The Guardian View On Greta Thunberg: Seizing The Future

The Guardian - Editorial

The Swedish teenager’s clarity and urgency have cut through layers of obfuscation and helplessness – and forced climate change up the agenda

Swedish environmental campaigner Greta Thunberg at the Houses of Parliament on Tuesday.

Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images 

Nobody could have predicted that a Swedish teenager would shift the terms of the global climate debate in the way that Greta Thunberg has done.
Since she began her school strike in Stockholm last August, Greta has addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos, the European parliament and the UN climate talks in Poland. Last week she met the pope in Rome.
On Tuesday she met UK political leaders at the House of Commons. That Theresa May opted out of an encounter with one of the world’s foremost young activists is an embarrassing error of judgment.
By any rational calculus, Greta is in the process of doing humanity a huge favour.
That is because we struggle to give the global warming and wildlife crisis the attention they deserve. We have the science, with predictions of a manmade greenhouse effect dating back to the 1890s. (One of Greta’s distant relatives, Svante Arrhenius, was a pioneer in the field.)
We have the international structures to collate the experts’ findings: the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its first report in 1990. We have some, although not all, of the knowledge and technology we need to wean us off our addiction to fossil fuels: wind and solar energy; healthy alternatives to meat; bicycles and trains. Many nations have laws to help us transition to a low-carbon future. The world has the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the agreement struck in Paris in 2015.
But for reasons that are psychological as well as political, we seem mostly unable to concentrate on the existential threat we face as global warming gathers pace (20 of the hottest-ever years were in the last 22) and climate chaos unfolds. Something else is always more important – or more manageable. Even those who recognise that we must use all the tools at our disposal, to stop emitting greenhouse gases as soon as possible, struggle to be heard.

 Greta Thunberg tells MPs: 'Our future was sold'

Thanks in no small part to the eye-catching tactic of the school strike, over the past nine months the movement spearheaded by Greta Thunberg has cut through. Green activists and scholars have spoken for years of the generational injustice of climate change.
The school strikers belong to a 21st-century generation who have either taken this idea on, or arrived at it through a process of deduction of their own.
Greta, who believes her outlook has been influenced by her autism, says she learned about climate change at school aged eight, and became depressed at 11. By 15, her angst had translated itself into a distinctive form of civil disobedience – the Friday school strikes which spread around the world.
Hints that Greta has been manipulated by adults appear to be unfounded. As a teenager, she is in any case entitled to advice. And while it is natural to focus on her as a figurehead, the movement does not depend on her. As she told the audience at a Guardian Live event on Monday, she does not see herself as a leader, but as a participant.
How the wave of demonstrations she helped start develops will be fascinating, as will the progress of the Extinction Rebellion protesters. Peaceful protest and activism are vital to democracy. The climate crisis makes them urgent and necessary. But decision-making requires processes and structures. This is not easy, and partly explains why so many of the successful civil disobedience campaigns of the past have been shaped by charismatic individuals.
The school strikers’ message, similar to the extinction rebels, is that we should panic. Our house, in Greta’s memorable phrase, is on fire. We must embrace “cathedral thinking” – laying the foundations for the carbon-free future without knowing how we are going to paint the roof.
This way of thinking does induce fear. But since doing nothing is not an option, except for nihilists and misanthropes, the rest of us have little choice but to battle through these darker emotions – and act with hope.
The IPCC said last year that the next 12 years are critical, a warning echoed on the BBC by David Attenborough in a landmark documentary last week. The film should have been made a decade ago.
We should have been alert to the dangers before children went on strike.
But we still have some time.

Links

• 'You did not act in time': Greta Thunberg's full speech to MPs
• Greta Thunberg Backs Climate General Strike To Force Leaders To Act
• Humanity Is At A Crossroads, Greta Thunberg Tells Extinction Rebellion
• Forget Brexit And Focus On Climate Change, Greta Thunberg Tells EU
• Protests And Purchasing Power Could Be Positive Tipping Points In Climate Change
• The Young Minds Solving Climate Change
• The Rise Of Students Against Climate Change
• Climate Strike: Greta Thunberg Calls For ‘System Change Not Climate Change’ – Here’s What That Could Look Like
• It’s Time For Climate Change Communicators To Listen To Social Science
• Students Worldwide Skip School To Demand Tough Action On Climate Change
• Climate Change Strikes Across Australia See Student Protesters Defy Calls To Stay In School
• Teenage Climate Activist Nominated For Nobel Peace Prize
• Amsterdam's First National Climate Change March Draws 40,000 People
• Climate Change And The Power Of One
• Striking For The Future: From Australia To Japan To India, Youths Will Skip School On March 15 To Protest Against Climate Change
• VIDEO: David Attenborough Climate Change TV Show A 'Call To Arms'