Over the past year, I have kinda mentioned the Fridays-for-the-Future crowd in Germany a number of times. It's a Greta-team effort to have demonstrations at 12-noon on Fridays, and tie up traffic around highly urbanized cities.
Are the majority of German teens participating in this? To some degree....although one might go and suggest that half of them are just skipping out on the Friday afternoon class business....for the fun of it....rather than for the carbon or climate change business.
So yesterday, there was supposed to be a big massive Fridays-for-the-Future march in Mainz. The school system (based on reporting by SWR, the Pfalz public TV network) said fine.....two could play this game, and dismissed the kids early (around 10 AM). They figured between the cold weather, and being thrown out of the city schools....they'd all hop on buses, trams, and trains....returning home.
Well....they guessed wrong. By city count, 9,000 kids gathered in the center of Mainz for the protest (the kids suggest they had 12,000). The home-early business? A failure. They might go and try cancelling school entirely on Friday, but I doubt that this would have much of an effect.
Oddly, while this protest was going on....a counter-protest, led by Pfalz and Hessen farmers.....also took place.
The farmer attitude? It's growing more angry.....as each week passes, with more intense regulation taking place, and profitability now being openly discussed as 'near-impossible'.
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