Britain’s opposition leaders on Tuesday met Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg to discuss what the teenager calls an “existential crisis” for humanity.
After months of Brexit tumult, climate change has leaped back up Britain’s political agenda due to protests that closed some of London’s traffic arteries.
Thunberg, who rose to global prominence by staging a school strike to protest about the climate, has praised the “Extinction Rebellion” sits-ins in London.
Photo: AP
Police have arrested 1,065 people and charged 71 in connection with the Extinction Rebellion protests that targeted Oxford Circus, Waterloo Bridge and other parts of London.
Thunberg called on more people to take action.
“As long as it’s non-violent, I think that it could definitely make a difference, it could make people become more aware of the situation, that we actually show that this is an emergency,” Thunberg told the BBC.
At the meeting with Thunberg, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn told her: “Well done with what you have done. You have changed the debate in a lot of ways which was very good and that needs to happen.”
After watching her deliver a separate speech to an audience of lawmakers, British Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Michael Gove told Thunberg: “Your voice — still calm and clear — is like the voice of our conscience and as I listen to you, I felt both admiration, but also a sense of responsibility and guilt, because I recognize that I am of your parents’ generation.”
There is broad political consensus in Britain that action is urgently needed to tackle climate change, but 16-year-old Thunberg said in her speech that the nation’s industrial policies have failed to answer the urgent need to cut the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming.
“The UK’s active, current support of new exploitation of fossil fuels — for example, the UK shale gas fracking industry, the expansion of its North Sea oil and gas fields, the expansion of airports, as well as the planning permission for a brand new coal mine — is beyond absurd,” Thunberg said.
“This ongoing irresponsible behavior will no doubt be remembered in history as one of the greatest failures of humankind,” she said.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
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