By Will Wade & Saijel Kishan / Bloomberg
World leaders and chief executives of global corporations gathered at a United Nations summit on Monday to say that a 16-year-old climate activist from Sweden is right: They are failing.
Greta Thunberg—the teenager who sparked a global youth movement to fight climate change—arrived in New York on a zero-emissions sailboat, climbed the stage at the UN and told a crowd of more than 300 presidents, prime ministers, CEOs, bankers and delegates that they’ve let down her entire generation by not acting on climate change.
“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” she said Monday. “How dare you!”
Nobody refuted her. Most agreed.
“I want to echo the sentiments and the emotion of Greta—that she could come here and condemn us all,” said Allen Michael Chastanet, prime minister of the Caribbean island nation of St. Lucia. “And deservedly so.”
UN Secretary-General AntÓnio Guterres called on world leaders at Monday’s Climate Action Summit, held in tandem with a two-week general assembly, to make more aggressive pledges to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and keep the world from warming to catastrophic temperatures.
The meeting was marked by, at times, contrite remarks from the likes of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Even US President Donald Trump made a surprise appearance, but didn’t speak.
The Climate Action Summit followed youth-led climate strikes that inspired millions to take to the streets on Friday and over the weekend in major cities from London to Paris to New York, kicking off a series of more than 150 climate-related events being held across Manhattan as part of a larger program known as Climate Week. In all, billions of dollars were pledged by governments and businesses to combat global warming, but few made commitments that went significantly beyond what they were already doing.
Also, the leaders of the world’s two biggest polluters—the US and China—were noticeably absent from the speakers’ list.
“Not one single nation is getting the job done,” former US Secretary of State John Kerry said during an opening ceremony of Climate Week. “It’s no wonder our kids are in the streets, screaming at us.”
Image credits: Bloomberg