Climate activist Greta Thunberg, at an outdoor rally close to the COP26 Summit in Glasgow, slammed the world leaders assembled at the United Nations meeting. The 18-year-old said that the politicians inside the COP are only ‘pretending to take our futures seriously’ and the event has ‘led us nowhere’. 

Hosted in partnership between the UK and Italy, the COP26 is being held in Glasgow. It is being attended by various world leaders including Indian PM Narendra Modi and US President Joe Biden. 

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The leaders undertook pledges underlined by issues like climate change, global temperature control and also energy conservation. 

However, Thunberg slammed the leaders in the summit. “Inside COP there are just politicians and people in power pretending to take our futures seriously. Change is not going to come from inside there,” she told a crowd. 

COP26 was delayed by a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This year it aims to keep alive a target of capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

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“Change is not going to come from inside, that is not leadership. We said no more blah blah blah….no more exploitation of nature, no more exploitation of people. We are sick and tired of it,” Thunberg added. 

Meanwhile, More than 80 countries pledged to cut methane emissions by 30% by the end of 2030 as the United States and European Union flagged the need to tackle the greenhouse gas as crucial to limiting global warming to 1.5C.

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US President Joe Biden, while addressing the COP26 conference in Glasgow, Scotland, thanked nations that had signed the “game-changing commitment.” He also mentioned specific steps the US would take to do its bit for the cuts, including getting the Environmental Protection Agency and Department for Transportation to work on reducing methane emission from new and existing oil and gas pipelines.