Greta Thunberg will not go to Sharm el-Sheikh, so as not to give the impression of endorsing Egyptian power. “I’m not going to COP27 for a lot of reasons”, including human rights, the Swedish environmental activist said on Sunday in London during a question-and-answer session for the launch of his ” Climate ledger “.
“The space for civil society this year is extremely limited” at the 27th UN climate conference, argued the 19-year-old activist at the close of the London literature festival at the Southbank Centre, where she received a standing ovation. This position, however, is not a surprise. On Twitter, she had already expressed her solidarity with “prisoners of conscience in Egypt before COP27”, which opens on November 6.
“COPs don’t really work”
The COPs, the previous one of which was held in the UK in Glasgow, “are not really intended to change the system” but to encourage gradual progress in the fight against climate change, argued the climate activist. They “are mostly used as an opportunity for leaders and people in power to get attention, for all kinds of ‘greenwashing'” or communications operations to claim action against the climate crisis when this is not the case. , she continued. So “as they are, the COPs don’t really work, unless they are used as an opportunity to mobilize” continued the young woman.
Released on Thursday The big climate book includes a hundred collaborations of climate or other experts, including the economist Thomas Piketty, the boss of the WHO Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, or the writer Naomi Klein. All royalties from Greta Thunberg will be donated to her 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 a bit ironic given that my thing is school strikes”, joked the one who had started to demonstrate in front of the Swedish parliament in 2018. Again and again on Sunday, she called on everyone to become an activist, knowing that there are “many different ways” to do so. “The time for small steps is over and we need drastic changes” and according to her, to obtain this change from leaders of governments or companies who have a stake in the status quo, “we need billions of activists”.