'You have stolen my dreams,' an angry Thunberg

tells U.N. climate summit

Valerie Volcovici, Matthew Green

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Teenage activist Greta Thunberg

angrily denounced world leaders on Monday for failing to
tackle climate change, unleashing the outrage felt by
millions of her peers in the heart of the United Nations by
demanding: “How dare you?”
The Swedish campaigner’s brief address electrified the
start of a summit aimed at mobilising government and
business to break international paralysis over carbon
emissions, which hit record highs last year despite decades
of warnings from scientists.

“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be

back in school on the other side of the ocean yet you all
come to us young people for hope. How dare you?” said
Thunberg, 16, her voice quavering with emotion.

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty

words,” she said.

Inspired by Thunberg’s solitary weekly protest outside the

Swedish parliament a year ago, millions of young people
poured onto the streets around the globe last Friday to
demand governments attending the summit take emergency
action.

“I was very struck by the emotion in the room when some of

the young people spoke earlier,” French President Emmanuel
Macron told the U.N. Climate Action Summit. “I also want to
play my role in listening to them. I think that no
political decision maker can remain deaf to this call for
justice between generations.”

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who organised the

one-day event to boost the 2015 Paris Agreement to combat
global warming, had warned leaders only to turn up if they
came armed with concrete action plans, not empty speeches.

“Nature is angry. And we fool ourselves if we think we can

fool nature, because nature always strikes back, and around
the world nature is striking back with fury,” said
Guterres, a former Portuguese prime minister.

“There is a cost to everything. But the biggest cost is

doing nothing. The biggest cost is subsidising a dying
fossil fuel industry, building more and more coal plants,
and denying what is plain as day: that we are in a deep
climate hole, and to get out we must first stop digging,”
he said.

Nevertheless, there were few new proposals from governments

for the kind of rapid change climate scientists say is now
needed to avert devastating impacts from warming. The
summit has, by contrast, been marked by a flurry of pledges
from business, pension funds, insurers and banks to do
more.

“We have broken the cycle of life,” said Emmanuel Faber,

chief executive of French food group Danone (DANO.PA), who
announced a “One Planet” initiative with a group of 19
major food companies to transition towards more sustainable
farming.
“We need your support for shifting agricultural subsidies
from killing life into supporting biodiversity,” Faber
said.