Climate activist @GretaThunberg addresses crowd at #FridaysForFuture protest during #COP26 pic.twitter.com/2wpM9GN4ZM

— Reuters (@Reuters) November 5, 2021

“It is not a secret that COP 26 is a failure,” Thunberg said, speaking at a rally outside the conference venue. The teenage activist said that we need immediate, drastic annual emission cuts unlike anything the world has ever seen before, to stay below the target set in the Paris agreement.

Thousands of campaigners, including many youths, marched through the streets of Glasgow on Friday, demanding urgent action from world leaders at the UN climate conference to stave off catastrophic climate change. They protested largely voluntary resolutions made at the conference, and accused world leaders of excluding the biggest polluters, or setting deadlines decades away.

Top quotes from Greta Thunberg’s speech in Glasgow:

Climate activist Greta Thunberg speaks at a Fridays for Future march during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), in Glasgow, Scotland on November 5, 2021. (Reuters)

It is not a secret that COP26 is a failure. It should be obvious that we cannot solve the crisis with the same methods that got you into it in the first place. And more and more people are starting to realise this. Many are starting to ask themselves what will it take for the people in power to wake up.

But let’s be clear. They are already awake. They know exactly what they are doing.

They know exactly what priceless values that are sacrificing to maintain business as usual. The leaders are not doing nothing. They are actively creating loopholes and shaping frameworks to benefit themselves and to continue profiting from this destructive system.

This is an active choice by the leaders to continue to let the exploitation of people and nature and the destruction of present and future living conditions take place.

The COP-26 has turned into a PR event where leaders are giving beautiful speeches and announcing fancy commitments and targets while behind the curtains, the governments of the global north countries are refusing to take any drastic climate action. It seems like their main goal is to continue to fight for status quo. And COP26 has been named the most exclusionary COP ever. This is no longer a climate conference. This is now a global north greenwash festival. A two-week long celebration of business as usual and blah blah blah.

The most affected people in the most affected areas still remain unheard and the voices of future generations are drowning in their greenwash and empty words and promises. But the facts do not lie and we know our emperors are naked.

To stay below the target set in the Paris agreement and thereby minimising the risks of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control, we need immediate, drastic annual emission cuts unlike anything the world has ever seen and as we don’t have the technological solutions that alone will do anything even close to that, that means we will have to fundamentally change our society. And this is the uncomfortable result of our leaders’ repeated failure to address this crisis.

At the current emissions rate, our remaining CO2 budgets to give us the best chances of staying below 1.5 degree Celcius will be gone within the end of this decade.

And the climate and ecological crisis of course doesn’t exist in a vaccuum. It is directly tied to other crises and injustices that date back to colonialism and beyond, crises based on the idea that some people are worth more than others and therefore have the right to exploit others and to steal their land and resources. And it is very naive of us to this that we could solve this crisis without addressing the root cause of it.

And the question we must now ask ourselves is ‘what is it that we are fighting for?’ Are we fighting to save ourselves and the living planet or are we fighting to maintain business as usual. They cannot ignore our screams as we reclaim our power. We are tired of their blah blah blah. Our leaders are not leading. This is what leadership looks like.