17-year-old Greta Thunberg has Asperger’s syndrome and sees almost everything as black or white. “If the emissions have to stop, then we must stop the emissions. To me, that is black and white. There are no grey areas when it comes to survival. Either we go on as a civilization or we don’t. We have to change.”
Yes, it’s a simple idea, but our societies refuse to believe in it. People are fooled to think that we don’t have the solutions yet to solve the climate crisis, but no, we already have all the facts and solutions. scientists have long solved them. it’s the politicians that we vote for and the economy that we support going against the solutions.
“We must change almost everything in our current societies. The bigger your carbon footprint — the bigger your moral duty. The bigger your platform — the bigger your responsibility. 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 you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”
I finished reading all these speeches with tears. I feel her anger. If this pandemic didn’t make us realize how messed up we are as a civilization, then we really haven’t learned our lesson.
It’s time to really take action and make changes. No one is too small to make a difference. “I think that if a few girls can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school for a few weeks, imagine what we could do together if we wanted to. Every single person counts. Just like every single emission counts. Every single kilo. Everything counts.”