From Frank Herrmann September 22, 2019 – 5:18 pm
Greta Thunberg also makes headlines in the USA.
Photo: dpa / Eduardo Munoz Alvarez
At the UN youth climate summit in New York, the Swede is the focus – despite all the political celebrities.
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From Frank Herrmann
09/22/2019 – 5:18 pm
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Washington – What he thinks of the climate summit, the American president demonstrated with a matter of course, as if the topic was none of his business. Donald Trump will probably shine by his absence on Monday, when heads of state and government from 60 countries meet in his hometown of New York for the “Climate Action Summit”. At the same time he will speak at a conference on religious freedom that is scheduled at short notice, also at the headquarters of the United Nations, just in a smaller room. It is a diplomatic affront that Mary Robinson, once President of Ireland and now UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, deliberately undiplomatically comments. “He wants the distraction factor, I suppose.”
Otherwise it should be Greta’s summit, despite all the celebrities who have announced themselves. France is represented by Emmanuel Macron, Germany by Angela Merkel, Great Britain by Boris Johnson, India by its Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to name just a few. But at the beginning, during the “Youth Dialogue” with UN Secretary General António Guterres, a 16-year-old schoolgirl from Sweden is in the spotlight. Greta Thunberg, the face of the Fridays for Future movement. It is the high point of their trip to America, which began rather cautiously, but then landed a real bang.
Conservative America is foreign to the Swede
To say that Greta Thunberg took the hearts of Americans by storm would be an exaggeration. More pronounced than in any other western country is the phalanx of skeptics who consider the scenario of man-made global warming to be a joke. Or, to put it in the words of Trump: for an invention by the Chinese who came up with the whole thing in order to take away the competitiveness of US industry. Thunberg aptly described the situation in a nutshell. In the US, she said, it feels like talking about climate change like something you can either believe or not believe in. “Where I’m from, you see it more like this: It’s a fact.”
As much as conservative America is alienating the activist, left-liberal America has found its new icon in her. When she came to a desk in Battery Park on the southern tip of Manhattan on Friday, the organizers estimate that she was speaking to a quarter of a million people. It is the largest climate demonstration in the history of the country, and Thunberg speaks as calmly, as seriously, as unfussy as always. “We don’t take to the streets sacrificing our education so the adults can take selfies with us and tell us that they really, really admire what we are doing. We do this so that we can force them to act. ”The politicians who gathered at the climate summit had only one chance: They could prove that they were acting, that they were listening.
The UN Secretary General says: “You have to challenge my generation”
The next day she sits in the UN headquarters. Next to her UN Secretary General António Guterres. The youth climate summit is called the event. Guterres takes up what Thunberg said in Battery Park. It sounds like her echo. One problem that leaders of this world have, he criticizes, is this: “They talk too much and they don’t listen enough.” When he took office in 2017, he says he observed a certain apathy in climate policy, in contrast to dramatic natural events. But now, with the youth movement, he is feeling new momentum. “I would like to encourage you to challenge my generation,” says the Portuguese, addressing Thunberg. “My generation failed.”
In Congress in Washington, where she limited her speech to a minute and submitted a UN study on global warming instead of a statement, Greta Thunberg sounded like an annoyed teacher who doesn’t understand that some just don’t get it. “I see no reason not to listen to science. This is not a political question, this is about science. ”And when Barack Obama praised her by saying that they were both a team, she answered only with a curt“ yes ”. Greta is the Jeanne d’Arc of climate change, wrote the magazine “New York” recently. Perhaps she smirked at the typically American cockiness.
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