Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Inside and outside climate talks, youths urge faster action
GLASGOW, Scotland — Young people both inside and outside of the United Nations climate talks are telling world leaders to hurry up and get it done, that measures to avoid catastrophic warming can’t wait.
Ashley Lashley, a 22-yearold from Barbados who is on her country’s climate negotiation team in Glasgow, thought about how to communicate the need for urgency during a session on carbon trading. As she listened to other delegates debate the intricate and intractable topic that has baffled negotiators for more than six years, a phrase popped into her head: ‘”blah-blah-blah.”
That’s the expression prominent teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg has started repeating to express her thoughts on the pace of government actions to curb global warming. The Thunberg-inspired Fridays for Future movement held a demonstration outside the conference venue to pressure the negotiators inside, drawing tens of thousands of participants.
And inside, the session Lashley attended droned on. She worries her fellow negotiators too easily become bogged down in minutiae and lose sight of the big picture: keeping emissions from exceeding 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, which could wipe out some island nations.
Umuhoza Grace Ineza, 25, a negotiator for Rwanda, said she watches some sessions crawling along and hears other negotiators say “Ooh, let’s try this way, that way, and then we can come up with a decision next session.” Ineza says she wants to ask them if they understand how urgent limiting climate change is for the next generation.
University of Michigan graduate student observers AJ Convertino and Evan Gonzalez said watching the sessions on the inside made them both more impatient but also more optimistic because they see the right things being said and done, if still way too slowly.
Friday was the day the U.N. conference said it was dedicating to youth. But the schedule didn’t reflect that.
“It’s our future. Our future is being negotiated, and we don’t have a seat at the table,” said 20-year-old Boston College student Julia Horchos.