This text was written as part of a week long simulation of the European Parliament at the end of which it was my task to deliver a speech. Our committee was dealing with policy solutions surrounding climate change and pollution. However dramatic as 17-year-old me tended to be, it still holds true with my current views on the issue.
Dear Mr President, honourable members of the board, officials and fellow delegates, my name is Yunus Poblome and I am from the ENVI II Committee.
We, as the ENVI II Committee, have shown you the numerous and increasing problems caused by plastic pollution. We’ve also shown you our best solutions to many of these problems. What I’ve come here to tell you now is how truly important these problems are. Plastic pollution is a topic that is too often pushed aside and postponed. Politicians and big corporations have continuously failed us in finding actual solutions. In most cases, they’ve actually made it exponentially worse over time. How long are we going to stand for politicians sweet-talking us in their election runs and continue to do nothing after they get elected?
How long will our governments, and in turn we, bow down to big corporations who continue to get away with making zero progress on this front, like Coca-Cola and Pepsico, who have been recorded as the two largest plastic polluters in the world? How long are we going to wait, while marine animals choke to death on something so seemingly unimportant as a candy wrapper? How long are we going to wait, while 50% of our coral reefs are already dead? minding you, 50% is GONE and may never come back. How long, while every credible expert points in the same direction? We, humans, were once in tune with nature, we respected it and knew to take care of it. What happened to us? Now, we have become selfish procrastinators who only care about our earth when it suits us. If we do not change the horribly selfish and unsustainable system we have created now, next generations may only get to see sea turtles in textbooks. Not even touching the topic of the effects of plastic pollution on plant life. We are poisoning the very ground we walk on with the countless insignificant and unfulfilling products our consumerist society convinces us to buy every single day of our lives. Is this really what we want? Do we really prefer IPhones and Big Macs over dolphins and sea turtles?
However, there is light at the end of this tunnel. There are, as we have only partially shown you today, a multitude of ways we as a species can change the way we interact with our planet. However to achieve this, we, as the young generation, must let our voices be heard, our agreements signed and our laws implemented. We refuse to keep going down this increasingly slippery slope we are currently on. Because when the last tree is cut down, the last river poisoned, the last fish caught, then only will we discover that we cannot eat money.
The Analytic Hour 
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