Since she lambasted world leaders at a UN conference when she was only 15 years old, the Swedish environmental activist has had the ears of the international community.
She is skipping the UN climate summit in Egypt. What's the reason? It's rife with greenwashing.
At a press event for her book, "The Climate Book," she said that the space for civil society this year is very limited. Many different kinds of greenwashing are used by the leaders and people in power at the COPs.
The COP conferences are not meant to change the whole system according to Thunberg. She's quitting because they're feel good events that don't do much.
The assessment is not unfair. Only a few nations have followed through on their pledges to cut back emissions and achieve net carbon zero by the end of the century. The energy crisis in Europe has taken away from the climate commitments.
We don't have to blame her because she didn't go. It's disappointing that a tenacious young person like Thunberg has given up on persuading world leaders at the largest climate summit in the world.
It might be indicative of the frustration of her generation. When asked what she thought about the recent wave of Just Stop Oil protests that included activists throwing soup on a Van Gogh painting, she said that it was a symptom of the world's failure to effect meaningful environmental change.
She said that people were trying to find new methods because they realized that what they had been doing hadn't worked. It's understandable to expect different actions.
If a UN climate conference isn't the place to get the message out and change hearts, where should we go? The headlines indicate that zoomers are having a hard time figuring that out.
Germany shutting down its nuclear plants is a bad idea.
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