Conservative politicians 'stupid and foolish' on climate policy rollbacks, says climate activist

As world leaders gather in Turkey for COP31, the climate movement faces an uncomfortable truth. Global emissions remain stubbornly high, fossil fuels continue to dominate, and political resistance to green policies is growing. Have climate activists failed to turn public pressure into real political action? Or is the problem that governments simply refuse to listen? Joining me now in our studio is social environmental activist Chloe Mikulajczyk. Good morning and welcome. Good morning, thanks. So, Chloe, I want to be blunt. After decades of climate marches, protests and campaigning, global emissions are still rising. Rising. Has climate activism actually failed? No, it hasn't failed. I think we just, we know, you know, the climate science is very clear and we're seeing it with our own eyes. This summer has been absolutely terrible. There's been 50,000 deaths linked to extreme weather events and two thirds can be attributed to climate breakdown. If we're talking about the economics, it's 180 billion euros that, you know, just went up in flames because of climate breakdown. We know all of that. What we're currently missing is the political willingness to act. And we see that in some countries, the political willingness is there. And I'm sorry to say, but most of these countries actually have progressive leaders. So we have hope based on the election of Lula a few days ago. We have hope from the midterm results in the US as well. We just need to have decision makers that actually do want to act. And I think this is extremely difficult until... We're not really serious about the influence of the fossil fuel industry. We're not willing to uncouple, basically, our dependency on fossil fuels. And we need to stop putting billions every year into fossil fuel subsidies. So when activists block roads, disrupt public events or target works of art, as in the past, are they winning converts or simply reinforcing the perception that climate activists are out of touch? No, we're not out of touch. Once again, I mean, being out of touch is denying what has happened this summer. Europe is the fastest warming continent on the planet, and you would have to be extremely blind to miss that. So I think everyone who presents themselves as reasonable, you know, or very smart, such as what we're seeing in our conservative politicians that are in power in most of Europe today, is that they're actually just very stupid and foolish in what they're pushing for. In Europe, we were sort of on a good path. It wasn't a perfect path, but we were sort of on a good path, right? We still fall short of the targets that we have established. But now what we're seeing… Is that there's a massive sort of rollback on a lot of environmental and climate policies that we committed to, whether it's on the methane regulation, whether it's on ETS, on the car regulation. We're being lobbied by certain countries such as the US and the fossil fuel industry, but also just from internal Europe, there is a strong push, notably from conservative politicians and certain industries to roll back. Have you been surprised by the power of that backlash? I'm surprised I would say yes and no because we always knew that these forces were very strong and they were very organized and they're really well funded. I think what we're seeing now is that People are also willing to you know stand up against these forces. What we're seeing in a lot of the protests across Europe these days, obviously it's mainly about cost of living and it's led by the youth, but there is in some of them a very strong environmental component as well. People are willing to make efforts, they just need these efforts to appear as fair and until these efforts are not fair, until we keep continuing to subsidize the fossil fuel industry with Billions, and polluting industry with billions, and we're letting billionaires off the hook and all of that. It's going to be very difficult for people to make efforts on that front, so we need the decision-makers to actually take decisions that are ambitious, but that appear fair as well. We'll be right back.