British actor Emma Thompson has staged a solo protest against Tony Abbott’s stance on climate change during a trip to the icy wilderness of the Arctic.
Thompson singled out the Australian prime minister for criticism while on a visit to the remote island of Spitsbergen. She is pictured holding a sign that reads: “Tony Abbott climate change is real, I’m standing on it!”
Abbott previously called the science of climate change “crap” but has recently been at pains, while leading the world’s first repeal of a carbon price, to stress his acceptance that human activity is altering the world’s climate.
Thompson visited the Smeerenburg glacier in the north-west of Spitsbergen, which is part of the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean.
The double Oscar-winning actor is travelling in the region, along with her 14-year-old daughter, on the Greenpeace ship Esperanza to highlight the threat posed by climate change.
A study published in Nature last year found that Arctic sea ice had melted at a rate of 8% each decade over the past 30 years, driven by warming temperatures.
Thompson and Greenpeace also want a legal sanctuary to be declared to protect the Arctic from oil drilling and industrial fishing.
Thompson said: “We’re told that it is all our fault, global warming – we want the fuel, we want our cars, and that the oil industry is merely responding to the needs of a greedy public.
“But that’s simply not fair. Most of us want to live cleaner lives, but our governments don’t make these things easily available.
“The changes we need, that the Arctic needs, must come from the top as well as the bottom. We need electric cars to be cheaper and more accessible. We want safer bike lanes in every big city.
“We want plastic bags to be banned for good. We need governments to stand up to the dirty industries that have for so long funded and controlled them, and to give us all an affordable chance to live our lives in a more sustainable way.”
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