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HomeEnvironment#Howdareyou: After Greta Thunberg speech, Twitter explodes with climate change debate

#Howdareyou: After Greta Thunberg speech, Twitter explodes with climate change debate

The 16-year-old activist spoke at a UN summit, which had world leaders such as Modi, Macron, and Merkel in attendance.

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New York: A 16-year-old environmental activist Monday scolded heads of state at the UN Global Climate Action Summit, accusing them of robbing her generation of a future by focusing on money and not on fighting global warming.

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” Greta Thunberg said in a speech full of emotion and stinging criticism.

“People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are at the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of endless economic growth. How dare you!”

Thunberg, who traveled from Europe to New York for the summit on a zero-emissions sailboat, said she should be in school in her native Sweden rather than at the UN telling world leaders what to do to address climate change. Listen to the science, she told them, which has been “crystal clear” for 30 years. She admonished them for leaving her generation with the task of sucking billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the air “with technologies that barely exist”.

Thunberg’s impassioned speech sparked many reactions from people across the world, applauding her efforts to get world leaders to commit more effectively to tackling climate change. The #HowDareYou began trending by Monday morning.


Also read: Don’t bet on the UN to fix climate change – it’s failed for 30 years


Leaders from around the world, including French President Emmanuel Macron, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, have gathered in New York this week to make new pledges to curb global-warming emissions. President Donald Trump, who wasn’t originally scheduled to attend, made a surprise appearance at the summit Monday.

However, there were some who ridiculed Thunberg, who suffers from Asperger’s. Most of these trolls seem to be pro-Trump, who is famously a climate change-denier, and went to the extent of suggesting that she was mentally disturbed and even a victim of “child abuse”.

https://twitter.com/MarkDice/status/1176341028929826816?s=20

Many came to the defence of Thunberg, who last year skipped school for three weeks to protest outside Sweden’s Parliament. Her climate movement has inspired many young voices, spurring people in over 100 countries to join her in a climate strike last week.

(With inputs from Bloomberg)


Also read: World leaders gather for UN climate summit, but without US and Brazil


 

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