When it comes to fury about the lack of action on climate change, Greta “how dare you” Thunberg has been the class act.
Well, there’s a new teenage girl in town, and she’s angrier – and a lot more left wing.
While 18-year-old Greta was blasting the US Congress on Thursday via Zoom to mark Earth Day, Xiye Bastida, a 19-year-old Mexican climate activist currently ensconced in New York, had just finished unloading on 40 world leaders for nine minutes.
“We demand you stop fossil fuel investment and subsidies. We demand you stop environmental plunder. We demand you get to net zero by 2030, not 2050,” she said, offering a stark contrast to the demure US Secretary of State who introduced her.
Sorry, India, and your hundreds of millions in extreme poverty, no further development for you.
Miss Bastida then dropped what was clearly the most bizarre — and potentially incoherent — demand ever uttered at an international conference of world leaders. “We demand comprehensive, non euro-centric and intersectional climate education including literacy on climate justice, environmental racism, ancestral and indigenous wisdom, disability justice, green careers and sustainable living,” she implored.
Michel Foucault would have been proud.
What a pleasure to introduce @xiyebastida of @fridays4future at the #LeadersClimateSummit today. Xiye is an inspiration to us all as we work together to leave a better planet for the generations that will follow us. pic.twitter.com/dDFWSs6Fik
— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) April 22, 2021
What the leaders of Russia, China and Saudi Arabia made of all this was unclear.
Ms Bastida’s diatribe was a bracing peroration to an otherwise tedious morning of climate platitudes, blissfully broken up by a series of embarrassments.
Barely half an hour into his signature global climate summit, announced back in March to underscore the US return to climate change leadership, President Joe Biden had to leave the summit.
“Just for a few minutes,” announced his secretary of state to everyone, which had me — and no doubt the other 290 viewers watching the summit live on YouTube, thinking: Couldn’t he have used the bathroom before it started?
A bit later, after a minute of French president Emmanuel Macron speaking from his gilded throne in the Elyse — the first leader not to have translator —the screen flicked suddenly to Russian President Vladimir Putin talking to his aides.
Putin would go first, for some reason, it seemed.
Mr Blinken conceded it was only a taped recording of Macron, cauterising a potential diplomatic slight, but revealing the French leader clearly had better things to do on a Thursday afternoon in Paris. Charles de Gaulle would have been proud.
Then, Scott Morrison delivered the crescendo in what was a technically farcical morning, giving his first minute or two of remarks on mute, right after the prime minister of Bhutan (population 770,000) had spoken.
If they can’t work Zoom properly, can they really control the climate?
“Mr Prime Minister I’m not sure we’re hearing you,” the secretary of State said. It was, one climate policy wonk in DC said, “a perfect metaphor” for Australia’s contribution to the climate debate”.
Experts were unsure whether the summit would culminate in a communique.
But one thing is already clear: the Johnson government in the UK should start its global search now, if it’s to have any hope of finding someone as furious as Miss Bastida to launch when it hosts the next climate summit in Glasgow later this year.
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