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Greta Thunberg's Message to the United Nations and the World
A transcript of Greta Thunberg's speech to the United Nations about the need to act to prevent catastrophic climate consequences.
Greta Thunberg is a teen from Sweden and she is an environmental activist on climate change. She brought her message to the United Nations on September 23, 2019. This is something that everyone living on this planet should hear or read. This is a transcript of her speech.
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 at 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 am one of the lucky ones. People are suffering, people are dying. Entire eco-systems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass of extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How Dare You! For more than thirty years the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away, and come here saying you are doing enough when the politics and solutions are needed are still nowhere in sight. You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But, no matter how sad and angry I 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. The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in ten years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees at the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control. They also rely of my generation sucking hundreds billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist. So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us we who to have to live with consequences. To have a 67% of chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise the best odds given by the IPCC the world had 420 giga-tons of CO2 left to emit back in January 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 giga-tons. How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just business as usual, and some technical solutions! With today’s emissions levels that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 ½ years. There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures her today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And 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, 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 not. Thank you!
