No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference

by Greta Thunberg

you seem more frightened of the changes that can prevent catastrophic climate change than the catastrophic climate change itself.

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 don’t.

no one talks about it. There are no headlines, no emergency meetings, no breaking news. No one is acting as if we were in a crisis. Even most green politicians and climate scientists go on flying around the world, eating meat and dairy.

We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is to wake up and change.

what is the point of learning facts within the school system when the most important facts given by the finest science of that same school system clearly mean nothing to our politicians and our society?

You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to your children. But I don’t care about being popular, I care about climate justice and the living planet.

We are about to sacrifice the biosphere so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury.

You say that you love your children above everything else. And yet you are stealing their future.

Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible, there’s no hope. We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis.

Some people say that the climate crisis is something that we all have created. But that is just another convenient lie. Because if everyone is guilty then no one is to blame. And someone is to blame. Some people – some companies and some decision-makers in particular – have known exactly what priceless values they are sacrificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money.

According to the IPCC, we are less than twelve years away from not being able to undo our mistakes. In that time, unprecedented changes in all aspects of society need to have taken place – including a reduction of our CO2 emissions by at least 50 per cent. And please note that those numbers do not include the aspect of equity, which is absolutely necessary to make the Paris Agreement work on a global scale. Nor does it include tipping points or feedback loops like the extremely powerful methane gas released from the thawing Arctic permafrost.

Either we prevent a 1.5°C of warming or we don’t. Either we avoid setting off that irreversible chain reaction beyond human control – or we don’t. Either we choose to go on as a civilization or we don’t. That is as black or white as it gets. There are no grey areas when it comes to survival.

And since the climate crisis is a crisis that never once has been treated as a crisis, people are simply not aware of the full consequences from our everyday life.

No other current challenge can match the importance of establishing a wide, public awareness and understanding of our rapidly disappearing carbon budget, that should and must become our new global currency and the very heart of our future and present economics.

We must change almost everything in our current societies. The bigger your carbon footprint – the bigger your moral duty. The bigger your platform – the bigger your responsibility.

But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.

When your house is on fire you don’t sit down and talk about how nice you can rebuild it once you put out the fire. If your house is on fire you run outside and make sure that everyone is out while you call the fire department. That requires some level of panic.

We need to focus every inch of our being on climate change, because if we fail to do so then all our achievements and progress have been for nothing and all that will remain of our political leaders’ legacy will be the greatest failure of human history. And they will be remembered as the greatest villains of all time, because they have chosen not to listen and not to act.

You can’t just sit around waiting for hope to come – you’re acting like spoiled, irresponsible children. You don’t seem to understand that hope is something you have to earn.

We live in a strange world, where children must sacrifice their own education in order to protest against the destruction of their future. Where the people who have contributed the least to this crisis are the ones who are going to be affected the most.

We live in a strange world, where we think we can buy or build our way out of a crisis that has been created by buying and building things. Where a football game or a film gala gets more media attention than the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced.

We live in a strange world. But it’s the world that my generation has been handed. It’s the only world we’ve got. We are now standing at a crossroads in history. We are failing but we have not yet failed. We can still fix this. It’s up to us.

We are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction and the extinction rate is up to 10,000 times faster than what is considered normal, with up to 200 species becoming extinct every single day.

If our house was falling apart our leaders wouldn’t go on like you do today. You would change almost every part of your behaviour as you do in an emergency. If our house was falling apart, you wouldn’t fly around the world in business class, chatting about how the market will solve everything with clever, small solutions to specific, isolated problems.

If our house was falling apart the media wouldn’t be writing about anything else. The ongoing climate and ecological crisis would make up all the headlines.

Our house is falling apart. The future as well as what we have achieved in the past is literally in your hands now. But it is still not too late to act. It will take a far-reaching vision. It will take courage. It will take fierce determination to act now, to lay the foundations when we may not know all the details about how to shape the ceiling. In other words, it will take cathedral thinking.

Around the year 2030, 10 years 252 days and 10 hours away from now, we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, that will most likely lead to the end of our civilization as we know it. That is unless, in that time, permanent and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society have taken place, including a reduction of CO2 emissions by at least 50 per cent.

The fact that we are speaking of ‘lowering’ instead of ‘stopping’ emissions is perhaps the greatest force behind the continuing business-as-usual.

You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in solutions that will enable you to carry on like before. Like now. And those answers don’t exist any more. Because you did not act in time.

Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.

We children are not sacrificing our education and our childhood for you to tell us what you consider is politically possible in the society that you have created. We have not taken to the streets for you to take selfies with us, and tell us that you really admire what we do. We children are doing this to wake the adults up. We children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. We children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back.

Many of us know something is wrong, that the planet is warming because of increased greenhouse gases, but we don’t know the full consequences of that. The vast majority of us know much less than we think. And this should not be a surprise. We have never been shown the graphs which show how much the CO2 emissions must be reduced for us to stay below the 1.5°C limit. We have never been told the meaning of the aspect of equity in the Paris Agreement – and why it’s so important. We have never been taught about feedback loops or tipping points – or what the runaway greenhouse effect is.

Presidents, celebrities, politicians, CEOs and journalists. People listen to you. They are influenced by you. They follow you. And therefore you have an enormous responsibility. And let’s be honest. This is a responsibility that most of you have failed to take.

This is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced. This is not something you can like on Facebook.

If you say that we can ‘solve’ this crisis just by maybe increasing or lowering some taxes, phasing out coal in ten or fifteen years, putting up solar panels on new buildings or manufacturing more electric cars, then people will think we can ‘solve’ this crisis with a few political reforms, without anyone making a real effort.

We must acknowledge that we do not have the situation under control and that we don’t have all the solutions yet. We must admit that we are losing this battle. We must stop playing with words and numbers. Because we no longer have time for that, and in the words of author Alex Steffen, ‘Winning slowly is the same thing as losing.’

Right there it says that if we are to have a 67 per cent chance of limiting the global temperature rise to below 1.5°C, we had, on 1 January 2018, 420 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide left in our CO2 budget. And of course that number is much lower today. We emit about 42 gigatonnes of CO2 every year. At current emissions levels, that remaining budget is gone within roughly 8.5 years.

What I really would like to ask all of those who question our so-called ‘opinions’, or think that we are extreme: Do you have a different budget for at least a reasonable chance of staying below 1.5°C of warming? Is there another intergovernmental panel on climate change? Is there a secret Paris agreement that we don’t know about?

You can’t simply make up your own facts, just because you don’t like what you hear. There is no middle ground when it comes to the climate and ecological emergency.

Once you realize how painfully small the size of our remaining carbon-dioxide budget is; once you realize how fast it is disappearing; once you realize that basically nothing is being done about it; and once you realize that almost no one is even aware of the fact that CO2 budget even exists . . . then tell me – just exactly what do you do? And how do you do it without sounding alarmist?

This is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced. And we need to treat it accordingly. So that people can understand and grasp the urgency. Because you cannot solve a crisis without treating it as one.

Would any one of you step onto a plane if you knew it had more than a 50 per cent chance of crashing? More to the point: would you put your children on that flight?

The climate and ecological crisis is beyond party politics.

Everybody says that making sacrifices for the survival of the biosphere – and to secure the living conditions for future and present generations – is an impossible thing to do. Americans have indeed made great sacrifices to overcome terrible odds before. Think of the brave soldiers that rushed ashore in that first wave on Omaha Beach on D-Day. Think of Martin Luther King and the 600 other civil rights leaders who risked everything to march from Selma to Montgomery. Think of President John F. Kennedy announcing in 1962 that America would ‘choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard’.