Youths urge faster climate 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 concrete measures to avoid catastrophic warming can’t wait.

Ashley Lashley, a 22-year-old from Barbardos 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 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), which could wipe out some island nations and other vulnerable spots.

“Can’t you guys just wrap it up,” Lashley, one of the few young people sitting in on negotiations, recalled thinking Friday.

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.

“In my mind, it’s like do these people have children?” she said.