'Our house is on fire': Greta Thunberg, 16, urges leaders to act on climate
Swedish school strike activist demands
economists tackle runaway global warming. Read her Davos speech here
Our house is on fire.
I am here to say, our house is on fire. According to the IPCC
(Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), we are less than 12 years away
from not being able to undo our mistakes. In that time, unprecedented changes
in all aspects of society need to have taken place, including a reduction of
our CO2 emissions by at least 50%.
And please note that
those numbers do not include the aspect of equity, which is absolutely
necessary to make the Paris agreement work on a global scale. Nor does it
include tipping
points or feedback loops like the extremely powerful methane gas
released from the thawing
Arctic permafrost. At places like Davos, people like to
tell success stories. But their financial success has come with an unthinkable
price tag. And on climate change, we have to acknowledge we have failed. All
political movements in their present form have done so, and the media has
failed to create broad public awareness.
But Homo
sapiens have not yet failed. Yes, we are failing, but there is still time to turn everything around. We can
still fix this. We still have everything in our own hands. But unless we
recognise the overall failures of our current systems, we most probably don’t
stand a chance. We are facing a
disaster of unspoken sufferings for enormous amounts of people. And now is not
the time for speaking politely or focusing on what we can or cannot say. Now is
the time to speak clearly.
Solving the climate
crisis is the greatest and most complex challenge that Homo sapiens have ever
faced. The main solution, however, is so simple that even a small child can
understand it. We have to stop our emissions of greenhouse gases.
Either we do that or
we don’t... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/25/our-house-is-on-fire-greta-thunberg16-urges-leaders-to-act-on-climate
