Sweden’s Thunberg meets DiCaprio and leads LA rally

Sweden’s 16-year-old environmental activist Greta Thunberg has met Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio and joined fellow teenagers at a Los Angeles rally to call for action on global warming.

She has been travelling across the US since addressing the United Nations in September.

Thunberg has become a youth leader, advocating environmental policies all over the world.

The Youth Climate Strike Los Angeles called for an end to California’s oil-extraction industry and the phasing out of oil wells.

“I will never understand how they can put short-term interests above our lives, above the planet’s future and our future,” Thunberg said of big business.

“But we young people have had enough. We say no more. And if our parents won’t speak up for us, we will.”

She has taken a year off from her school studies to advocate climate action and plans to travel to Spain in December for this year’s United Nations climate summit, COP25, which was moved from Chile because of serious rioting.

“Many young people are aware that they will be very much impacted by what we are doing now and that their future will be destroyed,” the teenager said. “We know what is at stake in a way that many older people maybe don’t.”

DiCaprio praise

DiCaprio said on Instagram: “There are few times in human history where voices are amplified at such pivotal moments and in such transformational ways – but Greta Thunberg has become a leader of our time.”

He said, “history will judge us” for what we do to give future generations “the same liveable planet” that we currently take for granted.

The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation says it “supports projects around the world that build climate resiliency, protect vulnerable wildlife and restore balance to threatened ecosystems and communities”.

“I hope that Greta’s message is a wake-up call to world leaders everywhere that the time for inaction is over,” DiCaprio posted.

The actor is a vocal climate campaigner and highlighted the issue during his acceptance speech at the Academy Awards in 2016 for The Revenant, where he witnessed climate change while filming in the Arctic.

He told the Oscar audience: “Climate change is real, it is happening right now. It is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating.”

 

 

Picture credit: Instagram