- Your first climate strike was a lonely event
a little over a year ago.
And in the intervening time,
you have sparked the interest of millions, literally,
of children around the globe
demanding action for climate change.
What's your message to world leaders today?
- My message is that we'll be watching you.
(box whooshing) (panel members laughing)
(audience applauding and cheering)
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!
You have stolen my dreams and my childhood
with your empty words.
And yet I'm one of the lucky ones.
People are suffering.
People are dying.
Entire ecosystems are collapsing.
We are in the beginning of a mass extinction
and all you can talk about
is the money and fairy tales
of eternal economic growth.
How dare you!
(audience cheering and applauding)
For more than 30 years,
the science has been crystal clear.
How dare you continue to look away
and come here saying that you're doing enough,
when the politics and solutions needed
are still nowhere in sight.
You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency.
But no matter how sad and angry I am,
I do not want to believe that.
Because if you really understood the situation
and still kept on failing to act,
then you would be evil.
And that I refuse to believe.
- [Audience Member] Oh ho.
(audience applauding and cheering)
- The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half
in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance
of staying below 1.5 degrees and the risk
of setting off irreversible chain reactions
beyond human control.
50% may be acceptable to you.
But those numbers do not include tipping points,
most feedback loops, additional warming
hidden by toxic air pollution
or the aspects of equity and climate justice.
They also rely on my generation sucking
hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2
out of the air with technologies that barely exist.
So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us,
we who have to live with the consequences.
To have a 67% chance
of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise,
the best odds given by the IPCC,
the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit
back on January 1st, 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 1/2 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.
You are failing us.
But the young people
are starting to understand your betrayal.
The eyes of all future generations are upon you.
And if you choose to fail us, I say
we will never forgive you!
(audience cheering and applauding)
We will not let you get away with this.
Right here, right now is where we draw the line.
The world is waking up.
And change is coming, whether you like it or not.
Thank you.
(audience cheering and applauding)
(boxes popping and thudding)
(air whooshing)
(boxes popping)