Greta Thunberg demanded this Thursday in Davos “massive public pressure” to end fossil fuels and said that without action “from the bottom up” those responsible for the climate crisis “They’re going to go as far as they can.”
The Swedish activist also accused the attendees of the Davos World Economic Forum of “feeding the destruction of the planet”, in an event held outside the official program together with three other young activists, Helena Gualinga from Ecuador, Vanessa Nakate from Ugandan and the German Luisa Neubauer.
“These are people who are at the very center of the climate crisis, the people who invest in fossil fuelset cetera and yet, in a way, they are the people we seem to trust to solve our problems,” he added.
According to her it is “absurd” “to listen to them instead of the people who are really affected by the climate crisis.”
The Swedish activist, who was briefly detained by the police two days ago in a protest against a coal mine in Germany, returned to this forum, a symbol for many of the excesses of globalized capitalism, where in 2020 she already faced the then US president Donald Trump.
Thunberg, who has joined forces with the other three activists to launch a petition against fossil fuels, believes that “without massive public pressure from the outside, these people are going to go as far as they can, as long as they can get away with it.” hers”.
The 20-year-old Swedish woman participated in a panel organized by CNBC, which was also attended by the director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), Fatih Birol.
Birol said the energy sector must transform or “we will have no chance of reaching our climate targets.”
According to an IEA report in October, the energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is sparking changes that could speed up the transition to a “more sustainable and secure energy system.”
900,000 signatures
The four activists launched a few days ago, coinciding with the forum, a petition calling on the big companies to stop exploiting fossil fuels, a text that already has more than 900,000 signatures.
“We are taking a very dangerous path. We are already seeing how people are suffering on the ground,” Helena Gualinga said in Thursday’s debate.
“It is completely insane that we are allowing this and that we have people here in Davos who are allowing it, through the government, through investment in fossil fuels and at some point there has to be a stop. It is criminal behaviour.” assured.
The petition, which takes the tone of a legal document, personally calls on the heads of big companies to “immediately stop opening new oil, gas or coal extraction deposits“.
Climate change is one of the central themes of this year’s Davos, where even former US Vice President Al Gore, now activist environmentalHe said on Wednesday that he “agrees” with Thunberg’s fight.
For his part, the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, attacked in a speech against the “big lie” of the oil companies, who hid that they had known about global warming for decades, and said that the goal of limiting it to 1.5 degrees Celsius from the pre-industrial era “is fading away”.
