No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference

by Greta Thunberg

Some people say that I should be in school instead. Some people say that I should study to become a climate scientist so that I can ‘solve the climate crisis’. But the climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is to wake up and change.

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.

The climate crisis is both the easiest and the hardest issue we have ever faced. The easiest because we know what we must do. We must stop the emissions of greenhouse gases. The hardest because our current economics are still totally dependent on burning fossil fuels, and thereby destroying ecosystems in order to create everlasting economic growth.

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.

You cannot rely on people reading between the lines or searching for the information themselves. To read through the latest IPCC report, track the Keeling Curve or keep tabs on the world’s rapidly disappearing carbon budget. You have to explain that to us, repeatedly. No matter how uncomfortable or unprofitable that may be.

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.

A lot of people, a lot of politicians, business leaders, journalists say that they don’t ‘agree’ with what we children are saying. They say we are exaggerating, that we are alarmists. To answer this I would like to refer to page 108, chapter 2, in the latest IPCC report.

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?

Instead, you must unite behind the science. You must take action. You must do the impossible. Because giving up can never ever be an option.

Your generation is 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.

To some people – particularly those who in many ways have created this crisis – that science is far too uncomfortable to address. But we who will have to live with the consequences – and indeed those who are living with the climate and ecological crisis already – don’t have a choice. To stay below 1.5°C – and give us a chance to avoid the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control – we must speak the truth and tell it like it is. In the IPCC’s SR15 report that came out last year it says on page 108, chapter 2, that to have a 67 per cent chance of staying below a 1.5°C global temperature rise – the best odds given by the IPCC – the world had 420 gigatonnes of CO2 left to emit back on 1 January 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatonnes. With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8.5 years.