Greta Thunberg’s prophetic speech at the UN Climate Action Summit
The young activist’s words were designed to disturb us and make us see ourselves as we are.
Speaking at the United Nations Climate Action Summit last month, 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg made no attempt to ingratiate herself with world leaders. Like a biblical prophet, she was angry and her indictment of those in power was withering: “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.”
Like a true prophet, Thunberg offered no false hope. Summarizing climate science in a few sentences, she warned that even cutting world carbon emissions in half in ten years—the most ambitious proposal on the global agenda—has only a 50 percent chance of keeping temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius. “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.”
Thunberg’s words were designed to disturb us, shake us out of the illusion that someone else will fix the problem, and make us see ourselves as we are.
