Juno News - May 22, 2022


Climate protesters say WEF meeting is a “corporate Disneyland”

Topics
climate protests at wef
Hosted by
Andrew Lutton
Mentioned
Yellow Submarine Greta
What should Ontario conservatives do this election？ The WEF's climate agenda in their own words

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

169.7

Word count

1,026

Sentence count

65

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

As the World Economic Forum (WEF) gets underway in Davos, protesters are gathering on the promenade to protest climate justice. They say that the WEF is little more than a corporate Disneyland, and that it's time to go back to basics and focus on the things we actually care about.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I'm coming to you from Davos, Switzerland, where the World Economic Forum's 2022 annual meeting
00:00:05.100 is about to begin. The thousands of VIPs, business and corporate elites coming in from all over the
00:00:10.960 world are descending on Davos, an alpine town in Switzerland, as we speak. But it isn't just them
00:00:16.960 who are here. Also, dozens of protesters gathering under an Antifa flag, having an impromptu concert,
00:00:23.140 steps from the promenade, which is where a lot of the action is taking place on the main drag of
00:00:27.700 Davos. Now, unsurprisingly, a lot of them are here to protest what they say is climate justice. And
00:00:33.760 it's odd because if you look at the Davos agenda, you can see that a great many sessions are
00:00:38.520 specifically about climate, about going to net zero, transitioning away from oil and gas, paying
00:00:43.680 attention to nature and conservation, all of these things. Well, oddly, the climate activists don't
00:00:48.500 believe that any of it is genuine. Many of them believe that it is, as this one protester's sign
00:00:53.300 said, no more than a corporate Disneyland. One woman I spoke to is part of a seniors group from
00:00:59.100 Switzerland that actually walked to Davos, and they feel that everyone who flew here is a big old 0.97
00:01:03.920 climate hypocrite. So what do you think of all of the people that fly in from around the world to 0.86
00:01:09.420 talk about climate? Flying is some of the baddest, of course. And I would forbid in Europe, because we
00:01:18.080 could go by train, we make better trains, who goes in the night, and then you are there in the morning.
00:01:24.380 But, and I would give some contingents for other countries, for USA and so on, you know, not only for
00:01:35.800 holiday in the Caribbean or so. But if you want to see the other cultures, especially for young people,
00:01:43.240 I would say every five years, a contingent to go in another Earth's place, or in another culture, yeah.
00:01:51.580 Now, do you believe that, because they talk about climate a lot at this conference, they have panels
00:01:55.500 about it, discussions about it. Do you believe, as a climate activist, that they actually care about
00:02:00.100 climate at the World Economic Forum?
00:02:02.540 I don't think, no. I don't believe. They say, and they did standing ovation when Greta was talking,
00:02:10.140 and said, you have to be afraid of, you must be afraid, the house is burning, she says. And the
00:02:17.460 people find it's nice what she's saying, but they didn't change anything. And this is the great
00:02:23.680 mistake, because the WEF is founded by making something better for the world. But we don't see
00:02:32.520 anything better. Since this, all this year, I think it's about 50 years, the WEF is existing,
00:02:39.640 but it doesn't change.
00:02:40.900 Now, these comments were echoed by one of the organizers who took aim at what seems like good
00:02:45.800 intentions by a lot of the people at Davos, but no real action. It's been going on for years,
00:02:50.980 and nothing has materialized.
00:02:52.840 Now, what brings you out here today?
00:02:54.960 I'm an organizer of the STRIKE WEF here, so we did a protest hike from Kubelis to Davos
00:03:00.100 over two days now, and we protested for climate justice.
00:03:04.080 Now, I've seen the agenda for this week. They have a lot of discussion about climate,
00:03:08.160 about net zero, about transitioning away from oil and gas. Are these things good in your idea?
00:03:13.500 Yeah, I think the intention is good, but we, like, we demand a big change, because we think
00:03:18.300 we have to take big steps to, like, tackle the climate crisis and the ecological crisis
00:03:24.260 in general. And we don't really see that the people actually want to change some values
00:03:30.100 in the economy, like, actually bring nature at the core and the humans and happiness, like,
00:03:36.620 just that this is in the core of economy and everything evolves around it. We still see
00:03:41.560 that profit and consumption and growth is really, really important. And also, like,
00:03:48.400 being ecological is, like, yeah, kind of fits sometimes into it. And then greenwashing is also
00:03:54.240 a big problem. So, like, we want that these people at the WEF really want to do something for the
00:03:59.920 climate and not just, like, do greenwashing and that it's good for their image, really.
00:04:05.540 Do you think capitalism is the problem then? Because there are a lot of companies here that have
00:04:09.400 their big displays. Do you think capitalism itself is the problem?
00:04:13.260 I think capitalism has some good things also. I'm not a full, like, enemy of capitalism. I think
00:04:20.960 there's some good things. But I think there's also a lot of things that we have to change. And
00:04:26.020 there's also a lot of, like, new systems that are really interesting, I think. And it's not about
00:04:32.460 communism. It's like a whole different, like, with new ideas and new values. And
00:04:39.020 like, just to think about, like, in the past 50 years, like, we really concentrated ourselves
00:04:45.500 on the, um, how is it called in German? It's BP. The, like, how much, like, the money flow,
00:04:53.300 kind of. Yeah. And also about growth and consumption. And I think it did a lot of good for humanity.
00:05:01.320 Like, we have a lot more, like, the life standard became bigger, but it also destroyed nature a lot. And
00:05:07.700 we're, have a climate crisis. And I think we have to rethink the values that we, we actually,
00:05:16.360 like, our economy is based around and have to, like, make nature a priority. And I think this was
00:05:22.800 missing in the last 100 years. And we really have to think about this.
00:05:27.320 Now, not only are these climate justice protesters not convinced that climate is truly on the agenda
00:05:33.240 of Davos, they actually believe it is, as this one chant in German suggested, a gathering of
00:05:39.260 murderers. Or, to put another song to the mix, someone who said, to the tune of Yellow Submarine,
00:05:44.560 this. What do we want? Climate justice. When do we want it? Now. We'll continue to cover the
00:05:58.920 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting. For True North in Davos, I'm Andrew Lutton.