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Several world leaders at the United Nations Climate Action Summit said Monday that they will do more to prevent a warming world from reaching even more dangerous levels, according to the Associated Press. But as they made their pledges, others conceded it was not enough.
Sixty-six countries have promised to have more ambitious climate goals and 30 swore to be carbon neutral by midcentury, according to President Sebastian Piñera Echenique of Chile.
While smaller nations are making commitments, the big carbon polluters — the United States, China and the European Union, among others — still aren’t stepping up, said David Waskow, international climate chief at the World Resources Institute.
Leaders from Finland and Germany promised to ban coal in their countries within a decade. Others also discussed goals of climate neutrality — when a country is not adding more heat-trapping carbon to the air than is being removed by plants and perhaps technology — by 2050.
President Donald Trump attended the summit, but he left without speaking. The United States did not ask to have someone speak at the summit, which followed Friday’s Global Climate Strike — possibly the largest climate protest ever. The worldwide series of climate rallies, led by 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg, is organized by school students.
Before world leaders made their promises in three-minute speeches, Thunberg gave an emotional appeal in which she chided the leaders with the repeated phrase, “How dare you.”
“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here,” said Thunberg, who began a lone protest outside the Swedish parliament more than a year ago that culminated in Friday’s climate protests. “I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you have come to us young people for hope. How dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”
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