WORLDFIRE - Chapter 16, Part III

A Green Fire Rising

The Greta Effect

Then there is Greta Thunberg, the lone wolf Swedish student who saw the climate threat with crystal clarity and acted in a way that changed everything. Inspired by the Parkland, Florida students striking for gun control sanity, this 15-year-old high school student took it upon herself in the fall of 2018 to “school strike” for the climate. As reported in the press: “Before the country’s parliamentary election on September 9th, she went on strike and sat on the steps of the parliament building, in Stockholm, every day during school hours for three weeks. Since the election, she has returned to school for four days a week; she now spends her Fridays on the steps of parliament. She is demanding that the government undertake a radical response to climate change.” Before long, Thunberg’s school strike caught fire, and the attention of world leaders. One of the strike’s offshoots, Fridays for Future, has since grown into a global movement.

Weigh these weighty words of wisdom from Thunberg’s press conference after meeting with the UN Secretary-General at the UN’s 2018 climate conference in Poland: “For 25 years countless of [sic] people have stood in front of the United Nations climate conferences, asking our nations’ leaders to stop the emissions. But clearly this has not worked since the emissions just continue to rise. So I will not ask them anything. Instead, I will ask the people around the world to realize that our political leaders have failed us. Because we are facing an existential threat and there is no time to continue down this road of madness… since our leaders are behaving like children, we will have to take the responsibility they should have taken long ago.” Then Thunberg told the assembled UN delegates: "You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to us children. But I don't care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet." Then she really unloaded: “You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes. Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope. We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis. We need to keep the fossil fuels in the ground, and we need to focus on equity. And if solutions within the system are so impossible to find, maybe we should change the system… We have come here to let you know that change is coming, whether you like it or not. The real power belongs to the people.”

Inspired by Thunberg’s example, thousands of students in Australia walked out of class that fall to launch the Strike 4 Climate Action to demand emergency government action. This prompted a fit of pique from Australia’s fossil fuel-friendly Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, whose scolding response was: “Kids should go to school… We do not support our schools being turned into parliaments… What we want is more learning in schools and less activism in schools.” That’s enough to make you wonder if kids’ shadow parliaments and congresses might not actually be a good idea to model how adults should be acting. Given that many kids fear–with good reason–that they might not get to live out their full lives due to climate chaos, they couldn’t do worse than the adults, and would, I’m sure, do worlds better.

Getting back to Greta, the now 16-year-old Thunberg outdid herself at the 2019 Davos World Economic Forum by using her address to the wealthiest of the world’s wealthy to call them out to their faces: "We are facing a disaster of unspoken sufferings for enormous amounts of people and now is not the time for speaking politely… The main solution, however, is so simple that even a small child can understand it. We have to stop the emissions of greenhouse gases. And either we do that or we don’t. You say nothing in life is black or white, but that is a lie, a very dangerous lie. Either we prevent a 1.5 degree of warming or we don’t. Either we avoid setting off that irreversible chain reaction beyond human control or we don’t. Either we choose to go on as a civilization or we don’t. That is as black or white as it gets. There are no grey areas when it comes to survival… Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them hope. 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 if you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire, because it is." The following year, Thunberg again lowered the boom at Davos: “Let’s be clear. We don’t need a low carbon economy. We don’t need to lower emissions. Our emissions have to stop if we are to have a chance to stay below the 1.5 degree target… we demand at this year’s World Economic Forum participants from all companies, banks, institutions, and governments immediately halt all investments in fossil fuel exploration and extraction, immediately end all fossil fuel subsidies, and immediately and completely divest from fossil fuels. We don’t want these things done by 2050, or 2030 or even 2021, we want this done now… this is just the very minimum amount of effort that is needed to start the rapid sustainable transition… I’m here to tell you that unlike you, my generation will not give up without a fight… I wonder what will you tell your children was the reason to fail and leave them facing a climate chaos that you knowing brought upon them.”

Thunberg’s uncommon courage and truth-telling earned her more than one Nobel Peace Prize nomination and made her TIME magazine’s 2019 person of the year (prompting a jealous Donald Trump to lash out at her on social media). It also generated plenty of hate mail and specious rumors. In response to what she called “enormous amounts of hate,” Thunberg wrote a long social media post which included this: “Some people mock me for my diagnosis. But Asperger is not a disease, it’s a gift. People also say that since I have Asperger I couldn’t possibly have put myself in this position. But that’s exactly why I did this. Because if I would have been ‘normal’ and social I would have organized myself in an organisation, or started an organisation by myself. But since I am not that good at socializing I did this instead. I was so frustrated that nothing was being done about the climate crisis and I felt like I had to do something, anything.” I can relate to that last part. Then she wrote: “I’m too young to do this. We children shouldn’t have to do this. But since almost no one is doing anything, and our very future is at risk, we feel like we have to continue.” She’s right, and it makes me furious that kids are being forced to do what the adults refuse to do.

In January of 2019, a throng estimated to be 35,000 people strong swarmed through the streets of Brussels demanding emergency climate action, making it the largest student strike up to that point. In February, the youth strike spread to the UK, where student walkouts in a reported 60 cities and towns prompted a spokesperson for Prime Minister Theresa May to criticize the Fridays for Future movement with the patently absurd complaint that it “wastes lesson time” needed for kids to “develop into the top scientists, engineers and advocates we need to help tackle this problem.” Theresa May, along with Scott Morrison, Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Joe Manchin, and countless others are willingly serving as fossil fuel tools. They have no intention of fighting for our kids.

Others, however, are responding to the street heat being generated by the student climate strikes. In a testament to the power of what one determined teenager can do, Thunberg spurred European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker to pledge nearly $1 trillion of the EU’s budget between 2021 and 2027 to addressing the global climate emergency. In March of 2019, an estimated 1.6 million people participated in a worldwide climate strike, with kids in 133 countries skipping school. Among the demands of the youth climate strike in the U.S.–led by a 12-year-old, a 13-year-old, and a 16-year-old–were several in line with the Green New Deal: 100% renewables by 2030, justice for marginalized communities, and a fair transition for fossil fuel-reliant communities. Some of their demands wisely went further by demanding a halt to any new fossil fuel infrastructure projects; an end to fracking and mountaintop removal mining; and the declaration of a national climate emergency. Two months later, an estimated 1.8 million people climate striked worldwide.

What impresses me the most about Thunberg is her no BS approach to the crisis. She consistently tells the truth. She doesn't say we’re winning when we’re losing. She doesn’t pretend that 500,000 people marching in Madrid is a victory. She doesn’t let people get away with that kind of crap. Instead, she says: "We have been striking now for over a year and still, basically, nothing has happened... We have raised public awareness and we have created opinion and that is a big step in the right direction. But of course it’s nowhere near enough... emissions aren't reducing. They are in fact increasing... if you look at it from a certain point of view we have achieved nothing." Something else I respect about her is how she is not intimidated by bullies, even when that bully is a jealous president of the United States.

The kids are not alright, and they are just going to keep getting louder. This rise of rightfully enraged youth fuels my hope that the world’s youth can convince a critical mass of parents and grandparents to get off the sidelines and into the game. Slowly, it is beginning to happen. After inviting adults to join them for a worldwide climate strike on September 20, 2019, more than 4 million people in more than 160 countries took to the streets. The following Friday, 2 million more struck. Then the pandemic struck, knocking the wind out of pretty much everything and everyone.

Something I hear a lot, usually from older generations, is how inspiring young people are, and how they will solve the climate crisis. In times past, it was common for adults to put their hopes in the next generation to set things right. I get that. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work with the climate emergency. We. Don’t. Have. That. Kind. Of. Time. With this crisis, everyone must take responsibility. It is not okay to passively put the burden on our kids to fix the problem when they grow up. For if we wait until then, it will be too late.

Knowingly or not, the adults broke it. The adults have to fix it. We have already robbed our kids of their innocent childhoods. We must not now also wittingly steal their futures. Yet that is what we are currently doing. The world is on fire, and if the adults don’t listen to the children and help lead the way to safety now, there may be no civilization for the children to later lead. The youth are sounding the alarm, but they need the active help of elders. By virtue of having lived longer, elders possess not only life experiences, but also skills and resources that young people do not yet have. The onus is on those of us who are elders to leverage every tool we have in our personal and professional toolboxes to give our children and grandchildren a fighting chance of surviving climate breakdown. Retiring from the field of battle is not an option in the middle of a climate war. This is all-hands-on-deck time. Each of us has a role to play.

NOTE: The written form of WORLDFIRE is the authoritative version. Any inadvertent errors in transcribing the recordings are mine and mine alone.