Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg said in an op-ed published Monday that the world’s leaders are not even “moving in the right direction” on addressing the growing climate crisis.
Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Thunberg, 20, said that financial resources need to be aggressively poured into “solutions, adaptations, and restorations” to address climate change, but that the funds are currently “going elsewhere.”
“The often-used argument that ‘we don’t have enough money’ has been disproven so many times,” Thunberg wrote. “According to the International Monetary Fund, the production and burning of coal, oil and fossil gas was subsidized by $5.9 trillion in 2020 alone. That is $11 million every minute, earmarked for planetary destruction.”
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the world launched unprecedented financial rescue packages. These recovery plans were seen as a huge opportunity to set humanity on a brand-new course for a more sustainable economic paradigm. They were called ‘our last chance to avert a climate disaster,’ as the enormous size of the investments would make it impossible for us to undo their consequences in the future if we got that funding even slightly wrong,” she said.
But, according to the International Energy Agency, only 2 percent of those massive financial aid packages went toward green energy, Thunberg said
“Our leaders completely failed,” she wrote.
“And they continue to fail; despite all the beautiful words and pledges, they are not moving in the right direction. In fact, we are still expanding fossil fuel infrastructure all over the world. In many cases, we are even speeding up the process. China is planning to build 43 new coal power plants on top of the 1,000 plants already in operation. In the U.S., approvals for companies to drill for oil and fossil methane gas are on schedule to reach their highest level since the presidency of George W. Bush,” she wrote.
Thunberg’s remarks come a month after she was detained by German authorities for her involvement in protests at a coal mine there.
In November, she joined a lawsuit against her native Sweden, alleging it has not done enough to counter the climate crisis.