Photo by Mikel Agirregabiria Agirre
On September 23, 2019, sixteen year-old, student Greta Thunberg spoke directly to the world’s assembled leaders at the United Nation’s climate summit. She held them accountable for their failure to act forcefully to combat Global Warming, excoriating them for their inaction and their few half-hearted measures.
Did they listen? No. They chose instead to characterize her as emotional (after all, she is a teenager and female), a socialist, or some other feeble trope, in an effort to discount her message and obscure their guilt. Once again, they failed their people and all life on Earth.
Now, almost two years after she chastised world leaders for their failure to take global warming seriously, they may be waking up. Just two days since Hurricane Ida devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, ironically, on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s pulverizing the same area, attitudes in the US are changing. Finally, long delayed action is being proposed in the $3.5 trillion Infrastructure Bill stalled in Congress. It is now up to our elected leaders to demonstrate that they understand the dire situation we are in.
This is not assured. The US is suffering from two plagues, one biological which we can fight with science and vaccinations, and one that is a wide-spread mental illness that we are struggling to find methods to treat.
That is why I’ve decided to post Greta’s words again, as a reminder. We have neglected the threat of global warming to the point that the UN’s latest climate report leaves no room for doubt. We act or we perish.
Here is what Greta said.
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 percent chance of staying below 1.5 degrees 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 percent risk is simply not acceptable to us, we who have to live with the consequences.
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 eight and a half 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
09/23/2019
United Nations
Photo by Mikel Agirregabiria Agirre
“Greta Thunberg in TIME” by Mikel Agirregabiria Agirre is licensed with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/
“Greta Thunberg Speaks Truth To Power” is licensed CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 . To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/