“The space for civil society this year is extremely limited” at the 27th UN climate conference, argued the Swedish activist during a question and answer session at the Southbank Center in London for the launch of his “Great climate book”.
On Twitter, she had already expressed her solidarity with “prisoners of conscience in Egypt before COP27”, which opens on November 6 in Sharm el-Sheikh.
The COPs, the previous one of which was held in Glasgow, “are not really intended to change the system” but to encourage gradual progress that has become futile in the face of the climate emergency, argued the 19-year-old activist, whose he intervention on Sunday brought the London Literature Festival to a close.
According to her, the COPs have become machines for ‘greenwashing’, or communication operations to claim that they are acting in favor of the climate when this is not the case.
“As they are, the COPs don’t really work, unless they are used as an opportunity to mobilize” continued the young woman with a petite figure, braided hair, in a red T-shirt and jeans.
Released on Thursday, “The Big Climate Book” includes around a hundred collaborations from climate and other experts, including economist Thomas Piketty, WHO boss Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, and writer Naomi Klein.
All royalties will be donated to his eponymous foundation and then distributed to charities related to the environment.
The activist says he wanted to write this book during the pandemic to “educate people, which is kind of ironic given that my thing is school strikes.”
Again and again on Sunday, she called on everyone to become an activist, knowing that there are “many different ways” to do so.
– Drastic changes –
“The time for small steps is over and we need drastic changes” and according to her, to get it from business leaders or governments who have an interest in the status quo, “we need billions of activists” .
She repeated again and again that the climate crisis was not the fault of all humanity but of the richest while the poorest or those who have been “historically exploited suffer the most”.
Instead of going in the right direction, the world is going full speed into the wall, she warns, noting for example that “the amount of electricity produced from coal”, the most polluting fuel, “has reached a historic record last year.
International commitments leave the Earth on the trajectory of a warming of 2.6°C, a result “pitifully not up to par”, denounced the UN chief last week, who calls for an end to “greenwashing” , while 2022 has already seen an increase in climatic disasters: dramatic floods like in Pakistan, droughts, heat waves or forest fires.
On Sunday, the 19-year-old Swede said she never imagined she was going to start a planetary movement: “one thing led to another,” she smiled.
She remembers 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 smirk, she says she “really enjoyed disturbing people so much”, especially those in power, “or who were”, like Donald Trump, the former American president who criticized her for many years. many times.
Asked about Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, she laughs and then replies seriously that there are more pressing causes than “spending a fortune sending rockets into space”.
Finally, when asked about the controversial actions of environmental groups like Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil, which have sprayed paint or soup on masterpieces recently, Greta Thunberg argued that there are “a lot of people who are becoming desperate “and that it is therefore “reasonable to expect them to try new types of actions”.
