Activist Greta Thunberg met UN Secretary-General António Guterres and (environmentalist) actor Arnold Schwarzenegger in Vienna. Together they discussed how to tackle the climate crisis.
Two smiling faces, one tanned by the West Coast sun, the other with typically Swedish features: the selfie of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Greta Thunberg went viral.
The young climate activist, known around the world for having launched the Fridays for Future movement, and the former governor of California, who made the state a protagonist in the fight against global warming, met in Vienna on the occasion of the summit of R20, the environmentalist organisation founded by Schwarzenegger himself and supported by the United Nations (UN).
Greta is a visionary and, like most dreamers who have changed history, she is not alone.Arnold Schwarzenegger
The conference was held on 28 and 29 May in the Austrian capital, with the aim of helping cities and nations honour the commitments made under the Paris Agreement and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. "Climate change represents the most serious crisis humanity has ever had to face," according to Thunberg. "Millions of young people have drawn attention to this emergency, but it is you — politicians, business leaders and celebrities — who are listened to by people. You are able to influence them. That is why you have an enormous responsibility, a responsibility that most of you have not yet taken on," the Swedish activist concluded.
Also present at the summit was the United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres. He recounted his recent trip to Tuvalu, a spectacular Polynesian island lost in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that risks disappearing forever due to rising sea levels. "The idea that continuing to finance fossil fuels is a way to improve people's lives could not be more wrong," he declared. "It means spending taxpayers' savings to fuel hurricanes, increase drought, cause the melting of ice and the bleaching of corals: in practice it means spending money to destroy the planet."
On one side are the world's major banks, which from 2016 to 2018 invested 1,700 billion euros in fossil fuels. On the other are Norway's sovereign wealth fund, which will finance renewables with 14 billion, and the Irish one, which will be the first in the world to divest its capital from coal, oil and natural gas. But there are also New York, Oakland and San Francisco, which have sued oil companies. The list of those who choose to open their wallets to save the world rather than destroy it is growing: all that is needed is to speed up the pace.
