Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has pledged to skip next month’s Climate Conference COP27 in Egypt, accusing the global environmental summit of “greenwashing.”
“The COPs are mainly used as an opportunity for leaders and people in power to get attention, using many different kinds of greenwashing,” the activist said at a Q&A session during the launch of her latest book at London’s Southbank Centre.
“I’m not going to CIP27 for many reasons, but the space for civil society this year is extremely limited,” she said, adding that the COPs in general are “not really working” and they “aren’t really meant to change the whole system,” but encourage gradual progress instead.
Remarkably, Thunberg had no qualms about attending the previous COP summit in Glasgow in 2021, which she immediately slammed as a “failure.”
The UN’s 27th conference on climate opens in the Egyptian Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh on November 6th.
Earlier in July, a group of environmentalists and activists penned an open letter questioning whether Egypt is fit to host the event successfully, citing its “poor” human rights record and alleging that “thousands” of prisoners of conscience remaining behind bars. Subsequently, the 19-year-old climate idol herself tweeted to express solidarity with “prisoners of conscience” allegedly being held in Egypt.
Thunberg also called upon “billions” of people to get involved in climate activism, urging “drastic changes” to the status quo.
In The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg gathered the environmental takes of over a hundred experts, ranging from geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists to engineers, economists, historians, philosophers and indigenous leaders. Alongside luminaries such as WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, she shares her own stories of demonstrating and calling out “greenwashing” around the world.
The activist said she wanted the book to be “educational,” admitting the palpable irony as she shot to fame as a 15-year-old with school strikes that originated as solitary protests in front of the Swedish parliament in 2018.
Previous literary efforts by Greta Thunberg include a collection of speeches around the world during her heyday as climate guru and media darling, as well as an autobiographic account of her climate activism penned together with her mother Malena Ernman and her father Svante Thunberg.