Greta THUNBERG, environmental activist, opens the extraordinary meeting of the Committee Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI) open to all MEPs, before discussing the EU climate law and targets due to be announced the same day, in the European Parliament in Brussels.

Brussels

statement

meeting

Committee on Environment, Public Health and Food Safety

fight against climate change (T)

THUNBERG, Greta (SE)

EU climate law and targets: extracts from the opening statement by Greta THUNBERG, environmental activist

Arrival of Greta THUNBERG, climate activist, to the ENVI committee meeting room (6 shots)

SOUNDBITE (English), Greta THUNBERG, climate activist, When your house is on fire you do not wait a few more years to start putting it out. And yet this is what the Commission are proposing today. When the EU presents this climate law and net zero by 2050, you indirectly admit surrender that you are giving up, giving up on the Paris agreement, giving up on your promises and giving up on doing everything you possibly can to ensure a safe future for your own children. Because this law is based on an insufficient CO2 budget that in reality gives us much, much less than a 50 percent chance of limiting the global average temperature rise to below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

SOUNDBITE (English), Greta THUNBERG, climate activist, What we do not have is awareness and leadership and above all, time. Our rapidly disappearing carbon budgets are the bottom line that sums up the current best available climate science. No matter how insufficient they may be, as they do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, equity nor additional warming hidden them by air pollution. They are still the most reliable roadmap we have to safeguard the future living conditions for humankind.

SOUNDBITE (English), Greta THUNBERG, climate activist, Pretending that your plan or policy, disregarding the united science will somehow solve the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced. Pretending that a law that no one has to follow is the law and pretending that you can be a climate leader and still go on building and subsidising new fossil fuel infrastructure.

SOUNDBITE (English), Greta THUNBERG, climate activist, We need to start cutting our emissions drastically at the source now. Your distant targets will mean nothing if high emissions continue like today's business as usual, even for just a few more years, because that will use up our remaining carbon budgets, before you will even have the chance to deliver on your 2030 or 2050 goals.And since these negative emissions technologies that this law fully relies on, do not exist today at scale and perhaps never will, we simply need to change our behaviour, change our society. And this is the uncomfortable truth that you cannot escape no matter how badly you want to or how hard you try. And the longer you keep running away, from that truth, the bigger your betrayal towards your own children.