De Wever told BuzzFeed News that as well as Thunberg’s video, two things happened this winter that made her feel like she had to take action: The first was Belgium’s decision not to embrace ambitious steps to cut carbon emissions in December. The second was the realization that she would not be 18 before the spring elections in both Belgium and for the Parliament of the European Union. By the time an election came where she would actually have a say, the chance to rein in climate change could be almost gone forever.
The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released last October, said the world would see catastrophic impacts from climate change, such as rising seas and coral reefs dying, even if countries managed to limit warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is the most ambitious target under the existing climate accords. The report also said countries needed to act even faster than they’ve previous agreed to.
This seems basically impossible especially as the US, one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases, is actually increasing its emissions. President Donald Trump has rolled back many climate directives and policies, as well as vowed to withdraw the US from the Paris agreement.
It’s shocking, De Wever said, that adults should have to be reminded by high school students that they’re making decisions that will shape their entire lives.
“Your political games, they’re very funny and all, but you’re the influences of our future,” she told BuzzFeed News. She said the protests, now in their fifth week and drawing tens of thousands in cities across Belgium, have given her a voice that’s “better than voting.”
Her protests have met a considerable backlash; there have been death threats online now being investigated by police, her mother told BuzzFeed News. (In a lengthy Facebook post, Thunberg wrote this month that she had seen “enormous amounts of hate” about her.)
One of Belgium’s environment ministers, Joke Schauvliege, claimed the country's intelligence service had told her the protests were a “setup” and not “spontaneous actions of solidarity with our climate.” Schauvliege later resigned after admitting that the security services told her no such thing.
De Wever told BuzzFeed News that her concern about climate change grew directly out of gender advocacy. De Wever, who was assigned female at birth, identified as a boy throughout primary school, and now identifies as gender-fluid and prefers female pronouns. This experience made her comfortable challenging basic assumptions about the world that older people often treat as unchangeable, which she said is also true of the feeling that the steps to stop climate change are out of reach.
“Being gender-fluid by a young age ... how I see the world is a bit different,” she said. “I don’t look at the mainstream and what they think. I start to have my own values, own principles, and I think about what’s not going right in this world and what can I do and improve it instead of just closing my eyes to it — that really scares me.”
De Wever became passionate about climate change while attending a youth conference associated with the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in 2016. There she learned that women often suffer disproportionately during natural disasters compared to men, and so were likely to be hurt the worst by climate change.
De Wever’s mother, Katrien Van der Heyden, told her about Thunberg’s video in their kitchen one evening last December. She watched it that night, and then announced the following morning she would make a video of her own with her best friend.
“I have to be very honest about this — at this point in time I didn’t think it would amount to anything,” said Van der Heyden, who now acts as her daughter’s de facto press secretary. “I thought, It’s a nice little project. She’s going to be making that little movie with her friends; it’s educational, much better that just staying at home watching Netflix — I underestimated my daughter.”
Van der Heyden, a 51-year-old sociologist who specializes in gender equity, said she also underestimated the whole young generation.
As far as she could recall, she said, “It’s the very first time in Belgium that a [mass movement was] started by two women and not about feminist rights.” When the protests drew tens of thousands, Van der Heyden said, she was stunned to see as many boys as girls in the crowds, and yet no one ever challenged the leadership of the female organizers.
“We, as women leaders, have been pushed aside by men. We were told we can only be leaders [on women’s issues],” she said. Van der Heyden said that when she sees boys in the crowd shouting her daughter’s name at the rallies, “Every time I’m moved to tears.”
“The whole mansplaining mechanism has really disappeared in that generation,” she said.