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Young Women Are Leading Climate Protests. Guess Who Runs Global Talks

There’s a clear gender and generation gap at the Glasgow talks, and the two sides have very different views on how to address global warming

• https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/06/climate/climate-summit-glasgow-protests.html

(NYT / Nov 6, 2021) The bookends to the first week of this watershed international climate summit in Scotland reveal a widening divide that threatens to grow larger in the weeks and months ahead.

Those with the power to make decisions about how much the world warms in the coming decades are mostly old and male. Those who are angriest about the pace of climate action are mostly young and female.

The two sides have vastly divergent views of what the summit should achieve. Indeed, they seem to have different notions of time. At the summit, leaders are setting goals for 2030 at the earliest. In some cases, they’re setting targets for 2060 and 2070, when many of today’s activists will be hitting retirement age. The activists say change must come immediately. They want countries to abruptly stop using fossil fuels and to repair the climate damage that is now being felt in all corners of the globe but is especially punishing the most vulnerable people in the Global South. For them, mid-century is an eternity.

“Now is the time. Yesterday was the time,” is how Dominique Palmer, 22, an activist with Fridays for Future International, put it during a panel discussion at The New York Times Climate Hub on Thursday. “We need action right now.”

Social movements have almost always been led by young people. But what makes the climate movement’s generational divide so pointed — and the fury of the young so potent — is that world leaders have been meeting and talking about the need to address climate change since before most of the protesters were born, with few results.

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