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I’ve never been to Glasgow.
I wish I had been there on Monday as Greta Thunberg led a march of thousands of young people.
Thunberg called the COP26 conference on climate change a greenwashing PR campaign by the industrial nations, led by the United States.
She joined a crowd of protesters in singing “You can shove your climate crisis up your arse.”
Addressing the crowd, across the river from the Cop26 venue, she said: “Inside COP they are just politicians and people in power pretending to take our future seriously.”Announcements by governments and corporations in the first days of the conference — including pledges to end deforestation, phase out coal-fired power plants and mobilize trillions of dollars for green initiatives — have been dismissed by many activists as insufficient or riddled with loopholes.
On Monday, Ms. Thunberg criticized leaders for “pretending to take our futures seriously.”
More protests by thousands of young folks are expected in Glasgow today and tomorrow.
It is their future they are marching for.
This past week Joe Biden made an appearance.
The irony of the leader of the world’s chief polluter showing up at one more conference of climate change was not lost on me.
Vijay Prashad noted in his 44th Newsletter from Tricontinental:
It is perhaps fitting that United States President Joe Biden arrived in Glasgow for the 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) on the climate catastrophe with eighty-five cars in tow months after declaring ‘I’m a car guy’ (for details on the climate catastrophe, see our Red Alert no. 11, ‘Only One Earth’). Only three countries in the world have morecars per person than the US, and these countries (Finland, Andorra, and Italy) have a much smaller population than the United States.
The United Nations has pointed out that the G20 countries account for 80% of the world’s greenhouse gasses and the U.S. leads the G20 with nearly 15% of that.
The legislation likely to come out of Congress will do little to slow this down.