Rolling Stone - Stephen Rodrick
How one Swedish teenager armed with a homemade sign ignited a crusade and became the leader of a movement
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Jack Davison for Rolling Stone
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There is persona and there is reality in
Greta Thunberg. It
is Valentine’s Day in her hometown of Stockholm, but there’s only wind,
no hearts and flowers. A few hundred kids mill about, with a smattering
of adults. If there were not signs reading “Our Earth, We Only Have
One,” it could be mistaken for a field trip to the ABBA museum.
But where is Greta? I find a scrum of reporters interviewing a child
in a purple puffer jacket, pink mittens, and a homemade-looking knit
hat. It takes me a minute to realize that it’s Greta. She is 17, but
could pass for 12. I can’t quite square the fiery speaker with the micro
teen in front of me. She seems in need of protection.
Of course, this is emphatically wrong. Greta Thunberg has Asperger’s,
which, she says, gives her pinpoint focus on climate minutiae while
parrying and discarding even the smallest attempt at flattery. We stand
near the Swedish Parliament house, where less than two years ago
Thunberg started her
Skolstrejk för klimatet, School Strike for Climate.
Back
then, it was just Greta, a sign, and a lunch of bean pasta in a
reusable glass jar. Then it was two people, and then a dozen, and then
an international movement. I mention the bravery of her speeches, but
she waves me away. She wants to talk about the loss of will among the
olds.
“It seems like the people in power have given up,” says
Thunberg, taking her hat off and pushing back her mussed up brown-blond
hair. She remains on message despite the tourists and teens taking her
picture and mugging behind us. “They say it’s too hard — it’s too much
of a challenge. But that’s what we are doing here. We have not given up
because this is a matter of life and death for countless people.”
It was my second encounter with Greta in three weeks. Back in
January, before the Coronavirus brought the world to its knees, forcing
Greta to move her Friday protests online, she was in Davos, Switzerland,
for the annual conference of the World Economic Forum, where
billionaires helo into the Swiss resort town and talk about solving the
world’s problems without making their lives any harder. Thunberg had
appeared last year and made her now iconic “Our House Is on Fire”
speech, in which she declared the
climate crisis
to be the mortal threat to our planet. Solve it or all the other causes
— feminism, human rights, and economic justice — would not matter.
“Either
we choose to go on as a civilization or we don’t,” said Thunberg with
cold precision. “That is as black or white as it gets. There are no gray
areas when it comes to survival.”
The speech made Thunberg the unlikely and reluctant hero of the
climate crisis. She crossed the ocean in a sailboat — she doesn’t fly
for environmental reasons — to speak before the United Nations. She was
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and was named
Time magazine
’s
Person of the Year, conjuring the manic jealousy of Donald Trump, who
called the honor “so ridiculous” and suggested she go to the movies and
chill out.
In Davos, the illuminati prattled on about planting a
trillion trees, even as we are still clear-cutting actual trees from the
Amazon all the way to Thunberg’s beloved Sweden. This did not amuse nor
placate the hoodie-wearing Greta. She seemed irritated and perhaps a
little sick; she canceled an appearance the day before because she
wasn’t feeling well. She was in no mood for flattery and nonsense. So
when
Time editor Edward Felsenthal asked her how she dealt with all the haters, Greta didn’t even try to answer diplomatically.
“I
would like to say something that I think people need to know more than
how I deal with haters,” she answered, before launching into details
from the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change’s
latest report. She mentioned that if we are to have even a 67 percent
chance of limiting global temperature change to under 1.5 C, the point
where catastrophic changes begin, we have less than 420 gigatons of CO2
that we can emit before we pass the no-going-back line. Thunberg stated
that, at the current rate, we have eight years to change everything.
Thunberg’s face was controlled fury. This was the persona: an
adolescent iron-willed truth teller. The Davos one-percenters clapped
and rattled their Rolexes. It has become a disconcerting pattern for
Thunberg appearances that would be repeated at the European Commission:
Greta tells the adults they are fools and their plans are lame and
shortsighted. They still give her a standing ovation. A few minutes
later, she was gone and the audience dispersed into a fleet of black
BMWs and Mercedes, belching diesel into the Alpine sky.
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Greta Thunberg illustration by Shepard Fairey. Based on a photograph by Markus Schreiber/AP Images/Shutterstock
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My Greta travels
featured a Vancouver-Zurich round trip and then an L.A.-Stockholm trip.
In between, I fly from Vancouver to L.A. for another story. It’s the
job, but I take stock in horror and calculate that my three flights burn
more carbon than the yearly usage of the average citizen of more than
200 countries. I torch the atmosphere so I can hear others praise the
girl who won’t fly.
“The phrase ‘A little child shall lead them’ has come to mind more
than once,” Al Gore tells me in Davos, before sharing his favorite Greta
moment. It was at the U.N. summit last fall. “She said to the assembled
world leaders, ‘You say you understand the science, but I don’t believe
you. Because if you did and then you continue to act as you do, that
would mean you’re evil. And I don’t believe that.’” Gore shook his head
in wonderment. “Wow.” He then gives a history lesson: “There have been
other times in human history when the moment a morally-based social
movement reached the tipping point was the moment when the younger
generation made it their own. Here we are.”
Activist-actress Jane
Fonda was so inspired by Greta that she has been hosting a series of
Fire Drill Fridays. “I was just filled with depression and hopelessness,
and then I started reading about Greta,” Fonda tells me one winter
afternoon in Los Angeles. “She inspired me to get out there and do
more.”
But in Stockholm, the world of presidential taunts, former vice
presidents slathering praise, and Oscar winners rhapsodizing seems far
away.
Outside of the Parliament building, Greta tells me she doesn’t worry
about her safety despite Trump and others speaking cruelly about her on
social media. (According to her mother, locals have shoved excrement
into the family mailbox.) Later in February, she would march in Bristol,
England, and be met by social media posts suggesting she deserved to be
sexually assaulted.
“It’s just the people with 10 accounts who sit and write anonymously
on Twitter and so on,” Greta says. “It’s nothing you can take
seriously.”
Still, all is not rotten. America has come up with the Green New Deal. In Trumplandia, that seems like a beacon of hope, right?
Nope.
“If you look at the graphs to stay below the 1.5 degree Celsius
global average temperature and you read the Green New Deal, you see that
it doesn’t add up,” says Thunberg with some impatience. She references
her Davos speech about how the world only has 420 gigatons of CO2 to
burn over the next eight years or the 1.5 goal becomes impossible. “If
we are to be in line with the carbon-dioxide budget, we need to focus on
doing things now instead of making commitments like 10, or 20, 30 years
from now. Of course, the Green New Deal is not in line with our
carbon-dioxide budget.”
Meanwhile, the main criticism of the Green New Deal at home is that
it moves too fast in getting the United States to zero carbon emission
by 2050. But Greta doesn’t do politics.
“At least it has got people to start talking about the climate crisis
more,” says Thunberg in a tone that suggests the slightest of praise.
“That of course is a step in the right direction, I guess.”
There’s
more to say, but now it’s time to march. The children’s crusade forms
into a regimented mob. Greta moves to the front and holds a
Skolstrejk för klimatet
banner with some other teens. The taller kids lift it too high, and she
nearly vanishes. All you can see is Greta’s winter hat and her gray
eyes. That’s enough.
Al Gore was right. A child leads us.
Technically, Greta Thunberg’s childhood continues
for another year. But she hasn’t been a kid for some time. She is one of
two daughters of Malena Ernman, an
opera-singer-turned-Eurovision-contestant, and Svante Thunberg, an
actor. According to the family’s book,
Our House Is on Fire,
the bohemian clan has endured a scroll of psychological disorders
beginning with Malena, who suffered from bulimia and still deals with
ADHD. Greta’s younger sister, Beata, was diagnosed with OCD and ADHD,
and has an acute noise sensitivity, which has meant at times the rest of
the family eating in a guest room with plastic plates to keep noise to a
minimum. When Beata went to dance class, Malena wasn’t allowed to move
during the two-hour session lest Beata have a tearful meltdown.
Greta
battled her own life-threatening demons. When she was 11, she stopped
eating and rarely spoke to anyone outside of her family for months.
Sometimes she would come home after being bullied at school — recess was
spent hiding out in the bathroom — and either spend hours petting her
dogs or crying at her own pain. She lost 20 pounds as her parents
chronicled her food intake. (“Five pieces of gnocchi in two hours.”)
Somehow, it was Greta turning her weakness into strength that made
her a global icon. According to Malena, Greta fell silent after seeing a
film in school depicting floating armies of plastic infesting our
oceans. Other students were horrified, but quickly returned to their
iPhones and talk of upcoming ski trips. Not Greta. She fell silent and
obsessed over the climate’s demise.
“I felt very alone that I was the only one who seemed to be worried
about this,” Greta tells me in Stockholm. “I was the only one left in
this sort of bubble. Everyone else could just continue with their lives
as usual, and I couldn’t do that.”
Greta read all she could and
sometimes went online and battled with climate deniers, oft exclaiming
triumphantly, “He blocked me,” to her parents. She eventually wrote an
essay on the climate crisis for a Swedish newspaper. Eco-activists
contacted her, and Greta mentioned the inspiration she took from the
school strikes after the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting, and suggested
a climate version. The activists showed little interest. Greta didn’t
care and slowly broke out of her cocoon.
“I thought what the Parkland
students did was so brave,” says Thunberg. “Of course, it was not the
only thing that got me out of that feeling. I did it because I was tired
of sitting and waiting. I tried to get others to join me, but no one
was interested and no one wanted to do that. So I said, ‘I’m going to do
this alone if no one else wants to do it.’ ”
So in August 2018, Greta and her father bicycled down to the Swedish
Parliament, across the cobblestone street from where Greta and I now
stand. She propped up the first
Skolstrejk för klimatet sign,
which she’d made from scrap wood. Greta also wrote up an information
sheet with climate data and a hint of the defiant humor that eventually
led her to make her Twitter profile read, “A teenager working on her
anger management problem,” after Trump told her to chill out. Her bio
was simple:
“Because you grown-ups don’t give a damn about my future,
neither do I. My name is Greta, I am in ninth grade, and I am going on
strike from school for the climate.”
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| Photograph by Jack Davison for Rolling Stone |
Her
dad left, and she sat alone. She posted a couple of images to
Instagram. It was passed on by a few of her followers. Then a reporter
noticed. And then local activists from Greenpeace. Within two months,
there were hundreds of fellow travelers, and the news spread through
Scandinavia to Europe and on to America. Within a year, climate student
strikes attracted tens of thousands, from London to New York.
Greta’s rise was the activist version of a perfect storm. Her
ascension from bullied Swedish student to global climate icon has been
driven by both a loss and a regaining of hope. It is not a coincidence
that her ascent happened immediately in the aftermath of the election of
Trump. It’s impossible to see a Greta-like phenomena emerging during
the Obama-driven run up to the Paris climate talks, when it actually
looked like nations of the world were getting their shit together to
deal with global warming. It became obvious after Trump and the Paris
implosion that 30 years of rhetoric and meetings had created very little
except more talk.
And then you had the natural disasters. California
could not stop burning. Floods ravaged Europe. We now watch glaciers
melt and collapse in real time. The dawn of 2020 brought the Australian
calamity, with images of scorched earth, koalas and kangaroos burned
alive, and the death of a way of life.
The irony of the Greta Age is
that we now have options, but refuse to take them. Clean-energy
technology has evolved to a point where old arguments that fossil fuels
remain the cheapest way to create energy are now obviously nonsense. The
cost of clean energy is no longer a barrier to change. Over the past
decade, it became an obvious truth: Burning fossil fuels no longer made
economic sense anywhere, anytime. What remains is the power and
influence of the energy conglomerate superpowers to maintain the status
quo. No politician has the courage to face them down. By 2018, it became
even clearer that politicians could not be trusted. Talk was wasted.
Companies would continue to put profits before nature. We were on our
own.
And that’s when Greta came along.
Thunberg’s perceived psychological weakness became her superpower.
Her flat, affectless, blunt voice was the perfect counterpoint to the
bureaucratic bullshit of the climate negotiators. It cut through all the
gobbledygook about offsets and the economic necessity of coal and cost
curves of solar power. She put it in simple human language: We are
losing our planet. Unlike many activists before her, she is not
political. She is not interested in reforming the process. Her voice is
unabashedly and explicitly moral — “How dare you.”
“I think she is
extraordinary in her determination,” says Eva Jones, an American high
school senior who recently spent a week protesting for climate justice
in Davos. “When you hear her speak, she doesn’t do vanity interviews.
It’s never like, ‘So what do your friends think about this?’ She’s like,
‘No, I don’t want to talk about my friends, I want to talk about the
crisis.’ She’s absolutely insane about getting reporters and getting
politicians and getting whoever’s talking to her back to the subject.”
All of this from a teenager who sometimes still wears her hair in pigtails.
Thunberg and her fellow protesters head toward Medborgarplatsen
(Citizen Square), in central Stockholm. They pass over a bridge by the
harbor, where massive renovations are being done so the city can host
even more waste-multiplying mega cruise ships. The kids chant in
Swedish, “What do we want? Climate justice! When? Now! When? Now, now,
now!” At the square, the squirrelly tweens play tag and are entertained
by a rapper in a ski mask (some things don’t translate).
Eventually,
Greta takes the stage. She speaks in her native Swedish, and her tone
is faster and more emotional than in English. She mentions that
temperatures in Sweden have been 5 to 10 degrees Celsius above normal
this winter, and how globally 19 of the past 20 years have been the
warmest on record.
“I have been on the road and visited numerous places and met people
from all over the globe,” says Greta. “I can say that it looks nearly
the same everywhere I have been: The climate crisis is ignored by people
in charge, despite the science being crystal clear. We don’t want to
hear one more politician say that this is important but afterward do
nothing to change it. We don’t want more empty words from people
pretending to take our future seriously.”
She pauses, and her face goes grim. “It shouldn’t be up to us
children and teenagers to make people wake up around the world. The ones
in charge should be ashamed.”
The crowd chants, “Greta, Greta, Greta.…”
She must hate that.
Greta keeps moving. In January, it was Davos. This
week it is Stockholm. Next Friday is Hamburg. It’s a debilitating
schedule since she doesn’t fly. Greta says it won’t go on forever. And
she’s right. Within a few weeks, the world would shut down for the
coronavirus, with Greta and her father both falling ill (neither of them
was tested for the virus, but she said she thought it was “extremely
likely” that they had it, given her schedule). Besides, she is nearing
the end of her gap year, between high school and university. “I really
hope that we can solve this thing now because I want to get back to
studying,” says Thunberg, shivering a bit in the Stockholm wind. I can’t
tell if she is joking or is having a rare moment of optimism.
Still, she is so small, and the world is so big. I wonder how she
continues forward as the world pays lip service and not much else.
For the first time, Thunberg softens.
“I’m very weak in a sense,” says Thunberg quietly. “I’m very tiny and
I am very emotional, and that is not something people usually associate
with strength. I think weakness, in a way, can be also needed because
we don’t have to be the loudest, we don’t have to take up the most
amount of space, and we don’t have to earn the most money.”
A
friend comes over and whispers in her ear. It’s time to go, maybe home
for a silent walk with her two dogs, Moses and Roxy. But she isn’t quite
finished.
“We don’t need to have the biggest car, and we don’t need to get the most attention. We just need to…”
Mighty Greta’s voice trails off as if she is lost in thought or
searching for the right word in English. Then, she looks up, locks eyes,
and smiles for the first time.
“We need to care about each other more.”
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