COP26 live updates: Greta Thunberg leading climate protests in Glasgow

Environmentally conscious visitors in Glasgow, Scotland, for COP26 may have begun to notice an environmentally unfriendly sight: Overflowing trash cans, or rubbish bins, depending on where you’re from.

Trash collectors are engaged in a dispute over pay and working conditions with the city council and have been out on strike since Nov. 1, taking advantage of the moment to get the world’s attention and put pressure on the city during COP. City officials have been scrambling to bring in contractors while the standoff continues.

The workers appealed to Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg for support. And she in turn invited them to join her for Friday’s climate march. “Climate justice also means social justice and that we leave no one behind,” she wrote.

Enthusiastic workers RSVPed in a video featuring an inflatable rat. Chris Mitchell, from the GMB union, which represents the workers, said: “Camaraderie and solidarity from the cleansing workers in Glasgow. Stand with us.”

On Friday morning, climate protesters were saying that it was important that the workers, once heralded as ‘key workers’ of the coronavirus pandemic, were once again at the forefront of public attention.

“We need the solidarity of young people and working class that makes the city run,” said Keely Mullen, 27, who was demonstrating in Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Park. “Greta has been making appeals recently to the trade union movement and it’s so welcome.”

When Greta Thunberg began striking outside of the Swedish Parliament when she was 15-years-old, she did so alone.

Today, tens of thousands of young activists are joining Thunberg as they march through the streets of Glasgow, demanding greater action on climate change. She is joining in a climate strike organized by Fridays for Future Scotland, the Scottish arm of the movement she founded.

Why are people so drawn to the 18-year-old from Sweden?

The young activists spilling into Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Park early on Friday morning said that it was a mix of the message and the messenger.

Skye-Layla Marriner, 18, a student and FFF Scotland organizer, said she could imagine going to high school with someone like Thunberg.

“She seems like a very gentle soul, she seems like a very real soul, she’s someone relatable,” she said. “She’s not someone doing herself up and trying to conform to media images … it’s someone we look at and think ‘yeah, I could have gone to school with that person,’ or ‘I see myself in that person,’ it’s someone real.”

Ailis Keyes, 18, who is also an organizer with FFF Scotland, said, “We see her, and we are like she shows our anger, she shows our emotion toward the climate crisis, and emotion to the inadequacy.”

Raymond Stokki, 37, an after-school teacher from Sweden, said that Thunberg has risen to prominence because of “the way the message is delivered” and that when thousands of schoolchildren skip their lessons to demand action on climate, people pay attention. “It’s an old method, striking, but it is showing the majority of people who actually have power.”

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They outgas a lot more carbon dioxide.

This likely comes as no great shock: the wealthiest 1 percent of the world’s population emitted twice as much carbon dioxide as the poorest half of the world from 1990 to 2015, according to new research highlighted at COP26 on Friday.

The carbon footprint of the global one-percenters is also forecast to keep on growing in coming years, while the poorer half remains small and flat.

Emissions of the very, very rich are likely to be 30 times higher than what's required to help stop the planet from warming above 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), say the authors of the study, commissioned by the anti-hunger charity Oxfam, and carried out by the Stockholm Environment Institute.

Oxfam points out that every person the planet — to reach Paris accord climate goals — needs to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by half, to an average of 2.3 tons by 2030. The planet’s wealthiest ones are on track to release 70 tons per person by decade’s end if current trends continue, the Swedish researchers say.

If you’re on social media following the climate activists protesting in Glasgow, expect to see the hashtags #Uproot the System and #ClimateJustice. What do they mean?

According to a newsletter posted on the Fridays for Future website, the “dominance” of the global north (rich, industrialized countries that are mainly in the Northern Hemisphere) over the global south (the poorer, less industrialized countries, mainly located in the southern part of the world) is a crucial to understanding and addressing climate change. Activists also talk about how race, gender, class, inequality and other issues interconnect and exacerbate the climate crisis. It’s not one thing, but a system, with deep roots, that they want yanked out.

In a similar vein, protesters talk about “climate justice,” noting that low-income countries tend to have lower greenhouse gas emissions — the Group of 20 countries, with the world’s largest economies, are responsible for about 80 percent of global emissions — and yet many of the countries that will be harmed the worst by climate change are poor. Protesters say rich countries need to recognize their historical responsibility and do more to support poorer countries.

Greta Thunberg was not impressed.

Inside a sprawling conference center in Glasgow, Scotland, this week, world leaders virtually tripped over one another to announce new promises aimed at tackling climate change and its disastrous impacts.

Outside the venue earlier this week, Thunberg, the Swedish activist, said the gathering was shaping up like so many that had come before it: Too much talk, too little action.

But not everyone is ready to declare the summit a failure at its halfway mark.

“COP26 is probably unfolding in a way that exceeds expectations compared to where we were a couple months ago, in no small part because I do think we’ve seen a few countries — a few important countries — step up,” said Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “And whether your glass is half full or half empty depends a lot on your expectations of what this COP was likely to deliver.”

Adriana Bottino-Poage is 6 years old, with cherub cheeks and curls that bounce when she laughs. She likes soccer, art and visiting the library. She dreams of being a scientist and inventing a robot that can pull pollution out of the air. She wants to become the kind of grown-up who can help the world.

Yet human actions have made the world a far more dangerous place for Adriana to grow up, according to a first-of-its-kind study of the impacts of climate change across generations.

If the planet continues to warm on its current trajectory, the average 6-year-old will live through roughly three times as many climate disasters as their grandparents, the study finds.

These findings, published recently in the journal Science, are the result of a massive effort to quantify what lead author Wim Thiery calls the “intergenerational inequality” of climate change.

As climate disasters intensify and the prospects for avoiding even more catastrophic warming grow dim, U.N. experts say the world must spend five to 10 times more helping vulnerable people adapt to inevitable environmental upheaval.

Already, millions are suffering amid prolonged droughts, catastrophic wildfires, chronic flooding and worsening storms brought about by rising temperatures. The threats will only intensify if emissions continue along their current trajectory, heating up the Earth by an estimated 2.7 degrees Celsius (4.9 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century.

“Climate change is happening, impacts are increasing now and today, and we’re going to be committed to these growing impacts for the foreseeable future, as long as we can actually imagine,” said Henry Neufeldt, chief editor of the U.N. Environment Program’s Adaptation Gap Report.

The COP26 climate summit has been largely focused on those inside the glimmering Scottish Event Campus. Friday, though, the theme of the conference is pointed outward.

“Youth and public empowerment” day at COP is centered on how to engage the public — and particularly young people — in tackling climate issues and helping bring about systemic change at the policy level.

“We absolutely need system change, but how do we get system change?” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

For that, he said, you need people power.

What are the central problems we face under this theme?

There are a range of hurdles when it comes to empowering people to engage with climate change — from risk perception to political polarization.

One problem, said Leiserowitz, is that many people around the world don’t know about climate change. “They are keenly aware of changes,” he said. “What they lack is the context of climate change to make sense of those changes.”