
Transcript

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Gretta, your first climate strike
was a lonely event a little over a year ago.
And in the intervening time, you have sparked the interest
of millions literally of children around the globe
demanding action for climate change.
What's your message to world leaders today?
My message is that we'll be watching you.
This is all wrong.
I shouldn't be up here.
I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean.
Yet you all come to us, young people, for hope.
How dare you?
You have stolen my dreams and my childhood
with your empty words, and yet
I'm one of the lucky ones.
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 the money
in fairy tales of eternal economic growth.
How dare you?
For more than 30 years, the science
has been crystal clear.
How dare you continue to look away
and come here saying that you're doing enough
when the politics and solutions needed
are still nowhere in sights.
You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency.
But no matter how sad and angryI am, I do not want to believe that
because if you really understood the situation
and still kept on failing to act,
then you would be evil and that I refuse to believe it.
The popular idea of cutting our emissions
in half in 10 years only gives
us a 50 percent chance of staying below 1.5
degrees and the risk of setting off irreversible
chain reactions beyond human control.
50 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.
To have a 67 percent chance
of saying below a 1.5
degrees global temperature rise, the best
odds given by the IPCC, the world
had 420 gigatons
of CO2 left to emit back on January
1st, 2018.
Today, that figure is already down to less than
350 gigatons.
How dare you pretend that this can be sold
with just business as usual and some technical
solutions? With today's
emissions levels, that remaining
CO2 budgets will be entirely gone
within less than eight and a half years.
There will not be any solutions or plans
presented in line with these figures here today
because these numbers are too uncomfortable.
You are still not mature enough to
tell it like it is.
You are 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.
We will not let you get away with this
right here, right now is where we draw the line.
The world is waking up
and change is coming, whether you like it or not.
Thank you.