Justin Welby Apologises For Nazi Comment
The Archbishop of Canterbury; Justin Welby has apologized after saying world leaders who fail to act on climate change at the summit could be making a bigger mistake than their predecessors who ignored warnings about the rise of the Nazis.
While speaking at the start of the climate change summit in Scotland, Welby, who happens to be the spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion of about 85 million Christians, said he was sorry for the offense caused to Jews by his comments.
“I unequivocally apologize for the words I used when trying to emphasize the gravity of the situation facing us at COP26,” Welby said on Twitter. “It’s never right to make comparisons with the atrocities brought by the Nazis.”
The U.N. summit critical to averting the most disastrous effects of climate change opened on Monday, with world leaders, environmental experts, and activists pleading for decisive action to halt global warming.
Earlier on during an interview by the BBC at the climate change gathering in Glasgow, Welby earlier told the BBC that, world leaders will be “cursed” if they fail to reach an agreement on climate change.
“People will speak of them in far stronger terms than we speak … of the politicians who ignored what was happening in Nazi Germany because this will kill people all around the world for generations,” he said.
“It will allow a genocide on an infinitely greater scale. I’m not sure there are grades of genocide, but there’s the width of genocide, and this will be genocide indirectly, by negligence, recklessness, that will, in the end, come back to us or our children and grandchildren.”
Welby was later asked what sort of commitments he was seeking from the leaders at Cop26, with the archbishop saying that one key thing was providing sufficient money for developing nations.
“All moral thinking starts with the idea that if you’re going to do the right thing, it needs action: money,” he said. “Are they going to reach the amounts of money committed – the $100bn a year – which is a fraction of what was paid out during the great banking crisis, in 2008-9 – are they going to reach the amount of money that says we’re serious about this?”
