Rhetorical Analysis on Greta Thunberg’s Speech at the U.N Climate Action Summit (Essay Sample)

The article above expressed how Thunberg feel about world leaders and their ways of fixing climate change. She was clearly disappointed of how politicians and leaders talk about fixing this crisis but ended up not upholding their promises. Because of this, consequences have been made. She demanded for leaders to act as they promised and not just talked and quoted their words as ‘blah, blah, blah’.

While she had some long words to expressed “action speaks louder than words”, what she said was a hundred percent right. Have you seen any so called ‘leaders’ from developed countries, such as United States, China and United Kingdom taking their words seriously or are they just merely ‘blah, blah, blah’? All I see is more pollution. Take this as an example, the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping wrote this in his letter for the COP26 climate conference: “we should provide support to help developing countries to do better”, “we should jointly tackle the climate challenge” and “we should focus on concrete actions”. All these wonderful words simply do not count. Where are the actions, where are the solutions? China is currently leading the world of carbon dioxide emissions with a share of 29.18%, over a quarter of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions. But are they stopping it? I do not think so, just from 2020 to 2021, carbon dioxide emissions from China just dropped by 0.28% and that is only possible because of the coronavirus pandemic. Because of continuous cycle of carbon dioxide, many areas in China suffers from notoriously bad air pollution. Researchers also found that China has and unhealthy level of PM2.5, this caused a roughly 1.42 million premature deaths in China in 2019. Of the 15 most polluted cities, 3 of them are in China. All of these because they are not doing anything, instead they are continuing to burn fossil fuels and polluting the atmosphere with more and more greenhouse gases. Why? Because of one power, second money and third fighting for the top spot.

Speaking of COP26 climate conference, many world leaders from all around the world met at Glasgow, United Kingdom to talk about climate change. Although many of them signed agreements and agreements to help slow down this crisis, but are they actually doing anything or are these agreements just a ticket for them to political fame? From 2010 till our present, carbon dioxide emissions measured in parts per million (ppm) rose from 389 ppm to 417 ppm. As they are busy talking about ‘blah, blah, blah’, have they considered how they got to Glasgow the first place? 118 private jets were flown to Glasgow for the sake of taking these leaders to the conference. 118! That is equivalent of burning 1000 tons of carbon dioxide! Still, they have the guts to talk about fixing the climate crisis, as if they had not just contributed more. Considering we are still in a pandemic and living in the 21st century, aren’t there more ways, like video conferencing than to fly a plane across a continent just to listen to someone giving a speech about ‘blah, blah, blah’? This is the exact example of why Thunberg is concerned, or why our future generations will not be able to witness breath-takingly adorable penguins and ferociously brave polar bears in the arctics. And this is why the ‘blah, blah, blah’ must stop!

Just like Thunberg said, our future descendants’ fate depends on how well climate change is managed now. Quoting the article: “Research published on Monday showed that children born today would experience many times more extreme heatwaves and other climate disasters over their lifetimes than their grandparents.” If this were happening now, what would it be like for the future little ones. Are they going to have to live with heatwaves every day? Do they have to wear layers of clothes to survive long-lasting blizzards? Do they have to flee their hometown because of the rising of sea levels? Do they have to suffer from the consequences of our actions? Why risk it? So that it hurts the future rather than us now? This is the reason our leaders’ nonsense must go, they are elected as a role model for society to follow. Every word that come out of their mouths don’t matter. It is their actions that really make a difference.

COP26 is just as useless as a pile of trash if leaders who attend do not uphold their promise and their virtues. How are we going to stay below 2 degrees Celsius if leaders were doing nothing to stop emissions? As the article said: “We are on track to rise by 16% by 2030.” Why are our leaders doing nothing? Why are they not switching to renewable energy? Why are they not educating the new generations? Why are they glorifying deforestation and pollution of plastics wastes? Why are they withdrawing from climate agreements? More importantly, how are young activists, like Thunberg herself more educated in this specific topic than these leaders? Even England’s beloved Queen Elizabeth II was just as irritated by these ‘talk but don’t do’ leaders. Head of the United Nations had found that $423 billions of taxpayers’ money worldwide were being fueled to the fossil fuel industry. Despite the cost of renewable energy is declining worldwide, a report shows that fossil fuels in global energy mix was 80.3% in 2009 and 80.2% in 2019, a tiny 0.1% decrease in over a decade! Why are our leaders ignoring these signs and why aren’t they finding solutions? Like Thunberg said: “The Science does not lie!” Actions are required or leaders must simply move over.

In a nutshell, unless actions are immediately taken, Earth’s fever won’t be going anywhere. It’s our sole duty to protect our home and call out actionless leaders to uphold their promise. ‘Deeds Not Words!’, as the suffragettes’ motto was. A change can only be made if there were actions. This is a message to these leaders, if you’re not listening, move over!