18-year-old Thunberg takes aim at world leaders
Climate activist Greta Thunberg has accused the UK of 'lying' about its climate credentials, going so far as to say 'It feels like… they’re trying to create loopholes'.
Her statement came at a briefing to launch a major Unicef report, published on Friday, which warns that roughly one billion children across the world live in countries at “extremely high risk” of climate and environmental shocks. The UK comes in at 111th on the index of 163 countries - above the US at 80th but worse than Australia, Iceland and Ireland.
At a Unicef press briefing on Thursday, Ms Thunberg said the country is guilty of “creative carbon accounting” and suggested it is a “lie that the UK is a climate leader”. She continued to say world leaders treat the climate crisis as a “faraway, distant problem”.
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“It feels like… they’re trying to create loopholes, instead of actually trying to find solutions that would actually turn things around,” Ms Thunberg said, adding she was not optimistic that the COP 26 climate summit in November would trigger enough change.
The climate change meeting is thought to be the worlds last hope to make serious changes. However,
it has since been confirmed that there is now too much Co2 in the atmosphere to be absorbed by trees-even if we plant enough to cover America. Though there are more effective methods of carbon sequestration like mangroves, coral, and seaweed, these natural resources are also
perishing in the face of the climate crisis.
“There’s a lie that the UK is a climate leader and that they have reduced their CO2 emissions by 44 per cent since 1990,” Thunberg said.
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She continued: “But if you include things like aviation, shipping, outsourcing, and… consumption, for instance and the burning of biomass, it doesn’t really look that good.
"So I’m really hoping that we will stop referring to the UK as a climate leader, because if you look at the reality that is simply not true.”
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Thunberg continued: “Children are the ones who will be most impacted by this crisis and the ones who will suffer the most from these consequences… in order to really change things, and to find solutions to the actual climate crisis - not just the symptoms - we need to go to the root of the climate crisis and we need to treat it as a crisis.
“Unless the people in power are willing to do that now, then it will just continue like now. Unfortunately I don’t expect them to do that... but I will be more than happy if they can prove me wrong.”
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