Rishi Sunak will be attending Cop27 after all. After being widely criticised for planning to skip the UN climate conference this month, the British Prime Minister performed a U-turn. But for the climate activist Greta Thunberg, politicians who attend such events out of self-interest are little help; if they were truly committed to the environment they would resign in protest at the world’s failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the necessary speed to stop catastrophic global warming.
On Sunday evening (30 October) at the launch of her new book, Thunberg, 19, revealed that she herself will not be attending Cop27, which starts on 6 November in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. She said there were many reasons for her decision but did not go into detail, mentioning only a desire to “give space” to activists from nations on the front line of climate change.
Her comments revealed a deep scepticism about the negotiations as a whole. “Cops are now mainly being used as an opportunity for those in power to get attention,” she said at the closing event of the London Literature Festival, held at the Southbank Centre. “As it is now, Cops are not really going to lead to any major changes – unless, of course, we use them as an opportunity to mobilise, which we must try to do, and make people realise what a colossal scam this is.”
This echoes what Thunberg wrote in her recent guest edit of the New Statesman. She eviscerated the world’s political leaders for “actively delaying change and distracting the electorate” and told the singer-songwriter Björk Guðmundsdóttir that “we can have as many Cops as we want to, but as long as nothing changes it won’t make a difference”. In an interview with the New Statesman on Sunday she added that the UK’s historically high emissions leave the nation with a particular “duty to lead on the climate crisis”.
Unless politicians are prepared to upset the status quo that has led them to power, Thunberg argues, the necessary changes will not come. This system-change approach to the climate challenge is encapsulated in phrases that have become slogans of the Fridays for Future movement, which Thunberg started, such as “there is no climate justice without social justice”.
This perspective also informs her…
