This is the callout for a demonstration called by the Fridays for Future / End Fossil Lisbon, organized jointly with Climáximo in a common front to End Fossil Fuels.
We want to live in a fair world, without fear, with well-being on a habitable planet. This is the world we have been fighting for. But what we see around us is a world in collapse, a world of crises, injustice, and death.
We see the cost of living rising, genocide unfolding before our eyes, and the rise of fascism. This summer, in Portugal, we saw thousands of deaths due to extreme heat and the largest fire ever in our territory. We are rapidly heading towards climate collapse: towards drought and water shortages in half of the country, towards ever larger fires, towards more deadly heatwaves that lead to overcrowded hospitals, and towards the constant threat of the next catastrophe that could take us or someone we love.
The science is clear: the use and exploitation of fossil fuels is destroying the conditions that allow life on the planet. The climate crisis is here, and it will affect us all. And the time to stop it is running out. But the government continues to refuse to guarantee a plan that will ensure the end of fossil fuels within the timeframe set by science, preferring to continue selling our future to the fossil fuel industry.
To safeguard the present and the future, today society as a whole has a decision to make: to unite behind the demand for an end to fossil fuels by 2030, or to be complicit in condemning all living generations to an uninhabitable world.
From the Student Climate Strikes in 2019 that mobilized thousands of people to take to the streets, to the school occupations in 2022 that united hundreds of students, and the dozens of protests in front of politicians, we, the young people, have made one thing very clear: the fight to end fossil fuels by 2030 is an existential demand. In 2024, we wrote and delivered an ultimatum to the government: a letter demanding that it present a plan to end the use of fossil fuels in our country by 2030, through a just transition that does not harm the people who did not cause this crisis. We gave the government until November 22, 2025, to present this plan because time is running out to make the present and the future livable. Starting on November 17, students will stop attending school in protest as a final warning to the government. We will show that we do not consent to them selling our future, and that we are willing to stop our schools and not be governed by those who are condemning our lives.
On November 22, if the government has done nothing, we call on all of society to take to the streets, side by side, to demand the future we are all entitled to and march to the Assembly of the Republic in Lisbon.
You cannot stand idly by with all this destruction around you. You, student, who plans your life every day and dreams of what you can become, the time has come to fight for that future. You, teacher, who is educating a new generation and does not want them to live in a world on fire, join us in imagining a new world. You, healthcare professional, who know that the climate crisis is and will increasingly be a public health crisis and who are committed to safeguarding human life, you know that you need to fight alongside us. You, artists, who have always played a fundamental role in all moments of social transformation, you are needed once again. You, fathers and mothers, we need you to march with us, as an act of care, an act of protection. You who are alive today and do not consent to the destruction of life and the selling of the future!
On November 22, we will fight for the future we are entitled to, for a world without fossil fuels, which has justice for all people at its core.
Our future is not for sale. Our lives are not for sale. For an end to fossil fuels by 2030 and an end to all violence against people, take to the streets and join us!
