Greta Thunberg launches open letter demanding world leaders take immediate action on climate crisis

Greta Thunberg has launched an open letter signed by thousands of activists and celebrities, and hundreds of scientists demanding global leaders take measurable, immediate action to genuinely tackle the climate crisis.

"The race to safeguard future living conditions for life on Earth as we know it needs to start today," reads the letter, sent to all EU leaders and heads of state on Thursday. "Not in a few years, but now." Signatories include Malala Yousafzai, Leonardo DiCaprio, Priyanka Chopra, Opal Tometi, Jane Fonda, Shawn Mendes, Coldplay, Mark Ruffalo, Margaret Atwood, and many others.

The Swedish teen climate activist teased something big on Twitter on Thursday, then tweeted out the link to the letter, noting the campaign hashtag #FaceTheClimateEmergency.

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Written by Thunberg alongside fellow climate activists and School Strike 4 Climate organisers Luisa Neubauer, Anuna de Wever van der Heyden, and Adélaïde Charlier, the letter makes demands "essential to our chance of avoiding a climate- and ecological disaster​," including the immediate halting of all investments in fossil fuel exploration and extraction, and an end to fossil fuel subsidies.

The letter also demands that EU member states make ecocide, or extensive damage to Earth's ecological systems, an international crime at the International Criminal Court, and calls for transparency in reporting of total emissions in the shipping and international flight industries.

It also demands the establishment of "annual, binding carbon budgets based on the current best available science and the IPCC’s budget which gives us a 66 percent chance of limiting the global temperature rise to below 1.5 °C" — as per the Paris Climate Agreement. These budgets, the letter says, cannot depend on hypothetical results from future technological plans. Plus, the letter calls for climate policies that reduce racial, economic, and gender inequality.

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You can read the demands on the site and you can also add your signature if you want to.

The letter was sent to EU leaders on Thursday. It's been months since Thunberg's visit to the European Parliament in Brussels on March 4, on the day the European Union unveiled a landmark law to achieve "climate neutrality" by 2050.

Since then, Thunberg has been in lockdown during the pandemic like the rest of us, urging online climate protests to continue during this time, and crafting one hell of a letter.

Now to convince world leaders...