Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has raged at world leaders at the United Nations Climate Action Summit telling an audience that briefly included United States President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, “You have stolen my dreams, my childhood, with your empty words.”
Before a packed room of presidents, prime ministers, governors, mayors, and business leaders Ms Thunberg was livid.
“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be in school on the other side of the ocean,” she said.
“How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just business as usual and some technical solutions?
“People are suffering., people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing.
“We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”
Reuters Newsagency reports The Swedish campaigner’s brief address electrified the start of a summit aimed at mobilising government and business to break international paralysis over carbon emissions, which hit record highs last year despite decades of warnings from scientists.
Days after millions of young people took to the streets worldwide to demand emergency action on climate change, leaders gathered ahead of the annual United Nations General Assembly aiming to inject fresh momentum into stalling efforts to curb carbon emissions.
A visibly emotional Ms Thunberg, 16, said in stern remarks at the opening of the summit that the generations that have polluted the most have burdened her and her generation with the extreme impacts of climate change.
Ms Thunberg has galvanised a new wave of climate change activism through her weekly Fridays for Future school strikes, which she began with her weekly, solitary protests outside of the Swedish parliament.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had warned governments ahead of the event that they would have to offer action plans to qualify to speak at the summit, which is aimed at boosting the 2015 Paris Agreement to combat global warming.
In his opening remarks, he tried to capture the urgency of climate change and called out the fossil fuel industry.
“Nature is angry. And we fool ourselves if we think we can fool nature, because nature always strikes back, and around the world nature is striking back with fury,” Mr Guterres said.
“There is a cost to everything. But the biggest cost is doing nothing.
“The biggest cost is subsidising a dying fossil fuel industry, building more and more coal plants, and denying what is plain as day: that we are in a deep climate hole, and to get out we must first stop digging,” he said.
“I was very struck by the emotion in the room when some of the young people spoke earlier,” French President Emmanuel Macron told the UN Climate Action Summit.
“I also want to play my role in listening to them. I think that no political decision maker can remain deaf to this call for justice between generations.”
Reuters reports nevertheless, there were few new proposals from governments for the kind of rapid change climate scientists say is now needed to avert devastating impacts from warming.
The summit has, by contrast, been marked by a flurry of pledges from business, pension funds, insurers and banks to do more.
“We have broken the cycle of life,” said Emmanuel Faber, chief executive of French food group Danone, who announced a “One Planet” initiative with a group of 19 major food companies to transition towards more sustainable farming.
“We need your support for shifting agricultural subsidies from killing life into supporting biodiversity,” Mr Faber said.
President Trump, who questions climate science and has challenged every major US regulation aimed at combating climate change, made a brief appearance in the audience of the summit along with Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
He did not speak but he listened to remarks by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who serves as a UN special envoy on climate action, called out President Trump’s low-key appearance before he spoke: “Hopefully our deliberations will be helpful to you as you formulate climate policy,” he said to audience laughter.
Chancellor Merkel announced Germany would double its contribution to a UN fund to support less developed countries to combat climate change to €4 billion from €2 billion.
Among the day’s other initial announcements was one from the Marshall Islands, whose President Dr Hilda Heine said she would seek parliamentary approval to declare a climate crisis on the low-lying atoll, already grappling with sea level rise.
Dr Heine said her country and New Zealand, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and others who form the “High Ambition” bloc at UN climate negotiations, will commit to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
With climate impacts such as extreme weather, thawing permafrost and sea-level rise unfolding much faster than expected, scientists say the urgency of the crisis has intensified since the Paris Agreement was agreed.
The agreement will enter a crucial implementation phase next year after another round of negotiations in Chile in December.
Existing pledges to curb emissions are nowhere near enough to avert catastrophic warming, say scientists, who warn that failing to change course could ultimately put the survival of industrial societies at risk.
Over the past year, Mr Guterres has called for no new coal plants to be built after 2020, urged a phase-out of fossil fuel subsidies and asked countries to map out how to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
While some countries have made progress, some of the biggest emitting countries remain far behind, even as wildfires, heat waves and record temperatures have provided glimpses of the devastation that could lie in store in a warmer world.
In a measure of the gap between government action and the ever-louder alarms sounded by climate scientists, the United Nations Development Program said that 14 nations representing a quarter of global emissions have signalled that they do not intend to revise current climate plans by 2020.
EcoNews is an independent publication that relies on contributions from its readers.
WE’RE BUILDING A PLATFORM WITH A CLEAR FOCUS ON THE ENVIRONMENT, CULTURAL AND SOCIAL GOOD. CONTRIBUTE AND TOGETHER WE CAN MAKE AN IMPACT.
One Response
While Scamo thinks it isn’t happening??