TEEN TO UN CLIMATE SUMMIT: ‘YOU HAVE STOLEN MY DREAMS.’
HOW DARE YOU?
UNITED NATIONS • Teenage activist Greta Thunberg angrily denounced world leaders on Monday for failing to tackle climate change, unleashing the outrage felt by millions of her peers in the heart of the United Nations by demanding: “How dare you?”
The Swedish campaigner’s brief address electrified the start of a summit aimed at mobilizing government and business to break international paralysis over carbon emissions, which hit record highs last year despite decades of warnings from scientists.
“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you?” said Thunberg, 16, her voice quavering with emotion. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” she said.
Inspired by Thunberg’s solitary weekly protest outside the Swedish parliament a year ago, millions of young people poured onto the streets around the globe last Friday to demand governments attending the summit take emergency action.
“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.”
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who organized the one-day event to boost the 2015 Paris Agreement to combat global warming, had warned leaders only to turn up if they came armed with concrete action plans, not empty speeches.
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.
With climate impacts such as extreme weather, thawing permafrost and sealevel rise unfolding much faster than expected, scientists say the urgency of the crisis has intensified since the Paris accord 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.