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16-Year-Old Climate Activist Greta Thunberg Meets U.K. Lawmakers

HeadlineApr 24, 2019

And in Britain, 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg called out U.K. lawmakers Tuesday for failing to act in time to avert catastrophic climate change. Thunberg was speaking to a group of MPs from Britain’s House of Commons; Prime Minister Theresa May was invited but declined to attend.

Greta Thunberg: “Now we probably don’t even have a future anymore, because that future was sold so that a small number of people could make unimaginable amounts of money. And it was stolen from us every time you said that the sky was the limit and that you only live once.”

Greta Thunberg’s appearance at the House of Commons came as climate activists with Extinction Rebellion continued a nonviolent civil disobedience campaign. This is Zuhura Plummer, a climate activist who locked herself to a truck at London’s Marble Arch landmark, with one hand bound inside a tube labeled “Greta.”

Zuhura Plummer: “Our tube is called Greta. And this is the very truck that she spoke from yesterday. And I’m doing this because I believe I have literally no other choice. I have worked on climate change for 15 years, and it felt urgent 15 years ago, my first job. And I will sit here until I am arrested, because I don’t think we have any other way of making our point. And I see myself in the long line of amazing, amazing people who have gone before us, from the suffragettes to Gandhi to the civil rights movement, and many, many, many other people around the world who are putting their bodies and their minds and their hearts on the line.”

London police have arrested over 1,000 people since Extinction Rebellion protests broke out in mid-April.

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