I was one of 50 people arrested for stopping a coal train bound for the Port of Newcastle on Sunday.
We were supported by more than 100 people cheering and singing from the other side of the fence, including my 96-year-old grandfather. The feeling of connection and hope was incredible, I've never felt more empowered to actually change society and address the climate crisis in ways I once thought were impossible.
Most people who know me know I've been passionate about environmental causes my whole life.
I've done what I can and attended the school strike rallies, voted for parties with the best climate policies, become a vegetarian, rode my bike, minimised my energy use, dedicated my studies to renewable energy, and always followed the rules.
All the while listening to more and more dire warnings about the climate collapse and what my future is going to look like, and pretending that what we are doing is enough.
The impacts of climate change are no longer a far-off future challenge. The past eight years have been the warmest eight years on record. Temperature and disaster records are being broken every year.
Floods in Pakistan and China, heatwaves in India, droughts in China and Europe, tropical storms in Asia and America, bushfires in Australia and the US are already causing billions of dollars in damages and displacing millions of people.
We know without a doubt that these are fuelled by climate change and are only going to get worse and more frequent, and I realised that what we are currently doing is simply not good enough.
The IPCC and the world's leading scientists have delivered a "final warning" for humanity.
Even temporarily exceeding certain warming thresholds will see irreversible and catastrophic impacts, and potentially trigger further runaway warming, and all pathways to keep warming below 2 degrees involve deep, rapid (in most cases immediate) and sustained reduction in emissions this decade.
Despite this, there is a substantial gap between current commitments/policies and the pathways required to keep warming below this level, even though we've been repeatedly told the benefits of keeping warming below 2 degrees outweigh the costs of mitigation.
I don't know how we can truly understand these facts and still believe that my actions are more radical than those that continue to expand production of fossil fuels.
Prioritising short-term gain and profit over the survival of humanity is genuinely one of the most radical actions I can imagine.
We currently have a choice between temporary disruption now, or worse disruption in the future, forever.
I'm in my final year of renewable energy engineering, and I understand that despite the progress being made we obviously can't stop burning all fossil fuels today. But Australia has 116 "new" fossil fuel projects in the pipeline.
If all of these proceed, our annual emissions will triple by 2030. I can't even begin to wrap my head around how insane these numbers are.
At a time when we know we are in a crisis, when we've been told again and again that our house is burning, we think it's OK to keep adding fuel to the fire.
I think everyone will have their assumptions about why I did what I did, but I want you to hear it from me.
I'm scared and I don't know what else to do. What choice do people like me who are terrified for our future have left but civil disobedience? You can try to tell me that this is not the right way to advocate for change, but so many historical social movements we take for granted now (civil rights, women's suffrage, the 40-hour work week) in their time were criticised as disruptive, radical, extreme and not the "right" way to protest.
We now look back to these people with admiration and respect, as the ones who were on the right side of history, and I have no doubt my actions will be viewed the same way in the future.
When we stand together and use hopeful actions like this to achieve a mass movement, I really believe we can be part of building a better future.
I'm not denying the challenges of dramatically reducing our emissions. But I am not going to stop fighting for a safer future, and I'm begging us to stop denying the catastrophic human and economic costs of our current path.
If the past few years have shown us anything, it's that our society can achieve incredible things when we truly treat something as an emergency.
Let's start treating the climate crisis like one.
Jasmine Stuart is a renewable energy engineering student
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