I want you to act as if the House was on fire.
I have said those words before a lot of people have explained
why that is a bad idea.
A great number of politicians have told me that panic
never leads to anything good and I agree.
To panic, unless you have to, is a terrible idea.
But when your house is on fire and you want to keep your house
from burning to the ground, then that does require
some level of panic.
We are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction
and the extinction rate is up to 10,000 times faster
than what is considered normal, with up to 200 species
becoming extinct every single day.
Erosion of fertile topsoil, deforestation of our great forests,
toxic air pollution, loss of insects and wildlife,
the acidification of our oceans.
These are all disastrous trends being accelerated
by a way of life that we can in our financially fortunate
part of the world see as our right to simply carry on.
[Applause]
Our house is falling apart and our leaders need to start
acting accordingly because at the moment they are not.
If our house was falling apart our leaders wouldn't go on
like you do today.
You would change almost every part of your behaviour
as you do in an emergency.
If our house was falling apart, you wouldn't hold
three emergency Brexit summits and no emergency summit
regarding the breakdown of the climate and the environment.
[Applause]
The EU elections are coming up soon.
And many of us who will be affected the most
by this crisis – people like me – are not allowed to vote.
Nor are we in a position to shape the decisions of business,
politics, engineering, media, education or science
because the time it takes for us to educate ourselves to do that
simply does no longer exist.
And that is why millions of children are taking to the streets,
school-striking for the climate to create attention
for the climate crisis.
You need to listen to us, we who cannot vote.
You need to vote for us, for your children and grandchildren.
What we are doing now can soon no longer be undone.
In this election you vote for the future living conditions for humankind.
And though the politics needed do not exist today,
some alternatives are certainly less worse than others.
And I have read that some parties do not even want me standing
here today because they so desperately do not want to talk
about climate breakdown. [Applause]
To do your best is no longer good enough.
We must all do the seemingly impossible.
And it's OK if you refuse to listen to me.
I am, after all, just a 16-year-old schoolgirl from Sweden.
But you cannot ignore the scientists or the science or the millions
of school-striking children who are school-striking
for a right to a future.
I beg you: please do not fail on this.
[Applause]