A draft text was published Wednesday asking governments to “accelerate phasing out coal and subsidies for fossilfuels” for the first time. Saudi Arabia is one of the major fossil fuel producers. However, they are refusing to use that language. CNN reached out to Saudi officials for comment but they have not yet responded. Analysts expect it to be absent in the final agreement. Australia, the largest exporter of coal in all developed nations has not yet responded to CNN’s request for comment.
“I am disgusted at the way that this COP is not managing climate crisis. The final text cannot even mention fossil fuels. “Polluters are more welcomed than people, and this is what youth will continue doing: fighting for the phase-out of fossil fuels,” Mitzi Joelle Tan, a Filipino climate justice activist, said at the conference.
“I live in the Philippines. It is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world. I am so sick of repeating that sentence over and again because I have to talk about my climate traumas and my anxiety in order to make people understand the urgency of the climate crisis. That is the point we must get over. We must get beyond the point of trying to explain why the climate crisis is here.
The youth addressed an open letter to world leaders claiming that fossil fuels were their generation’s weapons for mass destruction. They demanded that all new oil, gas and coal production be stopped and all existing production halted.
The young activists expressed their support for the treaty, and made a list of demands to world leaders. They also shared their frustration at the failure of the summit.
Tan stated, “We’ve already noticed how the largest delegation at a UN climate summit was the fossil fuel lobbyists.” “We are still not able to see how the fossil fuel industry is responsible for many of our problems.”
The analysis showed that the fossil fuel lobby had approximately two dozen more delegates than the largest country delegation. They also outnumber the event’s official Indigenous constituency by about two to one. This is in addition to the number of delegates representing the eight worst-affected countries by climate change in the last 20 years — Puerto Rico, Myanmar and Haiti, Mozambique (the Bahamas), Bangladesh, Bangladesh, and the Philippines).
