16-Year-Old Activist Takes On Authorities on Climate Change
Alexandra McArver and Rain Camerlinck
Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist, is one of the biggest voices in global climate change today.
Over the past year and a half, Thunberg has gone from sitting outside the Swedish Parliament advocating for action to making speeches to world leaders and heading nation-wide protests. On March 15, at least 100 countries participated in the youth-led climate strike inspired by Thunberg. Her message to “tell it like it is” won her an invitation to speak at the United Nations (UN).
On September 23, Thunberg gave a speech at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York. She addressed world leaders by starting her speech with “this is all wrong, I shouldn’t be here.”
She went on to blame the world leaders of betraying young people. “If world leaders continue to fail us, my generation will never forgive them,” said Thunberg. The purpose of her speech at the UN was to convince politicians to take climate change seriously. “How dare you!” Thunberg said many times in her speech.
In order to travel from Sweden to New York, Thunberg traveled in a zero-carbon yacht called Malizia II that harnessed the wind, sun, and hydropower to move. While on her trip, Thunberg kept her Twitter updated to inform her supporters when she was going to arrive. When she arrived, she was greeted by a huge crowd, most of them younger activists.
Thunberg’s docking was purposeful as well. She docked her zero-emissions yacht just blocks from Wall Street, the heart of the global financial system whose investments in fossil fuels are one of the main targets of climate protesters and an area that climate change threatens with rising sea levels.
Thunberg has contributed to and written two books. Her first book, Scenes from the Heart is an autobiography of Thunberg’s mother, Malena Erman. The book follows Erman’s life as she, her husband, and their two daughters, including Thunberg, toured Europe for Ermans’s opera singing career. The book addresses the diagnosis of Thunberg’s Asperger’s syndrome and her sister’s attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
The second book Thunberg contributed to is called No One is Too Small to Make a Difference. This book consists of 11 of Thunberg’s key speeches. The first speech in One is Too Small to Make a Difference was given three weeks after her first climate strike in 2018.
“You must unite behind the science. You must take action. You must do the impossible. Because giving up can never ever be an option,” said Thunberg to Congress in September 2019.
