"I shouldn't be up here. I should be back at school on the other side of the ocean," 16-year-old Greta Thunberg told the United Nations Climate Action Summit on Monday. "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."
In a passionate and now-viral speech (embedded below), the climate activist from Sweden addressed world leaders from more than 60 nations and didn’t hold back a thing. "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," she continued to the audience at the United Nations headquarters in New York City.
Thunberg, who herself literally sailed from the United Kingdom to New York to avoid carbon emissions, called out leaders who support the goal of cutting emissions by 50% in 10 years. What’s the problem there? As Thunberg explains it, this cut only offers a 50% chance of keeping the planet’s warming trend beneath 1.5 degree Celsius. What happens if that threshold is breached? In Thunberg’s own words, it could ignite "catastrophic chain reactions beyond human control.”
"A 50 percent risk is simply not acceptable to us—we who have to live with the consequences," she told the audience.
Thunberg fairly pointed out that members of the U.N. are more interested in “fairytales of eternal economic growth” than the planet, extinction, and destroyed ecosystems.
Along with 15 other young people ranging in age from 8 to 17, Thunberg filed a complaint to the U.N. over human rights violations related to the climate crisis. The complaint, which was filed on Monday, specifically alleges that Turkey, Germany, France, Brazil, and Argentina aren’t upholding their end of the deal in regard to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which is a human rights treaty. The complaint calls for involved countries to make an international effort to curb climate change.
If you’re wondering why the U.S. isn’t named in the complaint, by the way, it’s because it’s not signed into the part of the treaty that allows minors to file justice violation complaints, like this one.
In terms of next steps for the complaint, a U.N. panel will determine whether or not it is actionable.
You can watch Thunberg’s speech, quoted in part above, here:
Here’s a smaller cut of her speech, which is going viral on Twitter:
And check out a live stream of the full summit here:
On another note, Thunberg’s facial reaction to Trump’s brief appearance today is a small gift to the Twitter masses: