Swedish weather activist says UN weather convention will be “used as an opportunity for leaders and those in force to draw attention”
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg said she would skip next month’s COP27 talks in Egypt and criticized the summit as a forum for “greenwashing. “
“I’m going to COP27 for many reasons, but the area for civil society this year is incredibly limited,” he said in a question-and-answer session at the launch of his new e-book at London’s Southbank Centre.
The 19-year-old activist had tweeted in the past to explicitly show solidarity with “prisoners of conscience” detained in Egypt. The 27th UN climate convention opens on November 6 at the Red Sea Hotel in Sharm el-Sheikh.
“Police officers are mainly used as an opportunity for leaders and other people in power to draw attention, many other types of greenwashing,” he said.
COP conferences, he added, are “not intended to replace the total system,” but rather to inspire incremental progress.
“So, as things stand, the cops don’t work, unless, of course, we use them as an opportunity for mobilization. “
Thunberg was among those who last week signed a petition from a human rights coalition calling on the Egyptian government to open a civic area and release political prisoners.
The petition had nearly a thousand individual and organizational signatories, plus 350. org, Amnesty International and the Climate Action Network, the world’s largest meteorological network of over 1500 civil society organizations. Some organisations, including Greenpeace UK, have been criticised for signing the petition.
Released last week, Thunberg’s The Climate Book includes a hundred contributions from experts, plus economist Thomas Piketty, WHO leader Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and editor Naomi Klein.
Thunberg’s royalties from the e-book will pass on to her foundation, which will distribute them to charities dealing with environmental issues.
The activist said she sought to make the e-book “educational, which is a bit ironic since school strikes are my thing,” referring to her outdoor protests in the Swedish parliament starting in 2018.
On Sunday, Thunberg called on more people to get involved in climate activism, saying the time had come to “radically change” the prestige quo.
“To replace things, we want everyone, we want billions of activists,” he said.
Thunberg attended the Cop in Glasgow in 2021.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
This article was replaced on October 31, 2022: an earlier edition claimed that Thunberg had criticized Greenpeace for not signing a human rights petition, but in fact this is not the case.