September 2019 Newsletter – Climate Change

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!

To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degree 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 January 1, 2018. Today, that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons. 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 8.5 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.

Greta Thunberg, 2019 UN Summit