Greta Thunberg’s Speech – What We Need To Know
“COP26 is a failure.”
A quote from Greta that summarises her entire views on the current COP climate conference hosted in Glasgow, Scotland.
Greta Thunberg is a prominent (important and famous) Swedish climate activist who is known for demanding answers from world leaders and challenging their actions. At just 18 years old she won the first Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity and is now nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
While others may think that COP has been a great success and the UN is making substantial (good) development, Greta is “pessimistic (negative) about the ‘progress’ made at COP26”.
She made her speech highlighting these views on Friday the 5th of November in front of 8000 protestors at the “Fridays for Future” march. This took place within Kelvingrove Park and lead into George Square, passing the COP26 venue at the SEC hydro. Greta was not officially invited to the conference, yet made her own way over by train and was swarmed by protestors when she arrived because of how strongly she feels about this issue.
Greta Thunberg started the ‘Friday’s for Future’ movement in August 2018, protesting against the lack of action surrounding the climate crisis. Greta and other young people sat in front of the Swedish Parliament every school day for three weeks to protest the inaction on climate change. This soon became viral after being shared on social media.
Now, three years later, every Friday hundreds of students are joining the initial movement, protesting outside their local parliaments and city halls. This clearly highlights just how much of an impact Greta has had throughout the world.
Within this weeks speech she has covered diverse (lots of) views. She stated:
- “We can not solve the crisis with the same methods that got us into it.” This suggests that she believes we need to come up with innovative (new) and improved methods of reducing carbon emissions.
- That all the promises the politicians have made are all well and good but realistically have led to nothing. She has stated “Our hopes and ambitions drown in their empty promises.”
- “We can no longer let the people in power decide what is politically possible or not”. This highlights the fact that the world leaders are not doing everything possible to make progress and are trying to convince people to make small changes towards a more environmental future.
- She believes that in the last 30 years, there has been no progress whatsoever and that it would take immediate yearly admission reductions to make any change.
- “The lack of action is a betrayal to all present and future generations”. Here she explains how if the people in power do not make changes to society now, it will cause irreversible damage to the Earth which will harm current and later generations.
Sources: The Guardian, BBC News, Sky News, Fridays For Future
Journalists: Liam Watson, Lucia McCabe, Victory Ekpekurede
