“We are fed up with the lies”, the shout in the street

Armando G. Tejeda

Sent

La Jornada newspaper
Tuesday, November 2, 2021, p. 3

Glasgow. In the street, the speeches, sometimes triumphalist or paternalistic, of world leaders participating in the Glasgow Climate Summit (COP26) are heard in a different way. When they hear them talk about be more ambitious, from increase development aid funds, they answer we’re sick of being sold smoke, that they tell us lies.

In the vicinity of the Glasgow Convention Center, headquarters of the multilateral meeting sponsored by the United Nations (UN), the security cordon was suffocating yesterday.

In ten streets around there were fences on all sides and an endless line of police officers who prevented the passage of anyone who did not have official accreditation and a message on their cell phone confirming that the antigen test carried out in the same morning gave negative result.

Even so, activists managed to overcome the cordon and make themselves heard. Among them, two young militants from a Scottish environmental movement, who stood at the entrance of the COP26 participants to shout their impressions and their discomfort with a megaphone in hand. Inside there the satraps who are destroying the planet gather. Watch them arrive with their polluting planes, with their big diesel and gasoline cars, with their double standards in tow.said one of them, under the watchful eye of the police. On top of a lectern and just on the other side of the fence, the young man just peacefully yelled all his discomfort.

Other activists, gathered by the Spanish environmental organization Oxfam Intermón, also came to the streets of the gates of COP26, disguised as world leaders playing in a traditional Scottish bagpipe band and wearing masks of bigheads.

We are fed up with being sold smoke and that rich and polluting nations are reducing greenhouse gas emissions too slowly and not doing enough to support vulnerable nations facing the devastating impacts of climate change., they denounced.

And they added that Instead of cutting emissions and putting the world on a safer course, these leaders only talk bragging and we’ve had enough of bragging and empty promises. What we ask for are concrete actions.

As Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressed COP26 attendees, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg retweeted a petition for her millions of followers to sign an open letter accusing leaders of treason.

This is not a simulacrum. It’s a code red for Earth, is indicated in the letter and adds: millions will suffer as our planet is devastated, a terrifying future that will be created or prevented by the choices you make. You have the power to decideReuters reported.

Also on the outskirts of COP26, another group, from the US NGO Build Back Fossil Free, took advantage of its presence in Glasgow to demand that its president, Joe Biden, declare a climate emergency and take strong action against fossil fuels.

They denounced precisely the double language of the president, who on the one hand was self-erected in the leader in the fight against climate change and on the other, during the first six months of his administration, he did not make major changes with the policy of his predecessor, Donald Trump.

They recalled that last month up to 600 activists were arrested when they protested in Washington against fossil fuels.

Tom Goldtooth, a Native American leader who traveled to Glasgow, told the media that We are the original people of the United States and that is why we want to denounce that this summit is based on corporate interests, we are here to defend our people because we want to survive.

Members of Global Climate Justice denounced the marginalization to which the militants of the poorest countries in the world have been subjected, to which with the excuse of pandemic and the vaccine they have been prevented from reaching Glasgow.

The COP26 exclusion level is extreme, they asserted, since the The process of issuing visas, quarantines, misinformation and policy modification at the last minute by the British government has led to the absence of representatives from less favored countries.

Our presence has been reduced, accused the Filipina Dorothy Guerrero, so this is the most exclusive climate conference in all history.