(London) Environmental activist Greta Thunberg said on Sunday that UN climate conferences and COPs have become greenwashing machines.Green washing) And they should be used on the contrary to compel leaders to take action.
Updated yesterday at 9:34 pm.
“Space for civil society is very limited this year,” at 27.e The Swedish activist argued during a question-and-answer session at London’s Southbank Center for the opening of the UN climate conference. weather ledger.
On Twitter, she has already expressed her solidarity with “Prisoners of conscience in Egypt ahead of COP27” starting on November 6 in Sharm el-Sheikh.
The COPs, previously held in Glasgow, “are not really meant to change the system” but to encourage incremental progress on the climate emergency, argued the 19-year-old activist, whose speech on Sunday closed the London Literature Festival.
According to her, COPs have become greenwashing machines, marketing activities that mimic real actions to combat the climate crisis.
“As they are, COPs don’t really work, unless they are used as an opportunity to mobilize”, the young woman continued.
Released on Thursday The Big Weather Book It has a hundred contributions from climate or other experts, including economist Thomas Piketty, WHO boss Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus or author Naomi Klein.
All royalties are donated to a foundation bearing his name and distributed to environmental charities.
“I wanted to write this book to educate people, which is kind of ironic that my subject is school strikes,” the activist said during the pandemic.
Again and again on Sunday, she called for everyone to become activists, knowing that there are “many paths.”
drastic changes
“The time for small actions is over and we need radical changes” and according to her, “we need billions of activists” to get it from business leaders or governments that have a stake in the status quo.
She repeated time and again that the climate crisis was not the fault of humanity as a whole, but the fault of the wealthy, while “the historically exploited suffer the most”.
Instead of moving in the right direction, the world is going full speed into the wall, she warned, as, for example, “the amount of electricity generated from coal,” the most polluting fuel, “reached a historic record last year.”
International pledges to warm the Earth by 2.6°C, a “woefully inadequate” result, the UN Secretary General condemned last week, calling for an end to greenwashing, but 2022 has already seen an increase in climate disasters: dramatic floods in Pakistan, droughts, heat waves or forest fires.
On Sunday, the 19-year-old Swede said she had no idea she was about to start the planetary movement: “One thing led to another,” she laughed.
She recalls starting to protest outside the Swedish parliament in 2018 because she was “too shy and autistic” to join existing NGOs. “And it worked better than I thought!” »
With a smile, she says she “really likes to upset people”, especially people in power, “or whoever”, like former US President Donald Trump, who criticized her for years. Many times.
When asked about Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, she laughs and gravely replies that there are more important reasons than “sending rockets into space.”
Finally, when asked about the controversial actions of environmental groups such as Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil, which recently sprayed paint or soup on artworks, Greta Thunberg argued that “a lot of people are frustrated and that’s why.” It is reasonable to expect them to try new types of actions”.
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