Describing the UN climate conference in Glasgow as just “blah blah blah” and a failure, teen activist Greta Thunberg insisted the world needs immediate and drastic change in order to avoid an impending disaster.
“It is not a secret that COP26 is a failure,” Thunberg said at the very start of her address to thousands of young activists who gathered in the Scottish city for her ‘Fridays for Future’ rally.
The “Global North” is “refusing to take any drastic climate action,” she went on, and all the politicians gathered at the conference want is to “continue to fight for the status quo.”
“This is no longer a climate conference. This is now a global greenwashing festival, a two-week long celebration of business as usual and ‘blah, blah, blah’,” Thunberg thundered. The climate summit has turned into a public-relations event, she argued, and the people in power are sacrificing “priceless values” to “maintain business as usual” and continue their “exploitation of people and nature.”
Thunberg echoed her own remarks from Monday, but was even more strident, insisting that “the voices of future generations are drowning in their greenwash and empty promises.”
“We need immediate, drastic, annual emission cuts unlike anything the world has ever seen,” to avoid “irreversible” change to the global climate, Thunberg told the crowd. “And as we don’t have the technological solutions that alone will do even close to that, that means we will have to fundamentally change our society.”
“Our leaders are not leading. This is what leadership looks like,” she said, gesturing at the crowd. Politicians are afraid of the truth, she claimed, but “they cannot ignore the scientific consensus, and above all, they cannot ignore us, the people – including their own children.”
Thunberg also lashed out at the media, which she said “fails to hold the people in power responsible for their action and inaction.”
The nearly ten-minute speech also included references to “root causes” of the world’s problems, inequality, exploitation, and even a form of reparations for countries she said were most affected by climate change.
The 26th UN climate summit convened in Glasgow on October 31 and is scheduled to last another week. Delegations of almost 200 UN member states are attempting to work out the details of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which aims to limit carbon emissions in order to limit global warming.
Inspired by a school protest in the US, Thunberg began a “climate strike” in August 2018, skipping school on Fridays to raise awareness of global warming, and has since become a celebrity climate change activist.
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