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By Dayo Benson New York
With an audacious voice dripping with emotion, 16-yr-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, yesterday in New York, took a swipe at world leaders, accusing them of stealing her dreams and childhood over their inaction on climate change.
Thunberg made the blistering allegation while addressing 60 Heads of State and Government at the United Nation’s Climate Action Summit which was held at the U.N. Headquarters
The tough-talking teenage activist who arrived in New York August 28, 2019 from Sweden, ahead of the summit had last Friday led other teenagers who skipped classes in New York City to join their counterparts across the globe on climate change protest.
Addressing her eminent gathering which included President Donald Trump who had pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement, Thunberg queried the leaders’ indifference to the threats of climate change, saying her generation would never forgive them if they failed to act.
Despite its harsh tone and sheer brazenness, the speech drew resounding applause from the world leaders.
“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 on 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’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering, she said.
Thunberg spoke further, “People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!
“For more than 30 years, science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you’re doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.”
She expressed concerns on whether the leaders actually understood what was at stake saying,”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 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.
“Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of 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 have to live with the consequences.
“To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise – the best odds given by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.
The young activist accused her audience of pretense saying,”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 1/2 years.
“There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here 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, I say: 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 or not”, she declared.