday March 15, the court finally decided that the government did not “no duty of care towards children in the face of the effects of climate change“.
Not sure who this will even reach lol but i’m lying in bed literally devastated. I’m angry. It’s not every day that the Federal #EnvironmentMinister decides to argue that she doesn’t have to care about climate impacts on children, and it’s not every day she wins. What the hell.
— anjali (@anjsharmaaa) March 15, 2022
When leaving the courtroom, many young people cried, but not Anjali Sharma. She went home and wrote a long op-ed that the Sydney Morning Herald just posted:Children are always told that you have to accept losing, that victory is not everything, that the important thing is to participate. Yeah, but we lost, and I’m angry, I’m devastated.”
Anjali Sharma recalls that when she filed a complaint, Australia was suffering the biggest fires in its history. And that today, the same territory is devastated by extraordinary floods, so she asks, how many disasters will it take for measures to be taken?
Anjali Sharma is a litigant in the class action against the Federal government (in particular the Environment Minister, Sussan Ley) for failing to consider the impacts of #ClimateChange.
She is, quite simply, amazing! #abc730 #auspol pic.twitter.com/frixxNjCZb—Mia Kennedy (@Mia__Kennedy) March 15, 2022
“Certainly, she writes, the court found that the government owes the children nothing when it agrees to open coal mines, but our moral argument stands, and this verdict does not change the scientific truth, it does not cancel the mega-fires, nor the floods that result from climate change.“Anjali Sharma does not want to stop there, with her comrades, she is studying the possibility of going to cassation.
She, who was born in 2004 in New Delhi, India, in one of the most polluted cities in the world, before her parents emigrated, says she is not only fighting for Australia, but for limit global warming. Greenhouse gases know no borders. On social networks, moreover, she received thousands of messages of support, thanks, encouragement. And not just from young Australians. Proof that she and her eight comrades are far from alone.