Published on: 31/10/2022 – 07:39 Environmental activist Greta Thunberg will not be present at COP27 which opens on November 6 in Sharm el-Sheikh because these meetings are not, according to the Swedish activist, than communication operations where the space for civil society “is extremely limited”. The COPs have become ‘greenwashing’ machines, i.e. communications operations by leaders to claim that they are acting in favor of the climate when this is not the case, stormed environmental activist Greta Thunberg on Sunday October 30, a few days of the 27th UN climate conference. “The space for civil society this year is extremely limited,” continued the Swedish activist during a question and answer session at the Southbank Center in London for the launch of his “Great climate book”. “As they are, the COPs don’t really work, unless they are used as an opportunity to mobilize” continued the young woman with a petite figure, braided hair, in a red T-shirt and jeans. Twitter, she had already expressed her solidarity with “prisoners of conscience in Egypt before the COP27”, which opens on November 6 in Sharm el-Sheikh. The COPs, the previous one of which was held in Glasgow, “are not not really intended to change the system” but to encourage gradual progress that has become futile in the face of the climate emergency, argued the 19-year-old activist, whose intervention on Sunday closed the London literature festival. “The big book du climat”Released on Thursday, “Le grand livre du climat” includes around a hundred contributions from climate and other experts, including economist Thomas Piketty, WHO boss Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, and writer Naomi Klein. royalties will be donated to his eponymous foundation then distributed to environmental charities. The activist says he wanted to write this book during the pandemic to “educate people, which is kind of ironic given that my thing is school strikes Again and again on Sunday, she called on everyone to become an activist, knowing that there are “many different ways” to do so. we need drastic change” and according to her, to get it from business leaders or governments who have a stake in the status quo, “we need billions of activists”. She repeated again and again that the climate crisis was not the fault of all humanity but of the richest while the poorest or those who have been “historically exploited suffer the most”. speed into the wall, she warns, noting for example that “the amount electricity produced from coal”, the most polluting fuel, “reached an all-time high last year”. International commitments leave the Earth on the path of a warming of 2.6°C, a result “pitifully not up to the task”, denounced last week the head of the UN, who calls for an end to “greenwashing”, while 2022 has already seen an increase in climatic disasters: dramatic floods like in Pakistan, droughts, heat waves or forest fires. A disturbing planetary movement On Sunday, the 19-year-old Swedish girl said she never imagined that she was going to start a planetary movement: “one thing led to another”, she smiled. recalls starting to protest outside the Swedish parliament in 2018 because she was “too shy and autistic” to join existing NGOs. “And it worked better than I would have thought!” With a smirk, she says she “really liked disturbing people so much”, especially those in power, “or who were”, like Donald Trump, the former American president who has criticized her on numerous occasions. Asked about Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, she laughs and then replies seriously that there are more pressing causes than “spending a fortune sending rockets into space”. Finally, when asked about the controversial actions of environmental groups such as Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil, which have sprayed masterpieces with paint or soup recently, Greta Thunberg argued that there is “a lot of people who become desperate” and that it is therefore “reasonable to expect them to try new types of actions”. With AFP