Thunberg has hope for climate, despite leaders’ inaction, according to the Star Tribune
Preparing for her appearance before the U.N. General Assembly last fall, Greta Thunberg found herself constantly interrupted by world leaders, including U.N. chief Antonio Guterres and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had formed a queue to speak to her and take selfies.
“Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of New Zealand, waits in line but doesn’t quite make it before it’s time for the event to start,” Thunberg recalls.
The 17-year-old has become a global figurehead of the youth climate movement since she started her one-woman protests outside the Swedish parliament in 2018.
Thunberg’s blunt words to presidents and prime ministers, peppered with scientific facts about the need to urgently cut greenhouse gas emissions, have won her praise and awards, but also the occasional pushback and even death threats.
To Thunberg’s disappointment, her message doesn’t seem to be getting through even to those leaders who applaud her work.
The message is certainly stark: Thunberg cites a U.N. report that estimates the world can only keep emitting the current amount of carbon dioxide for the next seven-and-a-half years. Any longer and it becomes impossible to meet the Paris climate accord’s ambitious goal of keeping global temperatures from rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) this century.
Most governments refuse to accept the idea that the world has only a fixed “carbon budget” left, because it implies that a sudden shift away from fossil fuel will need to happen in just a few years.
