Greta Thunberg, the 19-year-old Swedish climate activist on Monday described climate summits such as the Cop27 conference, scheduled to take place in Egypt next week as a ‘scam’ and that people in positions of power were “greenwashing, lying and cheating”. The Swedish activist also said she will be skipping Cop27.
“I’m not going to Cop27 for many reasons, but the space for civil society this year is extremely limited,” said Thunberg in an interview.
“The Cops are mainly used as an opportunity for leaders and people in power to get attention, using many different kinds of greenwashing, So, as it is now, the ‘Cops’ are really working, unless of course, we use them as an opportunity to mobilise.”
“We’re right now in a very desperate position and many people are becoming desperate and are trying to find new methods because we realise that what we’ve been doing up until now has not done the trick,” she added.
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Thunberg, who made waves for her crusade against the big corporates and governments said activists “must try to make people realise what a scam this is and realise that these systems are failing us.”
“Harming people is one thing and making someone annoyed is a different thing,” she added.
Thunberg may have been referring to the recent spate of environmental activists across the globe taking radical measures to make their voices heard.
Environmental activists have been staging protests by hurling products at famous paintings and bursting into monologues on ‘how to save the climate’.
Read more: ‘Woke’ climate activists throw tomato soup at $84 million Van Gogh painting
However, this is not the first time that Thunberg has called out greenwashing and the climate summits for being a sham.
Earlier this month, in an op-ed in a leading western publication, Thunberg echoed a similar line by stating, “we’ve been greenwashed out of our senses.”
“It gives me no pleasure whatsoever to keep calling out the bullshit of our so-called leaders. I want to believe that people are good. But there really seems to be no end to these cynical games,” she further wrote.
Notably, the process of fabricating or exaggerating a product, service, brand, or even an entire company’s green credentials is known as “greenwashing.”
(With inputs from agencies)
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