Glasgow, Scotland- Thousands of young campaigners marched through the Scottish city on Friday, demanding urgent action from the world leaders at the U.N climate conference to stave off catastrophic climate change with COP26 Deals.
A week of government discussions and pledges at the two-week gathering has included promises to phase out coal, slash emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane and reduce deforestation.
Those with the power to make decisions about how much the world warms in the coming decades are mostly old and male. Those who are angriest about the pace of climate action are mostly young and female.
The week ended with boisterous protests of thousands on the streets of Glasgow, led by young climate activists.
At the summit, leaders are setting goals for 2030 at the earliest. In some cases, they are setting targets for 2060 and 2070, when many of today’s activists will be hitting retirement age. The activists say change must come immediately.
Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg criticized world leaders and called the COP26 summit a “failure” on Friday, as she led a huge youth protest outside the venue of the climate summit in Glasgow.
Eighteen-year-old campaigner Greta Thunberg was set to speak to protesters later, more than three years after she founded the “Fridays for Future” school strikes movement that galvanized youth action over climate change.
In the headline speech of the demonstration, Thunberg told crowds that “history will judge them poorly,” calling the pivotal conference “a global north greenwash festival” and “a two-week long celebration of business as usual.”
Crowds chanted “We are unstoppable, another world is possible,” and other slogans as they attempted to attract attention near the venue.
“Our parents will die from old age. Our children will die from climate change,” warned a banner carried by 22-year-old Maia Runciman, originally from Texas and now living in Glasgow.
COP26 Deals
The conference aims to secure enough national promises to cut greenhouse gas emissions – mainly from fossil fuels – to keep the rise in the average global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
To that end, the United Nations wants countries to halve their emissions from 1990 levels by 2030, on their way to net-zero emissions by 2050. That means the world would release no more climate-warming gases than the amount it is simultaneously recapturing from the atmosphere.
COP26 President, Alok Sharma warned time was running short, with too many issue still remaining unresolved.
The New Normal
U.S climate envoy John Kerry said a deal at the summit could be reached to settle the final details of the rulebook for how to interpret the 2015 Paris Agreement.
The United States favored “the most frequent possible” assessments of whether countries were meeting their goals to reduce emissions, he said.
The placards and chants of the crowd in Glasgow clearly suggested people’s patience was running out.
However, Glasgow City Council and most neighboring local authorities told the BBC that schoolchildren would not be punished for taking part in the climate strike.
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