Greta Thunberg - No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference

Greta Thunberg was born in 2003. In August 2018, she started a school strike for the climate outside the Swedish Parliament that has since spread all over the world and now involves over 1 million schoolchildren. The movement is now called Fridays For Future. Thunberg has spoken at climate rallies across Europe. In December she attended the United Nations COP24 in Katowice, Poland, where she addressed the Secretary-General and made a speech that was shared many million times around the globe. In January 2019 she was invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos where her speeches again made a worldwide impact. She has won the prestigious Prix Libert and been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Thunberg is vegan, and doesnt fly, in order to live a low-carbon life.

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First published 2019

Copyright Greta Thunberg, 20182019, in agreement with Politiken Literary Agency

The moral right of the author has been asserted

PHOTO: ANDERS HELLBERG

ISBN: 978-0-141-99175-7

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Last summer, climate scientist Johan Rockstrm and some other people wrote that we have at most three years to reverse growth in greenhouse-gas emissions if were going to reach the goals set in the Paris Agreement.

Over a year and two months have now passed, and in that time many other scientists have said the same thing and a lot of things have got worse and greenhouse-gas emissions continue to increase. So maybe we have even less time than the one year and ten months Johan Rockstrm said we have left.

If people knew this they wouldnt need to ask me why Im so passionate about climate change.

If people knew that the scientists say that we have a 5 per cent chance of meeting the Paris target, and if people knew what a nightmare scenario we will face if we dont keep global warming below 2C, they wouldnt need to ask me why Im on school strike outside parliament.

Because if everyone knew how serious the situation is and how little is actually being done, everyone would come and sit down beside us.

In Sweden, we live our lives as if we had the resources of 4.2 planets. Our carbon footprint is one of the ten worst in the world. This means that Sweden steals 3.2 years of natural resources from future generations every year. Those of us who are part of these future generations would like Sweden to stop doing that.

Right now.

This is not a political text. Our school strike has nothing to do with party politics.

Because the climate and the biosphere dont care about our politics and our empty words for a single second.

They only care about what we actually do.

This is a cry for help.

To all the newspapers who still dont write about and report on climate change, even though they said that the climate was the critical question of our time when the Swedish forests were burning this summer.

To all of you who have never treated this crisis as a crisis.

To all the influencers who stand up for everything except the climate and the environment.

To all the political parties that pretend to take the climate question seriously.

To all the politicians that ridicule us on social media, and have named and shamed me so that people tell me that Im retarded, a bitch and a terrorist, and many other things.

To all of you who choose to look the other way every day because you seem more frightened of the changes that can prevent catastrophic climate change than the catastrophic climate change itself.

Your silence is almost worst of all.

The future of all the coming generations rests on your shoulders.

Those of us who are still children cant change what you do now once were old enough to do something about it.

A lot of people say that Sweden is a small country, that it doesnt matter what we do. But I think that if a few girls can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school for a few weeks, imagine what we could do together if we wanted to.

Every single person counts.

Just like every single emission counts.

Every single kilo.

Everything counts.

So please, treat the climate crisis like the acute crisis it is and give us a future.

Our lives are in your hands.

When I was about eight years old, I first heard about something called climate change, or global warming. Apparently, that was something humans had created by our way of living. I was told to turn off the lights to save energy, and to recycle paper to save resources.

I remember thinking that it was very strange that humans, who are an animal species among others, could be capable of changing the earths climate.

Because, if we were and if it was really happening, we wouldnt be talking about anything else. As soon as you turned on the TV, everything would be about that. Headlines, radio, newspapers. You would never read or hear about anything else. As if there was a world war going on.

But. No one talked about it. Ever.

If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before? Why were there no restrictions? Why wasnt it made illegal?

To me, that did not add up. It was too unreal.

I have Aspergers syndrome, and to me, almost everything is black or white.

I think in many ways that we autistic are the normal ones and the rest of the people are pretty strange. They keep saying that climate change is an existential threat and the most important issue of all. And yet they just carry on like before. If the emissions have to stop, then we must stop the emissions. To me that is black or white. There are no grey areas when it comes to survival. Either we go on as a civilization or we dont.

We have to change.

Countries like Sweden and the UK need to start reducing emissions by at least 15 per cent every year, to stay below a 2C warming target.

Now the IPCC say that we have to aim for 1.5C. So we can only imagine what that means. You would think every one of our leaders and the media would be talking about nothing else but no one ever mentions it. Nor does anyone ever mention anything about the greenhouse gases already locked in the system, nor that air pollution is hiding a warming, so when we stop burning fossil fuels, we already have an extra 0.51.1C guaranteed.