WHO IS GRETA THUNBERG?
She is a 17-year-old who grew up in Stockholm, in Sweden. Greta’s mother, Malena Ernman, is an opera singer and former Eurovision Song Contest participant.
Her father Svante Thunberg, is an actor, and is a descendant of Svante Arrhenius, a scientist who came up with a model of the greenhouse effect. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903.
The elder of two girls, she says she learned about climate change when she was eight, but that her parents were not climate activists.
Greta has Asperger’s syndrome, a developmental disorder, and has described it as a gift and said being different is a “superpower”.
Greta named Time Person of the Year for 2019
WHEN DID SHE START CAMPAIGNING?
In May 2018, aged 15, Greta won a climate change essay competition in a local newspaper.
Three months later, in August, she started protesting in front of the Swedish parliament building, vowing to continue until the Swedish government met the carbon emissions target agreed by world leaders in Paris, in 2015.
She held a sign that read “School Strike for Climate” and began regularly missing lessons to go on strike on Fridays, urging students around the world to join her.
Her protests went viral on social media and as support for her cause grew, other strikes started around the world, spreading with the hashtag #FridaysForFuture.
SPEECH AT THE U.N. CLIMATE ACTION SUMMIT
My message is that we’ll be watching you.
“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you! For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you’re doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight. You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe. The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control. Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist. So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences. To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise – the best odds given by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons. How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just ‘business as usual’ and some technical solutions? With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years. There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is. You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.
Thank you.
Greta Thunberg’s speech was very emotional. She has excoriated world leaders for their “betrayal” of young people through their inertia over the climate crisis at a United Nations summit that failed to deliver ambitious new commitments to address dangerous global heating.
REACTION TO THE SPEECH
Greta Thunberg is an eye opener to all of us. She presented her speech to all of us that also serves as a wake up call. She is telling us that we should do something for our environment to be better and that there will be a world where the young people could enjoy it. We should also focus on the problems happening especially to our environment because this is our home and it is where we get resources that helps us live. She focuses to address the government but it also for us people. She said that “change is coming, whether you like it or not”. This line makes me realize that we should start doing something that will be good for us, for others, and also to our environment.
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