COP26 is officially underway, and it looks like Greta Thunberg is enjoying her time up north so far. On Monday (November 1) the Swedish activist joined a crowd of protesters, singing: “You can shove your climate crisis up your arse.”
The 18-year-old campaigner was among a crowd of hundreds of activists in Glasgow’s Festival Park – one of many demos being staged against world leaders’ lack of action in tackling the climate emergency. Thunberg quote tweeted the video of her singing, captioning it, “When in Scotland...”
Addressing the crowd across the river from the COP26 venue, she said: “Inside COP they are just politicians and people in power pretending to take our future seriously. We say, ‘No more blah blah blah, no more exploitation of people and nature and the planet. No more whatever the fuck they’re doing inside there’.”
Thunberg is no stranger to embracing her musical side, having danced to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” – her version of a rickroll – at a recent Stockholm climate concert, and getting the Swedish death metal meme treatment out of her UN speech.
Running from October 31 to November 12, the COP26 summit promises to “bring parties together to accelerate action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change”. The heads of 120 countries have arrived for talks, while around 25,000 delegates will be attending the conference.
Back in August – in the wake of a damning climate report from the IPCC – youth activists told Dazed that immediate action is necessary to “rapidly and drastically reduce emissions” and keep global warming below the two degrees Celsius suggested in the Paris Agreement.